Renewables provided 90% of new US capacity in 2024 – FERC
Renewable energy – solar, wind, geothermal, hydropower, biomass – accounted for more than 90% of total US electrical generating capacity added in 2024, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and reviewed by the SUN DAY campaign.
Solar alone accounted for over 81% of the new capacity. Moreover, December was the 16th month in a row in which solar was the largest source of new capacity.
Renewables made up the lion’s share of new generating capacity in December and in 2024. In its latest monthly “Energy Infrastructure Update” report (with data through December 31, 2024), FERC says 105 “units” of solar totaling 4,369 megawatts (MW) came online in December, along with two units of wind (324 MW) and two units of biomass (45 MW). Combined, they accounted for 86.9% of all new generating capacity added during the month. Natural gas provided the balance: 717 MW.
During the full 2024 calendar year, solar and wind added 30,816 MW and 3,128 MW, respectively. Combined with 213 MW of hydropower, 51 MW of biomass, and 29 MW of geothermal steam, renewables accounted for 90.5% of added capacity. The balance consisted of the 1,100 Vogtle-4 nuclear reactor in Georgia, plus 2,428 MW of natural gas, 13 MW of coal, 11 MW of oil, and 28 MW of “other.”
Solar was 80.1% of new capacity in December and 81.5% during 2024. Solar accounted for 81.5% of all new generating capacity placed into service in 2024 – 50% more than the solar capacity added in 2023.
In December alone, solar comprised 80.1% of all new capacity added.
New solar capacity added in 2024 is almost nine times that added by natural gas and nuclear power combined.
Solar has now been the largest source of new generating capacity added each month for 16 months straight, from September 2023 – December 2024.
Adjusting for the differences in capacity factors among solar, nuclear, and natural gas, the new solar capacity added in 2024 is likely to generate seven times as much electricity as the new nuclear capacity and about five times as much as might be expected from the new natural gas capacity.
Solar + wind are now almost 22% of US utility-scale generating capacity. New wind accounted for much of the balance (8.3%) of capacity additions, which is more than either the new natural gas capacity (6.4%) or nuclear power capacity (2.9%).
Taken together, the installed capacities of just solar (10.2%) and wind (11.7%) now constitute more than one-fifth (21.9%) of the US’s total available installed utility-scale generating capacity.
However, approximately 30% of US solar capacity is in the form of small-scale (e.g., rooftop) systems that aren’t reflected in FERC’s data. Including that additional solar capacity would bring the share provided by solar + wind closer to a quarter of the US total.
With the inclusion of hydropower (7.7%), biomass (1.1%), and geothermal (0.3%), renewables now claim a 31.0% share of total US utility-scale generating capacity. If small-scale solar capacity is included, renewables are now about one-third of total US generating capacity.
Solar’s share of US generating capacity is now 10x greater than a decade ago. As noted, by the end of 2024, solar and wind accounted for 10.2% and 11.7%, respectively, of all installed utility-scale generating capacity in the US, while the mix of all renewables accounted for 31.0%.
In December 2023, FERC reported that solar and wind were 7.9% and 11.7% of installed capacity while the mix of all renewables provided 29.0%.
Five years ago (December 2019), FERC released data showing solar and wind to be 3.5% and 8.5% of total capacity while all renewables combined were 22.1%.
A decade ago (December 2014), FERC reported that solar and wind were 1.0% and 5.5% of total capacity, while the combination of all renewables accounted for 16.6% of capacity.
Solar will soon become the second-largest source of US generating capacity. FERC reports that net “high probability” additions of solar between January 2025 and December 2027 total 91,558 MW – an amount almost four times the forecast net “high probability” additions for wind (23,601 MW), the second-fastest growing resource. FERC also foresees growth for hydropower (1,345 MW), geothermal (90 MW), and biomass (61 MW).
Taken together, the net new “high probability” capacity additions by all renewable energy sources would total 116,655 MW, with solar comprising over 78% and wind providing another 20%.
On the other hand, there is no new nuclear capacity in FERC’s three-year forecast, while coal, oil, and natural gas are projected to contract by 23,925 MW, 2,293 MW, and 833 MW, respectively.
If FERC’s current “high probability” additions materialize, by January 1, 2028, solar will account for nearly one-sixth (16.1%) of the US’s installed utility-scale generating capacity. That would be greater than either coal or wind (both 12.6%) and substantially more than either nuclear power or hydropower (both 7.3%).
