Faced with an increasingly congested grid and skyrocketing energy demands, data center developers are shifting toward solar-plus-storage as a logistically viable, essential solution for securing reliable power on a market-ready timetable.
Image: Fluke
There is a particular kind of meeting happening more frequently in data center development right now. It involves a site that has planning, has land, has a committed customer – but no clear answer on grid power within the window the program requires. The options on the table are not comfortable ones: wait for interconnection, redesign around what is available, or look seriously at generation assets that weren’t in the original plan. Solar keeps coming up in those conversations, and it’s no longer being brushed aside.
The scale of the pressure behind that shift is worth stating plainly. U.S. data centers consumed about 4.4% of total U.S. electricity in 2023 – up from 58 TWh in 2014 to 176 TWh – and the Department of Energy projects that figure could reach 325 to 580 TWh by 2028. For developers and operators, that trajectory has made power availability a first-order problem, not a planning assumption.
Solar’s moment
Solar’s appeal in this context is logistical. It’s one of the few generation sources that can still be built at meaningful scale on a timetable the market can actually use. The EIA projects 86 GW of new utility-scale capacity will come online in the US in 2026, with solar accounting for 43.4 GW and battery storage another 24 GW. Those aren’t technologies that data center developers are tentatively exploring – they’re what the grid is predominantly being built from right now.
The storage pairing is what turns solar from an interesting option into a serious one. Utility-scale storage is now cost-effective, making it economical to charge batteries at peak solar times and discharge them later.  For data centers specifically, that matters beyond simple load-shifting – batteries respond almost instantaneously to the short, sharp demand spikes that characterize high-density compute loads, reducing grid burden without compromising availability. On both speed and cost, the solar-plus-storage combination is about as close to a practical default as the current market offers.
A congested grid and a workable path through it
None of that makes the grid problem go away. The interconnection queue tells you how constrained the system already is – nearly 2,300 GW of generation and storage capacity was actively seeking connection at the end of 2024, according to Berkeley Lab’s latest data, more than the entire existing US generating fleet. That backlog predates recent federal policy; the current administration has slowed the process further, but it was already severely congested. If you can’t interconnect, you can’t deploy – and that applies to solar as much as anything else.
Solar-plus-storage gives developers another way to build a workable power mix while interconnection constraints remain in force. A co-located or nearby array paired with storage can reduce peak grid draw and buffer against supply volatility. Fault isolation in a solar array tends to be sectional – a string or a block goes down, rarely the whole system – which means the resilience profile looks different from pure grid dependence. For developers navigating a congested interconnection environment, it changes the risk calculation.
Megawatts don’t run themselves
A solar asset only becomes useful to a data center strategy when the operating model around it is tight enough to trust.
That means thinking through the Operations and Maintenance (O&M) model before construction starts, not after. Who’s doing the work, with what tools, against what monitoring thresholds, and with what plan when something goes wrong — those questions need answers before the system goes live. The baseline you establish at commissioning matters too. I-V curve testing at that stage creates a performance reference you can actually measure drift against later; without it, you’re troubleshooting without a baseline.
The spare parts question is less obvious but just as consequential. A colleague who runs an O&M company put it plainly: by the time you’ve finished building a utility-scale system, the manufacturers have often already moved on. Module formats change, inverter lines update, racking evolves – and within two or three years, the exact components you specified may no longer be readily available. At scale, that’s a serviceability risk that belongs in the project economics from day one.
The skilled labor constraint sits alongside all of this. The US solar workforce hasn’t kept pace with deployment, and that gap shows up in O&M availability. Long-term performance depends on whether the operating discipline is genuinely in place; capacity on its own doesn’t get you there.
The install-it-and-forget-it myth
For years, parts of the industry sold solar on terms that didn’t hold up. Install it, connect it to monitoring, trust it to perform. I hate to admit it, but that included selling residential solar as an install-it-and-forget-it proposition – which has turned out to be very much not true. At utility scale, with generation feeding into a critical power strategy, the consequences of that mindset are larger.
The clearest signal that serious operators have internalized this is where O&M shows up in their financials. The companies getting this right are accounting for operational expenditure, labor, and maintenance cycles in their project models before financial close. That is the dividing line between a project that looks convincing on paper and one that keeps delivering in service.
Where the value holds or erodes
The power problem data center developers are navigating isn’t going away, and the grid alone isn’t going to solve it on the timelines the market needs. Solar-plus-storage has earned its place in that conversation – on economic grounds and on the resilience profile it brings to a critical power strategy.
What that requires from developers is a different kind of discipline than the industry has historically applied to solar. The financial model has to account for O&M from the start. The operating decisions made at commissioning shape what the asset can do years later. And the gap between what gets built and what gets maintained is where the value either holds or quietly erodes.
Will White is the senior product manager at Fluke Corporation. 
The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own, and do not necessarily reflect those held by pv magazine.
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