Where Did All the Solar Go? Calculating Total U.S. Solar Energy Production

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Good data can be hard to come by. Let's take solar production data. According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), solar electricity production facilities — including photovoltaic (PV) and concentrating solar power (CSP) — produced a total of roughly 1,800 GWh in 2011. That's a 50 percent increase over 2010. Even so, as a percent of total energy produced, the number is so small, in Figure 1 (below), it's easy to confuse solar energy production with the horizontal axis.

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