First electric car statistics

• The University of Groningen’s museum calls Sibrandus Stratingh’s 3 kg cart, a design from 1835, the first electric car in the world.
• Electric vehicles were 37.6% of the 4,192 motor vehicles built in the US in 1900, a share computed from the Census Bureau’s counts.
• Detroit Electric built 13,000 electric cars between 1907 and 1939, most of them before the 1929 stock market crash.
• The US had 8,000 registered automobiles in 1900 and 17,481,001 in 1925, counting every power type.
• Tesla’s own filing reported a 236 mile range for the Roadster, which it began delivering in early 2008.
• The 2011 Nissan Leaf had an EPA range of 73 miles and a $32,780 list price.
• US plug-in sales grew from 17,763 in 2011 to 1,402,371 in 2023.
• Argonne counted about 1.5 million plug-in vehicles sold in 2025, 4% below 2024.
• The IEA counted more than 20 million electric car sales worldwide in 2025.

Who made the first electric car?

According to the University of Groningen’s museum, Sibrandus Stratingh built the first electric vehicle that could carry a load, a small cart made in 1835.

The cart the museum shows is an improved version of that original, and it weighs 3 kg, runs for 20 minutes on a full battery and carries 1.5 kg. Stratingh bent the straight magnets in Moritz von Jacobi’s motor design, which the museum says let the motor generate twice as much energy.

Source: Museum.nl, Stratingh’s cart, HISTORY, Engineering and Technology History Wiki, Vermont Public, Gazetteer for Scotland, Guinness World Records, Institution of Engineering and Technology, State Historical Society of Iowa, Porsche Newsroom. The Anderson row rests on HISTORY alone.

Other sources name other firsts. HISTORY credits Robert Anderson of Scotland with the first horseless carriage powered by an electric motor, built in 1832. It quotes the author Kevin A. Wilson saying the machine qualifies as a vehicle, though it can be argued that it isn’t a car.

Among this page’s sources, HISTORY alone names Anderson, so treat his carriage as single-sourced.

Two other early names built machines that weren’t cars. Thomas Davenport of Vermont built an electric motor in 1834 and a model electric train, and Robert Davidson’s Galvani locomotive ran at 4 mph on the Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway in 1842 before being dismissed as insufficiently powerful.

A working model and a locomotive are different machines from a car with a seat for a rider, and only the car looks like the electric vehicles on sale in 2026.

The State Historical Society of Iowa says William Morrison’s 1890 carriage in Des Moines carried up to 12 passengers at 14 mph and needed a recharge after 50 miles. The Energy Department’s history gives six passengers. Neither page says how it counted.

When did electric cars become practical?

Electric cars needed a battery that could be recharged, and in 1859 Gaston Planté designed a lead-acid battery that could store a useful amount of energy.

Gustave Trouvé fitted a pedal tricycle with lead-acid batteries and a Siemens motor and ran it down a Paris street in April 1881, which Guinness World Records lists as the first electric road vehicle. In England, an IET presentation says Thomas Parker built the first practical production electric car in 1884, while Grace’s Guide says only that he developed his first electric car that year.

The sources don’t agree on which car was the earliest practical one. The IET names Parker, and the Iowa historical society names Morrison for the US.

On April 14, 1900, the Lohner-Porsche electric car premiered at the Paris Exposition with a hub motor in each front wheel and a top speed of 32 km/h.

How many cars were electric in 1900?

Steam led US motor vehicle production in 1900 and electric came second, with the Census Bureau counting 1,575 electric vehicles among 4,192 built.

Source: US Census Bureau, Twelfth Census, Volume X, Table 7, shares computed from its counts and reported values. Electrek. HISTORY, a third of 160 cars at New York’s first car show in November 1900.

The shares differ because the sources count different things. The Census counted vehicles built and the value manufacturers reported for them, and HISTORY counted cars on a show floor.

Electrek calls that 38% split a share of vehicles “on the road,” but the Census counted vehicles built in a single year.

We computed the Census shares by dividing each vehicle type’s count, and its reported value, by the year’s total. HISTORY alone backs the Anderson row, and we found no federal or museum count of how many early electric cars were on the road.

Who bought electric cars in the early 1900s?

Before World War I, many women chose electric cars because they started instantly without hand cranking, according to The Henry Ford. At the 1914 average wage, you’d have worked about five years and 11 months to buy a Detroit Electric Model 47, which cost $3,730 as outfitted, by the museum’s own math.

The Smithsonian’s record for a 1904 Columbia says electric cars were expensive and electricity rates were high, and that maintaining batteries was a complicated, hazardous task.

Makers stayed small. Baker Electric of Cleveland was building about 400 cars a year by 1905, and Riker’s Electric Vehicle Company, founded in 1899, built more than a dozen types of electric cars and trucks.

Why did gasoline cars win?

A Ford Model T runabout cost $825 in 1909 and $260 by 1925, which IEEE Spectrum says came to about two and a half months of wages for the average worker.

Source: IEEE Spectrum, US Department of Energy, The Henry Ford. Prices are nominal dollars for different vehicle classes, so read each row on its own.

Starting a gasoline engine meant turning a hand crank, which kept some people, especially women, from operating cars. Cadillac introduced the self-starter in its 1912 model, and Henry Ford began offering one on the Model T in 1919.

The IEEE History Center says Ford’s cheap mass production and design improvements, especially the self-starter, contributed to gasoline’s dominance from the 1910s. In Texas, the Spindletop gusher of January 10, 1901 marked the birth of the modern petroleum industry, and its wells yielded 17,500,000 barrels in 1902.

How many cars were on US roads by the 1920s?

US registered automobiles went from 8,000 in 1900 to 15,436,102 in 1924, counting every power type.

Source: Federal Highway Administration, Highway Statistics Summary to 1995, Table MV-200. Every second year from 1900 to 1924.

The table doesn’t split registrations by power type, so it can’t say how many of those cars were electric.

What was the GM EV1?

GM announced the EV1 on January 4, 1996, and at its debut it was lease-only in two states, Arizona and California. If you lived outside those two states, you couldn’t lease one at launch.

The EV1 began in the 1990s as a response to a zero-emission vehicle mandate from California’s Air Resources Board.

Production counts differ. HISTORY says around 2,500 EV1s were produced from 1996 to 1999, while the Smithsonian says GM built 1,117 and canceled the program in 2003. The counts can’t both be right, and the Smithsonian’s is the exact one.

Which electric cars came after the EV1?

Tesla began delivering the Roadster in early 2008 and had sold 937 of them in 18 countries by December 31, 2009.

If you bought a 2011 Nissan Leaf, you paid a list price of $32,780 before incentives for a car the EPA rated at 73 miles. It went on sale in December 2010 in 5 states.

The Chevrolet Volt, a plug-in hybrid, was rated at 35 miles on electricity and 380 miles in total. The 2013 Tesla Model S with the 60 kWh pack was rated at 208 miles. The version with the 85 kWh pack was rated at 265 miles.

Source: Tesla Form S-1, where Tesla reports the Roadster’s range, fueleconomy.gov, Nissan Leaf, Chevrolet Volt, Model S 60 kWh and Model S 85 kWh. Years are model years except the Roadster’s first deliveries.

How many plug-in cars has the US sold each year?

Plug-in vehicles sold in the US since 2010 reached 4.7 million in 2023, after mass-market sales began at the end of 2010.

Source: US Department of Energy, Fact of the Week 1327 data file, from Argonne National Laboratory, as published January 29, 2024. Thousands of new light-duty battery electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles by calendar year.

Cumulative sales passed 1 million by October 2018. Annual totals slipped two years running, 2019 and 2020, then more than doubled the next year.

Argonne’s count of about 1.5 million plug-in vehicles for 2025 ran 4% below 2024. EIA calls 2025 the first year battery electric sales and share declined.

Two federal tax credits for new electric vehicles expired on September 30, 2025, the month battery electric cars hit a record 12% share before dropping below 6% in each remaining month of 2025.

The DOE and DOT Joint Office put plug-ins at 9.4% of US passenger vehicle sales in 2023, up from 6.8% in 2022. The sales story gets its own page on new electric vehicle adoption.

These counts cover battery electric and plug-in hybrid cars, so natural gas cars and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles sit outside them.

How far has the electric car come since Stratingh’s cart?

Electric vehicles were 2% of all registered light-duty vehicles in the US in 2024, according to EIA.

Battery electric cars were 6% of new vehicle sales in the first six months of 2026, down from 7% in the same months of 2025. That count covers battery electric cars alone, so it doesn’t compare with the plug-in share DOE reported for 2023.

Worldwide, the IEA counted more than 20 million electric car sales in 2025 after more than 17 million in 2024, and its Global EV Outlook 2026 forecasts 23 million for 2026.

If you’re thinking about buying one, the page on what charging an electric car costs gives the cost of charging at home for specific models, with electricity prices by state.

Top EV battery statistics

• DOE estimates a light-duty EV battery pack cost $139 per kWh in 2023, 90% less than in 2008, in 2023 dollars.
• The average new US battery-electric car had 292 miles of EPA range in model year 2024, almost four times the 2011 average.
• Recurrent’s November 2025 study of more than 30,000 EVs found that 0.3% of models from 2022 onward had a battery replaced.
• Many carmakers offer 8-year/100,000-mile battery warranties, according to DOE.
• China made over 80% of the world’s battery cells in 2025, the IEA reports.
• World lithium output from mines rose 31% to about 290,000 tons in 2025, USGS estimates.
• CATL supplied 39.4% of the EV batteries installed worldwide from January to August 2026, according to SNE Research data.
• Redwood Materials says it recovers more than 95% of the lithium, nickel, cobalt and copper in the products it processes.

What does an EV battery cost per kilowatt-hour?

DOE estimates a light-duty EV pack cost $139 per kilowatt-hour in 2023 when built in a factory making at least 100,000 packs a year. That figure counts the usable energy, the part of the pack a driver can draw on.

BloombergNEF’s survey measures pack prices across cars and stationary storage worldwide. It found packs cost $84 per kWh in China in 2025, with North America 44% higher, which works out to about $121 per kilowatt-hour for a North American pack.

At that price, the 85 kWh pack in a Chevrolet Equinox EV is worth about $10,300 before labor. Multiply any car’s pack size by the price per kilowatt-hour and you have a rough value for the pack alone.

The battery is one part of electric vehicle technology, alongside motors and charging. If you’re weighing a fuel cell car instead, the hydrogen fuel cells page covers that drivetrain.

How much has the price of an EV battery fallen?

DOE estimates that EV pack cost fell 90% between 2008 and 2023, from $1,415 to $139 per kWh, in 2023 dollars.

Source: DOE Vehicle Technologies Office, Fact of the Week #1354 dataset, built on Argonne National Laboratory’s BatPaC model. Costs are for usable energy at 100,000 or more packs a year.

Most of the fall came early. The cost in 2023 dollars dropped 70% from 2008 to 2013, to $424, and the next ten years took it down to $139.

BloombergNEF’s survey found a 20% drop to $115 per kWh in 2024, and it names cell manufacturing overcapacity and cheaper LFP batteries among the factors. Cell makers had 3.1 TWh of commissioned capacity that year, more than 2.5 times demand.

