Colorado (Business Emerge), September 6: The United States continues to rely heavily on fossil fuels for its energy needs, with fossil sources providing more than 58% of the nation’s power in the first eight months of 2024. This highlights the ongoing struggle to shift towards greener energy, even as renewable energy sources are being developed at an unprecedented rate.
While the percentage of energy produced from fossil fuels has slightly decreased from 60.4% in the same period of 2021, rising energy demands have forced the industry to maintain high levels of fossil fuel-based generation. This surge in energy needs, driven in part by the growing demands of data centers and artificial intelligence technologies, has strained power systems across the country.
Over the last decade, there has been a concentrated effort to prioritize clean energy. Since 2014, power companies have increased clean electricity capacity by over 70%, while reducing fossil-fueled capacity by 5%. This reflects a broader national effort to reach net-zero emissions and decrease reliance on non-renewable energy.
However, despite these gains in renewable energy, fossil fuel generation has continued to climb in absolute terms due to rapidly growing energy demand. Power producers have had to boost both clean energy output and fossil fuel generation to keep pace, making the complete transition to clean energy a more complex challenge than initially anticipated.