The quarterly Big Impact of Small Solar series 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:
- Over three-quarters of all new capacity installed in 2025 was solar – 63 percent from utility-scale solar farms and 15 percent from distributed (residential, community, and commercial) solar installations.
- More distributed solar came on line (1.9 gigawatts) in 2025 Q4 than in any other quarter last year.
- In addition, more than 15 GW of storage was added in 2025. About 14% of storage capacity was installed in distributed fashion “behind the meter.”
The chart below illustrates the past two years of electric power capacity additions in the U.S., disaggregated by energy source, quarterly.
The following pie chart shows the share of new power generation capacity from each source as a fraction of the 46 GW of new capacity added in the year 2025.
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Featured Photo Credit: U.S. Department of Agriculture via Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0)