We didn’t join the two series. DOE’s figures are modeled costs for usable energy, and BloombergNEF’s are surveyed market prices. The per-kilowatt-hour and pack-value estimates in the section above are our arithmetic on BloombergNEF’s China price and North American premium.

Which chemistries do EV batteries use?

Lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries made up over 55% of EV batteries deployed worldwide in 2025, up from nearly 50% in 2024, the IEA reports.

The IEA also says LFP packs were more than 40% cheaper on average than nickel manganese cobalt (NMC) packs. BloombergNEF’s averages, in the table below, put the gap at a little over a third, so the two sources agree on direction and differ on size.

Source: BloombergNEF, 2025 lithium-ion battery price survey (average across all segments), IEA, Global EV Outlook 2026 and General Motors, LMR announcement.

Which chemistry is in your car depends on the model. Chevrolet’s 2027 Bolt uses LFP cells in a 65 kWh pack.

How big is an EV battery, and how far does it go?

The average new US battery-electric car had 292 miles of EPA range in model year 2024, almost four times the 2011 average. Pack size sets much of that range, as the five models below show.

Source: Pack sizes from Hyundai, Chevrolet, Nissan and Chevrolet. Range and efficiency from fueleconomy.gov for the Ioniq 5 Standard Range, Bolt, Leaf, Ioniq 5 RWD and Equinox EV.

The two smallest packs in the table are also the two shortest-range cars. Wheels move range too. The same Leaf is rated for 303 miles on steel wheels and 259 miles on 19-inch wheels.

GM calls the Bolt’s 65 kWh its rated energy, and the other sizes are each maker’s own figures, so check whether a number is rated or usable energy before you compare cars.

How long does an EV battery last?

Geotab’s 2025 analysis of 22,700 EVs found the average battery loses 2.3% of its capacity a year, which projects to 81.6% of the original capacity after eight years.

How you charge matters. Cars that often used high-power DC fast charging lost 3.0% a year, against 1.5% for low-power charging. Geotab’s 2023 analysis of 11 common models found 1.8% a year, and Geotab says the return to 2.3% doesn’t mean batteries are getting worse.

Batteries that fail outright are rare. Recurrent’s 2025 study found that 0.3% of EVs from 2022 onward had a battery replaced, against 2% of second-generation EVs and 8.5% of first-generation ones, and some of those were warranty or recall swaps.

The data is young. About 75% of EVs on the road were sold in or after 2023, Recurrent says, and it calls them too new to show meaningful degradation.

What does an EV battery warranty cover?

Many manufacturers offer 8-year/100,000-mile warranties for their EV batteries, according to DOE. AAA says most EVs carry battery warranties of 8 to 10 years or up to 100,000 miles, and that a maker will typically repair or replace a pack that falls below a set share of its original charge.

California’s Advanced Clean Cars II rule text writes similar coverage into regulation. It requires battery-electric and plug-in hybrid makers to warrant the battery against losing health below 70% for 8 years or 100,000 miles on 2026 through 2030 models. From 2031 the threshold rises to 75%.

That rule is contested. The President signed a resolution on June 12, 2025 disapproving the EPA waiver for Advanced Clean Cars II, and California led a coalition of 10 attorneys general in suing the federal government the same day. Neither source says how the suit ended.

The federal emissions warranty is a separate rule. It runs 8 years or 80,000 miles for specified major emission control components. Before you compare cars, read how many years and miles each battery warranty covers and what capacity loss triggers it.

How much does it cost to replace an EV battery?

Recurrent puts replacement outside warranty at $5,000 to $16,000, depending on pack size and maker, and calls out-of-pocket replacements rare. AAA’s range is $5,000 to $20,000 or more, and the high end comes from the flagship packs of 100 kWh and more in its table.

Source: AAA, How Much Does an EV Battery Replacement Cost? Prices include parts and labor.

How and where are EV batteries made?

The IEA counts more than 20 million electric cars sold worldwide in 2025, and the electric vehicle sales page follows where they sold. China made 70% of electric cars and over 80% of battery cells in 2025, the IEA reports.

A cell starts as electrode material. In the conventional method, Argonne National Laboratory says, a slurry of active material, conductive material and binder is cast onto a metal foil and heat-dried in an oven, then pressed between rollers. Dry processing can cut manufacturing costs 11% and energy use 46%, Argonne estimates.

Source: U.S. Geological Survey, Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026: Cobalt and Graphite, and IEA, Global EV Outlook 2026: Manufacturing and trade.

Congo leads cobalt mining, and China leads the other four steps in the table.

Australia led lithium mining in 2025, and batteries account for 88% of global lithium use, from EV packs to grid storage. The battery storage on the grid page covers the storage half.

Source: U.S. Geological Survey, Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026: Lithium. Lithium content. US production is withheld.

On the cell side, CATL and BYD led. SNE Research counted 844.2 GWh of EV batteries installed worldwide from January to August 2026, and CATL had 39.4% of that and BYD 15.1%. The count includes hybrids and covers eight months, so it doesn’t line up with the IEA’s full-year figures.

Can EV batteries be recycled?

DOE lists three recycling technologies at different stages of commercialization, and two of them are smelting and chemical leaching. The third, direct recycling, keeps the cathode’s structure intact, so makers can reuse the material and cut manufacturing costs, Argonne says.

Cost is the catch. DOE says the cost of material recovery remains a challenge for the industry.

Redwood Materials says it recovers more than 95% of the metals in what it processes. The company recovers over 20 GWh of lithium-ion batteries a year from production scrap as well as battery packs and consumer devices, so the rate doesn’t describe retired EV packs alone.

The 2028 cells already scheduled

General Motors expects upgrades at its Ultium Cells plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee to be finished in 2028, when it plans to build lithium manganese-rich cells. GM designed them for 33% more energy density than LFP at a comparable cost.

Mercedes-Benz drove an EQS with a lithium-metal solid-state battery 1,205 kilometers, about 749 miles, from Stuttgart to Malmö on one charge in August 2025. It was a prototype test with cells from Factorial Energy.

To compare two electric cars, put their EPA range and battery warranty side by side, then take the efficiency figure from the EPA label and work out how much it costs to charge an electric car at your electricity rate.

Top photo: Mariordo Mario Roberto Duran Ortiz, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped.

Top biofuel statistics

• The US produced 16,514.8 million gallons of fuel ethanol in 2025, which was 80.1% of its combined ethanol and biomass-based diesel output.
• Biomass-based diesel, meaning biodiesel plus renewable diesel, fell 15.8% in 2025 to 4,097.1 million gallons after a record 4,865.7 million in 2024.
• The Alternative Fuels Data Center lists 4,784 E85 station locations as of October 29, 2026.
• Soybean oil supplied 33.3% of the fats and oils that plants making the two diesel fuels used in 2025.
• US ethanol exports ran at 1.96 billion gallons through November 2025, on pace for a record year, the Renewable Fuels Association reports.
• The International Energy Agency expects Brazil to supply 40% of the growth in road-transport biofuel demand to 2030.
• Corn ethanol’s emissions run from about 39% below gasoline in a 2019 USDA analysis to likely at least 24% above it in a 2022 study.
• Darling Ingredients reports that its Diamond Green Diesel joint venture sold 348.8 million gallons of renewable fuels in the second quarter of 2026.

What is a biofuel, and is it renewable?

Biofuels are, in EIA’s wording, liquid fuels and blending components made from biomass, the organic material that comes from plants and animals. In the US that mostly means ethanol, which is made from corn starch in 94% of cases, plus biodiesel and renewable diesel made from fats and oils.

Is a biofuel renewable? EIA calls biomass renewable organic material, and it supplied about 5% of US primary energy in 2025. Biofuels were 53% of the biomass energy the US used that year, the largest slice of the wider biomass energy picture.

Whether a crop-based fuel counts as renewable in practice depends on regrowth keeping pace with harvest, which the page on biomass as a renewable resource works through. Renewable and low-carbon are separate questions, and the lifecycle estimates for corn ethanol further down span a wide range.

How much biofuel does the US make?

US ethanol production rose from 13,929.1 million gallons in 2011 to 16,514.8 million in 2025. Over the same years, renewable diesel grew from 62.0 million gallons to 2,946.2 million.

Source: EIA Monthly Energy Review Table 10.3, Table 10.4a and Table 10.4b, September 2026 edition, calendar years. The 2025 figures are preliminary.

Renewable diesel did the climbing, and the last row of the table shows both diesel fuels falling. Biodiesel dropped 31.1% to 1,150.9 million gallons. Renewable diesel’s fall was smaller, 7.8% to 2,946.2 million.

Through the first six months of 2026, plants made 8,314.6 million gallons of ethanol and 2,286.2 million gallons of biodiesel and renewable diesel combined. Those are half-year totals, so they don’t compare with the full years in the table. On the company side, Darling Ingredients reports that its Diamond Green Diesel joint venture sold 348.8 million gallons of renewable fuels in the second quarter of 2026.

EIA’s October 2026 outlook forecasts ethanol at 1.10 million barrels a day in 2026, up from 1.08 million in 2025. It has renewable diesel at 0.23 million barrels per day in 2026, up from 0.19 million.

The combined total, the ethanol share and the fall in biomass-based diesel are computed from EIA’s three fuel tables, so they cover those fuels and leave out EIA’s separate category for other biofuels. EIA revises annual figures as new months arrive, so the 2025 numbers can move.

How each fuel gets made

Ethanol is grain alcohol. Producers use yeast to ferment the starch or sugar in corn or sugarcane, distill the result up to fuel grade and add a denaturant so it can’t be sold as a beverage, as EIA explains. It’s the same basic biology as a distillery, aimed at your gas tank instead of a bottle.

Biodiesel takes a different chemical path, called transesterification. A producer mixes roughly 100 pounds of oil with 10 pounds of methanol and a catalyst such as sodium or potassium hydroxide. The reaction yields 100 pounds of biodiesel and 10 pounds of glycerin, according to the Department of Energy’s Alternative Fuels Data Center.

That glycerin isn’t waste. It’s sold into pharmaceutical and cosmetics manufacturing.

Renewable diesel skips transesterification. Refiners run the same fats and oils through hydrotreating, adding hydrogen under heat and pressure to strip out oxygen and produce what the industry calls hydroprocessed esters and fatty acids, or HEFA. The output is a hydrocarbon chain almost indistinguishable from petroleum diesel, so it meets ASTM D975, the petroleum diesel spec, instead of the separate ASTM D6751 standard written for biodiesel.

What feeds the vats and reactors

Corn is the main US ethanol feedstock, and ethanol and its by-products took 5,547 million bushels of it in the 2025/26 marketing year, about 33.7% of all US corn use by a share computed from USDA’s table. The figure includes by-products, so it overstates the corn that becomes fuel itself. USDA’s Economic Research Service projected in July 2026 that 5.55 billion bushels would be the second-largest amount on record.

The two diesel fuels draw on a wider menu of fats and oils. Soybean oil supplied 11,016 million pounds in 2025, or 33.3% of the total, down from 13,320 million pounds in 2024.

