The Energy Department’s chief data collector released full-year stats on power generation. Of course, solar grew! Here are the numbers to brag about during your next Zoom call.
U.S. utility-scale solar plants generated almost 91,000 MWh for all of 2020, up 25% from a year earlier. Small-scale solar generated almost 42,000 MWh of energy during the year, up roughly 19% from 2019.
The metrics were reported by the Energy Information Administration (EIA), which reported on total electricity generation across all fuels and resources.
As recently as 2010, utility-scale solar accounted for just over 1,200 MWh of generation; small-scale solar didn’t make it onto EIA’s radar until 2014 when it clocked in at 11,233 MWh.
Solar’s 2020 performance was eclipsed by natural gas, which accounted for more than 1.6 million MWh of electricity, roughly 2% greater than a year earlier. For all of 2020, coal-fired sources produced north of 770,000 MWh of electricity, a drop of nearly 20% from 2019. A decade ago, coal generated more than 1.8 million MWh. The decline is just under 60%.
The EIA data also showed that during this past July, utility-scale solar generated more than 10,000 MWh of electricity. That helped push generation from solar for the May-September peak months to more than 47,000 MWh. That was a nearly 24% improvement over the roughly 38,000 MWh produced during the same period in 2019.
Meanwhile, small-scale solar produced almost 21,000 MWh during the five summer months of 2020. That was up from just under 18,000 MWh in 2019, an improvement of around 18%.
EIA said that total generation across all utility-scale power sources in 2020 was just over 4 million MWh, down from 4.1 million MWh in 2019. The 2020 total also was just under 3% lower than total generation recorded in 2010.
