Important Milestone: America's Solar-Coal Flip
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For more than a century, coal has helped keep America’s lights on. But its importance in the energy mix is diminishing rapidly thanks to market forces.
Like other advanced nations, coal powered the country’s initial industrial expansion and anchored the electric grid. But this spring, something significant changed. In May 2026, solar generated more electricity in the U.S. than coal for the first time ever. Sunshine supplied 12.8 percent of the nation’s electricity that month, compared with 12.2 percent from coal. Solar, in the process, became America's third-largest source of electricity, trailing only natural gas and nuclear power.
It’s an important milestone. But perhaps more important is why it happened. Because this was not the result of a new federal mandate or, even, environmental concerns. Rather, it was the happy result of a much larger change in the economics of electricity: solar costs have fallen dramatically. Since 1976, the price of solar modules has declined by 99 percent and panel efficiency has markedly improved too, so fewer panels are needed to generate the same amount of energy. Therefore, it is no wonder that deployment has accelerated, and utilities and developers are increasingly turning to solar to meet growing electricity needs.
Solar has become "the cheapest form of electricity in history", according to the International Energy Agency, since 2020. Importantly, along side this, battery economics have greatly improved in just the last two years. Following a sharp 40 percent fall in battery costs in 2024, 2025 saw another big fall of 31 percent. Analysis by Ember shows that falling battery costs and improving storage technologies are making round-the-clock solar electricity increasingly viable, enabling it to already meet 90 percent of electricity demand efficiently in solar-rich countries.
Despite Trump's best efforts, and thanks to his excursion into Iran (see Donald Trump: The Accidental Environmentalist), America's solar-coal flip is worth noting. It marks a transition that is increasingly being driven by markets, technological innovation, and consumer demand.
The Era of 24/7 Solar Has Begun: Battery storage is turning solar power from a daytime-only resource into all-hours electricity, experts say, declaring that the “era of anytime solar has begun” and that solar’s role in global power systems can be "far bigger than previously thought possible.”
