Share of utility-scale installed capacity, by source
This interactive map and sortable table show every biomass-fueled power plant in the United States, all 976 plants of 1 MW or larger whose primary energy source is biomass. They are color-coded by the EIA energy-source family: landfill gas (470), wood / wood waste (197), biogas / digester gas (111), municipal solid waste (83), black liquor (80), agricultural by-products (19), biomass liquids (12) and other biomass solids (4). Landfill gas is by far the most common. Unlike the rest of this site’s narrower views, this page is the full biomass universe, not just dedicated wood-burning power plants. Plants are shown across all statuses: active (550), standby (54), in development (10) and decommissioned (362), across 49 states and the District of Columbia; that is every state except Wyoming. Together, the 550 active biomass plants mapped here have a combined capacity of about 11,872 MW (~12 GW); the 54 standby plants add a further 641 MW. The ten plants in development are the smallest pipeline of any generation category on this site, and that is a finding rather than a data gap: biomass power is essentially not being built in the United States. Eight are landfill gas, digester gas or agricultural units of 36 MW or less. The ninth is a carbon-capture plant financed by carbon removal credits rather than power sales, and the tenth is the 253 MW Waiau Repower on Oahu, recorded here rather than as a petroleum plant because its licence requires at least 51% renewable fuel from 2032 and 100% by 2045.
Capacity is what is installed; generation is what actually ran. Biomass holds 0.89% of US utility-scale generating capacity and produced 1.04% of the electricity in 2025, an implied capacity factor of 44.4% on a nameplate basis. Nuclear is the extreme case in one direction, at 7.30% of capacity for 17.70% of generation; solar is the extreme in the other, at 12.73% for 6.67%.
Sources, basis and how the totals reconcile
Sources. Generation is EIA Electric Power Monthly, Table 1.1, Net Generation by Energy Source: Total (All Sectors), annual 2025 row. EIA marks 2025 and 2026 values as preliminary; 2024 and earlier are final, so these shares may be revised.
Basis. Both charts cover utility-scale plants of 1 MW or larger, generating sources only. Battery storage is excluded from the capacity chart because it shifts power rather than producing it, and estimated small-scale rooftop solar (93,148 GWh in 2025) is excluded from the generation chart so the two stay comparable.
Totals. The generation slices sum to 4,434,820 GWh. EIA’s published net total is 4,429,502 GWh, being that figure less 5,320 GWh of net pumped-storage hydro, which EIA reports as a negative because pumping consumes more electricity than generation returns, and a further 2 GWh that EIA attributes to independent rounding. Pumped storage is left out of the pie because a negative value cannot be drawn as a slice. Percentages use largest-remainder rounding at two decimal places so each chart adds to 100.00%.
Category notes. EIA reports wind, biomass and geothermal as one 526,246 GWh category; the split here carries a one-unit adjustment on wind so the three reconcile to that published total. Biomass covers wood and wood waste, black liquor, landfill gas, sludge waste, agricultural byproducts and biogenic municipal solid waste. Other fossil gas is blast furnace gas, gaseous propane and other manufactured waste gases; Other is hydrogen, non-biogenic municipal solid waste, batteries, purchased steam, sulfur and tire-derived fuel. One definitional seam is worth knowing: EIA-860 files gaseous propane under petroleum products, while Table 1.1 files it under other fossil gas, so the same fuel sits in the Petroleum slice on the capacity chart and the Other fossil gas slice on the generation chart. Only one 2.3 MW plant is affected.
Share of utility-scale electricity generated, by source
EIA preliminary data
Biomass plants run as baseload, and many are combined-heat-and-power units at pulp mills or landfills where the fuel arrives as a byproduct of another process. Output is nearly flat, with a slight daytime lift where host-site steam demand rises during working hours.
Method: this is a modeled profile, not metered data. The 24-hour mean of 44.4% is the implied annual capacity factor, calculated as 2025 generation from EIA Electric Power Monthly Table 1.1 divided by the nameplate capacity of the active fleet on this page multiplied by 8,760 hours. EIA’s own published capacity factors use net summer capacity as the denominator and therefore run higher. The hourly shape applies the documented operating behaviour of this technology to that mean and is indicative rather than measured; metered hourly output would come from the EIA Hourly Electric Grid Monitor, which is not yet wired into this page.
| # | Plant | Type | State | Nearest city | Operator | Status | Capacity | Online |
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Burned in steam boilers. Includes wood and wood-waste solids (WDS), agricultural by-products (AB), other biomass solids (OBS) and municipal solid waste (MSW). This family covers the traditional “wood-burning” power plants plus waste-to-energy.
