The sun now generates more electricity for U.S. consumers than coal, despite President Donald Trump’s penchant for carbon-heavy power.
Solar power rose to become the third largest electricity source in the U.S. last month, according to a Wednesday report from energy think tank Ember. Ember’s updated statistics come days after Trump invoked the Defense Production Act and other tools to provide $700 million to support the coal industry, all in an effort to reduce energy prices spiked by the war in Iran.
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“Overtaking coal for the first month on record shows just how far solar has come, from a niche contributor to the third-largest and fastest-growing source of power in the U.S. electricity system,” Nicolas Fulghum, Senior Data Analyst at Ember, said. “From Texas to California, markets across the U.S. are betting on solar to meet rising power needs.”
The share of solar in the U.S. nearly doubled since 2021, rising from 5.4% of energy generation capacity in May of that year to 12.8% last month. Coal, meanwhile, plummeted from 19.7% to 12.2% of American energy last month.
Coal, which fueled the U.S.’s industrial rise, generated its smallest share of national power on record in April.
Solar’s growth in the American market is partially due to government incentives. While Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill eliminated Biden-era subsidies for green energy, which he called a “giant SCAM” in a June 2025 post on Truth Social, various state governments continue to offer tax credits for businesses and homeowners who install solar panels.
The Biden administration pumped more than $7 billion into solar generation capacity through the “Solar for All” initiative alone. That initiative, announced in April 2024, sought to bring solar to more than 900,000 low-income households nationwide. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency moved to cancel those grants in August 2025, with only $53 million of the $7 billion budget having been spent.
Trump has long admired what he refers to as “beautiful clean coal.”
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His energy secretary, Chris Wright, is pushing ahead on an ambitious project to build a coal export terminal on a former military site in Oakland, California. The West Gateway Terminal would provide the capacity to ship more than 12 million tons of American coal to the Asian market, though the project is expected to be mired by legal challenges.
Solar now trails gas and nuclear as the third-largest source of electricity in the U.S.
