Following our US Power Capacity Report for the first two months of 2020, which showed that 99.7% of new US power capacity came from solar and wind, we’ve got a US Electricity Generation Report that is much less uplifting. Aside from the fact that 11% is a lot lower than … [continued]
How has US electricity generation from solar power, wind power, coal power, natural gas, and nuclear shifted in the past 11 years? Let me show you.
2020 US electricity generation data are in from the US Energy Information Administration. Crunching the numbers, renewable energy accounted for 20.6% of US electricity generation last year. That was led by wind power, which accounted for 8.3% of US electricity generation, followed by hydropower at 7.2% and solar power at … [continued]
Editor’s note: Note that this evaluation does not take social, environmental, or public health costs into account, and natural gas comes with high social, environmental, or public health costs. Those costs, for the most part, are not priced into power plant costs in the United States. A supplemental report to … [continued]
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) latest inventory of electric generators, 9.1 gigawatts (GW) of electric generating capacity is scheduled to retire in 2021. Nuclear generating capacity will account for the largest share of total capacity retirements (56%), followed by coal (30%).
In 2019, U.S. annual energy consumption from renewable sources exceeded coal consumption for the first time since before 1885, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) Monthly Energy Review. This outcome mainly reflects the continued decline in the amount of coal used for electricity generation over the past decade as well as growth in renewable energy, mostly from wind and solar.
The EIA predicts renewables will supply more electricity to the US grid than coal for the balance of this year. The trend for renewables is up. The trend for coal is down and getting worse.
The SUN DAY Campaign recently reported that 11% of US electricity generation in the months of January and February was from wind and solar power.
A new legislative package on energy is working its way through the U.S. Senate. The American Energy Innovation Act (AEIA) is a compilation of dozens of energy bills that have passed the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, most with bipartisan support.
It’s unclear why the EIA 2050 projections are so skewed from observable realities of costs, age of fleets, and global industry transformation. Like most major energy analysis organizations, they are very poor at predicting the rapidly declining costs of wind and solar, very poor at predicting the rapidity of growth of those technologies, and very poor at understanding that the existing technologies are fairly radically outcompeted.
