The U.S. Energy Administration (EIA) or the EIA recently released electric generation data from 2024. 

Solar and wind grew nationwide at the same time that coal continued its long-term decline. Natural gas had small increases and remains the country's top fuel for producing electricity. Natural gas power plants generated 43.3 percent of the country's electricity last year, up from 43.2% in 2023. Utility-scale renewables, wind, solar, and hydropower, were 22.7 percent, up from 21.4% percent. Nuclear was 18.2 percent, down from 18.5 percent. Coal accounted for 15.2 percent of electric generation, down from 16.1 percent.

EIA projects this trend will continue in 2025 as wind and solar dominate new generation sources. EIA also projects that solar plus storage will account for 81 percent of all new electrical generation in 2025. Wind will provide 12 percent of new generation surpassing natural gas accounting for about 7 percent.

Nuclear and Coal Stagnant and Declining

Nuclear and coal are not slated to add any additional capacity in 2025. Electric generators report that they plan to retire 8.1 gigawatts of coal-fired generating capacity this year, or 4.7 percent of the total U.S. coal fleet. This is double the amount of the coal-fired generation retired in 2024. Despite a lot of talk about a bright future in powering data centers, nuclear power is essentially unchanged in 2024.(https://www.npr.org/2024/09/20/nx-s1-5120581/three-mile-island-nuclear-power-plant-microsoft-ai)

 In April of last year, the Vogtel 4 nuclear reactor came online in Georgia. It was only the third nuclear reactor to come online in the US since 1980.
https://www.npr.org/2014/02/20/279987682/u-s-government-to-back-loans-for-nuclear-power

Construction of the Vogtel units 3 and 4 began in 2009. Initially it was projected to cost about $14 billion and take about 8 years to construct. It actually cost about double that, coming in at over $30 billion and taking almost twice as long, with 15 years to complete.

According to EIA, 8 nuclear reactors have been retired over the last 7 years. The Diablo Canyon reactor in California, is set to retire this year. There are no nuclear power plants under construction in the U.S. at this time.

 A brownfield site, the Hanford Nuclear Reservation,  is going green

Located on the Columbia River in southeastern Washington State and described  as the nation's most contaminated nuclear site, is currently being eyed by a solar developer. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/05/business/hanford-nuclear-site-solar-farm.html During the Cold War, this site expanded to include 9 reactors and 5 large plutonium processing complexes, which produced plutonium for more than the 60,000 weapons built for the U.S. nuclear arsenal. 

The site shut down in 1989, and that year the Washington Department of Ecology and the United States Environmental Protection Agency, as well as the Department of Energy, formed a tri-party agreement and began to engage in what has since become the world's largest environmental cleanup.

In 2014, it was estimated that the cost of completing the cleanup at the Hanford site will exceed $113 billion. It has determined that 10,300 acres of the site has been sufficiently cleaned up for redevelopment. It has been purchased or repurposed by solar developer, Hecate. https://www.hecateenergy.com/ 

The project is expected to be completed by 2030 at an estimated cost of around $4 billion. It will generate about 2,000 megawatts of electricity, which is enough to power the cities of Seattle, San Francisco, and Denver. This will make it the largest solar array currently in the country, far exceeding the currently largest array, which is Copper Mountain Solar Facility in Nevada, which has a generating capacity of about 802 megawatts. 

Research Group Studies Land Use

The amount of land needed for renewable energy projects is often criticized, but a new study points out that countries like the UK and the United States use much more land for golf courses than they do for renewable energy projects.

According to the recent study published by the Environmental Research Communications Group, in 2024, there were about 38,400 golf courses worldwide, 80 percent of them located in just 10 countries.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/02/24/global-golf-courses-take-up-more-land-than-solar-wind-plants/

The United States, with over 16,000 courses, was  number one, followed by the UK and then followed by Japan. 

Based on the land required by wind and solar farms per kilowatt of generation, the study found that golf courses consume about four times as much land as renewable energy projects. The study also pointed out that golf courses have an outsized environmental impact as compared with other uses, because they usually require quite a lot of chemicals to treat the grasses as well as a great deal of water.