So much solar: Digging into the list of every US power plant that went online this year

Next were natural gas combustion turbines, with 22, and natural gas internal combustion engines, with 21.

Onshore wind had nine projects.

Combined-cycle natural gas, despite having massive amounts of announced capacity in development, had just 3 projects that went online. The high tide of new gas plants won’t arrive for another few years.

If we look at projects in terms of generating capacity, utility-scale solar led with 11,458 megawatts, followed by batteries, 8,207 megawatts, and then onshore wind, mostly because of the SunZia projects, with 5,473 megawatts.

The three largest types of natural gas plants added a total of 2,707 megawatts of new capacity.

Small-scale solar, including rooftop solar, is not part of this database.

A perpetual caveat: Power plant technologies have important differences to keep in mind when comparing generating capacity. The most obvious one is that solar doesn’t produce power at night. Another is that many gas plants only run a few days or weeks per year, when they’re needed to handle peak demand.

What do these numbers tell us? I asked Eric Gimon, a senior fellow at Energy Innovation, a San Francisco-based think tank.

Gimon explained that the bulk of new projects are small and mid-size utility-scale solar. They are not attention-grabbing. But they’re almost everywhere. Many of the solar projects are paired with batteries.

“These kinds of smaller-size projects are just easier to build, and the site possibilities are much more diverse and easy to find,” he said.

Now, let’s look at the new power plants in terms of where they were built. Three states account for about half of the country’s new generating capacity: Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.

Texas was the leader, with a power mix that leaned more heavily on batteries and gas than other states. The leading category in Texas was batteries, with 3,067 megawatts, followed by utility-scale solar, with 2,311 megawatts, and then natural gas combustion turbines or natural gas internal combustion engines, with 1,154 megawatts.