Solar Companies and Solar Capacity by State

How many solar companies are there?

There are well over 10,000 solar companies across the United States.  The SEIA estimates that there are ~10,500 solar employers, while industry reports like IBIS estimates over 11,000.  These aren’t exact numbers as solar contractors can pop up and close down over the course of a year.  But the important highlight for your career and job search, is that this number is expected to grow in the coming years.  IBIS estimates it will rise across both residential and commercial markets (utility-scale is concentrated across dozens of larger employers).  

Each state is in a very different cycle of the solar revolution as we highlighted in our prior blog post, breaking down the capacity and growth projections of the next 5 years. In this post, we'll dive a bit deeper to look at the average project size and average employer size in solar.

How large are the average solar installations by state?

The US has 4.7 million solar installations across the country.  California has a whopping ~2 million, accounting for over 40% of total installations of the country.  However, each state has a different distribution of residential, commercial, utility, and now nascent community projects. 

The average residential solar project is 6.6 kW based on data from SunRun.  Commercial projects can range from 10 kW to hundreds of kW, and utility projects can go all the way up to 875 MW (California’s Edwards & Sanborn Solar + Energy Storage project)!.  Community projects, still fairly nascent, can power hundreds to thousands of homes and can range from hundred of kW to low single digit MW.  

Below, we’ve blotted the total solar capacity by state and the average installation capacity using data from the SEIA. 

Any state in the low double digits will be dominated by residential solar, while states with an average kW / installation of over 100 will have large utility projects.  For example, Georgia, the first obvious outlier in the group, has projects like Cool Springs by NextEra, which have 213 MW of capacity and limited residential installations to date.  South Dakota, which is literally off the charts, has almost no residential solar, but is building large utility projects; just last month, South Dakota’s largest solar farm went online to provide more solar power than the rest of the state’s capacity combined.

How many employees do solar companies have?

There are over 260,000 full-time or close to full-time solar jobs across ~10,500 employers, so the average firm size is about 25 employees in 2023.  The smallest firms are 1 or 2 workers doing local installations in a rural area, while the largest employers will be those utility-scale providers that employ hundreds of technicians across the largest projects in the country.

Below, we’ve broken down the average number of employees per solar company across all of the states.

California has more than triple the number of solar companies than New York, the state with the 2nd most number of companies.   Nevada, as we’ve highlighted before, is an outlier given its utility solar projects that drive a high number of employees per company operating in the state.

What does this mean for your career in solar?

Almost every state will have solar job opportunities across residential, commercial, and utility employers (barring the long-tail, where solar is just getting going), so you can find the right opportunity for you.  As we’ve written about before, breaking into solar will be easiest through residential employers where you can learn on the job from experienced team members, or through large utility-scale providers that offer training programs.  

Beyond that, it’s important to think about the type of work you see yourself doing in the medium to longer term.  Do you want to work on mega-infrastructure projects with 100s of team members or run a small firm that works face-to-face with customers and you know every colleague’s name, if not their entire family’s name?  We’ll expect to see growth in the count of companies across the country as solar continues to drive forwards across the country.  There are millions of more homes to install solar for, millions of commercial locations, and thousands of massive utility projects to be built. Hopefully these contextual numbers will give you information for some of the many differences in solar across states today and get you thinking on the implications for your career.  

Let us know what you think and be sure to check out the latest solar jobs posted!