Note: In 2025 we changed the name of this quarterly series to Big Impact of Small Solar to better reflect its aim of showing just how much distributed, small-scale (community, residential, and commercial) solar is contributing to new power capacity additions in the United States. The bottom line: it’s a lot! Especially considering that it still undercounts utility-scale solar in the 1 to 5 MW range. We are also now combining gas and coal-fired power into a single “fossil” category in the chart below.
More than 11 gigawatts of new power capacity went online in the first quarter of 2025 and the vast majority (99%) of this capacity was renewable. Eighty-four percent of new capacity was from solar generation, with 7.7 gigawatts of utility-scale solar and 1.6 gigawatts of distributed solar. Wind energy buildout contributed 1.7 gigawatts, while fossil fuel power grew by only 111 megawatts.
The chart below illustrates the past two years of electric power capacity additions in the U.S., disaggregated by energy source, quarterly.
Key takeaways:
- Eighty-four percent of all new capacity installed in the first quarter of 2025 was solar – 69.4 percent from utility-scale solar farms and 14.1 percent from distributed solar installations (residential, commercial, and community solar).
- As measured by both capacity (megawatts) and as a percentage of new capacity build-out, distributed solar recorded one of its slowest quarters in the past two years. The decline that started last year was the result of California’s misguided reduction in rooftop solar compensation.
- Only 111 megawatts of new fossil-fired power generation capacity came online in the year’s first quarter – this is less than in any other quarter over the past two years, with the exception of the first quarter of 2024.
- Developers also installed 1.7 gigawatts of utility-scale energy storage in the first quarter of 2025 – approximately 50 percent of what was installed in the previous quarter.
For more on the advancement of clean, distributed energy, see these recent ILSR resources:
- The 2025 Community Power Scorecard
- Community Power Map
- Community Solar Tracker
- State Community Solar Programs
- Community Leaders on the Benefits of Locally Owned Clean Energy
- What the Monopoly Utility Model Really Costs Us
- Upcharge: Hidden Costs of Electric Utility Monopoly Power
- Local Energy Rules episode 236 – Community Solar Cracks Gas Crisis in Alaska
- Local Energy Rules episode 235 – Community Solar Complements New Hampshire’s Resident-Owned Communities
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.
This article was originally posted at ilsr.org. For timely updates from the Energy Democracy Initiative, follow John Farrell on Twitter or Bluesky, and subscribe to the Energy Democracy weekly update.
Featured Photo Credit: U.S. Department of Agriculture via Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0)