- Solar is rapidly emerging as a new darling for data center power
- Crusoe, Erthos and Redwood have proven out a solar microgrid for smaller data center facilities
- IEA forecasts solar power generation for data centers surging through 2035
Forget BYOD. Data centers are increasingly looking to BYOP – bring your own power – to avoid grid interconnection delays, and solar can help them do it.
Solar has long been a part of the data center equation, but until recently, solar, wind and other renewable deals were structured around power purchase agreements. For example, Google last month announced a new data center in Minnesota that will leverage 200 MW of solar power.
The problem is these are connected to – and thus constrained by – the national power grid. Grid interconnection wait times in the U.S. for new power generation sources are now five years or more, up from less than two years a decade ago. That’s why data center operators are now eyeing solar and battery fueled microgrids to accelerate time-to-power timelines.
Case in point: Neocloud player Crusoe’s work with battery recycler Redwood Materials and solar vendor Erthos to prove out an off-grid system capable of powering smaller-scale data centers. Crusoe CEO Chase Lochmiller told Bloomberg in July 2025 that it was able to light up its initial deployment in about four months.
Crusoe’s project initially included four Crusoe Spark modular data centers, and the solar+battery combination delivered 99.2% operational availability over seven months. This week, Crusoe announced it is expanding the project from four modular facilities to 24.
Moment in the sun
Data centers have been slow to pursue off-grid renewable technology in part due to concerns around reliability. After all, the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow, but data centers have to run 24/7. Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) emerged as an answer to that problem, but came with a hurdle of its own: high pricing.
Now that the cost of batteries has come down, solar’s other strengths are beginning to shine through.
Speed is the primary perk, with deployment helped along by the fact that smaller-scale solar installations use low-voltage transformers. That allows solar deployments to sidestep supply chain constraints that have cropped up around high-voltage kit.
“Speed is key,” Erthos CEO Jim Tyler told Fierce. “If you can’t deploy it fast and its cost isn’t relatively cheap enough, then it doesn’t work…We’ve got the costs so low and the availability rapid that this can be deployed at a price point that is on par with” natural gas, coal and nuclear power. In some instances, he added, solar can be cheaper.
Solar isn’t just a short-term solution either. Tyler noted that everything Erthos designs has a 40-year lifespan, with the battery elements of the system needing replacement around every 20 years. But the cost to swap out the batteries is built into the cost of energy, he said.
Tyler also pointed to zero water usage and the ability to “leave no trace” if an installation ever needs to be removed as additional perks of using solar power.
“The sun is the best use of fuel there is. It’s nuclear power at a distance, so why not use it?” he said.
What the future holds for solar
Why does this all matter? Well, Lochmiller argued that in the future, centralized gigawatt-scale data centers will be complemented by smaller edge data centers as AI inferencing becomes ubiquitous. Solar and battery systems are a great fit for those smaller facilities, he argued.
But zooming out, it appears solar – whether connected to the grid or not – will continue to play a critical role in powering data centers for the next decade.
According to the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) base case forecast, global solar electricity generation for data centers is expected to jump from around 40 TWh in 2024 to just over 250 TWh by 2035. The IEA predicts that by the end of the forecast period, solar will eclipse wind generation (210 TWh) and edge out nuclear (just under 250 TWh).
In the U.S. specifically, solar power generation is expected to rise from around 20 TWH in 2025 to just under 100 TWh by 2035. Nuclear generation for data centers is expected to eclipse solar sometime around 2032, while natural gas will remain dominant by a wide margin through the forecast period.
Interestingly, the U.S. is expected to have significantly more solar, nuclear and overall electricity generation for data centers than China, with which it is competing for AI dominance.
It is unclear how the current U.S. government’s stance on power, which favors nuclear and natural gas over wind, solar and other renewable generation, might impact the IEA’s forecast.