368 new US power plants, and 302 of them are solar or batteries

The US Energy Information Administration's list of utility-scale plants that began operating between January and June counts 368 entries, and by project count the group is dominated by utility-scale solar ^[1][2]. Solar accounted for 207 of those projects and batteries for 95, which is 302 of 368, or about 82 percent of everything that came online ^[3][4][1].

That leaves roughly 66 projects, about 18 percent of the list, for every other technology combined, including gas, wind, hydro and everything else ^[2]. Solar on its own was about 56 percent of the count ^[3]. The EIA figures cited by Ars Technica are counts of projects, not a megawatt split, and the distinction matters, because the top of the list reads very differently from the middle of it ^[3][4].

The two largest additions were SunZia Wind South and SunZia Wind North in New Mexico, which came online this spring with a combined 3,650 megawatts and are now the largest wind farms in the country ^[5]. SunZia has been in development for roughly a decade, and it arrives while US onshore wind development has dwindled for reasons tied to regulation and public opinion ^[6]. Ars Technica's read is that SunZia is not evidence of an onshore wind boom but an echo of a past one ^[7]. The same applies to Vineyard Wind, the offshore project near Massachusetts, which the publication ranks fourth-largest if SunZia is counted as two plants and describes as another long-gestating build whose completion says little about future trends ^[10].

Third on the list is the Trumbull Energy Center in Ohio, a 900-megawatt combined-cycle gas plant that Ars Technica places within a broader expansion of gas generation in the PJM Interconnection region, which covers parts of the Mid-Atlantic, Midwest and South ^[8][9]. SunZia's combined nameplate is about four times Trumbull's ^[4], which is why a single legacy wind pipeline can distort the headline picture of what the grid is actually adding at the margin.

The first entry in the top five that reflects the trend in the rest of the data is fifth-largest: Green River Energy Center in Utah, 800 megawatts split evenly between 400 megawatts of solar and 400 megawatts of batteries ^[11]. That pairing is the shape of the list. Ars Technica's conclusion is that first-half 2026 completions were mainly a story of utility-scale solar and batteries ^[12].

For anyone siting load, the operational planning assumption follows from the count rather than the headlines. New capacity showing up on a two-to-three-year horizon is overwhelmingly solar, often with storage attached, plus a smaller stream of gas concentrated in PJM ^[3][4][8][1]. A siting model that treats the SunZia and Vineyard Wind completions as the leading edge of a wind buildout is modelling the end of an old pipeline, not the start of a new one ^[6][7][10].

Worth watching: whether the second-half list keeps the same solar-and-storage ratio, whether any new onshore wind projects enter the completions data rather than closing out decade-old permits, and how many additional gas plants land inside PJM after Trumbull ^[3][4][6][8].