Solar Power In Us 2016

In 2013 sunpower acquired greenbotics to offer robotic solar panel cleaning products and services for large scale solar power plants.

Solar power in us 2016. For the first time solar represented the largest new source of electricity generating capacity beating out both natural gas and wind for new capacity additions. The pv market grew 97 over 2015 installing 14 8 gwdc from over 370 000 individual installations. But capacity is growing exponentially. Installations have grown 35 fold to an estimated 62 5 gigawatts gw today.

This is enough capacity to power the equivalent of 12 million average american homes 1. Not only does north carolina have a lot of solar energy with 2 087 mw of capacity capable of powering 223 000 homes it s also creating a lot of solar jobs. Nearly 500 pv generating units totaling 8 gigawatts gw were added to the electric grid in 2016 making it the second most common technology installed in 2016. Solar power is more affordable accessible and prevalent in the united states than ever before.

In 2016 solar jobs in north. Solar power in the united states includes utility scale solar power plants as well as local distributed generation mostly from rooftop photovoltaics as of the end of 2019 the united states had over 71 3 gigawatts gw of installed photovoltaic capacity. Three years ago the us had 10gw of solar pv in total. In 2018 utility scale solar power generated 66 6 terawatt hours twh 1 66 of total u s.

By any measure 2016 was a record year for solar in the united states. Solar produced just 0 6 of us electricity in 2015 compared to 4 7 for wind and 33 each for coal and natural gas. Average construction costs reached 2 436 per kilowatt kw in 2016 down from 3 705 kw in 2013. Ironically the numbers for the end of 2016 are buoyed by policy uncertainty.