Full Title: Big Impact of Small Solar Quarterly: 2025 Q1
Author(s): Ingrid Behrsin
Publisher(s): ILSR
Publication Date: June 25, 2025
Full Text: Download Resource
Description (excerpt):
In 2025 we changed the name of this quarterly series to Big Impact of Small Solar to better reflect its aim of showing just how much distributed, small-scale (community, residential, and commercial) solar is contributing to new power capacity additions in the United States. The bottom line: it’s a lot! Especially considering that it still undercounts utility-scale solar in the 1 to 5 MW range. We are also now combining gas and coal-fired power into a single “fossil” category in the chart below.
More than 11 gigawatts of new power capacity went online in the first quarter of 2025 and the vast majority (99%) of this capacity was renewable. Eighty-four percent of new capacity was from solar generation, with 7.7 gigawatts of utility-scale solar and 1.6 gigawatts of distributed solar. Wind energy buildout contributed 1.7 gigawatts, while fossil fuel power grew by only 111 megawatts.