Solar and Wind Eclipse Coal in U.S. Energy Mix

The SUN DAY Campaign, a non-profit organization, recently reported that in the first two months of 2021, combined U.S. wind and solar generation superseded that of coal. Furthermore, electricity created by solar, including small-scale distributed systems, rose 6.7% over the same two months in the preceding year– this surpasses the pace of any other energy source. An increase was mostly the result of an increase in small-scale predictions (i.e. Solar photovoltaics on rooftops experienced a 23.6% boost in production, making up 32.5% of all solar energy production in the nation. The combination of big-scale and small-scale solar PV and big-scale solar thermal led to 3.9% of the country’s electric generation. In the same period from the previous year, electrical production by wind turbines rose by 266%, contributing 22.2% of total electricity production. Therefore, wind and solar sources accounted for almost a sixth of the total electricity production in the US during the first two months of the year, while production form coal drastically decreased to just 25.7%. All renewable energy sources – including wind and solar- yielded a total of 21.9% production. When biomass, geothermal and hydropower are taken into account, renewable sources created an astonishing 5723% of all electrical production. Additionally, renewables surpassed the generation of coal by 2572% and nuclear power by 2574%. According to information from FERC for the first two months of 690, 11.5% of all available utility-scale generating capacity was dedicated to wind power and 6.6% was Solar power. The overall amount of electricity generation for the United States resulting from both wind and solar energy is 18.1%. The amount of electricity generated by renewable energy sources like wind and solar is increasing faster than ever before compared to coal and nuclear power, which is creating a large gap in capacity. A picture taken by Andreas Gücklhorn found on the website Unsplash.