Utility-scale solar outproduced gas plants on 82% of all days from January through May, with batteries helping to extend solar’s reach into the evening hours.

This year has been full of dramatic rivalries. World Cup matchups, Knicks versus Spurs, One Battle After Another versus Sinners at the Oscars, and now California solar power versus natural gas.

For years, natural gas has dominated electricity production in the climate-conscious Golden State, just as it has nationally. In both cases, this fossil fuel delivered about 40% of annual generation for much of the last decade. But that started to change in California as solar developers and rooftop installers added more and more capacity, and big batteries joined the party, too.

Last year, the competition turned into a Knicks-Spurs–style nail-biter: California generated nearly as much from large-scale solar power as from gas. This year, it’s turning into a Super Bowl LX–style rout, with solar surging ahead of gas generation for the first five months of 2026, per federal data.

In fact, solar outperformed gas on 82% of the days in that five-month stretch in the California Independent System Operator’s wholesale market. That’s all the more striking given that the state still has more installed gas capacity (29 gigawatts) than utility-scale solar capacity (25 gigawatts), and that this larger gas fleet can operate whenever, while solar is constrained to sunny times. Nonetheless, the solar fleet overcame those structural limitations to beat gas overall so far this year.

California’s gas fleet is in free fall: Generation dropped by 60% from the same time period in 2024. Solar generation increased by 21% in that interval.

Solar didn’t beat gas on its own, though. Battery developers have built 16 gigawatts of capacity in CAISO to charge up on solar power and then compete with gas after sundown. This buildup has rapidly altered grid dynamics in the evenings, when batteries regularly become the top source of power for multiple hours. Meanwhile, wind imports recently jumped as the gigantic SunZia project came online, and that takes the fight to gas in the middle of the night, further depressing its output.

There’s one big player missing from the government figures. The U.S. Energy Information Agency does not have a direct line on rooftop solar production, since those units don’t report data the way large power plants do; the EIA makes an estimate based on various data streams but doesn’t include those numbers in its solar-versus-gas comparison.

Empirically, we know that California’s rooftop solar capacity nearly matches its utility-scale capacity, so a complete accounting of solar production would presumably look like more of a blowout. Data firm Ember, for instance, tallied small- and large-scale solar production to show that all California solar nearly beat gas for the full year of 2024, but it hasn’t yet released results for the whole of 2025 on its U.S. Electricity Data Explorer.

What we can say for sure, based on just the EIA data, is that utility-scale solar alone is off to a roaring start. Gas may rally this summer, if heat waves push demand from air conditioners beyond what solar production can feasibly meet. But in recent months, the scoreboard hasn’t even been close, so this is solar’s game to win.

When that happens, it will mean that the world’s fourth-largest economy has swapped out its biggest fossil fuel for solar, making the grid both cleaner and more efficient.

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In a first, the state could speed up data centers’ grid connection if they bankroll energy-saving residential tech like heat pumps and batteries.

New Jersey is offering data centers an unorthodox way to get the power they need: by bankrolling home energy upgrades.

Last week, Gov. Mikie Sherrill (D) signed a bill that will create a first-of-its-kind program to incentivize data centers to secure clean capacity by reducing demand elsewhere on the grid. Data centers will be able to pay for households to replace their energy-hogging electric-resistance space and water heaters with much more efficient electric heat pump appliances — or to install rooftop solar and batteries.

The scheme could lower electricity bills for potentially millions of households statewide by hundreds to thousands of dollars annually. In return, the data centers would get priority in the interconnection queue.

“New Jersey just set a national precedent,” said Ari Matusiak, CEO and co-founder of nonprofit Rewiring America, who served on Sherrill’s transition team. The law, called the Data Center Fair Share Act, ​“is a blueprint for how policymakers can start to think about households as energy infrastructure.”

Nationwide, utilities propose to spend at least $1.4 trillion on capital expenditures through 2030, according to consumer advocacy nonprofit PowerLines. ​“A meaningful percentage of that could be directed to households,” Matusiak said.

Rewiring America first championed the approach last September, when it released a report finding that installing heat pumps, solar, and batteries in homes could offset more than 93 gigawatts of anticipated AI-driven demand nationwide. The nonprofit provided input on New Jersey’s bill, but it ​“very much had its own momentum,” according to spokesperson Alex Amend.

Using what’s known as ​“voluntary demand-reduction trade programs” established at the utility-level, data centers will be able to hire companies that can aggregate households and other utility customers into a virtual power plant. The utility would then likely work with the aggregator to verify the resulting capacity will be there when the data center is built, according to Amend.

Power-hungry data centers have been pushing up electricity prices in the PJM Interconnection grid region, which includes New Jersey as well as a large swath of the Midwest and mid-Atlantic. And utility customers have been left footing the bill.

New Jersey’s law aims to put the kibosh on that. In addition to the household program, the measure will create a new rate class for data centers, following the lead of Minnesota, Oregon, and Virginia. The move is meant to ensure data centers pay for their own energy use and associated grid infrastructure.

Other states are looking to push data center dollars into home energy upgrades. California, Colorado, Illinois, Pennsylvania, ​“and likely many others” are considering legislation, said McKenna Beck, policy analyst at the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, which helped create the New Jersey bill’s framework. On Tuesday, New York joined the list: Gov. Kathy Hochul signed an executive order that halts data center development for up to a year and directs regulators to consider requiring data centers to fund distributed energy resources and battery storage.

Hyperscalers are staying mum on New Jersey’s initiative. Microsoft declined to comment, Google did not respond in time, and Amazon told Canary Media that it had no stance.

Still, Big Tech companies are increasingly keen to leverage households as energy assets.

