86% of New US Electric Utility Generation Capacity Coming from Non-Fossil Fuels in 2023::In 2023, Non-Fossil Fuel Sources Will Account for 86% of New Electric Utility Generation Capacity in the United States
Finally, a good step from US.
Not to be confused with about a third of all generation.
I would say that anyone with basic reading comprehension understands the title of the news piece.
The APPA report there uses “nameplate capacity”, which they define as “capacity labeled as operating and restarted as well as capacity that is on standby and mothballed”, which means plants sitting unused are still counted. The EIA gives actual generation:
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3
The numbers are in the same ballpark, but not the same. Percentage-wise, solar and nuclear are quite a bit higher with EIA’s numbers, while wind and natural gas are a bit lower.
How are batteries generating electricity?
They don’t, obviously, but what they do is charge when the spot price for electricity is low, and then discharge when it’s higher.
While not exclusively the case, this drop in price most typically occurs when you have a higher amount of electricity being generated than being consumed, which is usually because of high amounts of renewables because the unit cost of renewables is essentially 0. For example, the middle of the day at peak solar, or windy nights. Fossil fuel generators are burning a commodity with a substantially higher unit cost, so they will mostly turn off (where possible) during these times.
This is why batteries are often counted under renewable, because they shift an abundance of renewable power in to times when there is less or none.
Personally I don’t think we should really be considering the extensive use of rare earth metals as renewable, but that’s a separate point.
But still 18% Non-Renewable…
I think this looks better than it is. Sure, new energy generation coming from green sources is good but proportionally of existing sources it’s very small.
Total energy generated in US is 4 trillion KWh
56 billion KWh out of 4000 billion kWh is small.
You can easily check the percentage of electricity generated by non-fossil fuel sources. By that metric Wind and Solar already surpassed coal in 2022. Ofcourse, total energy also includes transportation and other sectors so that is a different metric. In that case, non-fossil fuel energy accounted for 21% of all energy consumed in the US in 2022.
