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California's Solar Dominance, In One Graph
New government data show how the Golden State compares to the rest of the country—and it’s not even close.
When it comes to solar power in the U.S., California’s in a league of its own.
The home of Hollywood, Yosemite, and the Golden Gate Bridge also boasts almost half of the nation’s roughly 20,000 megawatts of overall solar capacity, new data from the Energy Information Administration show. Even more striking, in both types of utility-scale solar—photovoltaic and thermal—California operates more capacity than every other state combined. The next runner up is Arizona, at one-fifth of California’s solar might.