Source: EIA, Feedstocks Consumed for Production of Biofuels, release of September 30, 2026, calendar years. Shares are computed from EIA’s totals.

Tallow passed yellow grease in 2025, with 9,025 million pounds against 5,166 million. EIA’s table reports yellow grease and has no separate used cooking oil line.

USDA counts soybean oil on a different calendar. Its October 2026 WASDE has 14,800 million pounds going to biofuel in the 2025/26 marketing year, about 49% of domestic soybean oil use, on a year that runs October to September. USDA also expects the oil to average 64.08 cents a pound over the marketing year ending in September 2026, against 47.59 cents the year before.

Which countries make the most biofuel?

The US made 16,494 million gallons of fuel ethanol in 2025, 52% of a world total of 32,000 million, by the Renewable Fuels Association’s count.

Source: Renewable Fuels Association, Annual World Fuel Ethanol Production. RFA’s US figure differs from EIA’s.

Brazil, whose ethanol comes mostly from sugar cane, made less in 2025 than in 2024, while India’s output rose 41% to 2,600 million gallons. The IEA expects the US to remain the largest biofuel producer and consumer through 2030.

The two US counts differ slightly. EIA has 16,514.8 million gallons for 2025, which is 21 million more than RFA’s count. Neither source says why.

Gallons made and gallons burned at home differ too. US consumption was 14,340.7 million gallons in 2025, about 2,174 million below production. RFA reports exports on pace to pass 2 billion gallons that year.

How much of each you can put in a tank

Ethanol made 10.5% of US gasoline in 2025, and EIA’s June 2026 outlook expects 10.7% in 2026. The blend wall is the point at which fuel infrastructure and all vehicle engines would need updating to take more than E10.

Source: EIA, Ethanol and the blend wall, AFDC, Biodiesel blends and AFDC, Renewable diesel.

E15 is approved for model year 2001 and newer light-duty vehicles, so if your car is that age or newer, you can likely use it. E85 goes further, at 51% to 83% ethanol, but it needs a flex-fuel vehicle. AFDC lists 4,784 E85 station locations, 1,997 for biodiesel and 1,237 for renewable diesel as of October 29, 2026.

EPA issued the first nationwide fuel waiver for the 2026 summer on March 25, 2026, which let E15 be sold from June 1 to September 15. The House passed year-round E15 legislation on May 13, 2026, by 218 votes. The bill went to the Senate.

The most common biodiesel blends are B5 and B20, and many diesel engine makers approve B20, so check your warranty before you fill a diesel pickup with it. At the other end, renewable diesel faces no such ceiling, because AFDC says it can fully replace petroleum diesel or be blended in any amount.

The federal program that created this market

EPA finalized the 2026 and 2027 Renewable Fuel Standard volumes on March 27, 2026, setting total renewable fuel at 26.81 billion Renewable Identification Numbers (RINs) for 2026 and 27.02 billion for 2027. Refiners and importers are the program’s obligated parties. They must retire enough RINs to meet an annual quota, and one RIN stands for one ethanol-equivalent gallon.

Source: EPA, Final Renewable Fuel Standards for 2026 and 2027. Reallocated volume is EPA’s 70 percent reallocation of small refinery exemptions granted for 2023 through 2025.

EPA set 2026 biomass-based diesel at 9.07 billion RINs and cellulosic biofuel at 1.36 billion, after partially waiving the 2025 cellulosic requirement for a production shortfall.

RINs aren’t gallons. A gallon of biodiesel generates 1.5 RINs and a gallon of ethanol generates 1.0. As of June 4, 2026, D4 RINs traded at $2.41 and D6 RINs at $2.37, both close to their all-time highs set in 2021.

California’s carbon math, and the credit that replaced it

California runs its own carbon pricing system on top of the federal one. Its Low Carbon Fuel Standard, or LCFS, tallies credits and deficits by the carbon intensity of each transportation fuel.

In the first quarter of 2026, CARB counted 6.93 million metric tons of credits against 9.77 million metric tons of deficits. The cumulative bank stood at 36.86 million metric tons, and regulated entities can still correct the quarterly figures.

A newer federal tax credit reshaped the incentive further. The Clean Fuel Production Credit, known as 45Z, replaced older, separate blender credits for biodiesel and sustainable aviation fuel with one production credit for fuel made starting January 1, 2025, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation. It pays 20 cents a gallon at the base rate, and the law limits qualifying feedstock to North America.

The 2025 reconciliation law, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, extended 45Z through 2029 and dropped indirect land-use-change emissions (ILUC) from the carbon scores, which lowers scores for corn ethanol and soy biodiesel by up to 20 to 25 grams of CO2-equivalent per megajoule, per the Clean Air Task Force.

Treasury proposed 45Z regulations on February 4, 2026, and IRS Notice 2026-53 on September 8, 2026 set the 2026 emissions rate table. The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates the credit will cost $25.7 billion through 2029, the Clean Air Task Force reports, against an original estimate near $2.9 billion.

Sustainable aviation fuel is next

Sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF, is jet fuel that can be made through HEFA, the same hydrotreating process renewable diesel uses. EIA estimated US capacity at about 30,000 barrels a day in May 2025, counting only HEFA SAF.

Even at that pace, EIA expected SAF to stay under 2% of the 1.7 million barrels a day of US jet fuel in 2025 and near 2% in 2026. Your seat on a US flight is still burning almost entirely petroleum jet fuel.

Capacity built unevenly. Phillips 66 finished its 10,000-barrel-a-day Rodeo project in California in the third quarter of 2024 and then temporarily halted production in the fourth, while Diamond Green Diesel completed a 15,000-barrel-a-day unit at Port Arthur, Texas, in the fourth quarter of 2024.

The 2025 law cut the SAF credit from $1.75 a gallon to the same $1 cap that applies to other biofuels. EIA’s October 2026 outlook puts other biofuels, the category that holds SAF, at 0.04 million barrels per day in both 2025 and 2026.

Is biofuel better for the climate than gasoline?

Estimates of corn ethanol’s emissions against gasoline run from clearly better to likely worse, depending on what each study counts.

Source: EPA, Overview of the Renewable Fuel Standard. USDA, corn ethanol greenhouse gas analysis. Argonne National Laboratory, GREET model results. Lark and colleagues, PNAS.

The USDA and Argonne rows model the average life cycle of a gallon of ethanol, and Argonne presented its figure at an industry conference. The PNAS paper estimates what the policy changed on the ground instead. It found the RFS raised corn prices by 30% and added 2.1 million hectares of cropland between 2008 and 2016, and the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center summarizes its conclusion that corn ethanol failed to meet the policy’s own greenhouse gas emissions targets.

EPA’s third triennial report to Congress found that the RFS had a modest positive effect on biofuel production and so a modest negative effect on the environment. Both diesel fuels face a tougher test than corn ethanol, because the RFS requires a 50% lifecycle cut from them.

Your grocery bill and your gas tank pull from the same soybean field

Soybean oil goes into both tanks and kitchens, and USDA’s October 2026 WASDE puts the biofuel share of domestic use near half. The American Soybean Association put the 2024 record for US biomass-based diesel production at 4.86 billion gallons. It calculates actual 2026 use at 5.86 billion gallons once backfill and exemptions are counted, with 5.66 billion gallons from US plants.

The 5.86 billion is use, not production, and the analysis predates EPA’s final rule.

Whether farmland pushed into fuel crops adds carbon is the same accounting debate that surrounds whether biomass is carbon neutral. The clean fuel credit described above leaves indirect land-use change out of its scoring.

At the grocery store, USDA’s Economic Research Service forecasts food-at-home prices up 2.3% in 2026 in its October 23, 2026 update, with prices for fats and oils below 2025’s. At the pump, the blend table above lists which vehicles can take each fuel, and your owner’s manual settles the rest.

Top biomass renewable statistics

• EIA puts biomass at about 5% of all US energy consumed in 2025.
• In the Rocky Mountain region, high tree mortality left a growth-to-removals ratio of 0.74 in the Forest Service’s 2017 report.
• Modern bioenergy supplied 45% of the world’s renewable energy supply in 2024.
• Bioenergy plants made up 3.0% of the world’s installed renewable power capacity in 2025, a share computed from IRENA’s totals.
• Ember counts biomass at 2.24% of world electricity and 1.02% of US electricity in 2025.
• FAO reports deforestation of 10.9 million hectares a year in 2015 to 2025, down from 17.6 million a year in 1990 to 2000.
• Managed loblolly pine stands in the US South can reach sawtimber size in 25 to 40 years.

Is biomass renewable?

Biomass is renewable when new growth replaces what’s burned, which matches the IPCC’s definition of renewable energy as energy replenished by natural processes at least as fast as it’s used.

EIA describes biomass as renewable organic material that comes from plants and animals. The IPCC’s AR6 energy chapter lists bioenergy among renewable energy with wind, solar, hydroelectric, geothermal, tidal and ocean power, the other types of renewable energy.

Ember counts bioenergy as renewable because forest and energy crops can be regrown and replenished, which isn’t true of burning fossil fuels. The plant and animal materials that count as biomass are covered in how biomass energy is used.

Is renewable the same as carbon neutral?

No. The IPCC defines carbon neutrality as a condition in which anthropogenic CO2 emissions are balanced by anthropogenic CO2 removals, which is a different test from whether a fuel replenishes.

EIA calls biomass a carbon-neutral energy source because its source plants take in nearly as much CO2 as burning releases. IPCC inventory rules report CO2 from biomass fuels in the land-use sector and leave it out of energy totals, and Ember adds that the lifecycle carbon intensity the IPCC reports for bioenergy is higher than for other renewables.

Whether regrowth offsets the carbon released by burning is the subject of our page on whether biomass counts as carbon neutral.

Who counts biomass as renewable?

EIA, the IPCC’s energy chapter, US law, North Carolina, the EU and Ember all count biomass as renewable, and the legal definitions add conditions about land, forests and lifecycle emissions.

Source: EIA, Renewable energy explained, IPCC AR6 WG3 glossary, IPCC AR6 WG3 chapter 6, EPA, Renewable Fuel Standard overview, 40 CFR 80.2, 42 USC 15852, North Carolina G.S. 62-133.8, European Commission, Biomass and Ember, Global Electricity Review 2026.

The US Renewable Fuel Standard counts planted crops and crop residue only from agricultural land cleared or cultivated before December 19, 2007, and planted trees only from non-federal tree plantations. It also requires lifecycle greenhouse gas cuts of 60% for cellulosic biofuel and 50% for advanced biofuel. Corn starch ethanol needs a cut of 20%.

Electricity works differently. EIA says no federal renewable portfolio standard exists, though a federal Renewable Fuel Standard oversees transportation fuels such as ethanol and other biofuels. Federal law on government electricity purchases defines renewable energy to include electric energy produced from biomass.

Your state may decide which biomass counts. EIA says many states specify the types of renewable energy and technologies that qualify, and North Carolina’s statute lists wood waste and energy crops as renewable energy resources.

The EU’s directive puts primary and old-growth forests, peatland and other no-go areas off limits for biomass that counts toward its renewable targets or receives subsidies.

How long does biomass take to regrow?

Energy grasses like miscanthus are harvested every year, and northern hardwood stands run on rotations of 50 to 120 years or more.

