Share of utility-scale installed capacity, by source
This interactive map and sortable table show every large-scale utility solar farm in the United States, all 8,745 solar farms of 1 MW or larger, color-coded by type: photovoltaic (8,727) and concentrating solar / CSP (18). Rooftop and residential solar are not included; those behind-the-meter systems aren’t power plants in EIA-860. Solar is the fastest-growing source of new US electricity, at roughly 167 GW of active and standby capacity here. Farms are shown across all statuses: active (7,589), standby (15), in development (1,081) and decommissioned (60), and with more than a thousand farms in development, solar dominates the US project pipeline. Together, the 7,589 active solar farms mapped here have a combined capacity of about 168,929 MW (~167 GW), with a further 129,311 MW in development, the largest pipeline of any source on this site.
Capacity is what is installed; generation is what actually ran. Solar holds 12.73% of US utility-scale generating capacity and produced 6.67% of the electricity in 2025, an implied capacity factor of 20.0% 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
Solar is the only source with a fully deterministic profile: zero output overnight, a rise after sunrise, a peak near solar noon and a fall to zero at sunset. That shape is what drives the duck curve, because the fleet stops producing at the moment evening demand climbs.
Method: this is a modeled profile, not metered data. The 24-hour mean of 20.2% 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 |
|---|
PV panels convert sunlight directly into electricity with no moving parts. Nearly all US utility-scale solar is PV, the fastest-growing source of new capacity in the country, ranging from modest arrays up to the 690 MW Gemini project in Nevada.
CSP uses mirrors to concentrate sunlight, producing heat that drives a turbine, sometimes with molten-salt storage to run after sunset. Only a handful operate, all in the desert Southwest: Ivanpah, Solana, Crescent Dunes, Mojave and Genesis.
Every entry here is a utility-scale solar farm (1 MW and larger) in EIA-860. Rooftop and residential solar are not included; those are behind-the-meter systems that EIA tracks separately, not power plants on this list.
Any utility-scale solar plant (1 MW or larger) whose energy source is the sun (code SUN), aggregated to the EIA plant. That yields 8,745 farms: 8,734 from EIA-860M (August 2026) and eleven projects under power purchase agreements certified by the Georgia Public Service Commission that EIA does not list. Type is set by prime mover: photovoltaic (PV) panels, or a concentrating solar (CSP) heat engine. Capacities are EIA nameplate figures. For solar that is an alternating-current rating on almost every plant, matching net summer capacity within 2% on 93% of operating farms, though a few filings appear to use the direct-current rating, which runs about a quarter higher. Industry reports quote direct current as standard, so their totals are not comparable with the figures here without conversion. In development covers very different things: of the capacity shown, about 46 GW is under construction or already built and awaiting commercial operation, while roughly 61 GW has not yet received its regulatory approvals. A project can also appear here as planned while the state body that must license it has never received an application, which this map notes where it is known.
No. This list is large-scale utility solar farms only. Rooftop panels on homes and businesses are behind-the-meter distributed generation; EIA estimates that small-scale solar separately, and it is not part of the EIA-860 power-plant data shown here.
Photovoltaic (PV) panels convert sunlight straight into electricity and make up nearly all US solar. Concentrating solar power (CSP) uses mirrors to focus sunlight into heat that drives a turbine, sometimes with thermal storage; only a handful exist, all in the desert Southwest (e.g., Ivanpah, Solana, Crescent Dunes).
Solar is the fastest-growing source of new US generating capacity, so the project pipeline is huge; this dataset alone lists 1,081 farms in development, more than any other technology on the site.
About 167 GW of active and standby utility-scale solar capacity, almost entirely photovoltaic. That figure has roughly doubled in just a few years and continues to climb quickly.
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). EIA notes that preliminary monthly capacities are estimates and may be revised, and that a small number of plants may be withheld pending validation. A few proposed farms without published coordinates are omitted from the map.
No map is growing faster. Utility-scale solar already spans more than 8,500 farms and roughly 167 GW of active capacity, and its development pipeline, over a thousand farms, dwarfs every other technology on the site combined. The geography is widening in real time: once concentrated in California and the desert Southwest, solar now blankets Texas, the Carolinas, the Midwest and beyond, following cheap land and supportive policy rather than just the sunniest skies.
Almost all of it is photovoltaic; only a handful of concentrating solar-thermal plants survive, all in the desert Southwest. Solar’s limitation is built into the resource; it produces nothing after sunset. That is why its explosive growth is so tightly coupled to two partners: flexible natural gas that covers the evening peak today, and battery storage that increasingly will tomorrow. The story of the 2020s grid is largely the story of this map filling in. We explore it in depth in Solar Is Booming, Gas Still Dominates.
A tax deadline shaped this pipeline. Projects that did not begin construction by 4 August 2026 lose their federal tax credits unless they are in service by 31 December 2027, and the rush shows in the data: 408 farms and 43 GW are due in 2027, nearly double any other year. Developers safe-harboured an estimated 216 to 240 gigawatts of direct-current capacity before the deadline, enough to sustain construction into the early 2030s, so the cliff is deferred rather than avoided. Trade rules tightened alongside it, with a 15% tariff on imported polysilicon, foreign-made inverters added to the FCC's restricted list in August 2026, and rules limiting how much of a project's cost may come from Chinese-linked suppliers, rising from 40% this year to 60% by 2030.
Federal land has become a bottleneck. Since July 2025 solar decisions on federal land require the personal review of the Interior Secretary, and an August 2025 order added a capacity-density test that counts against solar because it uses more land per megawatt than other sources. In October 2025 the Bureau of Land Management cancelled the environmental review for Esmeralda 7 in Nevada, 6.2 GW across 62,300 acres, which would have been the largest solar project in the country; its seven component projects may reapply individually. Approvals have not stopped entirely, and the Purple Sage Energy Center on this map was approved in June 2026.
Where solar dies, it is usually local. Ohio has refused certificates to eight projects since 2021, 1,293 MW in all, every one of them on the ground of local government opposition, and 37 Ohio counties have barred new solar from parts of their territory outright. That is a different kind of obstacle from the turbine shortages and interconnection queues that constrain other sources, and it does not show up in any federal dataset: a project can sit in EIA as planned for years after the state that must license it has turned it down.