There should be a minimum level of expertise or commitment to the truth so that publication who certainly think of themselves as major league or factual don't publish blatantly false statements like this.

Yes, demand rose, and solar panels were installed whose capacity was about 60% of the new demand, but to say solar handled 60% of new capacity is blatantly false.

As someone who owns solar panels, I'm painfully aware that there can be days, weeks of bad weather when there's barely any generation. But even at the best of times, solar has a hard time covering for the demand of something like data centers which suck down insane amount of juice round the clock.

There's also no information about whether these data centers are located to be close to solar farms, and we know that in many cases, they're not.

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jakobnissen 4 hours ago | parent [-]

No, you are reading the article wrong. It is indeed 60% of new electricity generation that is from solar, not capacity

	▲	torginus 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I think it's incredibly fishy. If I add a 1MW coal plant to the grid, I can pretty much run it at nominal capacity all year round, so 1MW * hours in the year is afair calculation. If I add the same 1MW for solar, needless to say even assuming perfect weather, I'm lucky to get 1/3rd of that. Under real circumstances, the numbers are probably much worse. When looking at marketing, I think it's always safe to assume they picked the most flattering numbers when they didn't specify how they made the calculation. That's why it's very meaningful to talk about adding kWh - 1 kWh peak solar means more in Texas than in Chicago. It's even less meaningful for batteries - they can sustain incredible currents, to the point it's very rarely the meaningful bottleneck. Yet that's exactly that what the cited 'global think-tank' Ember did, which the article cites as source. So they either misled on purpose, or like a lot of people, they confused GWh and GW, which is such a grave error for a supposed expert, that their whole analysis should be disregarded.
	▲	phendrenad2 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Then shy doesn't the article literally say that? Why does it take three carefully-crafted sentences to say it? Because they're fooling you.