Conventional hydropower fell from its perennial perch as the source of the majority of U.S. renewable energy in 2014, yet another sign of the rise of a new wave of renewables – wind and solar, especially – on the U.S. electrical grid.

Data released Wednesday by the U.S. Energy Information Administration showed hydropower with net generation of 258,749 gigawatt-hours in 2014, while renewable sources excluding hydropower produced 281,060 GWh. It was the first time the nonhydro renewables – biomass, geothermal, landfill gas and municipal solid waste, in addition to wind and solar – surpassed hydropower in annual generation.

 

Source: EIA

While hydropower provided 6.3 percent of the nation’s electricity in 2014, the nonhydro renewables added up to 6.9 percent. Those figures were dwarfed by traditional sources like coal (38.7 percent), natural gas (27.4 percent) and nuclear (19.5 percent), but renewable energy has made progress, creeping up from 8.8 percent of U.S. electricity in 2004 to 13.2 in 2014.

Wind has been the biggest factor in that shift, and in 2014 the nation’s 48,000-plus turbines churned out 181,791 GWh of electricity, 4.4 percent of the nation’s total, up from 4.1 percent in 2013. That’s a new high for wind, which in 2004 accounted for just 14,144 GWh, 0.4 percent of U.S. generation.

Source: EIA

Texas was far and away the leading state in producing wind energy in 2014, accounting for 39,371 GWh, 21.7 percent of the U.S. total.

Source: EIA

Solar stands about where wind did a decade ago – in 2014, utility-scale PV and solar thermal plants together generated 18,321 GWh, equal to 0.45 percent of the national electricity total. But solar has been on a remarkable growth trajectory; generation exploded by 103 percent in 2014, from 9,036 GWh in 2013. With the Investment Tax Credit set to drop from 30 percent to 10 percent at the end of 2016, huge new generating capacity will go online this year and next. It bears noting, too, that these totals don’t include the energy produced from several megawatts of net-metered residential and commercial solar power systems.

Source: EIA

While Texas dominated wind, California owned the solar category. Its 9,922 GWh constituted 54 percent of the utility-scale solar produced in the country in 2014. Neighbors Arizona and Nevada were Nos. 2 and 3, respectively, but there were signs others states were waking up to utility-scale solar, with big percentage gains in generation in North Carolina (168 percent), Massachusetts (294 percent), Indiana (401 percent) and Georgia (809 percent).

Source: EIA

While some of the gigawatt-hour totals for these states remain tiny, they are all part of a sea change in U.S. renewable energy, fed by climate-change concerns, government policies and incentives and rapidly falling costs.

Dating from the 19th century and through most of the 20th century, hydropower was virtually the only source of grid-connected renewable energy, and the era of big dam building from the 1930s through the 1960s made it a fairly significant source of U.S. electricity. As recently as 2011, hydro provided 7.8 percent of the nation’s electricity.

But with hydropower capacity stagnant, nonhydro renewables began growing in the middle of the last decade, and that growth has accelerated since President Barack Obama came into office. According to the EIA, October 2012 was the first month ever when nonhydro renewable generation exceeded hydropower generation, although with hydro’s month-to-month variability that reversal wasn’t sustained.

Hydropower was down last year as drought reduced generation in California by more than 8,000 GWh, but even at its average for the past ten years of 271,846 GWh, hydropower still would have lost out to nonhydro renewables in 2014. And with wind and solar continuing to grow, it’s a virtual certainty that hydropower has now forever lost its hold as the majority source of U.S. renewable energy. In a short-term energy outlook released last month, the EIA said it expected nonhydro renewables to rise to 7.9 percent of total electricity generation in 2016, led by wind at 5.2 percent, with hydropower remaining around 6.5 percent.

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