Soaring solar and a surge in hydro push more coal off the US grid

Key points

• Last year, the first few months of data from the US grid suggested that fears of a data-center-driven surge in demand were becoming a reality.
• Demand had risen by about 3 percent, triggering a surge in coal, interrupting what had been a long downward trend.
• But over the course of the year, both trends slowed considerably.
• A year later, all of that seems to be in the past, as the US has returned to its normal pattern: slow growth, with renewables pushing coal off the grid.
• The one oddity is that hydroelectric production has surged without a corresponding increase in capacity, likely due to unusually warm weather in the western US causing the snowpack to melt early.