Source: Sanford et al., Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment, 2016, Forest Research (UK), Energy crops: Grasses, University of Arkansas Extension, loblolly pine and Minnesota DNR, northern hardwoods guidelines. The coppice figure is a UK harvest cycle and the pine and hardwood figures are US rotations.

Corn stover is the residue of an annual crop, while an unmanaged loblolly pine stand can take up to 50 years to reach sawtimber size, against 25 to 40 years under management.

Are US forests growing faster than they’re harvested?

The balance varies by region. In the North, net growth was 2.4 times removals, against 1.8 times in the South, while in the Rocky Mountains removals outran growth.

Source: USDA Forest Service Indicator 2.13 and Forest Resources of the United States 2017. Ratios describe inventories through 2016, and removals cover all harvest, whatever the wood is used for. The Pacific Coast value is the Forest Service’s “twice,” and the national ratio is computed from 25 and 13 billion cubic feet.

If the wood for a plant near you comes from the North or the South, the Forest Service count says growth in those regions outran removals from all uses, which tests the region and says nothing about that one plant.

In the Rocky Mountains the low ratio traces to tree mortality. Softwood mortality there doubled since 2006, from 1.2 to 2.4 billion cubic feet a year, and the Forest Service says removals in the region are among the lowest in the country.

How much of US renewable energy is biomass?

Biomass supplied 54.9% of US renewable energy in 2025, down from 81.9% in 1950, and the yearly table shows the share falling since 2010 as all renewables together grew faster than biomass.

Source: EIA, Monthly Energy Review Table 1.3, annual values in quadrillion Btu. Shares are computed from EIA’s unrounded values, and 2025 is preliminary.

Biomass use peaked at 5.101 quads in 2024 and fell to 4.853 in 2025, on EIA’s preliminary count, while all renewables kept growing.

How much renewable energy is biomass worldwide?

Modern bioenergy supplied 45% of the world’s renewable energy supply in 2024. At your wall outlet it is a sliver, 1.02% of US electricity in 2025. The gap comes from what each yardstick counts, and from where.

Source: EIA, Monthly Energy Review Table 1.3, IEA Bioenergy, Role of Bioenergy up to 2050, European Commission, Biomass, IRENA, Renewable Energy Statistics 2026 and Ember via Our World in Data. The IEA total of 64% adds its 45% and 19% shares, the EIA and IRENA shares are computed, and the EU figure is for 2021.

Capacity counts power plant size in megawatts, so it can’t be compared with energy supply in quads or electricity in kilowatt-hours. IRENA counts US bioenergy capacity falling from 12,903 MW in 2016 to 10,314 MW in 2025, so only compare rows that share a yardstick.

When does biomass stop being renewable?

Biomass stops being renewable when harvest outruns regrowth, and a 2015 study in Nature Climate Change estimated that 27% to 34% of the pan-tropics’ 2009 woodfuel harvest was unsustainable. The study notes that over half of all wood harvested worldwide is used as fuel, supplying about 9% of global primary energy.

FAO’s 2025 assessment puts net forest loss at 4.12 million hectares a year in 2015 to 2025, down from 10.7 million hectares a year in the 1990s. That is a net figure for all forest change, and it doesn’t single out wood burned for energy.

Crop residue has its own limit. USDA scientists say stover harvest has to avoid worsening soil erosion or degrading soil organic carbon, and at the roughly one third of study sites where they could estimate it, the minimum residue return rate was 3.9 megagrams of stover per hectare a year.

The IPCC’s AR6 energy chapter says growing dedicated bioenergy crops raises a broad set of sustainability concerns, which leaves the long-term role of bioenergy in low-carbon energy systems uncertain.

What wood does Drax source?

Drax Group sourced 9.74 million tonnes of wood fibre in 2025, and sawmill and other wood industry residues were 53.4% of it.

Source: Drax Group, ESG Performance Report 2025, group-wide fibre sourced. Shares are computed from those tonnes.

Thinnings and low-grade roundwood together were 40.6% of the fibre, a share computed from the same table.

In February 2025 the UK government agreed to cut Drax’s subsidies by 50% from 2027 to 2031, Power Technology reported, citing Reuters. Drax also committed to source all of its woody biomass from “sustainable origins.”

Where these numbers come from

Each share in the US history, yardstick and Drax tables is one sourced total divided by another, and the table’s source line says so. The 2025 US figures are EIA’s preliminary count, and the other figures cover different years, so read each against the year beside it.

What to ask before you accept that biomass is renewable

The European Commission is preparing its post-2030 renewable energy framework, with proposals scheduled by the end of 2026.

When someone tells you a biomass project is renewable, ask what the fuel is and which rule counts it. With those two answers you can tell whether the claim rests on a residue or on standing trees, and which clock in the regrowth table above applies.

Top hydropower statistics

• Hydro made 22.7% of US utility-scale renewable generation in 2025, worked out from EIA’s final figures.
• IHA counted 1,469 GW of hydropower worldwide at the end of 2025, with pumped storage above 200 GW.
• Hydro plants across the US ran at a 35.3% capacity factor in 2025, well below nuclear’s 91.0%.
• IRENA found that hydropower’s global weighted-average cost of electricity rose 9% to USD 62 per megawatt-hour in 2025.
• Paraguay made 99.47% of its electricity from hydro in 2025, and Ethiopia made 96.46%.
• Upgrades to existing plants drove most of the 2.1 GW that US conventional hydropower capacity grew between 2010 and 2022.
• Operators added 18.4 GW of renewable hydropower worldwide in 2025, and 96% of it was in China.
• Grand Coulee Dam in Washington has more than 6,809 MW of generating capacity, the largest hydropower complex in the US.

How does hydropower work and what types of plant are there?

A hydroelectric plant makes electricity when water runs down a pipe called a penstock and pushes against turbine blades, and the spinning turbine drives a generator.

Picture a fire hose aimed at a pinwheel. The more water flows and the higher it falls, a drop called the head, the more electricity a plant can make.

The Department of Energy sorts hydropower plants into three types, and the most common is the impoundment plant, which uses a dam to store river water in a reservoir. A diversion plant, also called run-of-river, channels part of a river through a canal or penstock and may not need a dam at all. The third type, pumped storage, uses two reservoirs at different heights and makes power as water moves down through a turbine.

DOE counts more than 90,000 dams in the US, and less than 3% of them produce power, so odds are the dam you drive past isn’t making electricity.

How much of US electricity comes from hydropower?

US conventional hydropower made 241.3 TWh of electricity in 2025, about 5.5% of utility-scale generation, in EIA’s final figures. EIA’s hydropower explainer shows 5.6% for 2025 on preliminary data, and the final figures replace it here.

Source: EIA Monthly Energy Review, Table 7.2a for 2001 to 2024, and EIA’s final Electric Power Annual for 2025, Table 3.1.A and Table 3.1.B. Wind and solar are utility-scale, and solar includes thermal. Each hydro share is computed from the total.

Hydro’s output in 2025 was 24.4% below its 2011 high of 319.4 TWh, the top year in the table, and the line zigzags from year to year.

Wind passed hydro in 2019, and solar’s 300.3 TWh in 2025 topped hydro’s 241.3 TWh. That puts hydro behind both wind and solar among the renewable sources that feed the US grid.

How much of the world’s electricity comes from hydropower?

World hydropower made 4,432.3 TWh in 2025, or 13.97% of global electricity, by Ember’s count. Our World in Data, which republishes Ember’s figures, shows hydro’s share of world electricity sliding from 16.3% in 2020 to 14.0% in 2025.

Ember’s review found output similar to 2024, with China up 45 TWh and India up 21 TWh after strong monsoon rainfall. Output fell 25 TWh in Brazil and 43 TWh in the EU, where Ember says alpine regions were hit by lower precipitation after good hydro conditions in 2024.

Three organizations publish world hydropower totals for 2025, and their numbers don’t match.

Source: Ember, Yearly electricity data, IRENA, renewable capacity report for 2026 and IHA, 2026 World Hydropower Outlook. IRENA’s capacity row excludes pure pumped storage, and IHA’s counts conventional hydropower. The n/a cells mark figures a source didn’t publish in the data used.

IHA’s generation figure runs a bit above Ember’s, and neither report explains the gap.

Which countries and US states rely on hydropower most?

China makes more hydropower than any other country, and its row in the table is larger than the next five combined.

Source: Ember, Yearly electricity data, 2025.

Hydro is a modest slice of China’s power mix even at that size. Norway, in the table, makes most of its electricity from hydro, and Paraguay and Ethiopia, which make less hydropower than any country in the table, make nearly all of theirs.

Inside the US, Washington held 27% of conventional hydropower capacity in 2025 and California held 13%, by EIA’s preliminary figures. The western states made 60% of US hydropower in the water year ending September 2023, and Washington and Oregon alone hold 37% of capacity.

If you live in a western state, you’re in the region that made most of the country’s hydroelectricity that year. Wherever you live, your state’s average cost of electricity shows what a kilowatt-hour costs in your state.

What are the biggest hydroelectric dams?

Three Gorges in China has 34 generating units and a capacity of 22.5 GW, and Baihetan, at 16 GW, was ranked the world’s second largest hydro project when it reached full operation in December 2022.

Source: Xinhua via China’s State Council (Three Gorges), Renewable Energy World (Baihetan), Itaipu Binacional (Itaipu) and the US Bureau of Reclamation (Grand Coulee). Three Gorges is converted from 22.5 million kilowatts.

Three Gorges made 111.795 billion kWh in 2020, a record for a single power station that passed the 103.098 billion kWh Itaipu made in 2016.

Itaipu’s own site lists its best year as 103.1 million MWh in 2016. In 2025 it made 72.9 million MWh, according to Paraguay’s La Nacion, which is 29% below that best year.

How much does drought cut hydropower output?

Western US hydropower fell 11% to 141.6 million MWh in the water year ending September 2023, and EIA says drought contributed to the historically low output.

In May 2023, a heat wave 30°F above normal rapidly melted the snowpack in the Columbia River Basin region. According to EIA, water flows in May were high, but much of the water that summer generation needed melted during the heat wave.

A plant’s capacity factor is the share of its maximum possible output that it delivers over a year, and hydro’s fell to 35.0% in 2023 from 43.0% in 2017.

Source: EIA, Electric Power Monthly Table 6.07.B, 2025 annual capacity factors for US utility-scale plants.

How does pumped storage compare with grid batteries?

At the end of 2025, US utility-scale batteries had 43.6 GW of operating power capacity, against 23,156 MW for pumped storage, or 23.2 GW.

Those are gigawatts of power, not gigawatt-hours of stored energy. EIA’s 2022 storage table lists pumped storage’s energy capacity as NA.

DOE says pumped storage acts like a giant battery. Water drops from an upper reservoir through a turbine to make power, and pumps send it back up to recharge. IHA calls pumped storage the world’s dominant form of large-scale energy storage, though POWER’s report doesn’t say whether that counts power or energy.

Source: EIA (US batteries), EIA (US pumped storage), IRENA (pure pumped storage) and IHA (all pumped storage), each at the end of 2025.

