The U.S. power grid added more capacity from solar energy in 2024 than from any other source in a single year in more than two decades, according to a new industry report released on Tuesday.
The data was released a day after the new U.S. energy secretary, Chris Wright, strongly criticized solar and wind energy on two fronts. He said on Monday at the start of CERAWeek by S&P Global, an annual energy conference in Houston, that they couldn’t meet the growing electricity needs of the world and that their use was driving up energy costs.
The report, produced by the Solar Energy Industries Association and Wood Mackenzie, a research firm, said about 50 gigawatts of new solar generation capacity was added last year, far more than any other source of electricity.
Mr. Wright and President Trump have been strongly critical of renewable energy, which former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. championed as a way to address climate change. The energy secretary, Mr. Trump and Republicans in Congress have pledged to undo many of Mr. Biden’s climate and energy policies.
“Beyond the obvious scale and cost problems, there is simply no physical way wind, solar and batteries could replace the myriad uses of natural gas,” said Mr. Wright, who was previously chief executive of an oil and gas production company.
Yet solar energy and battery storage systems appear to have significant momentum and may not be easily thwarted. The U.S. Energy Information Administration, which is part of Mr. Wright’s department, said last month that it expected solar and batteries to continue leading new capacity installations on U.S. electric grids this year.
Proponents of clean energy celebrated the milestone for solar power as the world moves to increase electricity production to meet the needs of energy-hungry data centers to support the growth of artificial intelligence.
“There’s wild agreement that in order to do that, we have to have enough electricity, and there are facts that show that the fastest way to do that and the cheapest way to do that is through the deployment of solar and storage,” Abigail Ross Hopper, president and chief executive of the solar association, said in an interview at CERAWeek.
In a panel discussion, the leader of one of the nation’s largest utility companies acknowledged solar’s ability to deliver new electricity generation quickly and cheaply.
“Renewables are ready to go right now because they’ve been up and running,” said John Ketchum, president and chief executive of NextEra Energy, the largest U.S. producer of renewable energy and the parent company of Florida Power & Light, a utility that owns power plants that burn natural gas.
But Mr. Wright said the growing use of solar and wind power was driving up the cost of electricity, which has steadily increased the last couple of years. Some of that increase has been due to the sharp jump in the costs of oil and natural gas after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and to upgrades to grids that experts say utilities had put off for many years.
“Wind and solar, the darlings of the last administration and so much of the world today, supply roughly 3 percent of global primary energy,” Mr. Wright said. “Everywhere wind and solar penetration have increased significantly, prices on the grid went up and stability of the grid went down.”
Electricity rates across the country reached their highest levels in 2024, rising an average of 4 percent nationally to $162.60 a month in December for the typical 1,000 kilowatt-hours of usage, up from $156.90 a year earlier, according to the latest federal data.
Even as prices rise, electricity demand is expected to increase drastically. Mr. Ketchum projected a 55 percent increase in electricity demand over the next 20 years, almost a fifth of that related to the growth of data centers, with manufacturing and industrial growth accounting for much of rest.
Given the projections for the increased electricity demand, energy experts said governments should focus on affordability, reliability and safety of domestic and global energy while not losing sight of concerns about climate change.
“There’s going to be bumps in the road,” Ernest Moniz, who was energy secretary in the Obama administration, said on a panel discussion at CERAWeek. “We are moving to this low-carbon future.”