Mostly black liquor (BLQ), the energy-rich pulping byproduct burned in recovery boilers at pulp & paper mills, along with wood-waste liquids (WDL) and other biomass liquids (OBL).
Captured gas burned in engines or turbines: landfill gas (LFG) and other biomass / digester gas (OBG) from wastewater plants, farms and food waste. By plant count this is the largest group of biomass generators in the US.
Any power plant of 1 MW or larger whose primary energy source (Energy Source 1) is a biomass fuel: wood/wood waste (WDS), agricultural by-products (AB), other biomass solids (OBS), municipal solid waste (MSW), landfill gas (LFG), other biomass/digester gas (OBG), black liquor (BLQ), or biomass liquids (OBL/WDL). That yields 976 plants nationwide.
Hundreds of US landfills capture methane and burn it on-site in reciprocating engines to generate power. Each qualifying site counts as a biomass plant, so landfill gas dominates by plant count even though individual sites are small.
Black liquor is the energy-rich liquid byproduct of the kraft pulping process. Pulp & paper mills burn it in recovery boilers to generate steam and electricity, which is why many large biomass generators sit at paper mills.
EIA classifies the biogenic portion of municipal solid waste (paper, wood, food and yard waste) as biomass. Waste-to-energy plants appear here because their primary energy source code is MSW.
It reflects EIA Form EIA-860M (Preliminary Monthly Electric Generator Inventory) through August 2026, reconciled against the EIA-860 2025 early release (Schedules 2 and 3), supplemented by regulator and developer records for two projects EIA does not yet carry. EIA notes that preliminary monthly capacities are estimates and may be revised, and that a small number of plants may be withheld pending validation. Statuses here: active (550), standby (54), in development (10), decommissioned (362).
Capacity is the summed nameplate of a plant’s biomass generators; the year is the earliest generator operating year. Where EIA did not report a value (e.g., some proposed units), the field shows N/A.
Biomass is the website’s most dispersed thermal source, and its geography follows the feedstock. Plants cluster where organic fuel is abundant and cheap: wood and mill residues across the forested Southeast, Pacific Northwest and Northeast; agricultural waste in farm country; and landfill gas and municipal solid waste near population centers. Many are small, and a large share are combined-heat-and-power units attached to paper mills, sawmills and factories that consume their own steam.
That industrial pairing is biomass’s defining trait. Unlike a merchant gas plant built purely to sell power, a biomass unit often exists to turn a waste stream into useful energy on-site. That stream might be sawdust, black liquor, or methane that would otherwise escape a landfill. It is renewable and dispatchable, but constrained by fuel logistics and modest scale, which is why its total capacity stays in the low single-digit gigawatts. Its real value is local and circular rather than national. See where it sits among the larger renewables in our power-mix overview.
What the map does not show is a build pipeline, because there is not one. Ten plants are in development against 362 decommissioned, and eight of the ten are small landfill gas, digester gas or agricultural units. Searches for new biomass power projects return renewable natural gas plants, anaerobic digesters producing pipeline gas and wood pellet mills serving export markets, almost none of which generate electricity. No federal programme supports biomass generation in the way recent programmes have supported coal recommissioning or advanced nuclear, and where data centre buyers touch biomass at all they are buying carbon removal rather than power.
That last point is where the only real growth is. Bioenergy with carbon capture plants burn biomass and capture the carbon dioxide, earning revenue from removal credits, and they are financed and contracted through carbon markets long before they reach any generator inventory. The scale is concentrated here: of 94 such facilities under development worldwide in 2024, with about 37.5 million tonnes a year of planned capture, roughly 31.6 million tonnes were in the United States. The Arbor Energy plant near Lake Charles on this map is the first to reach a firm contract, and its economics are worth noting because they invert the usual order. Its $41 million of offtake buys carbon removal, not electricity, and the power is close to a by-product.