The renewable buildout, month by month.

The bars show where each installed megawatt comes from. Solar (blue) is the longest: more than half the total. Wind is second. Large hydro, counted only since December 2023, is part of today's total and has its own bar. Bio and small hydro are short bars at the bottom.

One rising line: a stock that almost never falls, because capacity is added faster than it retires. Read the slope, not the jumps: the buildout accelerated through 2024-26 as solar capacity was added at record pace. The one violent move is December 2023, where the line steps up by 48 GW: that is not construction, it is the reclassification of large hydro into the renewable total.

Growth rates computed across the step are meaningless: the series is two different definitions bolted together. The line is drawn as one continuous array (the source publishes it that way) but the seam is annotated so no reader mistakes the step for building.

Four lines, four speeds. Solar (blue) grew nearly five-fold and overtook wind in 2021. Wind (grey) grew but slowly; bio (grey) and small hydro (grey) are nearly flat. The renewable buildout is, to a first approximation, a solar buildout; the other sources are the base that solar was built on top of.

Large hydro is deliberately omitted from this chart. It would sit above wind at 47 GW from Dec 2023, but it is a definitional addition, not a buildout. Showing it alongside the genuine growth sources would mislead.

Two lines, both rising fast. Ground mounted (blue) is the bulk: utility-scale solar parks in Gujarat, Rajasthan, Karnataka. Rooftop (grey) is the surprise: it steepened visibly from 2024 as the PM Surya Ghar scheme pushed residential solar onto household roofs. Rooftop grew thirteen-fold across the window; ground mounted grew nearly four-fold.

Six lines, one per state, all rising: but at very different slopes. Gujarat and Rajasthan (blue) pulled away from the pack, together holding roughly a third of national capacity. Gujarat's line is steeper early (wind came first), Rajasthan's steeper later (solar surged). Tamil Nadu plateaus: its wind base was built years ago and grows slowly now.

The December 2023 step is visible on states with large hydro: Karnataka, Himachal Pradesh and Maharashtra jump where large hydro was added to the definition. Solar-only states (Rajasthan) do not step.

Two strips, one question each. The top strip asks where is the solar? The bottom strip asks where is the total capacity? A state that leads the second without leading the first holds a large wind fleet as well as solar. The rankings swap because wind and solar are built in different geographies: wind on the coasts and passes (Tamil Nadu, Gujarat), solar in the desert (Rajasthan).

Each source is ranked on its own, as a share of its own national total, so a small source and a large one can sit side by side. Read the length of the first few bars: the shorter the list of states that matters, the more a source depends on a particular kind of place. Wind needs steady coastal and plateau winds, large hydro needs mountain rivers, and bio power needs sugar cane, because most of it is burned at sugar mills.

For a household this is the difference between where power is made and where it is used. Power made in one state travels to others over the national grid, so a state's capacity is not its consumption: a state with no wind farms still uses wind power.

Rooftop panels sit on homes, shops, schools and factories, so this is the solar a person is most likely to see. A state's rooftop capacity depends on its electricity tariffs, how quickly its distribution company connects net meters, and how many roofs it has, not only on sunshine.

Four lines, one for each kind of plant. Bagasse cogeneration runs in the crushing season at sugar mills in Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and Karnataka, which is why bio power follows the sugar belt on the map above. Non-bagasse cogeneration burns other crop and wood residue. Waste to energy burns or digests city and industrial waste; its off-grid line counts plants that power a factory or a campus without feeding the grid.