Here’s How Nearly 15 Gigawatts of Solar Gets Built in One Year
In 2010, the U.S. installed 852 megawatts-DC of solar photovoltaics from just over 53,000 individual projects. The non-residential (aka commercial) segment took the largest share (40 percent) of that capacity, and the largest state (California) accounted for 216 megawatts of new solar.
How times have changed. In the record-breaking 2016, a year in which U.S. solar installations grew 95 percent over the previous high, the U.S. installed 14.6 gigawatts of solar from nearly 375,000 projects. The non-residential sector represented just 11 percent of that total, while utility-scale solar accounted for a massive 72 percent. California, still the leading state, installed over 5 gigawatts alone — over 2,000 percent growth relative to 2010.
