U.S. Monthly Power Generation

Highlights:

• EnerWrap wrangles daily U.S. Lower-48 power generation data from the EIA to provide an early look into monthly generation statistics by energy source

• Utility-scale power generation in May 2024 was 338 TWh, up from 300 TWh in April

• The highest monthly reading is 414 TWh in July 2023, which likely gets broken this summer if weather trends continue

• Solar generation was 21 TWh in May, representing 6.2% of total generation, both all-time highs

• Coal generation was 14% of the power stack in May, the third-lowest on record

• Solar & wind generation was 18% of the total stack in May, down from 22% in April

• Green/clean energy (solar, wind, nuclear, hydro) was 45% of generation in May down from 48% in April

Natural gas continue to be the dominant power generation fuel source in the U.S..

Despite significant growth in recent years, solar and wind remain far behind natural gas power generation.

The trend for solar & wind power generation continues to be up and to the right.

Green energy (solar, wind, nuclear, hydro) power generation as a percent of total shows significant seasonality, but recently took out all-time monthly highs.

Daily solar generation has seen a significant increase in 2024, with capacity continuing to be added to the grid.

Daily solar generation recently exceeded 7% of the total power generation stack.

Daily wind power generation growth has been muted since 2022.

Despite capacity additions, the record high for daily wind generation as a percent of total generation is from October 2022. 

We’ll continue to build out this dataset and report these figures at the beginning of each month.