Millions of retail electricity customers in the United States buy voluntary clean power, meaning renewable energy beyond what load-serving entities such as utilities otherwise provide. These clean power sales have surged in the past decade: According to data collected and published annually by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, they doubled from 2010 to 2014 and doubled again from 2014 to 2019.
NREL estimates that voluntary clean power sales reached 164 million megawatt-hours in 2019, accounting for around 32 percent of all non-hydropower renewable electricity sales, or just over 4 percent of all retail electricity sales in the United States. While several factors explain this healthy growth, an important one is the increasing number of pathways allowing customers to participate, as the following table shows.
