The solar industry is growing rapidly but is being held back by an aging grid

The solar energy industry is growing at a breakneck pace as local utilities and companies that operate energy-hungry data centers look for renewable energy sources, Spencer Kimball and Gabriel Cortés report for CNBC.

“But renewable energy sources face a huge grid connection bottleneck, and building transmission lines to support growth is a major challenge,” the authors add. Renewables will remain just 3.9 percent of the country’s energy mix in 2023, and the country’s aging energy infrastructure is struggling to keep up with demand, which is growing in part due to the expansion of data centers, as well as rising temperatures and a growing population.

While “nearly 2,500 gigawatts of solar, wind and battery projects have been requested to come online in 2023, which is nearly double the entire installed capacity of the current U.S. power plant fleet,” one analyst notes that “The pace of renewables deployment would have to at least threefold to achieve 90% clean electricity within the next decade.” The plant, which will come online in 2023, took about five years to complete, and only 20 percent of projects with applications submitted between 2000 and 2018 have been completed.

But solar energy is also making significant gains. “In California, for example, solar power accounted for more than 50% of the state’s electricity demand from 7:45 a.m. to 5:25 p.m., peaking at about 18 gigawatts, or 64% of the supply, around 1 p.m., according to Grid Status, which tracks major American networks in real time.”