Justin Fox, Columnist

Where America Gets Its Electricity

California warms to solar. Texas leans into wind. And the East Coast is switching to natural gas.

June 14, 2017 at 6:23 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

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Photographer: Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images

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The way the U.S. generates electricity has changed a lot over the past decade.

This chart ran with my column Tuesday on the electrical utility industry's seeming conviction that its reliance on natural gas and renewables is just going to keep growing, regardless of the Donald Trump administration's efforts to engineer a coal resurgence.

The chart only included the top five sources of electrical power in the U.S.1497458182078 Perhaps surprisingly, solar power doesn't make the cut. Even when you include the Energy Information Administration's estimate of the power generated by rooftop panels and other small-scale solar, it's still in seventh place behind biomass (burning wood, mainly).