This year has been full of dramatic rivalries. World Cup matchups, Knicks versus Spurs, One Battle After Another versus Sinners at the Oscars, and now California solar power versus natural gas.<\/p>\n
For years, natural gas has dominated electricity production in the climate-conscious Golden State, just as it has nationally. In both cases, this fossil fuel delivered about 40% of annual generation for much of the last decade. But that started to change in California as solar developers and rooftop installers added more and more capacity, and big batteries joined the party, too.<\/p>\n
Last year, the competition turned into a Knicks-Spurs\u2013style nail-biter: California generated nearly as much<\/a> from large-scale solar power as from gas. This year, it\u2019s turning into a Super Bowl LX\u2013style rout, with solar surging ahead of gas generation for the first five months of 2026, per federal data<\/a>.<\/p>\n In fact, solar outperformed gas on 82% of the days in that five-month stretch in the California Independent System Operator\u2019s wholesale market. That\u2019s all the more striking given that the state still has more installed gas capacity (29 gigawatts) than utility-scale solar capacity (25 gigawatts), and that this larger gas fleet can operate whenever, while solar is constrained to sunny times. Nonetheless, the solar fleet overcame those structural limitations to beat gas overall so far this year.<\/p>\n California\u2019s gas fleet is in free fall: Generation dropped by 60% from the same time period in 2024. Solar generation increased by 21% in that interval.<\/p>\n Solar didn\u2019t beat gas on its own, though. Battery developers have built 16 gigawatts of capacity in CAISO to charge up on solar power and then compete with gas after sundown. This buildup has rapidly altered grid dynamics in the evenings, when batteries regularly become the top source of power for multiple hours. Meanwhile, wind imports recently jumped as the gigantic SunZia project came online<\/a>, and that takes the fight to gas in the middle of the night, further depressing its output.<\/p>\n There\u2019s one big player missing from the government figures. The U.S. Energy Information Agency does not have a direct line on rooftop solar production, since those units don\u2019t report data the way large power plants do; the EIA makes an estimate based on various data streams but doesn\u2019t include those numbers in its solar-versus-gas comparison.<\/p>\n Empirically, we know that California\u2019s rooftop solar capacity nearly matches its utility-scale capacity, so a complete accounting of solar production would presumably look like more of a blowout. Data firm Ember, for instance, tallied small- and large-scale solar production to show that all California solar nearly beat gas<\/a> for the full year of 2024, but it hasn\u2019t yet released results for the whole of 2025 on its U.S. Electricity Data Explorer<\/a>.<\/p>\n What we can say for sure, based on just the EIA data, is that utility-scale solar alone is off to a roaring start. Gas may rally this summer, if heat waves push demand from air conditioners beyond what solar production can feasibly meet. But in recent months, the scoreboard hasn\u2019t even been close, so this is solar\u2019s game to win.<\/p>\n When that happens, it will mean that the world\u2019s fourth-largest economy has swapped out its biggest fossil fuel for solar, making the grid both cleaner and more efficient.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This year has been full of dramatic rivalries. World Cup matchups, Knicks versus Spurs, One Battle After Another…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":369993,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8,150009,9155,8075,120251,8460,150008],"class_list":["post-369992","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-gas-capacity","tag-gas-generation","tag-natural-gas","tag-rooftop-solar","tag-solar-power","tag-solar-production"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369992","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=369992"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369992\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/369993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=369992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=369992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=369992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}