In fact, assuming current growth rates continue, the installed capacity of utility-scale solar is likely to surpass coal and wind within the next two years, placing solar in second place for installed generating capacity, behind natural gas.
Meanwhile, the mix of all renewables is now adding about two percentage points each year to its share of generating capacity. Thus, by January 1, 2028, renewables would account for 37.3% of the total available installed utility-scale generating capacity – rapidly approaching that of natural gas (40.2%) – with solar and wind constituting more than three-quarters of the installed renewable energy capacity.
All renewables combined are on track to exceed natural gas within three years. As noted, FERC’s data don’t account for the capacity of small-scale solar systems. If that’s factored in, within three years, total US solar capacity could surpass 320 GW. In turn, the mix of all renewables would then exceed 40% of total installed capacity while the share of natural gas share would drop to about 37%.
Moreover, FERC reports that there may actually be as much as 222,443 MW of net new solar additions in the current three-year pipeline in addition to 68,815 MW of new wind, 8,659 MW of new hydropower, 199 MW of new geothermal, and 127 MW of new biomass. By contrast, the net new natural gas capacity potentially in the three-year pipeline totals just 19,438 MW. Thus, the share of renewables share could be even greater by early 2028.
“For more than a decade, renewable energy sources – led by solar – have dominated growth in US generating capacity,” noted the SUN DAY Campaign’s executive director Ken Bossong. “Consequently, efforts by the Trump Administration to reverse this trend are both illogical and likely to fail.”
Electrek’s Take
FERC’s latest data further illustrates how utterly ridiculous Trump’s “national energy emergency” executive order is. The steady growth of clean energy, which has kept large energy markets like Texas out of trouble during weather events, disproves Trump’s claims that the US clean energy supply is “precariously inadequate and intermittent.”
Further, his refusal to even define solar and wind as “energy” in that executive order isn’t going to stop their progress, and both he and his new secretary of energy, Chris Wright, telling lies about renewables isn’t going to make them any less clean, affordable, or reliable.
Read more: Thanks to wind and solar, Texas has kept the power on and the costs down
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Autonomous taxi company Waymo faced scrutiny last month when a car was caught on video illegally passing a stopped school bus that was letting children off in Atlanta. Now, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is looking into it.
Georgia State Representative Clint Crowe seemed stunned after being presented with video of a Waymo driverless car illegally passing a stopped school bus on Briarcliff Road in Atlanta last month. “I’m a big fan of new technologies and emerging technologies and I think that driverless cars are going to become more prevalent,” he told local NBC news affiliate WBIR. “But we got [sic] to think about how they’re going to comply with the law.”
WBIR | Waymo illegally passes school bus
Crowe co-sponsored Addy’s Law in 2024. The legislation was named after 8-year-old Addy Pierce, who was killed in Henry County after being struck while crossing the street to get to her bus. The law stiffened penalties for illegally passing a stopped school bus, carrying penalties of up to $1,000 in fines and even jail time.
According to Crowe, those rules still apply to autonomous vehicles. “The majority of our traffic laws, the penalty is usually a fine and or driver’s license suspension. These cars don’t have a driver, so they don’t have a driver’s license and so we’re really going to have to rethink who’s the responsible party, who’s going to be responsible for being in control of that vehicle and who’s going to be the operator of that vehicle,” he said.
Crowe believes manufacturers should face stronger consequences when their vehicles break the law, saying the $1,000 fine doesn’t go far enough.
Now, thanks to pressure from social media and politicians like Crowe and Geoirgia State Senator Rick Williams, who helped co-author Addy’s Law, it seems like NHTSA is getting involved.
Prompted by media reports, the US Department of Transportation issued an investigation regarding Waymo’s AV, which states that, “the AV initially stopped, but then drove around the front of the bus by briefly turning right to avoid running into the bus’s right front end, then turning left to pass in front of the bus, and then turning further left and driving down the roadway past the entire left side of the bus. During this maneuver, the Waymo AV passed the bus’s extended crossing control arm near disembarking students (on the bus’s right side) and passed the extended stop arm on the bus’s left side.”
