Kind: Measured report
By Asif Hussain, Founder and CEO, SpecIndex
Utility-scale solar farms in open desert get the trade-press coverage. What SpecIndex's own bid and permit corpus shows is a different picture: renewable energy construction activity that is more permit-dense in built-up eastern states than in the sunbelt land typically associated with solar development.
Since January 1, 2025, SpecIndex's corpus shows 3,359 projects matching solar, photovoltaic, wind farm or battery storage language in their name or description, carrying a combined $5.75 billion in disclosed estimated value. The state distribution does not track resource availability. It tracks where distributed and commercial-scale projects are actually pulling permits.
Facts at a glance
- Since January 1, 2025, SpecIndex's corpus shows 3,359 projects matching solar, photovoltaic, wind farm or battery storage language in their name or description, carrying a combined $5.75 billion in disclosed estimated value. (From: the opening paragraph.)
- This article counts a project once if its name or description matches any one of the four renewable terms above, solar, photovoltaic, wind farm, or battery storage, for a combined total of 3,359 projects across renewable generation and storage. (From: Method note and scope.)
- The battery storage article counts battery energy storage system permits on their own, 436 permits, and counts battery manufacturing plant projects separately. (From: Method note and scope.)
- Texas shows 498 projects and $18 million disclosed. (From: Method note and scope.)
New York is the volume leader, not Texas or California
New York shows 1,239 matching projects since January 2025, with $480 million in disclosed value, the largest of any state in the corpus. That count is more than triple the next state. Texas (498 projects, $18 million disclosed), California (376 projects, $142 million) and Illinois (358 projects, $222 million) follow, each with lower counts despite larger utility-scale solar pipelines nationally.
| State | Projects (2025-01-01 to present) | Disclosed value |
|---|---|---|
| New York | 1,239 | $480M |
| Texas | 498 | $18M |
| California | 376 | $142M |
| Illinois | 358 | $222M |
| Maryland | 206 | $243M |
| Connecticut | 137 | $14M |
| Arizona | 136 | $46M |
Download CSV (the rows above, exactly as shown)
*Source: SpecIndex's own corpus of public bid and permit records, `description`/`name` matched on solar, photovoltaic, wind farm and battery storage language, `opened_or_announced_date >= 2025-01-01`.*
New York's lead is a distributed-generation story, not a handful of mega-projects: 1,239 projects averaging well under $1 million in disclosed value each is consistent with rooftop, community-solar and small commercial installations pulling permits across the state's municipalities. New York's community solar and distributed-generation programs have run at a higher volume of individual interconnections than most states for several years, and that shows up directly as permit count in a corpus built from public records.
One Arkansas project sets the dollar ranking on its own
Dollar value tells a different story from count. One project alone, the Steel River Energy Center in Arkansas, a $4.5 billion facility tied to Cypress Creek Energy and Google on the project record, accounts for more disclosed value than the renewable pipelines of New York, Texas, California and Illinois combined. That single hyperscale-linked project is a reminder that in renewables, as in manufacturing, a state's dollar ranking can be set by whichever grid-scale or data-center-adjacent project last broke ground, while its project count is the more stable measure of how broad-based the underlying construction activity actually is.
Maryland is a useful middle case: 206 projects and $243 million in disclosed value, a combination of count and dollars that suggests a mix of commercial-scale solar canopies and larger installations rather than either extreme. Several Maryland records in the corpus describe solar canopy microgrids over parking structures. That is a project type that does not show up in utility-scale capacity tallies at all, because it is commercial construction, not a generation-asset transaction.
The eastern lean is a permit record pattern, not a capacity ranking
The federal Energy Information Administration's planned-capacity data (Table 6.7.B of Electric Power Monthly) shows Texas and California still leading in gigawatts of utility-scale solar capacity under construction nationally. SpecIndex's corpus is not measuring the same thing. It is measuring construction permits and public bid records, which skew toward the states and project types that go through a conventional public permitting process.
Those types include distributed generation, commercial and municipal solar, and battery storage retrofits. They do not include the same volume of public bid or permit paper trail from the large private land-lease utility-scale farms concentrated in Texas' ERCOT territory.
That distinction matters for anyone reading state renewable-activity rankings: a capacity-under-construction ranking and a permit-volume ranking are answering different questions, and conflating them produces exactly the kind of "Texas and California lead everything renewable" assumption that a look at the actual public-records corpus does not support for construction activity specifically.
The record can name the parties on a project, without a document claim here
Where full bid documents are attached, SpecIndex's brand position extraction is built to show named developers, EPC contractors and, on the largest projects, specific equipment integrators for a given project, state by state. That is the layer a capacity table cannot show: which contractor and which equipment package is on a project, rather than an aggregate megawatt figure with no construction-side detail behind it.
No document or page citation for Cypress Creek Energy or Moss on the Steel River Energy Center is stated in this article. The document claim in the original text has been softened to the general corpus record above, for the reason given in the method note. The Steel River tie to Cypress Creek Energy and Google in the section above is stated as a project record tie, not as a bid document citation.
Method note and scope
We counted projects in SpecIndex's own corpus of public bid and permit records matching solar, photovoltaic, wind farm or battery storage language in `description` or `name`, as the source line under the table states. The date field is `opened_or_announced_date`, and the window is January 1, 2025 onward.
This article's population is distinct from the battery storage article's population, on the rules the two articles themselves state. This article counts a project once if its name or description matches any one of the four renewable terms above, solar, photovoltaic, wind farm, or battery storage, for a combined total of 3,359 projects across renewable generation and storage.
The battery storage article counts battery energy storage system permits on their own, 436 permits, and counts battery manufacturing plant projects separately. The two totals are defined by different match rules, so they are not two counts of the same set and should not be added together.
All figures in this article are retained from the original September 2026 count. That includes the 3,359 projects, the $5.75 billion combined disclosed value, the state counts and values in the table, and the Steel River Energy Center at $4.5 billion. The corpus keeps growing, so the figures are dated and will not match a live count run later.
Disclosed value needs a plain warning here. Texas shows 498 projects and $18 million disclosed.
A total that low across that count means most Texas records in this set disclose no value at all. State value totals in this article are therefore floors where disclosure is thin, not full values for the projects counted.
On October 16, 2026, we ran `find_brand_positions` through the SpecIndex MCP for Cypress Creek Energy with a limit of 20 and for Moss with a limit of 20. Cypress Creek Energy returned 0 rows and a total count of 0. Moss returned 7 rows and a total count of 7, and none of those rows was on the Steel River Energy Center.
Each query reported 322,370 documents searched and 62,117 projects with documents in the coverage returned that day. No matching document row for either name on that project was returned, so no document claim for either name on that project is cited in the text above.