In 2019, US pumped storage returned 79% of the electricity put in, against 82% for utility-scale batteries. EIA reported in October 2019 that nearly half of the country’s pumped storage capacity still operating was built in the 1970s.

Operators added another 8.3 GW of batteries in the first half of 2026, the kind of grid-scale battery storage that competes with pumped storage on power.

How much does hydropower cost?

The average installed cost of hydropower fell 10% to USD 2,079 per kilowatt in 2025, IRENA found, yet the cost per megawatt-hour rose 9% as less favourable hydrology and higher financing costs offset the cheaper builds.

Onshore wind averaged USD 33 per megawatt-hour and solar PV USD 44 in 2025, against USD 62 for hydropower. Those figures are what it costs to make power, and what you pay at home depends on your state’s rates.

What are the pros and cons of hydropower?

Hydropower generators don’t directly emit air pollutants, EIA says. IHA cites an IPCC median of 24 grams of CO2-equivalent per kilowatt-hour over a plant’s life cycle.

Reservoirs emit methane. A 2016 global synthesis put emissions from reservoir water surfaces at 0.8 petagrams of CO2 equivalent a year, mostly methane, and it counts every reservoir, including ones used for flood control and irrigation. The exact amount of greenhouse gas reservoirs emit is uncertain and varies by site, according to EIA.

Fish pay a price too. Energy Department-sponsored turbine designs could cut fish deaths to below 2%, against 5% to 10% for the best existing turbines, EIA says.

American Rivers counted 100 dam removals in 30 states in 2025, and 2,350 documented removals since 1912, though the release doesn’t say how many of those dams made power. The largest dam removal in US history took out four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River in 2024, and salmon returned to spawn above the old dam sites in less than a month.

Where these numbers come from

The US table joins two EIA releases. The Monthly Energy Review covers 2001 to 2024, and the final Electric Power Annual covers 2025. We worked out each hydro share, the change against 2011 and the renewable share from EIA’s totals, and comparisons like China against the next five countries come from adding the rows in the table. The world and storage tables keep each source’s own figures even where they differ, and the unit conversions (kilowatts to gigawatts, gigawatt-hours to million megawatt-hours) are plain moves of the decimal point.

The 243 GW of pumped storage already under construction

In June 2026, POWER reported that IHA counts 243 GW of pumped storage under construction worldwide, on top of more than 200 GW already operating. China began building the Yarlung Zangbo River hydropower project in 2025, and IHA’s outlook estimates it could make about 300 TWh a year, roughly three times Three Gorges.

In the US, DOE counts 43 pumped storage plants and says the country could more than double that capacity.

If you live near a dam with no generators, adding turbines to dams like it makes up 95% of the new hydropower capacity proposed in the US, by DOE’s 2023 market report.

Top photo: David Brodbeck from Seattle, WA, USA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped.

Geothermal meets less than 1% of world energy demand and made about 0.35% of US electricity in 2025. Enhanced geothermal systems, or EGS, crack open hot rock that lacks natural water pathways, and Fervo Energy’s first Cape Station block in Utah began commercial operation on September 30, 2026.

Top geothermal energy statistics

• US geothermal plants generated 15,628 GWh of electricity in 2025, 1.4% more than in 2024.
• Installed geothermal capacity worldwide reached 17,173 MW at the end of 2025, up 223 MW in the year.
• EIA counted 2,683.9 MW of net summer geothermal capacity in the US in July 2026.
• IRENA puts geothermal at $89 per megawatt-hour in 2025, against $44 for solar PV.
• Compared with fossil-fuel plants, geothermal plants emit about 99% less carbon dioxide.
• The IEA sees potential for up to 800 GW of geothermal capacity worldwide, about 15% of global electricity demand growth to 2050.
• Cape Station’s Phase I is about 100 MW in three 33 MW GeoBlocks, and the first reached First Power on September 24, 2026.

What is geothermal energy, and is it renewable?

EIA describes geothermal energy as heat found inside the earth and counts it as renewable because the earth constantly produces that heat. The heat comes from the slow breakdown of radioactive particles in the earth’s core.

Most major resources sit near the edges of tectonic plates, where most volcanoes are.

Geothermal also heats buildings directly. Iceland’s government says about 85% of houses there are heated with it. The earth 10 feet below your own yard stays between 50°F and 60°F, the steady temperature a geothermal heat pump draws on.

For how geothermal fits beside wind and solar, see how the renewable energy sources compare.

Three ways to turn underground heat into power

Plants fall into three designs, and the state and temperature of the underground fluid decide which one a site uses.

Dry steam plants are the simplest. The reservoir already produces steam, so the steam runs straight to the turbine, the way a kettle’s whistle can spin a fan held over the spout. DOE says the design was first used in Italy in 1904 and still runs at The Geysers in northern California, the world’s largest single source of geothermal power.

Flash steam plants, which DOE calls a common type, tap fluid hotter than 182°C (360°F). As that pressurized water reaches a low-pressure tank at the surface, part of it flashes into steam. The steam spins the turbine, and any liquid left can be flashed again in a second tank to extract more energy.

Binary plants work where the resource isn’t scalding hot. The geothermal fluid never touches the turbine. It passes through a heat exchanger and boils a second fluid with a much lower boiling point, which drives the turbine on its own loop.

A geothermal heat pump is a different machine. It moves heat between one building and the ground instead of generating electricity, and what a home ground-source system costs is a separate question.

How much of the US and world electricity comes from geothermal?

US geothermal output has grown about 14% since 2001, from 13.7 billion kWh to 15.6 billion kWh in 2025.

Source: EIA, Monthly Energy Review Table 7.2a for 2001 to 2024, all sectors, and EIA, Electric Power Annual 2025, Table 1.1 for 2025, utility-scale plants only.

Worldwide, 25 countries generated about 92 billion kWh from geothermal in 2022, and Kenya got the largest share of its own electricity that way, about 43%. That’s roughly 0.3% of the 28,894 TWh the world generated that year.

The IEA’s figure covers all energy demand, and electricity is one slice of that, so the two shares don’t conflict.

Where the world’s geothermal capacity actually sits

Ten countries hold more than 93% of the roughly 17,173 MW of geothermal capacity installed worldwide at the end of 2025, and the United States leads with 3,953 MW.

Source: ThinkGeoEnergy, Global top 10 geothermal power countries at year-end 2025. Shares are our arithmetic on ThinkGeoEnergy’s world total.

ThinkGeoEnergy reports installed nameplate capacity but counts only plants that are operating, so its US total runs above EIA’s 2,683.9 MW of net summer capacity for July 2026, the output a plant can supply at summer peak after its own power use.

These tables mix sources that count differently. The world share above divides an EIA numerator by an Ember denominator for the same year, and EIA’s US figures cover utility-scale plants.

Which US states have the most geothermal power?

California made 68.6% of US geothermal electricity in 2025, but Nevada leans on it harder, with geothermal at 8.6% of its own generation against California’s 5.2%.

Source: EIA, Use of geothermal energy for 2025 generation shares and EIA, Electric Power Monthly Table 6.2.B for capacity. Seven states had geothermal plants.

Utah ranks third in the nation for installed geothermal capacity. If you live in California, your power provider may be one of the California utilities holding 500 MW of Cape Station’s first two phases, such as Southern California Edison, Clean Power Alliance or Desert Community Energy.

How much does geothermal power cost?

IRENA put geothermal’s global weighted-average cost at $89 per megawatt-hour in 2025, the second-highest of the seven technologies in the table, behind only concentrating solar.

Source: IRENA, Renewable power generation costs in 2025. LCOE is the levelized cost of electricity.

Geothermal’s 2024 average was $60 per megawatt-hour, down 16% from 2023, according to IRENA’s earlier report, so the rise to $89 in 2025 spans two IRENA reports.

Lazard’s 2026 analysis puts new US geothermal at $67 to $111 per megawatt-hour without subsidies. That range rests on an illustrative capital cost of $7,000 per kW drawn from publicly disclosed estimates.

DOE’s Enhanced Geothermal Shot sets a target of $45 per megawatt-hour by 2035, a 90% cut in EGS costs. To compare these figures with what you pay at home, see what electricity costs in your state.

Pros and cons of geothermal energy

Geothermal plants can run around the clock, but the US fleet’s 65.9% capacity factor in 2025 sits well below the 91.1% for nuclear.

Source: EIA, Electric Power Annual 2025, Table 4.8.B.

The US geothermal figure was 76.0% in 2018, while the IEA put the global geothermal utilization rate at over 75% in 2023. The two cover different fleets and years. For how the measure works, see what capacity factor means.

EIA says geothermal plants emit about 99% less carbon dioxide than fossil-fuel plants, and NREL’s 2017 systematic review of life-cycle emissions by Eberle and colleagues put the median at 32.0 grams of CO2eq per kWh for EGS binary plants, against 47.0 for high-temperature flash plants.

The limits are where the resource sits, what the plants cost to build and, for EGS, the ground shaking that drilling can set off.

What makes enhanced geothermal different

Every power plant above depends on a natural hydrothermal reservoir, and EIA describes hydrothermal resources as underground areas that hold both water and heat. EGS targets hot rock that has the temperature but not the permeability.

Engineers drill into that rock and pump water down at pressure high enough to open cracks in the stone, the way a hydraulic jack uses fluid pressure to lift a car. At Utah FORGE, stimulating the wells in April 2024 created the fracture network that forms the reservoir. Crews then pump cool water down an injection well and draw it back up through a production well.

If EGS works at scale, geothermal can reach beyond the plate edges where natural reservoirs cluster. DOE’s March 2024 Liftoff report sees US geothermal reaching 90 GW or more by 2050, a twentyfold increase. The IEA sees potential for up to 800 GW worldwide and says costs for newer geothermal technologies could fall 80% by 2035, to around $50 per megawatt-hour.

The Utah projects testing whether EGS scales

Fervo Energy says Cape Station in Beaver County, Utah is the first greenfield EGS development in the world to reach contractual commercial operation, and that its first GeoBlock produced 33 MW of net power after a 23-month build and commissioning.

A smaller Nevada pilot, Project Red, came before it. A 30-day well test there supported 3.5 MW of electricity from a horizontal well pair with 3,250-foot laterals, and Project Red came online in 2023 and has supplied the local grid since. A 2024 Cape Station test reached a maximum flow of 107 kg/s at high temperature, potentially enabling over 10 MW, according to Utility Dive.

Fervo says about 900 MW of Cape Station is fully contracted. Google signed a 396 MW agreement on September 1, 2026 for a Utah data center, following a 320 MW agreement with Southern California Edison in 2024.

Source: Canary Media, ThinkGeoEnergy on the Google agreement, Fervo Energy on the Shell agreement, ThinkGeoEnergy on the Fervo IPO and Fervo Energy on commercial operation. The dates for later phases are Fervo’s expectations.

Utah FORGE is the Department of Energy’s EGS research site near Milford. It ran a 30-day circulation test in August 2024 that produced temperatures around 370°F and began an extended circulation test in August 2026, a stage DOE says only a handful of EGS projects worldwide have reached. DOE extended the project through 2028 with an additional $80 million.

