In May 2026, California got over 50% of its entire statewide electricity from solar power alone — an INCREDIBLE world-first milestone!
Tell your state leaders to accelerate solar-plus-battery progress!
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Reasons For Hope
Throughout the month of May 2026, the entire state of California got a record-breaking 51% of all its electricity generation, including both on-grid and off-grid, from solar power alone! Other zero-carbon sources including nuclear, wind, hydro, and geothermal totaled 33%, while fossil gas provided a record-low 14.9% of power that month. California is America’s largest state and would be the world’s fourth-largest national economy if it was counted as a separate country, making it all of human civilization’s largest economy yet to cross the 50% solar threshold1!
This is an incredible milestone: a majority electrotech-powered grid is here NOW, in America, advancing every day! For decades, the fossil fuel industry said it was impossible — now it’s just the unremarkable status quo. And there’s a lot more room to grow, as in addition to decarbonizing the electric grid (well underway!) it’s now a better deal than ever to electrify transport and heating with EVs and heat pumps.
This solar surge has become a stable, reliable, and non-intermittent source of power thanks to the epic Californian battery build-out. Grid-scale battery storage in the Golden State grew by a whopping 26,129% (not a typo: over twenty-six thousand percent!) from 2016 to 2026. This is a working model that other states can follow!
State leaders must accelerate the buildout of the solar/battery revolution to bring its benefits to their state as fast as possible, and there are tons and tons of policy options available! Kickstart a statewide review to eliminate red-tape permitting bottlenecks like the governors of Oregon and Colorado are doing, pass an Illinois-style battery-boosting Clean and Reliable Grid Affordability Act, exempt solar farms from permitting review like Florida has, encourage municipal-level battery resilience like the EPB town utility is doing in Chattanooga, Tennessee…the list goes on and on. We need maximally supportive legal, regulatory, and permitting structures for solar and batteries to make it as fast and easy as possible to build cheap, clean, reliable electricity for America!
Tell your state leaders to accelerate solar-plus-battery progress!
Your Dose of Climate Hope is written by Sam Matey-Coste for Climate Action Now.
For context, China has built lots more solar power than the U.S. in absolute terms, but China is also much bigger and has much more electricity generation overall, so solar generation there is a “bigger slice, but a smaller percentage because it’s part of a bigger pie” and has not yet passed that 50% threshold. Two things are true here: China is leading the world in absolute quantity of solar and battery build-outs, and California is leading the world in how much of its total electricity system has gone solar!
My brain has been stuck in a hopeless loop for a couple years now, so I’m trying to specifically seek out good news. And this definitely seems like good news ☺️
This is a good climate story because it shows transition as something already happening, not just something imagined. The big challenge now is storage, transmission, and reliability. What would make this kind of solar-heavy grid easier for other states to copy?