US‘s spike in electricity use is slowing down a bit

Where does that leave the grid? Despite the slight decline, natural gas continues its dominance, fueling 39 percent of the power placed on the grid during the first half of 2025. Nuclear follows at 18 percent, with coal at 17. The renewables in order are wind (12 percent), solar (7 percent), and hydro (6 percent). (Numbers may not add up to 100 percent due to rounding and the fact that a number of energy sources are at under one percent and not included here.)

Renewables booming

Those last numbers could be significant, as hydroelectric generation tends to peak in the spring during the snow melt. In contrast, with additional solar plants coming online over the course of the year, there's a good chance that in 2025, grid-scale solar will end up producing more electricity than hydroelectric plants for the first time. That's especially notable because hydroelectric generation is largely the same as it was the year prior, indicating that it is being passed due to the growth in solar alone.

Collectively, the three renewables have provided 25 percent of the US's electricity over the first half of the year. That means renewables are now second only to natural gas. If you add in nuclear power to get a sense of the emissions-free generation, we're now up to 43 percent of the electricity produced.

The one thing missing from this analysis is non-utility solar—the rooftop generation that is found on residential and commercial buildings, as well as some of the small-scale community solar. The EIA doesn't directly track its production, partly because a lot of it is used where it's produced and never ends up on the grid, instead showing up simply as lower demand. It does, however, estimate its production, with it rising by about 11 percent or five TW-hr year-over-year.

We also did a couple of additional analyses using these estimates under the assumption that 100 percent of this power didn't end up on the grid and thus displaced demand. The five TW-hr change compares to an increase in consumption of about 62 TW-hr overall. That means demand would have risen by about seven percent more if this solar hadn't been in production.