We receive a small fee from trusted installers when you request a quote through our site. This helps us keep our content independent, well-researched and up to date – Learn more
- Solar was responsible for 61% of electricity growth in the US last year
- President Trump claimed China has no wind farms while speaking at Davos
- Gas generation also rose by 8% in 2025 but remains in long-term decline
Solar power met a staggering 61% of the growth in demand for electricity in the US last year, defying Donald Trump’s efforts to take the country away from renewable and clean energy.
According to global energy think tank Ember, demand for electricity in the US rose by 3.1% in 2025, or 135 TWh, marking the fourth largest annual rise in a decade. Similarly, solar generation increased by 83 TWh, or 27% compared to 2024, the largest growth of any electricity source.
Sixty-one percent of this growth was met by solar energy. Such has been the boom in solar in the past 12 months, there’s a belief that it could one day meet 100% of demand growth for electricity in the US.
Dave Jones, chief analyst at Ember, said that the growth in solar was “essential” in helping to meet the US’ boom in electricity demand in 2025.
Get free solar panel quotes
Answer a few quick questions, and our trusted installers will send you bespoke solar panel quotes – for free.
“It [solar] generated where it was needed, and—with the surge in batteries—increasingly when it was needed,” Jones said.
Where electricity demand grew most, Texas, the Midwest, and the Mid-Atlantic also saw the largest rises in solar generation, meeting 81%, 81% and 33% of electricity demand growth respectively.
The rise in generation met all US electricity demands between 10:00-18:00 ET, as well as some demand from 18:00-02:00 ET thanks to solar storage batteries. With solar energy used by rising demand, it avoided displacing an existing supply, allowing solar to scale alongside system growth.
Jones continued: “Solar has the potential to meet all the rise in electricity demand and much more. With electricity demand surging, the case to build solar has never been stronger.”
However, despite evidence of the benefits of solar power, for both people and the environment, Trump continues to do his best to stop the take up of renewables.
In the past 12 months he has taken the US out of several international organisations that work to prevent climate change, including the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It has also withdrawn from the world’s leading authority on climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The Trump administration has repeatedly dismissed climate change, labelling it as a hoax, and a woke agenda. It had previously withdrawn from the Paris Climate Agreement for a second time, as well as declining to send a delegation to the COP30 climate summit in Belém, Brazil, in 2025.
Earlier this week, in a rambling speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Trump called wind energy a “new green scam” and made a number of absurd statements about clean energy, Greenland and WW2, and repeatedly called wind farms “windmills”.
For instance, he told world leaders that he had not “been able to find any wind farms in China.” As a matter of fact, China has the largest wind farms ever built, at Gansu. It is so large it can be seen from space, but not, apparently, from The White House.
Not only does China boast the biggest wind farm in the world, it also generates more wind power than any other country. In 2024, China generated 997TwH from wind, roughly 40% of all global generation.
In fact, in April 2025 wind and solar accounted for more than a quarter of China’s electricity.
Get free solar panel quotes
Answer a few quick questions, and our trusted installers will send you bespoke solar panel quotes – for free.
EU clean energy continues to boom
In more good news for clean energy, wind and solar generated a record breaking 30% of EU electricity in 2025 , as opposed to 29% produced by fossil fuels, according to Ember.
Dr Beatrice Petrovich, Senior energy analyst at Ember, said it was a “ milestone moment” and credited “just how rapidly the EU is moving towards a power system backed by wind and solar.”
“As fossil fuel dependencies feed instability on the global stage, the stakes of transitioning to clean energy are clearer than ever.”
From 2020-2025, wind and solar grew from 20%-30%, whereas fossil fuels have fallen from 37% to 29% in the same period.
Renewable energy currently accounts for 48% of EU power. 2025 weather conditions caused a drop in hydro generation and wind by 12% and 2% respectively, but in turn allowed solar generation to flourish. Even so, wind remains the second largest EU electricity source (17%), also beating gas.
Petrovich said the EU’s next priority should be to put “a serious dent” in its reliance on gas as it makes the bloc “vulnerable to energy blackmail” as well as high prices.
“In 2025 we saw some early signs of using more battery storage to shift homegrown renewable power to gas-heavy hours,” Petrovich said.
“As this trend accelerates it could limit how much gas is needed in evening hours, therefore stabilising prices.”
The rise in renewable trend can be attributed mostly to a rise in solar power. For the fourth year running, it grew by more than a fifth (+20.1%), generating 13% of EU power and beating coal and hydroelectric.
All EU countries saw growth in solar generation as the EU increased focus on solar installation, and wind and solar generated more electricity than all fossil sources in 14 of them. For Cyprus, Greece, Hungary, the Netherlands and Spain, solar provided over a fifth of their electricity.
However, gas generation rose by 8% in 2025. This was largely attributed to reduced hydro output, but it remains in long-term decline. Coal also continued to decline, falling to a 9.2% historic low, compared to ten years prior when it provided nearly 25% of EU power. For 19 EU countries, coal power makes up less than 5%. It even dropped to an all time low in the EU’s biggest coal countries, Germany and Poland.
Get free solar panel quotes
Answer a few quick questions, and our trusted installers will send you bespoke solar panel quotes – for free.