Last month, Google announced a pioneering agreement with the virtual power plant provider Voltus for up to 100 megawatts. Also in June, Tesla, Sunrun, and Renew Home broadcast that they would provide a whopping 16 gigawatts of power across data center hot spots in the U.S. using distributed energy resources. The power will be ​“ready in months, not years,” according to their website.

In New Jersey, Rewiring America estimates that of about 2 million single-family homes, roughly 85,000 have electric-resistance heating systems and 422,000 have electric-resistance water heaters. ​“But all households could benefit from home batteries and, in most cases, rooftop solar as well,” Amend said. ​“So the potential is enormous.”

New Jersey’s public utilities regulator has one year to flesh out the standards of the state initiative for utilities. Utilities then have 180 days to submit proposals for their individual programs.

Enrolled households could start getting data center–funded heat pumps, solar panels, and batteries as soon as mid-2028, Beck noted.

“These resources will directly lower bills for households and communities in which the data centers are built,” Beck said. ​“It’s incredibly exciting.”

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As it pivots from shutting down nuclear plants to building them, Holtec says small modular reactors can cut costs and speed construction. Now it has to prove it.

Nuclear giant Holtec International is betting big that its 300-megawatt small modular reactors are the future of atomic energy.

On Friday, the Florida-headquartered firm filed paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission in order to sell shares in the company on the Nasdaq.

Across hundreds of pages, the disclosure document outlines the 40-year-old Holtec’s plans to transform itself from the industry’s undertaker — manufacturing canisters to safely store radioactive spent fuel and decommissioning shuttered nuclear plants — to its midwife, producing and operating new electrical stations. This transition comes as nuclear energy regains popularity in the U.S. as a way to meet booming power demand without creating more planet-warming pollution.

Developers have traditionally offset nuclear’s high up-front costs by building ever-larger reactors to capture the economies of scale. Since the early 2000s, however, a number of companies have proposed building small modular reactors that can be constructed identically and in batches. SMRs could generate about a third of the electricity of conventional large-scale plants, but, proponents argue, would bring down costs through assembly-line repetition rather than physical scale.

That cost reduction has yet to be proven out in the real world with actual plants. But in its S-1 filing, Holtec said, ​“SMRs will offer scalable, cost-effective solutions for new capacity with enhanced safety features, reduced construction timelines and reduced land and transmission infrastructure needs as compared to traditional, larger-scale reactors.” It noted that a single-unit SMR plant would only need 15 acres of land and take a mere three years to build. By contrast, the big reactors on the grid today can take up hundreds of acres, and construction typically drags on for nearly a decade.

Holtec’s SMR-300, as the pressurized-water reactor is named, ​“is expected to receive regulatory approval for deployment in 2029” and reach its first deployment ​“in the early 2030s,” according to the filing.

The company said it expects SMRs to play ​“a meaningful role in the expansion of nuclear capacity,” noting that they can ​“complement large-scale nuclear generation through lower upfront costs” and more flexible planning around how much power is needed.

For example, smaller reactors may be better suited for converting some old coal-fired stations into nuclear plants. The DOE has been researching the idea for years, given that nuclear and coal are both thermal resources that operate with similar rates of frequency and therefore use similar equipment to generate electricity from steam — which in nuclear plants is made from the heat created by splitting atoms and in coal plants is made from heat created by burning the black rocks. Converting a 400-MW coal plant into a similar-size nuclear reactor makes more financial sense than using a bigger reactor, which could require costly transmission upgrades and more space.

“We believe that our SMR-300 plant can become a favored nuclear generation source over large reactors because of certain advantages,” the company said in its filing.

The future of restarts

The company will also operate at least one conventional reactor, the 800-MW unit it’s currently restoring at its Palisades nuclear station, in western Michigan. That project — the nation’s first effort to return a permanently shuttered nuclear reactor to service — could be completed within months, though its contract to sell power to the local grid won’t kick in until next year.

Holtec hopes to combine its plant-restart strategy with its SMR vision. It’s planning to deploy two SMRs at the Palisades site; if that works out, the company has said it may build SMRs at New Jersey’s Oyster Creek nuclear plant, which it’s been in the process of decommissioning for eight years.

Holtec owns three other defunct nuclear plants — Massachusetts’ Pilgrim, Michigan’s Big Rock Point, and New York’s Indian Point — that it could also try to rebuild. The Trump administration has called for reconstructing Indian Point, but Albany remains opposed to the controversial proposal.

Local opposition isn’t Holtec’s biggest hurdle, however. That would be competition from the nuclear behemoths in Russia and China. Virtually every Western nuclear developer is facing an uphill battle to compete with the Kremlin’s state-owned Rosatom, by far the biggest international vendor of nuclear technology in the world, and China’s two state-owned nuclear companies, which are building more than three dozen reactors at home and are expected to enter the export game soon.

Still, among its domestic rivals, Holtec may be the best positioned to hold its own on a global playing field. It is an established company with profitable enterprises in a dozen countries across four continents, and has experience managing infrastructure so sensitive it’s overseen by a dedicated agency, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The company has facilities with electrical equipment on-site that can be potentially used to deploy SMRs. It also has won significant support from the federal government, both in the form of a $1.52 billion loan the Department of Energy provided to finance the Palisades restart and the $400 million the agency gave the company to support construction of its first SMR-300s.

“We began work in 2011 on a small modular reactor solution, and drawing on our in-house capability to design, license, manufacture, construct, and commission nuclear systems, honed through decades of turnkey supply, we are now uniquely positioned to launch the development of our small nuclear reactor,” Krishna Singh, Holtec’s founder and chief executive, said in a letter to prospective investors.

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