While it remains to be seen how much work NHTSA is actually doing amid the ongoing shutdown of the Federal government, it’s worth noting that, regardless of the outcome, Senator Williams said he plans to introduce new legislation that would hold driverless car companies accountable with higher fines if their vehicles violate traffic laws. If that passes in Georgia, it could set the stage for politicians across the US and even abroad to use similar fins to halt the spread of autonomous taxis in their states.
“Driverless cars should be stopped until it can be figured out,” said Williams. “We should not have this on the road. It’s too dangerous for our children.”
You can read NHTSA summary, below.
We’re typically pretty tech- and autonomous-forward here, but as a parent I would absolutely lose my s*** if a Waymo or Robotaxi or whatever else ran over my kid. but I’ve also seen plenty of human drivers blow past a school bus with a knee on the steering wheel and both eyes glued firmly to their phones. Let us know who you’d be more ready to trust with your kids’ lives in the comments.
SOURCES: WBIR, NHTSA, via School Transportation News.
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![Lion Electric school bus warranties voided, leaving districts stuck [update]](https://i0.wp.com/electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2025/07/unforgivable.jpg?resize=1200,628&quality=82&strip=all&ssl=1)
Nobody ever says “this is business” before doing something nice, and the recently reborn Lion Electric company is keeping that streak alive by doing the unthinkable to cut costs: they’re going to void the warranties on hundreds of electric school buses.
UPDATE 01NOV2025: two Lion Electric buses caught fire, now they’re in more trouble.
This past summer, the fallout from Lion Electric’s dissolution reached a critical mass, and the company’s new owners — the Quebec-based real estate giants Groupe MACH — decided to cancel the warranties on electric school buses sold in the US, leaving many districts with unsafe or broken down buses and no recourse to get their money back while the brand continued to take orders and make money in Canada.
Now, it seems like even the Canadian fleets have some serious safety concerns. School Transportation News and the CBC report that The Quebec Ministry of Education has ordered Lion school bus models be taken out of service immediately after a pair of LionC electric buses caught fire in Montreal, Quebec on Sept 9th, leading to disruptions across the province and a renewed scrutiny of Lion bus safety (Lion360 diesel-powered school buses, which Lion manufactured prior to only producing electric vehicles in 2017, were also affected by the issue).
Lion Bus (the company’s new, official name), has issued an inspection bulletin detailing a four-hour repair, which reads, “We have identified some potential anomalies in a sub-component of the HVAC system that Lion obtains from a third-party supplier … in the interest of safety above all else, we request that Lion bus operators perform the following inspections and modifications: mandatory inspection of several low-voltage electrical connections, replacement of certain electrical connectors, replace fan fuses with less powerful ones, adding a fuse to an HVAC control panel circuit. This inspection and modification procedure must be carried out on all Lion360 (diesel) and LionC 3rd generation and earlier buses (Gen3, Gen2 and Gen1).”
No word yet on whether the issue impacts any of the few Lion Electric buses still on US roads, but remember: Lion Bus wouldn’t help you if it did.
You can read about Lion’s decision to leave US school districts holding the bag on its troubled products in the original July post, below, then let us know how you feel about Groupe MACH’s handling of the situation in the comments section at the bottom of the page.
The warranty story
In a letter issued to exiting Lion Electric customers last week, Deloitte Restructuring announced that the warranties on all Lion vehicles purchased outside of the company’s home Province of Quebec are null and void – leaving dozens of school districts in the lurch with stranded assets that won’t get fixed, and can’t be sold to generate funds for replacements.
“We are working with alternate vendors at the expense of the school district to help keep our electric buses functional and on the road,” explains Dr. Richard Decman, Superintendent of Herscher CUSD No. 2 district in Herscher, Illinois. “Currently, six of our 25 (Lion) electric buses need some type of repair.”
Student Transportation News reports that Lion buses represent fully half of Herscher’s overall fleet of 50 buses, and that the district has received nearly $10 million for the purchase of 25 electric buses and the related charging stations from various state and utility incentive programs.
Herscher isn’t the only district having problems with Lion buses. “All four Lion buses that we own are currently parked and not being used,” Coleen Souza, interim transportation director of Winthrop Public Schools, told Clean Trucking. “Two of them are in need of repairs which would cost us money which we are not willing to invest in because the buses do not run for more than a month before needing more repairs.”
