Early in his term, President Joe Biden set an ambitious goal for the country’s power grid: 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2035.
Recently released data provides a status update on that target. As of the end of 2022, 13 states received the majority of their electricity from carbon-free sources, per the Environmental Protection Agency data released this year. The rest still mostly depend on fossil-fueled sources to keep their lights on.
Washington state had the cleanest grid overall as of 2022, the product of its prodigious hydropower resources drawn from the Columbia River. But the state still has a lot of room to improve its use of renewables: It sourced just under 7 percent of its electricity from wind and less than 1 percent from solar in 2022.
South Dakota rode wind power to second place — nearly 58 percent of its electricity came from wind turbines alone in 2022. The state has invested significantly in expanding the clean power source over the past few years; before 2019, it had built 526 wind turbines total. It installed another 511 turbines between 2019 and 2021.
Vermont, which boasted the third-cleanest grid, according to the data, sourced over half its energy from hydropower and 19 percent from wind in 2022. Legislators recently passed a law that requires the state’s utilities to reach 100 percent renewable electricity by 2035.
The state with the dirtiest grid, Delaware, still relies heavily on fossil gas and gets only a fraction of its power from wind and solar. It has committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by 2030, and legislators recently passed a bill that directs the state’s energy office to procure 1.2 gigawatts of offshore wind energy.
For other states, like West Virginia and Wyoming, coal still has a stronghold. In West Virginia, coal provided more than 89 percent of the state’s energy; clean energy is nearly nonexistent.
While the country overall still has a long way to go, it’s worth noting that when a clean energy project gets built in a state with a dirtier grid, the impact is far greater. Building a new solar plant in eastern Kentucky, for example, would reduce emissions by 62 percent more than building that plant in Los Angeles, as a report from Clearloop and WattTime details.
And wouldn’t you know, several of those states — including Wyoming and West Virginia — are presently taking steps to build what would be their largest solar installations by far.
A Flourish map