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California, for all its talk of clean energy and climate leadership, has long depended on fossil gas to keep its lights on. A decade ago, gas provided around 60% of the state’s electricity production. But this long-running dominance may be coming to an end.
California’s solar systems, from rooftop panels to massive desert installations, generated nearly as much electricity as its gas plants last year, according to data pulled from think tank Ember’s U.S. Electricity Data Explorer. Gas’ market share has declined gradually since its 2012 high, while solar’s shot up steadily — last year, the two nearly intersected. This year could be the first time that solar takes the lead.
Solar far outpaces all other electricity sources in new power plant construction, not just in California but in Texas and the nation as a whole. But that metric is measured in megawatts of production capacity — it doesn’t tell us how much electricity solar panels actually make in the course of a year. Solar produces only when the sun shines, so it needs more megawatts of nameplate generating capacity to rival sources like gas or nuclear that can operate around the clock.
That’s why this chart is so striking: It displays actual electricity production in California throughout 2024. Solar really produced more than 30% of the state’s electricity, while gas fell closer to that percentage than it has ever been in the modern era.
This inflection point represents the culmination of yearslong trends. Gas surged to a record level in 2012, when the San Onofre nuclear plant ceased pumping out carbon-free baseload power. But new gas plant construction in the state has effectively stopped, and the rapidly expanding battery fleet is now competing for the most valuable peak hours. Gigawatts of batteries now cut into gas plants’ run-time, as can be seen on hot summer nights and mild shoulder months alike.
Over the last decade, it’s worth noting, generation from nuclear, wind, and geothermal has stayed flat, and hydropower fluctuated with the annual weather patterns. Those carbon-free sources all have their own passionate advocates and deeply researched reports from the Department of Energy on how they can break out of stasis and grow again. But solar is the only one of the bunch consistently increasing production year over year.
That’s not guaranteed to always be the case. The Republican-led Congress still could axe federal tax credits that currently support renewable installations for the next decade. California has also gotten in its own way, as when Gov. Gavin Newsom’s handpicked utility regulators chose to dismantle the prevailing rules for rooftop solar, greatly diminishing the pace of residential installations.
Nonetheless, if gas power production continues its downward plunge, California will eventually have to figure some things out. Specifically, it needs other tools to ensure on-demand power through the nights and weather patterns that dampen solar production.
State grid planners have ordered utilities to start procuring long-duration energy storage, a category of technologies promising to deliver steady clean power for far longer than lithium-ion batteries can manage at today’s price points. The state is also taking early steps to open up its coastline for offshore wind development; the deep Pacific seabed calls for floating turbines, a newer technology that has not yet been built in the U.S. Efforts to better connect the western grid could also make it easier to balance supply and demand across the region.
California, whose state economy would rank fifth among the world’s nations, is not a place that can change course in an instant. But this impending unseating of gas power by solar shows what can happen over a decade of dedicated policy, regulatory, and business efforts to push down carbon emissions and accelerate clean energy. It took time to get to this point, but now the results are undeniable.
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