More of the same in Maine, where Yarmouth School Department bought two Lion Electric buses in 2023 with the state covering the costs. According to Superintendent Andrew Dolloff, the buses almost never worked. “We’ve had some sporadic service over the past two years, but as soon as the tech leaves, the buses produce error codes again,” explained Dolloff. ” and “Then the technician quits or is released, and we wait a few months for the next response.”
Dolloff added that Yarmouth’s electric buses did not operate during the 2024-25 school year.
Lion’s new owners are seemingly uninterested in their customers’ plight – which might be easily dismissed if those new owners, Groupe MACH, weren’t also the old owners of Lion Electric.
That’s right, kids. Quebec-based real estate company Groupe MACH, which stepped in to “save” Lion Electric earlier this summer, along with Ontario-based Mirella & Lino Saputo Foundation, bought $90 million of equity in Lion Electric back in 2023. And, while the MACH people may not have been the ones who ultimately made the call about voiding the warranties (that decision was made by the Deloitte bankruptcy team), it is absolutely Group MACH who have, to date, not announced plans to continue to honor those warranties, either.
Make of that what you will.
Deloitte Lion letter
SOURCES: School Transportation News, Clean Trucking, Deloitte.
If you’re considering going solar, it’s always a good idea to get quotes from a few installers. To make sure you find a trusted, reliable solar installer near you that offers competitive pricing, check out EnergySage, a free service that makes it easy for you to go solar. It has hundreds of pre-vetted solar installers competing for your business, ensuring you get high-quality solutions and save 20-30% compared to going it alone. Plus, it’s free to use, and you won’t get sales calls until you select an installer and share your phone number with them.
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The first-ever Liebherr MK 120-5.1E electric crane in customer hands has rolled into the narrow, historic streets of Bern’s old town at 20 meters tall with a 45 meter reach and (of course) zero emissions, no vibrations, and almost no noise.
Deployed by Swiss construction firm Zaugg AG Rohrbach, the new Liebherr electric mobile crane is working hard placing temporary roofs above operational construction sites. It’s precise work, since the narrow streets of Bern’s historic old town weren’t even built for cars — much less massive, five-axle construction machinery. The prices controls and smooth operation of the electric drive mean the MK120-5.1E’s operators could confidently navigate the narrow streets without causing damage and creating new, unpaid jobs for themselves.
“The all-wheel steering allows us to manoeuvre easily in the narrow alleyways,” explained Stefan Stettler, head of the crane department at Zaugg AG Rohrbach. In reverse gear, the crane worked its way along the historic Rathausgasse to its construction site, past the arcades typical of the old town.
In addition to on-board power, the mobile crane can also be plugged into on-site grid power where available, or any mobile power sources capable of offering a steady 63 AMP output for lifting work. A mobile Liebherr Liduro Power Port LPO 100 was on hand in Bern, made available to Zaugg expressly for this purpose. With the Liduro LPO 100 fully charged, Liebherr says the stored energy is good for two full days of crane work.
“The low-noise and emission-free crane work is naturally pleasant for (Bern’s) residents, tourists and passers-by,” explained Stettler. “Especially as we only extended the crane support on the side facing away from the construction site by 50 per cent, allowing pedestrians and cyclists to pass through at all times.”
The MK120-5.1E electric mobile crane offers 8,000 kg (~17,650 lbs.) of lifting capacity, and all of the crane’s drives and winches are powered by electric motors, eliminating both the need to “warm up” or service oil-based hydraulics. It can be had with either a 98 kWh on-board battery (shown) or a 544 hp Liebherr diesel genset.
Electrek’s Take
From compact wheel loaders to radical two-wheeled dumper concepts to massive battery electric retrofit excavators, Liebherr is absolutely killing it in the heavy equipment electrification race. Their electric equipment offerings are proving that EVs can get even the heaviest jobs done, and save big fleets even bigger money while doing it.
SOURCE | IMAGES: Liebherr, via Construction Equipment.
If you’re considering going solar, it’s always a good idea to get quotes from a few installers. To make sure you find a trusted, reliable solar installer near you that offers competitive pricing, check out EnergySage, a free service that makes it easy for you to go solar. It has hundreds of pre-vetted solar installers competing for your business, ensuring you get high-quality solutions and save 20-30% compared to going it alone. Plus, it’s free to use, and you won’t get sales calls until you select an installer and share your phone number with them.
Your personalized solar quotes are easy to compare online and you’ll get access to unbiased Energy Advisors to help you every step of the way. Get started here.
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