Chart: The biggest clean energy projects built in the US last year

Canary Media’s chart of the week translates crucial data about the clean energy transition into a visual format. 

Clean energy projects in the U.S. have gone through a growth spurt in recent years, with the average installation of solar panels, wind turbines, or batteries now way bigger than it used to be.

New data from Cleanview, shared exclusively with Canary Media, shows the 25 biggest clean energy projects that plugged into the grid last year.

The definition of a big clean energy project has shifted quite a bit in recent years.

According to an analysis done last July by Michael Thomas, a climate journalist and founder of Cleanview, the average capacity of a solar project built in the first half of 2024 was roughly six times bigger than it was a decade prior, in 2014. Wind projects grew about three times bigger between 2005 and 2024. And grid batteries, which only started to take off in recent years, were on average 15 times bigger in 2024 than they were just five years earlier, in 2019.

Just to drive it home further: The largest solar project that went online in 2014 was 151 megawatts. The biggest solar project last year? The 690-MW Gemini Project in Nevada, which was paired with a 380-MW grid battery — last year’s biggest storage installation.

Most of these huge projects are located in Texas, the designated state for building really big things. The Lone Star State leads the nation in terms of installed utility-scale solar and wind capacity and is gaining on California for the grid-battery crown.

Solar was the runaway favorite among developers of major installations. Out of the 25 biggest clean energy projects completed last year, 18 were solar installations. Four were wind projects, all located in Texas, and the remainder were battery-storage facilities.

Clean energy projects are growing in size for a simple reason: economies of scale. It’s far cheaper on a per-watt basis to install a whole lot of panels, turbines, and battery cells all at once than it is to split them up into smaller projects. Thomas points to other drivers of the trend, too, like the fact that it’s simpler to permit and interconnect one big project than multiple smaller ones.

The average project size for planned solar, wind, and battery projects is set to climb even higher in the coming years, Thomas found. Solar projects planned to come online in 2025, for example, have an average capacity of 125 MW, nearly double 2024’s average of 65 MW through July.

That trend is evident in glancing at recent headlines, too: Oregon regulators in December approved a humongous project that will have 1,200 MW of solar and another 1,200 MW of storage. A number of offshore wind projects with permits in hand will have over 2,000 MW of capacity once built, far eclipsing last year’s biggest wind project, an onshore installation with just 350 MW of capacity.

Of course, this trend now has the Trump administration to contend with. President Donald Trump has been hostile toward the clean energy industry, but while it seems certain that wind projects will slow over the next four years, it’s still unclear whether the solar and battery boom will face such strong headwinds.

Either way, the projects that do get built — even if they are fewer under Trump — are likely to continue climbing in size in the years to come.