https://insideclimatenews.org/news/09072026/inside-clean-energy-utility-scale-solar-booming/
Utility-scale solar is booming in the United States as electricity demand rises and projects remain relatively easy to develop.
By Dan Gearino
July 9, 2026
It’s good to be in the utility-scale solar business, even in the United States.
Despite tariffs and shifting tax credit policies, business is booming. Amid high electricity demand and rising concerns about consumer rates, solar’s low cost and short construction timeline make it an attractive option.
I spoke this week with solar developers, analysts and others to get a sense of how they’re feeling at the halfway point of 2026.
“Utility-scale solar is doing very well right now,” said Chris Bullinger, president and CEO of Hecate Energy of Chicago, one of the country’s top developers of solar and battery energy storage.
The company, which he co-founded in 2012, is preparing for an initial public offering of its stock and shifting its focus to long-term ownership of some projects, rather than building and then selling them.
Bullinger sees an opportunity to build and own “energy parks,” which are projects that combine multiple energy sources to provide reliable power, often directly to an on-site customer, such as a data center. A typical setup would include solar, battery energy storage and natural gas power.
The demand for energy parks is coming from data centers and other large users that want to get operational as soon as possible. One way to make that happen is to build data centers alongside power plants.
The boom in data centers is contributing to an increase in plans for natural gas power plants across the country, a trend that has drawn attention because of concerns about rising consumer gas prices, high emissions and other negative effects. But the increase in electricity demand is a boon for just about the entire power sector, including renewables.
This is despite the Trump administration’s hostility for renewable energy, which has hit onshore and offshore wind development, but is less of a factor for solar and batteries.
The United States is on track to add 42,971 megawatts of utility-scale solar this year, which is the sum of the 9,070 megawatts built from January to May and the 33,901 megawatts that are on track to be completed between June and December, according to the federal government’s Energy Information Administration.
Those are huge numbers, much higher than any other power plant technology and about a 45 percent increase over the utility-scale solar built in 2025.
And the strong showing in 2026 won’t be an outlier. Developers plan to build 42,875 megawatts that would go online in 2027.
For perspective, it was a big deal in 2020 when the country’s annual utility-scale solar projects exceeded 10,000 megawatts for the first time. Back then, the idea of 40,000 megawatts being built in a year stretched the limits of belief. This year, it’s just normal.
A perpetual caveat: Looking at megawatts of solar capacity can be misleading when comparing it to energy sources that run around the clock, since solar only produces when the sun shines. But even with this note, the scale of the growth in utility-scale solar is impressive. And the intermittent nature of solar is partially mitigated by the rapid growth of battery storage.
M.A. Mortenson Co. of Minneapolis is an engineering and construction firm that is among the national leaders in building solar and batteries. Trent Mostaert, a vice president, said the current moment is strikingly good for utility-scale solar.
“I would put this right up there with the best of times,” he said.
I asked him what’s not working, or what could be better. He said the biggest challenges are connecting to the grid, dealing with policy uncertainty and mobilizing a skilled work force, all while trying to complete projects fast enough to keep up with demand.