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Renewable energy production reached record amounts in 2024, producing 24% of U.S. electricity, an annual update on sustainable energy finds.
That includes electricity from solar, wind and hydroelectric power plants, with solar driving the increase, the Sustainable Energy in America 2025 Factbook, released Friday, reports.
Windpower is becoming less popular, both onshore and offshore projects struggled in 2024, showing the fourth straight year of declining additions.
“From the point of view of solar, things have been going very well. Huge, record level of additions, this sector has been going from strength to strength,” said Tom Rolands-Reese, the head of research for North America for BloombergNEF, which produces the annual factbook together with the Business Council for Sustainable Energy.
With significant changes to U.S. energy policies under the Trump administration, whether these trends will continue is not clear.
“The 2024 Factbook is a snapshot of where things were at the end of the previous administration,” Rolands-Reese said.
The U.S. electric grid added 54 gigawatts of new renewable power-generating capacity, with almost 40 gigawatts of that coming from new solar installations.
Battery storage, which allows solar and wind farms to feed power into the electric grid even when the sun is down or the wind isn’t blowing, also increased significantly. The United States is now the second-largest energy storage market in the world. China is the largest.
Corporations led much of the push to buy clean power in 2024, with companies signing up to buy 28 gigawatts of zero-carbon power. A new trend for 2024 was diversification of these purchases to include not just wind and solar but also nuclear.
Electric vehicle sales reached 1.5 million in 2024, growing by 6.5%. In total, one in 10 new cars registered last year came with a plug.
That’s included a lot more brands coming onto a market which Tesla had long dominated. “Particularly the legacy automakers are now really ramping up their electric vehicle operations,” said Rolands-Reese.
The whole energy sector continues to be more efficient. While the U.S. economy expanded 2.8% last year, primary energy consumption grew by only 0.5%.
U.S. greenhouse gas emissions were up slightly, 0.5% year-on-year, mostly due to increased use of fossil fuels. The increase was in industry, transport and agriculture.
U.S. greenhouse gas emissions from the power sector are down drastically from 2005 – 41% lower.
Overall the U.S. power sector is becoming more and more clean. Up until 2016 it emitted the largest amount of greenhouse gasses in the U.S. In 2024 it came in third place, after transportation and industry.
This decrease comes because the U.S. has shifted to more renewable energy, natural gas and increasingly less coal.
Compared with 2005, overall U.S. emissions were 15.8% lower in 2024.