Drilling costs, earthquakes and permits still slow EGS down

Well costs have fallen. A 2025 Stanford Geothermal Workshop study found vertical wells cost 12% to 24% less than a 2017 baseline. Horizontal wells cost 18% to 26% less. The study credits PDC drill bits and oil and gas techniques such as multiwell pad drilling.

That doesn’t make EGS cheap. CleanTechnica’s Michael Barnard wrote in November 2025 that EGS projects often sit at $10,000 to $15,000 per kW, and that a project may need four and a half to seven years from first drilling to commercial operation. Fervo’s build time, quoted above, covers the power facility and not the drilling before it, so it doesn’t settle Barnard’s estimate. Barnard’s per-kilowatt figure is an analyst’s estimate, and Lazard’s illustrative figure for new geothermal in the cost section is lower.

Induced seismicity is the other hard limit, and it has already ended a project. The Basel, Switzerland EGS project started hydraulic stimulation in December 2006, and a local-magnitude 3.4 quake hit five hours after the stimulation well was shut in. The quakes caused no injuries but led to $9 million of damage, and the project was shut down permanently in December 2009.

Fervo ran Project Red under an induced seismicity mitigation protocol built on DOE best practices and says it finished without incident.

On US federal land, permitting runs through the Bureau of Land Management, which has authority to manage geothermal leasing on approximately 245 million acres of public land, plus 104 million acres of Forest Service land. In April 2024 it adopted two categorical exclusions for geothermal exploration, though developing a resource still requires further environmental analysis.

Geothermal Rising, a trade group, says the 2025 tax law preserves full 48E and 45Y credits for geothermal projects that begin construction by 2033, phasing down through 2036.

The Cape Station blocks still to come online

Two more 33 MW GeoBlocks are due at Cape Station by January 1, 2027, and a further 400 MW is under construction for 2028. Google’s agreement covers a Utah data center, and how AI load is straining aging wires explains the grid pressure behind deals like it.

The extended circulation test at Utah FORGE pumps cool water for months, and DOE says it should answer the pressing questions about thermal decline and water loss. FORGE publishes its data through DOE’s Geothermal Data Repository, so you can check the results yourself when the test ends.

Top biomass statistics

• Biomass made up about 55% of the renewable energy the US consumed in 2025, a share computed from EIA’s Monthly Energy Review.
• US biomass use went from 5,101 trillion Btu in 2024 to 4,853 trillion Btu in 2025, a 4.9% drop computed from EIA’s preliminary table.
• Industry used 48% of the biomass energy the US consumed in 2025, more than any other sector.
• Bioenergy generated 710 TWh of electricity worldwide in 2025, about 2.2% of the total, in Ember’s data.
• IRENA counted 155 GW of bioenergy capacity worldwide in 2025, up from 104 GW in 2016.
• The UK got 14.1% of its electricity from bioenergy in 2025, the highest share among the eight countries tabled below.
• The US had 74 operating pellet manufacturers in July 2026, with room to make 13.2 million tons a year.
• The IPCC’s 2014 lifecycle review put dedicated biomass power at a median of 230 grams of CO2-equivalent per kilowatt-hour, against 820 for coal.
• Bioenergy projects commissioned in 2025 delivered power at a global average of $86 per megawatt-hour, compared with $44 for solar PV.

What is biomass?

Biomass is organic material from plants and animals that people burn directly or convert into fuel. DOE’s list of biomass feedstocks includes dedicated energy crops, crop residues, forestry residues, algae, sawmill waste, municipal waste and wet waste.

EIA counts biomass among the major types of renewable energy, alongside hydropower, geothermal, wind and solar, the other renewable energy sources on its list. The debate over whether biomass is carbon neutral is separate from whether biomass counts as renewable, and the pros and cons section has the short version.

What are examples of biomass?

Wood and wood waste, such as bark, sawdust, wood chips, wood scrap and paper mill residues, supplied about 2% of US energy in 2025.

Crops are the liquid-fuel example. US transportation used 1,145 trillion Btu of fuel ethanol in 2025, and the guide to ethanol and other biofuels covers that side in full.

Household and industrial trash counts too. For every 100 pounds of US municipal solid waste, about 85 pounds can be burned as fuel.

Manure and sewage, along with landfill gas, make biogas, a fuel that is 45% to 65% methane depending on what it came from.

How does biomass work?

Direct combustion is the most common method of turning biomass into useful energy, and gasification heats the material with controlled amounts of oxygen or steam to make a fuel gas called syngas.

In a waste-to-energy plant, a giant claw on a crane dumps trash into a combustion chamber, and the heat turns water into steam that drives a turbine generator. A dairy farm takes a different route. Anaerobic digesters hold manure while bacteria break it down into biogas, which the farm can burn to heat water and run generators. EPA’s AgSTAR program counted 394 operating livestock digesters in 2023, up from 25 in 2000.

Landfills give off biogas too. EPA counted 542 landfill-gas energy projects running as of September 2024 and rates 444 more landfills as good candidates. It also notes that methane is at least 28 times as potent as CO2 over 100 years.

How much US energy comes from biomass?

US biomass use grew from 2,622 trillion Btu in 2001 to 4,853 trillion Btu in 2025, and biofuels supplied all of that increase. The table gives the yearly totals by type.

Source: EIA, Monthly Energy Review Table 10.1, September 2026. The 2025 row is preliminary and EIA may revise it.

Biofuels did the growing, while wood and waste barely moved.

Who uses biomass?

Industry used the most biomass energy in 2025 at 2,317.5 trillion Btu, and the fuels that go into vehicles came next at 1,682.8 trillion Btu.

Source: EIA, Monthly Energy Review Table 10.2a, Table 10.2b and Table 10.2c, September 2026, preliminary 2025 data. Shares are each sector divided by the 4,853.1 trillion Btu total, rounded to one decimal.

Wood-product makers and paper mills lead the wood side. Industry accounted for 68% of US wood energy in 2025, mostly wood-product and paper makers that burn mill waste for steam and electricity.

If you heat with firewood or pellets, you’re the residential row in that table, and the smoke findings in the pros and cons section apply to you.

Power plants take a small slice. Biomass made about 1% of US utility-scale electricity in 2025, and EIA lists biomass-fired units among generators often run as base-load resources.

How much of the world’s energy comes from biomass?

Modern bioenergy was 45% of world renewable energy supply in 2024, and traditional biomass added another 19%, according to an IEA Bioenergy presentation from June 2026.

The WHO says around 2.1 billion people still cook over open fires or on inefficient stoves that burn wood, animal dung, crop waste, coal or kerosene, and it estimates household air pollution caused 2.9 million deaths in 2021.

On the grid, China generated more bioenergy electricity than any other country in 2025, at 213 TWh.

Source: Our World in Data, electricity production by source and share of electricity from bioenergy, built from Ember and Energy Institute data and updated June 30, 2026. Data are for 2025.

On capacity, IRENA counts 33 GW of bioenergy in China and 10 GW in the US in 2025.

How big are biomass power plants?

Drax Power Station in North Yorkshire, England, has 2.6 GW of active dispatchable generation, several times the capacity of any other plant in the table.

Source: Drax Group, 2025 full-year results, Lynemouth Power, Power Technology and EIA Today in Energy. Each figure is the operator’s or reporter’s own, the Power Technology article is undated, and the list isn’t a worldwide ranking.

Drax generated 15.0 TWh in 2025, about 6% of UK power. That is a different measure from the UK share in the country table, which covers all UK bioenergy.

The UK government said Drax’s subsidies will be halved after April 2027 and run until 2031. The deal also caps its output at 27% of capacity, and the UK regulator Ofgem fined Drax £25 million in 2024 for misreporting how it sourced its wood.

How many wood pellets does the US export?

The US exported about 9.4 million tons of wood pellets in 2025, according to EIA. In the first seven months of 2026 exports reached 5.5 million tons, a total computed from EIA’s monthly figures.

Those pellet plants employed the equivalent of 2,516 full-time workers in July 2026, according to EIA.

The UK was the main destination in 2014, when almost three-quarters of US pellet exports went there, mainly to make electricity.

What are the pros and cons of biomass?

Part of the fuel is trash. Waste-to-energy plants cut the volume of trash by about 87%, and the fuel supply is large on paper. DOE and Oak Ridge National Laboratory say the US could sustainably produce at least 1 billion dry tons of nonfood biomass a year by 2040, against about 400 million tons used when the 2023 report was written.

On cost, IRENA’s table puts bioenergy above solar and wind and below geothermal and concentrated solar.

Source: IRENA, Renewable Power Generation Costs in 2025, global weighted-average levelized cost of electricity for projects commissioned in 2025.

Carbon is the contested part. EIA says biomass is carbon neutral because source plants capture almost as much CO2 as biomass releases when burned. The IPCC’s 2014 lifecycle table gives a range that depends on the kind of biomass plant.

Source: IPCC, Fifth Assessment Report, Working Group III, Annex III, Table A.III.2, lifecycle emissions including the albedo effect, 2014.

Dedicated biomass sits well below fossil fuels such as coal and gas in that table, while co-firing biomass with coal lands close to coal itself.

Smoke is the local cost. A Science Advances study found residential wood burning accounts for 21.9% of average winter exposure to fine particles (PM2.5) across the US and leads to about 8,600 premature deaths a year, with most of those affected living in cities. Only 2% of US homes rely on wood as their main heat, so even if you never light a fire, wood smoke is part of the winter air you breathe.

Where these numbers come from

Several figures here are computed from EIA tables, namely the renewable share, the 2025 drop, the sector shares and the pellet total. EIA’s 2025 numbers are preliminary. Ember and IRENA publish different bioenergy electricity totals for the same years, so this page takes electricity from Ember through Our World in Data and capacity from IRENA.

Manure digesters under construction and cleaner wood stoves

EPA’s AgSTAR program counted 73 more livestock digesters under construction or being upgraded to make renewable natural gas, in a table that runs through 2024.

If you burn wood at home, EIA says modern wood-burning stoves, pellet stoves and fireplace inserts can reduce particulates.

Top electric car statistics

• The IEA counts around 1.5 million electric car sales in the US in 2025, slightly lower than in 2024.
• The Alliance for Automotive Innovation reports that EVs were 2.5% of all light-duty vehicles in operation in the US at the end of 2025.
• Cox Automotive estimates that battery electric cars were about 6.4% of new US vehicle sales in the third quarter of 2026, up from 5.8% in the second quarter.
• The average new EV sold for $55,879 in September 2026, according to Kelley Blue Book transaction data.
• Lithium-ion battery pack prices fell 8% to a record $108 per kWh in 2025, BloombergNEF found.
• 78,914 of the US’s public charging ports were DC fast chargers on October 15, 2026, according to the Department of Energy.
• AAA’s 2026 study found EV charging costs 66% to 70% lower than fuel costs for gas vehicles in the categories it studied.
• Pew Research Center found that 32% of US adults would seriously consider an EV as their next vehicle in March 2026, against 44% for a hybrid.
• EPA reports a record 27.2 miles per gallon for the average new vehicle in model year 2024.

