The fastest growing source of US electricity has lead to large CO2 reductions for US electricity.

[NNadir]

6. I didn't include "utility scale solar" in the OP text, mostly because it's absurdly trivial.

However, we now have a post in this space called, um, http://www.democraticunderground.com/1127103141
Big solar is leaving rooftop systems in the dust]

All of the data for total electricity produced in the United States as pure generated electricity - and not as primary energy - is found in the opening post. The figure for total electricity in 2015 was 14.71 exajoules as calculated by the means I described above.

Of this, 0.095 exajoules or 0.64% was produced by utility scale solar energy.

Seen as average continuous power, this is the equivalent of three average sized (1000MWe) power plants running at 100% of capacity utilization - something that solar plants can't do; they are lucky, extremely lucky, to reach 20% capacity utilization. More typical is half that.

The entire solar industry in the United States, constructed at enormous expense over a period of half a century, and covering huge swathes of land, could disappear tomorrow and no one would notice.

I very much doubt that the industry could actually run the servers from which websites saying how great the solar industry is, or all the computers devoted to contemplating blog posts about the solar "miracle."

The solar industry is a tremendous failure, and a tremendous waste of money. Faith in this absurd solar fantasy is yet another reason why we are observing the fastest ever accumulation of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in our favorite waste dump, the planetary atmosphere.