Fuel Mix & Renewables
What is generating America's electricity today — gas, nuclear, coal, wind, solar and hydro shares from EIA daily data since mid-2018, with renewable-share records.
Latest reading
On September 7, 2026, natural gas generated 40.2% of U.S. electricity — the largest source — followed by nuclear at 17.7% and coal at 17.3%. Wind and solar together supplied 19.3%; adding hydro, renewables covered 23.2% of the day's generation.
Sources, methodology & freshnessLast updated 2026-09-07 · Open ↓Close ↑
Share of the day's U.S. generation from wind, solar and hydro combined.
The big three — gas, nuclear, coal
Renewables share
Wind + solar alone, and renewables including hydro. The daily records — 29.9% wind+solar on May 4, 2026, 37.1% renewables on March 22, 2026 — both landed in spring, when demand is mild and wind and sun are strong. That seasonality is the pattern to watch. The share does not climb in a straight line.
Why traders and investors watch this
The fuel mix is market share, and market share is what the energy trades are actually about. Gas's generation share is the structural demand base for natural gas — power burn is its largest single use, which ties this page directly to the storage balance. The renewables share is the daily scoreboard the solar, wind and nuclear narratives have to match, including the inconvenient windless-heat-wave days. And coal's share is the cleanest series on the structural decline — plus its gas-price-driven comebacks, which carry information about gas-market tightness. Watch the gas share on peak-demand days during a storage deficit: that combination is how winter squeezes start.
How this is computed — and what it can't tell you
Each balancing authority reports hourly net generation by fuel to EIA-930. We sum each fuel across the lower 48 for each day and divide by total generation. "Other" bundles petroleum, geothermal, batteries and pumped storage (both roughly net-zero over a day), and unidentified sources. One reporting seam: before EIA's 2024 schema change, hydro was reported with pumped storage included; after, separately — a difference of a few tenths of a percentage point. Wind and solar figures are utility-scale only — rooftop solar generates behind the meter and shows up as lower demand, not as generation, so the true solar share of U.S. consumption is somewhat higher than shown.
EIA's fuel-level reporting begins in July 2018 and is revised for ~30 days; per-BA fuel splits have known quirks that EIA's adjusted series (used here) partially corrects. Shares are shares of generation, not capacity — a fuel can dominate installed capacity yet contribute little on a given day.
Share of the day's U.S. generation from wind, solar and hydro combined.
How Fuel Mix & Renewables Works
- 1Generation by fuel, hourly, all BAsEIA-930 reports each balancing authority's net generation by fuel every hour. We sum the lower-48, use EIA's adjusted series, and reduce each complete day to one share per fuel — gas, coal, nuclear, wind, solar, hydro, and a residual "other".
- 2Shares, not absolute outputGeneration swings with demand; shares show the competitive result — which fuels won the day's dispatch. Coal vs gas is a price race; wind and solar are weather-driven but trend with installed capacity.
- 3Column matching that survives EIA's quirksEIA's fuel headers changed across eras (a typo'd "witho Integrated", double spaces, hydro renames). We match loosely by fuel phrase and exclude substring collisions — solar-with-battery-storage columns must not double-count into solar — an error class we caught at ~14 percentage points in development.
- 4Records, honestly windowedWind+solar and renewables-including-hydro record shares are computed against the loaded history, which starts July 2018 when EIA's fuel columns begin. The page states the span rather than implying a longer one.