A federal agency says solar, battery, and wind additions will vastly outpace new gas facilities in whatâs set to be a record year for power
Federal agencies report that a significant majority of new power capacity being built in the US in 2026 will be clean energy. Solar alone makes up 51% of this progress--fossil gas is the only fossil fuel to make it on the chart at only 7% of new power capacity.
This will also be the most energy capacity of any kind that the US has ever added in a year.
I'm gonna say cautiously this is good news, but I'm cautious because one of the biggest solar farms in the US, in Death Valley, is run by the military and vaporizes birds bc it has mirrors that heat up the air in a cone around the solar panels. And that's... bad.
Renewables can still be built in ways that don't care about the environment, and owned by those who want to extract rent. A lot of solar is being built in the desert by people who think the desert is "barren" and "a wasteland" without an ecosystem in it. A desert has an ecosystem as rich and delicate as a rainforest.
So like, yay for renewables but I have Questions and Concerns.
So I looked up the above mentioned solar farm, and it turns out it's a solar thermal plant, was built in 2014, and photovoltaic solar has become so much more efficient that in 2025 they were talking about shutting down though they did reverse that decision. It apparently is twice as efficient to do modern solar panels than the method they use at this plant, which is the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility, by the way. It was never as productive as they expected it to be. It does kill birds by cooking them, but they're not vaporized for anyone hung up on the literal definition of that word. And it does kill a lot. Which is why a lot of people are working on the problem, more info here:
Apparently a solar thermal plant is where they use a lot of mirrors to focus light on one tower in order to heat it up, and use steam to turn a turbine. The U.S. hasn't built a solar thermal plant of this kind since 2016, so pretty safe to assume that they won't be building another now.
Solar thermal is very different from photovoltaic panels, and photovoltaic panels are way safer for birds. There are still concerns of course, but things have gotten better and people continue working to make them better. One cool thing is they used to think the usable life of solar panels would be about 25 years, but they've found they're still at 80% capacity after 30, and it's a slow drop after that.
This section addresses baseline environmental assessment prior to construction.
Solar panels do not have to have a negative impact on the ecosystems they're placed in, apparently:
The Science
Utility-scale solar facilities (âsolar farmsâ/âsolar parksâ) represent vast altered landscapes â currently covering âź0.025Â % of the earth's
Now, I should really get going so I'm not going to build a thesis level argument here. I personally would like to see more nuclear because on balance it seems to be one of the better options. There too, there's been so much improvement from what people in general know about nuclear power.

