What counts as an electric car

All-electric cars run on electricity only, using one or more motors powered by rechargeable battery packs. Plug-in hybrids pair a gasoline engine with a battery that charges from an outlet or charging station, and EPA reports them separately from battery-only cars. A conventional hybrid combines a gasoline engine with an electric motor, and the plug-in version adds a high-capacity battery.

In the numbers below, “plug-in” means both types, and “all-electric” or “battery electric” means a car with no gasoline engine. A plug-in hybrid can cost roughly $4 to $8 thousand more than a comparable non-plug-in hybrid, according to an undated Department of Energy estimate.

A motor turns stored electricity into motion without burning fuel, as it did in the earliest electric cars of the 1800s. EVs convert over 77% of the electricity from the grid into power at the wheels, while gasoline vehicles convert about 12% to 30% of the fuel’s energy. EVs also emit no tailpipe pollutants, although the power plant producing the electricity may emit them. Those emissions depend on the fuel behind the grid, which makes the share of renewable energy in your state’s electricity part of the answer.

Fuel cell and natural gas vehicles are outside this page. The hydrogen fuel cells and natural gas vehicles pages cover those.

How many electric cars are on US roads

The count of registered all-electric vehicles rose 26.3% during 2025, to 5,689,100. The counts are approximate and come from the National Laboratory of the Rockies, formerly NREL, which derives them from Experian vehicle data. They’re totals through the end of each year and aren’t annual sales.

California alone holds 1,843,100 of those vehicles, about a third of the US total, and Florida and Texas follow. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation counts 164 electric models for sale in the fourth quarter of 2025.

How many electric cars does the US sell each year

Summing Argonne National Laboratory’s monthly sales table gives 1,239,505 all-electric and 270,490 plug-in hybrid sales in 2025, and the table below shows the same count back to 2017.

Source: Argonne National Laboratory, Light Duty Electric Drive Vehicles Monthly Sales Updates, with annual sums and shares calculated from the monthly rows. Shares are of all new light-duty vehicle sales, and hybrids are conventional hybrids that don’t plug in.

The 2024 row is where hybrids pass plug-ins, and the plug-in share dips in the row after it. Argonne’s summary page says 2025 plug-in sales fell 4% from 2024. Summing the monthly rows gives a 3.3% drop, so the decline is between 3% and 4%.

Cox’s 7.8% share for 2025 counts battery electric cars only, while the IEA’s figure of around 10% adds plug-in hybrids, as the table above does, so the two differ by definition.

Cox Automotive estimates 725,888 battery electric sales from January through September 2026, 30.3% below the same months of 2025. It puts third-quarter 2026 sales at 262,649, the highest in a year, but 39.5% below the third quarter of 2025, when buyers rushed ahead of the federal credit’s end on September 30, 2025.

Cox estimates Tesla sold 589,160 battery electric cars in 2025, 46.2% of the total. Its share of battery electric sales was 52.9% in the first nine months of 2026. How policy and other countries’ markets shape electric vehicle sales around the world has its own page.

How much electric cars cost to buy

Kelley Blue Book data put the premium for an EV at about 11% over comparable gasoline and hybrid models in 2026, down from close to 18% on average in 2025. If you shop for a new EV, the average buyer paid $55,879 in September 2026, against $50,562 for the average new vehicle of any type. Both are transaction prices, meaning what buyers paid.

Lithium-ion pack prices fell 8% in 2025 to a record $108 per kWh, and packs for battery electric vehicles averaged $99, BloombergNEF reports. BloombergNEF’s figures are global averages and say nothing directly about US sticker prices.

Charging adds a running cost on top of the purchase price, and what it costs to charge an electric car at home depends on the model’s efficiency and your local electricity rate.

Which electric cars sell the most

The Tesla Model Y led US battery electric sales in 2025 with 357,528 vehicles in Cox Automotive’s estimates, and the table below ranks ten models by their sales that year.

Source: Cox Automotive and Kelley Blue Book estimates, Q4 2025 EV Sales Report for 2025 and Q3 2026 EV Sales Report for January to September 2026. Models are ranked by 2025 sales.

The 2026 column covers nine months, so read it for rank order and not against the 2025 totals. Electrek’s 2025 list prints 189,903 for the Model 3, which is Cox’s 2024 figure, so the table uses Cox’s own 2025 count.

How far electric cars go on a charge

The average EPA-rated range of a new all-electric model rose from 106 miles for model year 2012 to 302 miles for 2026, in a calculation from the EPA’s certification data.

Source: fueleconomy.gov vehicle data file, updated September 29, 2026, with average, median and longest range calculated across every all-electric configuration listed for each model year. Every configuration counts equally and the figures aren’t weighted by sales.

The average dipped for model year 2021 and has risen every year since. Recurrent, which analyzes real-world driving data, puts the average expected range of popular EVs at 325 miles for 2026 models, up from 293 for 2025. The two figures measure different things, since Recurrent covers popular models using real-world conditions while the EPA average counts every certified configuration.

The average 2026 EV uses 37.5 kWh per 100 miles, and the most efficient models use about 23.

How electric car charging works

The US had 82,756 public charging locations with 260,827 ports on October 15, 2026, according to the Department of Energy. Public ports come in three speeds, and Level 1 adds about 5 miles of range per hour. The table shows what the faster levels add.

Source: AFDC charging station basics for charging speeds and AFDC station counts for ports on October 15, 2026, with shares calculated from the counts.

AFDC says most EV drivers charge overnight at home with Level 1 or Level 2 equipment but gives no percentage, and that many owners can meet their daily driving needs with a Level 1 cord and an ordinary outlet. On the grid side, EPA says EV charging makes up less than 1% of California’s grid load, even during peak hours.

How long an electric car battery lasts

EPA, citing a Recurrent study, reports that battery replacements due to failure have averaged 2.5% outside major recalls and run below 0.5% for model year 2016 and later. Recurrent’s data show the average EV retains 97% of its range after three years and 95% after five.

Modeling by the National Laboratory of the Rockies suggests batteries may last 12 to 15 years in moderate climates. Extreme climates cut the modeled life to 8 to 12 years. AFDC also notes that complete data on EV battery failures isn’t available, so the lifetimes come from modeling.

Many manufacturers offer 8-year, 100,000-mile warranties on EV batteries, AFDC says. Kia covers its EV batteries for 10 years or 100,000 miles. Your own coverage depends on the maker, so check the terms for the car you’re considering.

Studies cited by AFDC find that a battery could keep at least 70% of its initial capacity at the end of its life if it hasn’t failed or been damaged. That makes second-use jobs such as stationary grid and backup power technically feasible, and it’s the work of battery storage systems. AFDC adds that the economics of second-life batteries are still evolving.

Costs and trade-offs of owning an electric car

AAA’s 2026 study found EV charging costs about 66% to 70% lower than fuel costs for gas vehicles in the categories it studied, though higher depreciation and finance costs often outweighed the savings. The study used national averages of $4.15 a gallon for gas and 18 cents per kWh for electricity.

AAA’s ownership-cost figures at 15,000 miles a year put the medium electric SUV at $0.955 a mile against $0.962 for gas, the only one of four classes where the electric version costs less.

Source: AAA, Your Driving Costs 2026, as published by Kelley Blue Book, at 15,000 miles a year. Totals count more than fuel, including depreciation and finance costs.

If you drive 15,000 miles a year in a medium sedan, those figures put the electric version about $3,090 a year above the gas one.

Smaller line items pull in opposite directions. AAA’s 2025 edition put EV maintenance at 10.07 cents a mile against 11.04 for the average vehicle. Full-coverage insurance for an EV averaged $1,995 a year against $1,694 for the average vehicle.

J.D. Power’s 2026 ownership study found that nearly all new battery EV owners, 96%, would consider another battery EV for their next vehicle. The study surveyed EV owners, so it doesn’t compare problem rates with gas cars. Shopper interest has fallen from 42% of US adults in 2022 to 32% in March 2026, the share who would seriously consider an EV.

Public charging is the gap to check before you buy

As quoted by the American Public Power Association, J.D. Power’s Brent Gruber says that public charging is the top reason new-vehicle shoppers reject EVs.

The company’s 2026 study found failed public charging visits fell to a record low of 12%, down from 14% a year earlier. Satisfaction with DC fast chargers rose 12 points to 666 out of 1,000. Satisfaction with public Level 2 chargers fell 12 points.

Before you buy, write down your daily miles and compare them with the 40 miles that 8 hours on a 120-volt outlet adds in AFDC’s example. If a home outlet covers the gap, public charging is a backup. If it doesn’t, count the DC fast ports along your usual routes before you sign anything.

Top photo: Gregory Varnum, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped.

Burn sawdust that would otherwise rot in a landfill, and the carbon neutral label holds up close to true. Burn whole trees cut specifically for pellets, and the payback can take decades, or it never happens at all.

The carbon debt problem

Picture a woodstove. Cut a log, and the carbon locked inside it while it grew goes up the chimney in the few minutes it takes to burn. A sapling planted in the same clearing needs decades to pull that same carbon back out of the air. Producers call the process carbon neutral because the harvested forest is expected to regrow and reabsorb what burned.

Chatham House found that assumption holds in many scenarios, but in some, harvesting permanently cuts the forest’s capacity to absorb carbon, making the payback period infinite. The gap between the two outcomes is why “carbon neutral” needs a feedstock and a timeframe attached before it means anything.

Source: Chatham House, 2017

The same Chatham House analysis cites a UK government-commissioned model, known as BEaC, which ran 29 biomass scenarios and found 11 with higher net emissions than natural gas, five of those worse than coal. If your power supplier burns wood pellets to meet a renewable target, that plant could be one of the 11 higher-emitting scenarios in the government’s own BEaC model. Climate targets have deadlines, and a biomass plant that reaches carbon parity decades from now doesn’t help meet a target due in the 2030s.

The feedstock decides almost everything

Lumping a sawdust briquette in with a centuries-old log flattens a real distinction, and the industry’s defenders have a point about that much. Low-impact feedstock covers sawmill residues and forest slash that would decompose or get burned as waste regardless.

Using that material for energy displaces a fossil fuel. The carbon in it was heading back into the atmosphere either way, whether it decomposed on the forest floor or went up a stack. Black liquor, a byproduct of wood pulping, made up 28% of US biomass electricity generation as of 2018, and that’s rarely treated as a forestry problem. If you live in a mill town, the boiler burning that black liquor runs on the pulping process’s own waste, no new logging required.

High-impact feedstock is roundwood harvested specifically for a pellet mill, and whole trees from natural or old growth stands. Hardwoods regrow slower than softwood plantations, which stretches the payback further, and Chatham House found that mature trees pull down more carbon per year than young ones. Cutting an established forest removes an active carbon sink at the same time it releases decades of stored carbon, including soil carbon lost to the disturbance of logging.

Why the accounting rules make this confusing

Greenhouse gas accounting treats biomass differently from every other fuel. Under IPCC guidance, the carbon from burning biomass isn’t counted in the energy sector of a national inventory. National inventories assume that carbon gets captured instead in the land use sector, through the change in forest carbon stock where the tree was cut. The Greenhouse Gas Management Institute explains the logic as avoiding double counting, since biogenic emissions are assumed to reverse a recent removal from photosynthesis.

