If someone had told Nat Bullard in 2008 that the world would install 599 gigawatts of solar in 2024, he would have guessed that “something truly crazy” had happened, like “we ended up with a global carbon tax of $200 a ton on all economic activity,” the present day Bullard said.
The reality, though, is the market has simply boomed, and as a result may be on the way to meeting global climate goals for the technology. But the huge growth intersects with huge, and also unprecedented, demand — and a problem with curtailing power that 2025’s markets don’t have to waste.
These are among several of the biggest trends that Bullard, the former chief content officer of BloombergNEF, outlined in his annual presentation of the biggest trends in decarbonization. Now the co-founder at energy insights startup Halcyon, Bullard unpacked why these and other developments are roiling the power markets in 2025 on two episodes of the Catalyst podcast with Shayle Kann.
AI-driven load growth and the DeepSeek curveball
Load growth in the United States is on its way to blow past historical highs. One key indicator, 10-year electricity load CAGR, has risen from about 0.5% in 2019 to nearly 2% in 2024, according to the National Energy Regulatory Commission. The last time the U.S. saw this rate of growth was in the 1990s and 2000s — and the latest NERC data appears on a trajectory to surpass even those levels.
“It doesn’t sound like much in one sense, 1% a year, except this is a very big system,” Bullard said. “And this very big system that we’ve done a very good job of making it hard to build into.”
It’s especially hard to build new generation and transmission, squeezing utilities in what Andy Lubershane of Energy Impact Partners calls “the electricity gauntlet.”
Driving this growth is the data center construction boom, and especially by the rush to build increasingly powerful AI models. In 2024, U.S. tech companies spent $31 billion in capex on data center buildings, outpacing capital spending on hospitals for the first time. And just last month Stargate, a consortium of OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle, announced plans to spend $500 billion on data center infrastructure in the coming years.
Listen to the part of Nat Bullard’s interview that tackles DeepSeek, on Catalyst:
Then a small Chinese startup called DeepSeek’s threw the industry a curveball. With just $5.6 million, a tiny fraction of the billions spent on leading models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, DeepSeek developed an open-source large-language model as powerful as Meta’s Llama.
“If you can do all of this with less, what does that mean for giga-scale data centers?” Bullard said.
It could mean that AI needs a lot less energy than expected. That potential has already rattled stock markets, where power company shares declined after news of DeepSeek hit the market. Or it could mean demand for AI will skyrocket, driving even more load growth.
Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella is betting on the latter, writing on social media that as “AI gets more efficient and accessible, we will see its use skyrocket, turning it into a commodity we just can’t get enough of.”
The direction of AI power demand will shape the data center market. New designs have trended away from small, on-premise servers and toward larger, more efficient hyperscale facilities — though it’s not clear which side of the market will benefit from the news of DeepSeek’s efficiency.
“ Does it mean that if everybody can go do a very lightweight, but very effective model, are they going to go back to hosting it in third party data centers?” Bullard said. Or else, he suggested, data center operators like Meta and Microsoft may double down on their strategy to build bigger and bigger data centers of their own.
A tale of two markets: solar and wind
Against the load growth backdrop, clean firm power sources like nuclear are seeing a bump. But more conventional renewables, even those that are intermittent, are determinedly surging nonetheless.
Solar, of course, reached nearly 600 GW last year. And the global wind sector also installed a record 131 gigawatts — huge compared with when Bullard first began this research, but less than a quarter of solar’s rapid pace of deployment nonetheless.
“It’s just going to be simpler and faster to develop solar than to develop wind,” Bullard said, “particularly in the absence of any particular reform to our transmission system in the United States.”
Beyond the practical difficulty in building transmission from windy areas to load centers, wind in the U.S. has faced headwinds like rising costs and high interest rates. Now, with a vocal clean energy critic in the White House, the path will get even harder. These problems, Bullard said, won’t necessarily be solved by the markets alone.
“They’ll probably stay like this, [even though] we should be doing as much wind as we absolutely can,” he said. “That’s going to be a challenge given interconnection and it’s going to be a challenge given current politics in the U.S.”
Meanwhile, coming from behind is storage, which is key to having intermittent renewables like solar and wind provide all-day power. Storage has quickly overtaken wind, adding 169 gigawatts of capacity in 2024. That’s up 70% from 2023, outpacing even solar’s rate of growth.
Wasted power in the middle of rapid load growth
If the rate of renewable deployment is impressive, imagine what could be done with all of the clean power currently being curtailed.
In 2024, California alone saw over three terawatt-hours of wind and solar curtailment, according to CAISO. And from April to May, the state had net negative load. It’s a striking waste of power given the rising concerns about load growth.
“ The four-hour storage artifact in California is purely a function of written regulation,” Bullard said. “What would it look like without that? What would the market be doing in terms of longer duration storage or different business models to use that energy?”
He added that no one knows because “there’s no incentive to even give it a try right now.”
Another region with high curtailment, the European Union, saw over 9,000 hours of negative pricing in 2024. Bullard explained that European power developers are eyeing hybrid power plants that combine storage with solar or wind, in order to avoid giving away the power they generate.
