---
title: "Solar Is Slowing, and It Still Pays the Whole Bill"
description: "US demand rose just 2% in 2026, and the growth of wind and solar still covered every added terawatt-hour"
author: "Inez Holloway"
published: 2026-09-25T18:27:18Z
modified: 2026-09-27T00:05:43Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/solar-is-slowing-and-it-still-pays-the-whole-bill-982bb4
language: en
tags: ["solar", "energy", "renewables", "infrastructure", "climate", "us"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Solar Is Slowing, and It Still Pays the Whole Bill

*US demand rose just 2% in 2026, and the growth of wind and solar still covered every added terawatt-hour*

By Inez Holloway · September 25, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/solar-is-slowing-and-it-still-pays-the-whole-bill-982bb4

## In brief

- US electricity demand rose 2% in the first seven months of 2026, down from 3% growth a year earlier
- Solar added 39 TWh year over year versus 48 TWh the prior period, a 22% growth rate and a clear slowdown
- Wind and solar now supply 21% of US demand; their 55 TWh of growth exceeded the 51 TWh rise in demand
- Non-carbon sources cover 45% of US electricity; the EU is at 65% emissions-free
- Two East Coast offshore wind farms may be the last built in the US until the 2030s

The numbers came late this time, seven months at once instead of the usual quarter, and they describe a grid doing, quietly, the thing everyone said would be difficult. According to Ars Technica’s reading of the Energy Information Administration’s data, American electricity use in the first seven months of 2026 rose 2 percent over the same period the year before. A year earlier, demand had grown 3 percent.

This is not the curve the headlines promised. The data centers are coming; the EVs and the heat pumps are already here, pulling new demand onto the grid. And still: 2 percent. Some of it is efficiency, the same force that kept demand nearly flat through the early 2000s. Some of it is that more data centers are generating their own power, which means their appetite never shows up on the grid at all. The apocalypse, so far, has not checked in.

The other story is solar, which had been growing at the kind of rates — over 30 percent, year over year, quarter after quarter — that arithmetic eventually forbids. Through September 2025, solar produced 48 terawatt-hours more than it had the previous year. For the same stretch of 2026, the increase was 39 TWh. That is still a growth rate of 22 percent. It is also a marked slowdown, arriving at a moment when a federal government openly hostile to renewables has been stripping away their incentives.

The details keep their own counsel. Rooftop and other small-scale solar grew more than 12 percent. Solar as a whole generated 72 percent as much electricity as coal over the seven months — helped, in part, by coal falling more than 10 percent. Hydro rose 9 percent, wind 6 percent, nuclear and natural gas less than 2 percent each.

Here is the sentence the whole report bends toward: wind and solar now cover 21 percent of US electricity demand, and their growth alone — 55 TWh — exceeded the entire rise in demand, which was 51 TWh. Every new kilowatt-hour Americans used, renewables supplied. Add hydro and renewables reach 27 percent. Add nuclear and the country covers 45 percent of its electricity without emitting carbon. The European Union, for comparison, gets about 30 percent from wind and solar and 65 percent emissions-free — 71 percent if you count bioenergy, which is largely carbon-neutral but not emissions-free.

What comes next, per the EIA’s interconnection lists, is a study in what is ending. Two large offshore wind projects will be completed off the East Coast, including a 2.6-gigawatt installation off Virginia. The Trump administration has paid developers to stop building anything like them, so these are likely the last of their kind until the 2030s. Onshore wind continues across the Midwest and the Plains; solar spreads through the South and, newly, into Michigan and Wisconsin, latitudes where the economics did not work a few years ago.

Batteries are leaving their California and Texas strongholds — installs in Arizona and Colorado, units paired with the new Michigan solar, a large one expected in Georgia. A smattering of gas plants will open, mostly in the Midwest and Texas. No new nuclear. No new coal. It has been thirteen years since the last coal plant came online in the United States, and none are being developed.

Thirteen years. Off Virginia, the largest offshore wind farm in the country will come online this year, its 2.6 gigawatts turning over open water, the last of its kind for a while, wired into a grid whose hunger it helps feed.