2016 Likely Year That Solar Capacity Installations Outpaced Wind Or Natural Gas

[hatrack]

2016 is shaping up to be a milestone year for energy, and when the final accounting is done, one of the biggest winners is likely to be solar power. For the first time, more electricity-generating capacity from solar power plants is expected to have been built in the U.S. than from natural gas and wind, U.S. Department of Energy data show.

Though the final tally won’t be in until March, enough new solar power plants were expected to be built in 2016 to total 9.5 gigawatts of solar power generating capacity, tripling the new solar capacity built in 2015. That’s enough to light up more than 1.8 million homes.

The solar farms built in 2016 were expected to exceed the 8 gigawatts of natural gas power generating capacity and the 6.8 gigawatts of wind power slated for construction this year. No new coal-fired power plants were planned in 2016.

“If 2016 planned additions pan out as operators initially expected for 2016, it would mark the first year that solar was the largest source of capacity,” said Tim Shear, an economist for the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Despite the growth, utility-scale solar power still represents a tiny fraction of the supply of electricity in the U.S. Though U.S. solar power generation was expected to have grown by 44 percent in 2016 and is expected to grow more than 30 percent in 2017, it will still provide around 1 percent of the nation’s electric power, according to EIA data.

EDIT

http://www.climatecentral.org/news/solar-expected-to-outpace-natural-gas-21005

[NNadir]

1. Capacity is not energy. The sooner we stop confusing peak capacity while ignoring capacity...

...utilization, the sooner we will begin to make rational choices.

This kind of rhetoric, which is very, very, very, very, very dangerous under the circumstances, is absurd. The solar industry has been, is and always will be trivial, and to speak of it in terms of dangerous natural gas by comparison is frankly, delusional.

It makes people believe that everything is OK. It generates more complacency than energy. Things not OK. We are in a carbon dioxide death spiral that is getting worse, not better. The solar industry, which is expensive and rather toxic, is like a finger in a dike against a tsunami.