That logic works inside one country’s border. Across borders, the accounting breaks down. If a “renewable” line on your UK energy bill includes wood pellets, it can rest on a plant burning Canadian or American wood that reports zero CO2 at the stack, while the harvest is supposed to show up instead in the exporting country’s land use accounts. Whether it does, consistently, is at the center of the political fights over biomass in the past decade.

The EU and the UK tightened the rules

Regulators eventually noticed the gap. The EU’s revised Renewable Energy Directive, in force since 20 November 2023, excludes wood from primary and old growth forests, and from highly biodiverse or high-carbon-stock land such as peatland, from counting toward renewable targets or subsidies. It also applies what the directive calls a cascading use principle, meaning wood is meant to go to its highest-value use before it gets burned for fuel.

The UK went further with the deal it struck for Drax specifically. Under the government’s February 2025 decision covering the plant’s subsidy from 2027 through 2031, sustainable sourcing requirements rise from 70% to 100% of biomass. Supply chain emissions intensity has to fall from 55.6 to 36.6 grams of CO2 equivalent per megajoule over that same stretch.

Wood from primary or old growth forest is explicitly excluded from support payments under the same decision. The government expects Drax’s output to fall to about 27% of the time, down from roughly 67%, with clawback penalties for noncompliance. If you’re one of the millions of UK households whose energy bill funds this subsidy, the 100% sourcing requirement is what decides whether Drax keeps its subsidy after 2027.

Drax is the test case, and it isn’t simple

Drax, the former coal plant in North Yorkshire, is the UK’s largest renewable power station, running on four 645-megawatt biomass units, 2.58 gigawatts combined. Even though UK carbon accounting treats that combustion as carbon neutral, Drax’s stack emitted 13.3 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent in 2024, more than the next four largest UK emitters combined, after burning 7.6 million tonnes of imported wood pellets that year.

Drax has collected more than £8.72 billion in UK subsidies since 2012, Ember calculated in April 2026. The payments hit a record £999 million in 2025 alone, up 15% on 2024, and that added about £13 to a UK power bill that year, including yours if you pay one. “Nearly £1 billion for woody biomass burning is an astonishing high-water mark for public subsidies,” said Frankie Mayo, the report’s author, in Ember’s analysis. Drax dropped out of the S&P Global Clean Energy Index in October 2021 over doubts about that carbon neutral classification.

Ofgem fined Drax £25 million in 2024 for misreporting the forestry type and sawlog share of its Canadian wood shipments. The regulator called it weak data governance and stopped short of alleging deliberate misreporting.

More than 20 environmental groups wrote to Drax shareholders opposing a roughly $625 million plan to expand pellet supply, arguing the sourcing doesn’t support a carbon neutral claim.

Stand.earth documented Drax purchasing whole logs from old growth forest in British Columbia in 2024, and likely in 2025, despite the province’s forestry minister denying it. The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority investigated Drax’s wood-sourcing disclosures from August 2025 to June 2026, then closed the case with no action taken.

Drax also said in March 2026 that it would stop burning British Columbia biomass at its UK plant within a year, a move Stand.earth called a milestone. It will keep sourcing BC wood for pellets sold into Asian and European markets, so the change addresses one customer’s supply chain, not the logging practice behind it. Drax’s marketing got ahead of its sourcing, and UK and EU regulators closed the gaps only after journalists and campaigners forced the question open.

Where biomass makes sense

The whole-tree, long-payback cases aside, a narrower category holds up. Waste and residue streams are the clearest case. Agricultural residue, sawmill byproducts, food processing waste, and municipal organic waste would otherwise land in a dump and generate methane, a gas the EPA rates at least 28 times more potent than CO2 over 100 years. If a landfill near your town takes that same waste, burning it for heat instead keeps a methane source out of the air without touching a live forest.

Combined heat and power (CHP) plants improve the math further, using the same fuel for both electricity and usable heat. The EPA puts CHP efficiency above 80%, versus about 50% for separate heat and power.

Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, known as BECCS, pairs biomass burning with underground carbon capture and storage. Anyone who calls it settled is skipping past real problems. Capturing the carbon from burning biomass and storing it underground could, in theory, make a plant carbon negative, provided the biomass is low impact.

Drax’s own BECCS project at Selby paused its roughly £2 billion investment in March 2023 while waiting for a firm government subsidy commitment. The February 2025 decision on Drax’s future subsidy declined to include BECCS support, saying it “cannot form the primary basis” of near-term policy.

Ember estimated in a December 2025 analysis that a single Drax carbon removal project could cost up to £30 billion in subsidies, more than the UK’s entire carbon capture budget, calling the removals “far from guaranteed” given the timeline and unclear efficacy. Independent advisory bodies have recommended that carbon removal projects source their feedstock domestically, but Drax already imports over 99% of its feedstock.

Bioenergy overall still accounts for 8.76% of world total primary energy supply in 2022, the World Bioenergy Association counted, a meaningful share of the global mix.

The £13 question EU and UK rules are trying to answer

Ask “is biomass carbon neutral” and expect a single word back, and the answer will mislead you either way. Ask which biomass and over what timeframe, and it gets useful fast. Waste-derived biomass burned in an efficient CHP plant is about as close to low carbon as bioenergy gets. Whole trees cut from natural forest and shipped across an ocean to satisfy a renewable energy quota belong in a different category, whatever the smokestack reading says.

If you pay a UK power bill, you already fund part of the answer, whether the wood behind it paid back its carbon debt or not. Ember put the 2025 subsidy cost at about £13 per household for a plant whose stack reading of zero still rests on unverified sourcing paperwork. The EU’s cascading use rule and the sourcing terms attached to Drax’s subsidy for 2027 through 2031 are the first rules built to catch the gap between that zero and the forest it came from, and whether they hold is still an open question.

Carbon capture and storage has 77 projects running worldwide right now, with 47 more under construction, according to the Global CCS Institute’s 2025 status report. Coal-fired power plants were supposed to be the technology’s proving ground, and the two flagship retrofits, Petra Nova in Texas and Boundary Dam in Saskatchewan, both missed their own capture targets.

Direct air capture is newer and smaller. The credit that funds a lot of this work, Section 45Q, pays up to $36 for every tonne of CO2 a qualifying plant captures, and that money comes out of your taxes whether or not you’ve heard of the project it goes to.

The short answer, in tonnes

Add up every carbon capture and storage project running today and you land somewhere around 50 million tonnes of CO2 captured a year, a 2025 estimate from the World Resources Institute that lines up with the scale the Global CCS Institute counted in its 2025 status report.

That works out to roughly 0.1 percent of the world’s annual CO2 emissions. A single plant capturing a million tonnes a year is a real industrial project with real engineering behind it, and against what the world emits every year, it’s a rounding error.

What carbon capture and storage means

Carbon capture and storage means catching carbon dioxide before it leaves a smokestack, or pulling it directly out of the air, then squeezing it until it behaves like a liquid and piping it into porous rock deep underground built to hold it. Coal plants faced added regulatory pressure to cut their carbon output around the same period this technology was being tested, covered separately in our look at the EPA’s Clean Power Plan.

Coal’s flagship plants missed their own targets

Two coal-fired plants built carbon capture at commercial scale, and both explain why skepticism about the coal version of this idea stuck. Petra Nova, a unit at the WA Parish plant in Texas, started up in 2017 rated to capture about 33 percent of that unit’s CO2 emissions. Its owners shut it down on May 1, 2020, citing low oil prices. New owners JX Nippon and Eneos now run it as part of their carbon capture portfolio.

Boundary Dam, in Saskatchewan, was designed to capture up to 90 percent of one unit’s carbon dioxide, about a million tonnes a year at full output. In 2015, its first year running, the plant ran at only about 40 percent of capacity and took a $12 million penalty for missing half of its contracted 800,000 tonnes. Neither retrofit turned coal capture into something routine, part of the wider decline of coal power. An earlier Energy Collective piece called this coal’s “pipe dream,” and both retrofits proved it right.

Direct air capture is real but still tiny

Direct air capture works differently from smokestack capture. Instead of pulling from a concentrated exhaust stream, giant fans pull ordinary air across a chemical filter that grabs carbon dioxide out of it. The Department of Energy groups direct air capture under its broader carbon dioxide removal category, alongside soil-based and ocean-based methods.

You’re unlikely to live near one. Only about 53 DAC pilot and commercial plants were expected to be running worldwide by the end of 2024, according to the Direct Air Capture Coalition’s deployment tally. That same tally projects 93 plants running by 2030, with a combined capacity of 6.4 to 11.4 million tonnes a year.

The gap between a plant’s rated capacity and what it delivers can be wide. Climeworks’ Orca plant, running since September 2021, is rated to capture 4,000 tonnes of CO2 a year. The company partially brought its larger Mammoth plant online in 2024, rated at 36,000 tonnes a year. A 2025 Heimildin investigation found the two plants’ combined Icelandic output was only about 876 tonnes total between December 2023 and October 2024, a figure that comes from that investigation, not from Climeworks itself.

Where the captured carbon goes

Capturing carbon dioxide is half of carbon capture and storage. What happens to it afterward is the other half, and the industry counts both outcomes the same way. Much of the captured carbon dioxide gets pumped underground to push more oil out of aging wells, a practice called enhanced oil recovery that dates back to the 1970s in the United States, according to WRI.

That distinction reaches your gas tank. Some of the carbon dioxide a plant reports as captured is helping produce more oil at the same time.

Permanent storage, with no oil recovery attached, keeps the carbon out of circulation for good. Industry tallies count both outcomes as storage, which leaves a reader with two different answers about what a project’s capture number means. Check which path a specific project uses before taking its capture number at face value.

The 45Q tax credit changed again in 2025

Section 45Q of the federal tax code sets a minimum project size before any credit kicks in, and the base rate depends on the pathway:

Source: IRS, Instructions for Form 8933. Rates shown are before any bonus multipliers and hold through 2026 under the law described below.

Congress amended Section 45Q again in 2025, through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Public Law 119-21, signed July 4, 2025. It equalized the rate for carbon dioxide used in enhanced oil recovery with the rate for pure underground storage, so both pathways now qualify for the same base rate the statute lays out. It also barred the credit for facilities owned by prohibited foreign entities, for tax years starting after the law’s enactment.

A separate explainer here covers how other policies put a direct price on emissions.

What Petra Nova, Boundary Dam and Mammoth have in common

Petra Nova and Boundary Dam already showed that a rated number and a delivered number aren’t the same thing. Petra Nova was built to capture about a third of one unit’s carbon dioxide and ran until low oil prices made it unprofitable. Boundary Dam delivered less than half its contracted tonnes in its first year and cost SaskPower a penalty for it. Mammoth added a third example, rated at 36,000 tonnes a year but delivering about 876 tonnes of combined output between December 2023 and October 2024.

None of that makes the technology fake, but it should make you skeptical of a rated number before a plant has run long enough to prove it. The Global CCS Institute’s 2025 count includes 47 more projects under construction beyond the 77 already running, and the Direct Air Capture Coalition expects 93 direct air capture plants running by 2030. Both groups publish an update every year, so the honest check is comparing each new report against these numbers, before trusting a ribbon-cutting headline.