Solar and storage keep pulling away from wind, and the second quarter made the separation hard to miss.
The American Clean Power Association reports developers energized 164 utility-scale solar, storage and wind projects in the second quarter of 2026, adding 17.1 GW and taking installed U.S. clean power capacity to nearly 388 GW. Utility-scale solar led at 7.4 GW, followed by close to 5 GW of land-based wind and 4.7 GW of battery storage. Installed storage crossed the 50 GW line during the quarter and now sits near 53 GW.
A record construction pipeline, weighted toward solar and storage
The pipeline reached 205 GW, up 11% year over year and the largest ACP has recorded: 111 GW of utility-scale solar and 56 GW of storage. Procurement ran 14.5 GW, up 23%.
Land-based wind went the other way. Its pipeline shrank 4% quarter over quarter, and the reason is visible in the pricing. ACP cites LevelTen Energy data putting wind PPAs at $83.79/MWh against $61.40/MWh for solar, a record $22.39 spread. At that gap, a buyer needs a specific reason to choose wind, and generation profile alone increasingly isn’t one now that four-hour storage is cheap enough to reshape a solar curve.
New Mexico ends the Texas run
New Mexico led all states at 3.6 GW, breaking a Texas streak that had run two and a half years. One project did most of that: Pattern Energy’s SunZia Wind at 3.65 GW, the largest land-based wind project ever built in the United States. Single-project concentration like that is a reminder that state rankings at this stage of the buildout track where one developer closed financing, not where the fundamentals shifted.
Read the source with its interests in view
ACP is a trade association advocating for its members. The data is self-compiled rather than a government series, and the release editorializes about federal policy headwinds. The Q2 additions are actuals and reasonably solid; the 205 GW pipeline is a statement of intent, and a meaningful share of any pipeline never reaches financial close.
What isn’t in dispute is the construction labor implication. Seventeen gigawatts a quarter is a lot of racking, trenching, medium-voltage cable and pile driving, and it’s landing in counties without a deep electrical trade base. The transmission to move it lags further still, which is why lines like the Champlain Hudson Power Express get built at all, and why storage, which needs no new right-of-way, keeps taking share.