The EIA released the latest edition of their Electric Power Monthly on September 25th, with data for July 2018. The table above shows the percentage contribution of the main fuel sources to two decimal places for the last two months and the year to date.
For the month of July, the total amount of electricity generated was the second highest amount generated for any single month since January 2013 at 410,148 GWh, 2,302 GWh less than the amount generated in July 2016. Coal and Natural Gas fueled almost 68.5% of US electricity generation in July and while the contribution from Coal increased from 27.36% in June to 28.18% in July, the contribution from Natural Gas also increased by slightly more than five percentage points, reaching an unprecedented 40.28% up from 35.02% in June. Nuclear power generated 72,456 GWh, 3.97% more than it did in June but, due to the increase in total generation, the percentage contribution to the total actually declined to 17.67% from 18.77% in June.
In July, the contribution from All Renewables at 13.01% fell further below that from Nuclear at 17.67%, similar to July 2017 when the ramp up of total generation resulted in the percentage contribution from All Renewables falling further below that from Nuclear. The absolute contribution from Solar declined from it’s all time high in June of 10,880 GWh to 10,049 GWh, with the corresponding percentage contribution declining to 2.45% as opposed to 2.93% in June. The amount of electricity generated by Wind decreased by almost 35%, from 24,411 GWh to 15,897 GWh and coupled with the increased total generation, the percentage contribution declined from 6.58% to 3.88% in July. The contribution from Hydro decreased 13.53% from 27415 GWh in June to 23706 GWh, resulting in the percentage contribution decreasing from 7.39% in June to 5.78%. The combined contribution from Wind and Solar decreased to 6.33% from 9.51% in June. Consequently the contribution from Non-Hydro Renewables also decreased to 7.23% from 10.48%.
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