Where ground breaks: red vs. blue
Monthly power-plant groundbreaking split by the 2024 statewide presidential winner: where the buildout physically happens.
What does it show?
Where the buildout physically happens, politically. Monthly groundbreaking megawatts stacked by the 2024 statewide presidential winner. Over the last twelve months, red states took 75% of all groundbreaking MW.
Methodology
The groundbreaking series (first entry into construction status, counted once per generator), with each generator assigned by its state. States are partitioned by the statewide winner of the 2024 presidential election (31 red, 20 blue including DC; ME and NE by statewide vote, ignoring their district splits). The color of a state is political fact from the 2024 result, not an estimate. Power in territories falls in neither bucket.
Limits
State lines are coarse: solar country inside blue states often votes red, and county-level election returns would sharpen the split at the cost of an external dataset. Differences between the buckets partly reflect what each side builds — offshore wind, concentrated in blue states, slips worst of all technologies — not only how each side permits and builds. As a robustness check, the split excluding wind entirely still shows blue-state power running later: 47% behind schedule vs 39% (the full-pipeline gap is 49% vs 41%), so the gap is not an offshore-wind artifact.