Comment by carefree-bob
12 hours ago
Except that didn't happen, and it's not a milestone.
First, you are confusing share of electricity generation with the share of all energy. Electricity is only 21% of all energy. Natgas, oil and coal are crushing it in that remaining 79%.
Second, the article is wrong, even for electricity. To their credit, Canary Media showed in their graph that this data is for electricity only.
The data for March is not out yet. Here is the latest official data from the EIA. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/
It only applies to January 2026, and the next release is April 23, and then you will get data for February 2026. All data has a 2 month time lag. Your spidey senses should have been tingling if an article published April 10 claimed to have data for the month of March, but this is why you don't get your statistics from activist blogs, but from official sources.
So if they are not accessing the official data, what are they accessing? They claim that their source is "Ember", but what is Ember? It is an environmentalist think tank. Well, maybe Ember has their own people calling up power companies and compiling data faster than the EIA. That would be pretty, cool, right?
Except they don't. Look at Ember's page.
https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent...
what do they cite as their data source: EIA.
It's right on the website.
So Ember is just pulling EIA data, and then filling the last two months with data they made up, but citing it as EIA data. And this, uh, sympathetic adjustment of EIA data is why Canary Media turns to Ember rather than directly pulling from EIA.
I guarantee you that by July, those adjustments will go away, because then the EIA data will be out.
Of course everyone else will have forgotten by then.
> First, you are confusing share of electricity generation with the share of all energy.
Think it was pretty obvious what I meant to all but the most pedantic, bud. But just to be clear, your issue here is that a think tank cited the same (notoriously anti-renewable Trump admin) government agency that you've cited multiple times yourself? That's what set off your spidey senses? Have you considered that this respected think tank isn't making up data, but you're just not able to find it?
> I guarantee you that by July, those adjustments will go away, because then the EIA data will be out.
Ember already has it hoss, they don't call it Milestone March for nothing.
The EIA is where Ember gets its data from.
It's where everybody gets their data from. Because they have thousands of employees collecting data. These are professionals, like the people at BEA, HUD, NIST, etc.
Ember, on the other hand, is a "decarbonization" think tank. They don't have their own data. They don't have the staff for it. What they do is analyze/spin, and in this case, augment, the raw data that is published by EIA. How do they augment the EIA data? All they do is round it to the nearest 2 decimals. It's exact copy and paste for every month except the last two, where the data is just made up.
And this entire article was written based on the augmentations by Ember, yet Ember cites it as EIA data. So let's check back in July, when EIA data will be out, and Ember will use that exact data, rounding it to the nearest 2 decimals. Save that blog page!
Something to think about.
I feel like I shouldn't have to be finding this info for you since it was right there in the links you already sent, but:
> Annual electricity generation and net imports are taken from the EIA.
> Monthly generation and imports are taken from the EIA. The EIA reports monthly generation data in two separate datasets: Monthly data for all 50 states and monthly data for the lower 48 states (excludes Hawaii and Alaska). Data for all 50 states is reported on a 3 month lag whereas data for the lower 48 states is reported without lag. Missing months from the data for all 50 states is estimated using the recent changes observed in data from the lower 48 dataset.*
Page 89: https://ember-energy.org/app/uploads/2024/05/Ember-Electrici...
There are two different EIA datasets.