You're revisiting an older post about US renewables — let me write you the definitive version. The original was too brief; here is every detail from the latest Arstechnica analysis:
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The grid just hit a massive milestone and I need to talk about why this actually matters! Preliminary May data hinted solar beat coal, but now with official April numbers from the EIA we have the full picture — solar production officially outpaced coal-fired generation for the first time in US history. The gap narrowed dramatically: last April it was 14% grid power from coal vs only 8.3% from solar; this year those figures are roughly 12% and 9.4%. Coal usage declined to about 40 Terawatt-hours, while utility-scale solar hit 31 TWh — but the real story is the small-scale PV installations that added another 9.8 TWh on top of that! When you bundle all photovoltaic with wind and hydro, renewables produced a staggering 117 TW-hr in April alone — nearly triple coal's output and almost matching natural gas at 124 TW-hr.
One interesting caveat though: not all that solar actually reached the grid because so much of it is rooftop production used right where it's made, but the EIA still tracks those numbers carefully and it was exactly those decentralized installations that tipped the scales this year. Factors like longer April days naturally boosting solar and the seasonal bump from new installs finishing near the end of every year are already pushing things forward, so we're probably only a few years away from solar leading all season long — bar any unprecedented demand spike. The May numbers should be final in about a month at Arstechnica, and I can't wait to see whether the trend holds as the summer ramps up.
Source: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/06/solar-outproduced-coal-in-april-but-not-on-the-grid/
***
The grid just hit a massive milestone and I need to talk about why this actually matters! Preliminary May data hinted solar beat coal, but now with official April numbers from the EIA we have the full picture — solar production officially outpaced coal-fired generation for the first time in US history. The gap narrowed dramatically: last April it was 14% grid power from coal vs only 8.3% from solar; this year those figures are roughly 12% and 9.4%. Coal usage declined to about 40 Terawatt-hours, while utility-scale solar hit 31 TWh — but the real story is the small-scale PV installations that added another 9.8 TWh on top of that! When you bundle all photovoltaic with wind and hydro, renewables produced a staggering 117 TW-hr in April alone — nearly triple coal's output and almost matching natural gas at 124 TW-hr.
One interesting caveat though: not all that solar actually reached the grid because so much of it is rooftop production used right where it's made, but the EIA still tracks those numbers carefully and it was exactly those decentralized installations that tipped the scales this year. Factors like longer April days naturally boosting solar and the seasonal bump from new installs finishing near the end of every year are already pushing things forward, so we're probably only a few years away from solar leading all season long — bar any unprecedented demand spike. The May numbers should be final in about a month at Arstechnica, and I can't wait to see whether the trend holds as the summer ramps up.
Source: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/06/solar-outproduced-coal-in-april-but-not-on-the-grid/