Big Impact of Small Solar Quarterly Update: 2025 Q3
The quarterly Big Impact of Small Solarseries aims to show just how much distributed, small-scale (community, residential, and commercial) solar is contributing to new power capacity additions in the United States.
Local, small solar and storage projects, when added together, can have a big impact on the energy transition!
Key takeaways:
Eighty-eight percent of all new capacity installed in the second quarter of 2025 was solar – 74 percent from utility-scale solar farms and 14 percent from distributed (residential, community, and commercial) solar installations.
More distributed solar came on line (1.6 gigawatts) in 2025 Q3 than in any other quarter this year.
In addition, more than 7.6 GW of storage has been added in 2025 so far. Almost 15% of that (1.1 GW) is distributed.
The chart below illustrates the past two years of electric power capacity additions in the U.S., disaggregated by energy source, quarterly.
Interested in earlier trends and analysis of new power plant capacity? Check out our archive, illustrating how electricity capacity additions have shifted in previous quarters and years.
