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 June 2024 was 381 TWh, up 12.6% from 338 TWh in May and up 9.5% from 348 TWh in June 2023

• The highest monthly total utility-scale generation reading remains 414 TWh in July 2023, which we expect to get broken this summer if weather trends continue

• Solar generation was 23 TWh in June, up from 21 TWh in May, another all-time high monthly record

• Solar as a percentage of total generation slipped from 6.2% to 6.0% of total generation

• Coal generation was 16.9% of the power stack in June, up from 14.0% in May

• Solar & wind generation was 16.1% of the total stack in June, compared to 12.5% last year

• Green/clean energy (solar, wind, nuclear, hydro) was 40.3% of generation in June versus 37.7% in 2023

Monthly solar generation continues to shine.

Natural gas continue to be the dominant power generation fuel source in the U.S. at 41.3% of the power stack in June, the highest since September 2023

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. June 2024 utility-scale solar generation was 5.9% of total generation versus 4.6% a year ago.

The highest reading of daily solar generation as a percentage of the U.S. power stack is 7.3% on April 14, 20124.

Daily wind power generation growth has been muted since 2022. June 2024 wind generation was 10.2% of the total stack versus 7.9% in 2023.

Despite capacity additions, the record high for daily wind generation as a percent of total generation is from October 2022 at 21.4%. 

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