More than 40% of electricity in US is carbon- free

Power from zero- carbon sources made up a full 41% of the U. S. electricity mix in 2022, a record- breaking number that has increased almost every year since 1990.

That mix includes power from nuclear plants, hydroelectric dams, solar and wind. With nuclear and hydro power relatively unchanged for years at about 19% and 10% respectively, the majority of the increase has come from the rapid build- out of solar and wind power, whose costs have plummeted in the past two decades.

The statistics come from the annual Sustainable Energy in America 2023 Factbook, released Wednesday. The Factbook is produced each year by BloombergNEF, a division of Bloomberg LP focused on the transition to a lower- carbon economy, in partnership with the Business Council for Sustainable Energy.

2022 also saw a huge increase in the number of electric vehicles Americans purchased, making up 7.1% of all new cars sold in the United States and bringing the total number of EVs in the country to just shy of 1 million.

The slow but steady increase in renewable energy, which has also become cheaper than most other power sources, means the transition to a carbon- free energy system is now “hardwired” into the U. S. economy, said Lisa Jacobson, president of the Business Council for Sustainable Energy, which has funded the annual report since 2013.

“Despite high inflation and supply chain issues and interconnection backlogs ( in the electric grid), we still saw pretty amazing growth in the capacity of wind and especially solar, despite a challenging business environment,” said Harrison Fell, a professor of resource and energy economics at North Carolina State University.

That shift, known as “the energy transition,” will be turbocharged in the coming years by the passage of 2021’ s Inflation Reduction Act, which included billions of dollars to help the United States shift to clean power and meet its goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.