Solar smashes US records with 50 GW added in one year, as Trump’s energy secretary gushes about gas

The United States installed a record-breaking 50 GW of new solar capacity during 2024, the largest single year of new capacity added to the grid by any energy technology in more than two decades.

New figures published this week by the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and energy research firm Wood Mackenzie showed that solar accounted for 66 per cent of all new electricity-generating capacity added to the US grid in 2024, a 21 per cent increase over 2023 and marking the second consecutive year of record-breaking capacity additions.

Combined with storage, the two technologies accounted for 84 per cent of all new electric generating capacity, according to the U.S. Solar Market Insight 2024 Year in Review report published on Tuesday.

New capacity additions were backed by huge growth in domestic module manufacturing capacity, which grew by “an unprecedented” 190 per cent, growing from only 14.5 GW at the end of 2023 up to 42.1 GW by the end of 2024 – on its way to surpassing 50 GW earlier this year.

Specifically, a number of manufacturers reshored cell manufacturing or initiated new manufacturing centres during 2024, thanks in large part to the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), a largely clean spending bill passed in 2022 that rewarded local clean energy manufacturing.

When operating at full capacity, domestic solar module production can now produce enough to meet nearly all demand for solar panels across the US.

“Last year’s record-level of installations was aided by several solar policies and credits within the Inflation Reduction Act that helped drive interest in the solar market,” said Sylvia Leyva Martinez, principal analyst for North America utility-scale solar for Wood Mackenzie. 

“We still have many challenges ahead, including unprecedented load growth on the power grid. If many of these policies were eliminated or significantly altered, it would be very detrimental to the industry’s continued growth.”

Looking forward, the momentum from installations and manufacturing growth is expected to see total US solar capacity reach 739 GW by 2035, up from the 236 GW that had been installed up to the end of 2024, thanks to average annual capacity additions of over 45GW.

However, given the antipathy towards clean energy technologies like solar held by newly installed US president Donald Trump, Wood Mackenzie and the SEIA are unsure exactly what the more immediate future will look like.

Having signed a number of executive orders rolling back climate change initiatives and promoting fossil fuels, Trump’s time in power could ensure that total solar installations by 2035 are down by as much as 25 per cent compared to the report’s high-level scenario, amounting to as much as 130GW not installed over the next decade.

A slowdown to solar capacity additions at this scale could end up leaving the US without the electricity needed to meet increasing demand, subsequently threatening growth in the manufacturing and technology sectors that rely on abundant power.

“Solar and storage can be built faster and more affordably than any other technology, ensuring the United States has the power needed to compete in the global economy and meet rising electricity demand,” said Abigail Ross Hopper, SEIA president and CEO. 

“America’s solar and storage industry set historic deployment and manufacturing records in 2024, creating jobs and driving economic growth. It’s critical that lawmakers continue to support an ‘all of the above’ energy strategy that fosters the growth of American energy sources like solar and storage.”

Ironically – though in no way surprisingly – the new figures from Wood Mackenzie and the SEIA came a day after the newly anointed US energy secretary Chris Wright claimed to a room of oil and gas executives that “there is simply no physical way that wind, solar and batteries could replace the myriad uses of natural gas.”

In a keynote address at S&P Global’s CERAWeek, Wright – the former CEO of North American oilfield services firm Liberty Energy – continued his assault on the clean energy transition, and facts in general.

Wright spent the majority of his keynote address spruiking for the natural gas industry while downplaying the significance of clean energy technologies like wind and solar.

At the same time as he extolled the virtues of natural gas and falsely claimed that it “has been the fastest growing source of energy over the last 15 years” – it hasn’t, and has been regularly outstripped by wind and solar – Wright also cherry picked whatever data on clean energy met with his preferred worldview.

According to Wright, “wind and solar, the darlings of the last administration and so much of the world today, supply roughly 3% of global primary energy.”

While this may be true in the United States, it is not true globally, with figures published last year showing that wind and solar accounted for 6 per cent of global primary energy.  

That’s also something of a misleading figure, given that “primary energy” also includes everything from the automotive sector to heavy industry and thermal. And while electrification has been top of the list for many countries in recent years, it is a slow process, and one that is continually hamstrung by executives and policymakers like Wright.

In fact, the United States government’s own Energy Information Administration (EIA) published data on Tuesday that showed wind, solar, hydropower, and nuclear will account for around 45 per cent of the US generation mix in 2025 and into 2026, while at the same time natural gas will actually decline, from 42 per cent in 2024 to 40 per cent of the mix in 2025 and 2026.