State of Solar 2025: Sunny Stats About Solar Power in the U.S. and Globally

As data centers pop up around the country  to support the artificial intelligence boom, electricity needs are spiking. Luckily, renewables — and solar energy in particular — have been rising to meet the challenge.

“We are seeing the first signs of a crucial turning point,” Małgorzata Wiatros-Motyka, a senior electricity analyst at the think tank Ember, said in a recent press release. “Solar and wind are now growing fast enough to meet the world’s growing appetite for electricity. This marks the beginning of a shift where clean power is keeping pace with demand growth.”

And that’s far from the only uplifting update about solar from this calendar year. Keep reading for statistics about solar energy’s continued growth and its projected progress in the years ahead.

‍What happened with solar energy in 2025‍‍

‍Despite federal tax-credit changes, solar energy is still growing in the United States.

‍The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law on July 4, reshapes the landscape for domestic clean energy development by cutting back on renewable-energy tax credits. Under the new legislation, developers must place projects in service by the end of 2027 to receive incentives, or begin construction by July 4, 2026 and complete them by 2030.  

Even so, solar energy progress in the U.S. isn’t slowing down. Despite the phase-out of tax credits and added complexity that could cause short-term delays and pricing volatility, developers added 12 GW of utility-scale solar capacity in the first half of 2025, with another 21 GW planned for the second half. Of the 64 GW of cumulative additions expected this year, 33.3 GW is solar, 18.3 GW battery storage, 7.8 GW wind, and only 4.7 GW natural gas—underscoring continued momentum even as policy shifts challenge the industry.

‍The U.S. hit 50 gigawatts of solar module manufacturing capacity.

‍This February brought the news that the United States had surpassed 50 GW of domestic solar module production capacity, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. The SEIA report added that those factories, if running at full capacity, could produce the solar modules needed to meet all of the country’s solar demand.

Supplanted by renewables, fossil fuels accounted for less than 50% of U.S. electricity generation for the first time. In March of this year, fossil fuels reached a record low in the United States’ electricity mix as solar and wind reached record highs, as Ember announced the following month.

Fossil fuels accounted for 49.2% of the electricity generated in March in the first time on record that share had dropped below 50%, while clean sources made up more than half of U.S. electricity generation for the first time. Together, wind and solar reached a record 24.4% of the country’s electricity mix that month, marking an all-time high, after U.S. solar power increased 37% year over year.

Data center operators and tech companies backed a dozen 100-megawatt-plus solar deals in 2025’s first quarter.TechCrunch reported at the end of March that data center operators and tech companies — including Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon — had signed 12 solar deals since the start of the year, which each deal contributing more than 100 megawatts (MW) to the grid.

‍Global solar installations increased 64% year over year in the first half of 2025.

‍During the first half of 2025, the world installed solar at a much greater pace than the same time in 2024, according to Ember data released this September. In those first six months of the year, the world added 380 GW of new solar capacity, a 64% increase from the first half of 2024. In fact, the world didn’t hit 350 GW of new solar installations until the month of September last year, whereas the world hit 350 GW of new solar installations in June of this year.

‍Renewables overtook coal for the first time on record.‍‍

‍Ember reported in October that renewable energy had surpassed coal for the first recorded time, following groundbreaking solar growth and steady wind growth.

Specifically, renewables supplied 5,072 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity around the world, up from 4,709 TWh in the same period in 2024, while coal supplied 4,896 TWh, down from 4,927 TWh in the same period in 2024.

‍Solar and wind growth met all new electricity demand in the first three quarters of 2025.

‍The following month, Ember had another reason for clean-energy advocates to celebrate. The think tank announced that that solar and wind had grown fast enough to meet all new electricity demand in 2025’s first three quarters. Even though global electricity demand had risen by 603 TWh by that point in the year, solar and wind generation had risen both 498 and 137 TWh, respectively, for a total of 635 TWh.

‍Fewer U.S. solar projects reported a delay in Q3.

‍Also in November, the EIA delivered the good news that fewer solar projects in the United States were reporting delays than in the year prior. In the third quarter of the year, projects representing 20% of planned solar capacity reported a delay, down 25% from the same period in 2024, according to the EIA.

‍The U.S. added 11.7 GW of new solar capacity in 2025’s third quarter, the third-largest quarter on record.

‍SEIA announced in December that the U.S. had installed 11.7 GW of new solar capacity in the third quarter of 2025, marking the U.S. solar industry’s third-largest quarter on record, despite political headwinds.

“This record-setting quarter for solar deployment shows that the market is continuing to turn to solar to meet rising demand,” SEIA president and CEO Abigail Ross Hopper said at the time. ‍

‍What to expect from solar energy in 2026 and beyond

‍The International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts global renewable power capacity to increase nearly 4,600 GW between 2025 and 2030, double the increase of the previous five years. That increase is equal to the combined installed power capacity of China, the European Union, and Japan, the IEA adds. That said, the agency also notes that its main-case model predicts renewable energy capacity will only total 9,530 GW in 2030, representing a 2.6-times increase and not the tripling to which the nearly 200 countries at 2023’s COP28 conference aspired.

There is more promising news, however: IEA expects global renewable electricity generation to increase 60% by 2030, going from 9,900 TWh to 16,200 TWh.

Meanwhile, SEIA announced a target this January to deploy 10 million distributed strange installations and reach 700 gigawatt-hours of total installed storage capacity in the United States by 2030.

“The U.S. storage market is at an inflection point, but with the mix of policy support and private, state and federal collaboration, we can achieve SEIA’s storage targets while creating jobs and ensuring reliable, around the clock power for every home and business in this county,” Joan White, SEIA’s director of storage and interconnection, said in a press release.

SEIA’s mission is to transform the clean energy economy so that solar comprises 30% of U.S. electricity generation by 2030. Between March 2015 and March 2025, solar power’s share of U.S. electricity jumped from 1% to 9.2%. The country’s solar industry still has a ways to go to reach the 30% mark, but it has increased its share of the energy-generation pie chart nearly tenfold in just ten years.