Delaware Clean Energy Guide

Delaware is one of the smallest and most renewables-light electricity markets in the country, and the honest framing matters here: it is a gas-heavy, import-dependent grid, not a clean-energy leader. The state generates only about 5.4 TWh a year in-state — roughly 49th of 51 U.S. states and territories — and imports well over half of what it actually consumes over the PJM grid.

In-state generation was roughly 83% natural gas in 2024, with renewables at about 9% — essentially all of it solar. There is effectively no in-state wind. So Delaware's real clean-energy story is not a rooftop-or-farm-field buildout; it is offshore. The US Wind project, whose Delaware substation and cable landing survived a Sussex County permit fight all the way to a unanimous state Supreme Court ruling in May 2026, is the single most consequential energy decision the First State has made in years.

An Ambitious RPS Bolted Onto a Tiny Supply Base

Delaware's Renewable Energy Portfolio Standards Act (REPSA), first adopted in 2005 under 26 Del. C. Sec. 351-364, requires 40% of retail electricity sales to come from renewables by 2035, with a solar photovoltaic carve-out reaching about 10% by 2035. That 40% target was raised from an earlier level by Senate Bill 33, signed February 10, 2021. The standard ramps annually — roughly 25% renewables in the 2025 compliance year and about 25.5% in 2026, with a solar carve-out near 3.75% in 2026.

The uncomfortable truth is that the target far outruns in-state supply. Because Delaware makes almost no renewable power itself, compliance leans heavily on imported RECs — and when that market gets tight, ratepayers pay. Backers of a 2025 rollback bill noted that Delmarva Power paid roughly $26 million in Alternative Compliance Payments over two prior years after failing to buy enough RECs. That bill, House Bill 80 (153rd General Assembly), was introduced March 18, 2025 and would have rolled the RPS back to 10% and frozen it for a decade. It was tabled in committee on April 16, 2025 and did not advance — the 40% target survived, but the affordability fight it exposed is not going away.

The Offshore Wind Statute

The centerpiece of Delaware's forward strategy is the Delaware Energy Solutions Act of 2024 (Senate Bill 265), signed by Gov. John Carney on September 5, 2024. It directs the State Energy Office to solicit offshore wind contracts for an aggregate nameplate capacity of at least 800 MW and no more than 1,200 MW — covering energy, capacity, ancillary services, and RECs — allows coordinated multi-state procurement, caps eligible bids at or below 110% of a Delaware Benchmark Price, and lets large renewable developers use state roadway rights-of-way for transmission. In a state with almost no room for utility-scale onshore renewables, the ocean is where the megawatts are.

Rooftop Incentives & Net Metering

• Net Metering: Available statewide up to 25 kW for residential customers under uniform rules; credits reset at the end of a 12-month period with no cash payout or rollover for excess. Senate Joint Resolution No. 1 (January 2025) required net-metering utilities to join a cost-benefit study, published April 2025.
• Green Energy Program: Direct up-front grants for Delmarva Power customers via a public benefits charge (roughly $0.70/W, up to $6,000); the Delaware Electric Cooperative and DEMEC municipal utilities run their own rebates. Grant recipients typically assign their SRECs to the Delaware Sustainable Energy Utility.
• SREC Market: Delaware SRECs have traded around $30 each in recent years; long-term contracts covering years 11-25 can pay a flat ~$10 each.

Where the Megawatts Actually Are

Delaware's in-state clean fleet is small and solar-only. Trackers count about 21 operating utility-scale solar farms totaling roughly 119 MW, while SEIA puts total installed solar (all types) over 219 MW across more than 9,000 systems — and about 55% of 2024 solar output came from small, customer-sited systems, not big farms. In-state wind is essentially a rounding error: the only onshore utility-scale turbine is a single 2 MW machine installed in 2010 at the University of Delaware campus in Lewes.

The generation base is also shifting under the state's feet. Natural gas rose from 51% of in-state generation in 2010 to about 83% in 2024, while coal collapsed from 46% to about 3% over the same period. The state's last coal plant, the 410 MW Indian River Generating Station in Sussex County, retired in February 2025.

Notable Projects

• ENGIE Solidago Solar (New Castle County, near Townsend): 50 MW — the largest in-state generator — operating since 2022 and selling power to Amazon under a PPA. A 12.5 MW battery addition is planned, targeted for around December 2026, making it the state's first notable utility-scale hybrid.
• Milford Solar Farm (Kent County): 12 MW, operating since December 2012.
• Dover Sun Park (Kent County): 10 MW, operating since July 2011.
• Heimlich Solar (Sussex County): 5 MW by EDF Renewables, operating since June 2024.
• Bruce A. Henry Solar Farm (Sussex County, near Georgetown): a Delaware Electric Cooperative project roughly doubled by a 4.2 MW DC expansion built and operated by Constellation under a 25-year PPA (combined ~40 acres powering nearly 1,000 homes).
• US Wind (Sussex County, offshore lease OCS-A 0490): up to 121 turbines serving regional offtake, with the export cable landing at 3Rs Beach in Delaware Seashore State Park and an onshore substation next to the retired Indian River plant. Delaware permits were issued in January 2025; construction was targeted for 2026, online around 2028.

Small State, Big Land-Use Fight

For its size, Delaware runs one of the more active siting battlegrounds in the Mid-Atlantic — and the reason is structural. There is no statewide siting board that preempts local zoning for utility-scale solar; land-use approval runs through county governments in Sussex, Kent, and New Castle. Sussex County uses a conditional-use process, and its restrictions bite: in agricultural zones only community solar projects under 50 acres are currently permitted, several larger proposals are effectively banned and tied up in court, and conditional-use approvals expire after three years. Central Delaware went further, placing a moratorium on utility-scale solar outside the general business district on farmland-preservation grounds.

The offshore substation dispute is the sharpest version of the same fight. Sussex County Council denied US Wind's conditional-use permit for its onshore substation near the Indian River plant on December 17, 2024. The General Assembly negated that denial with Senate Bills 159 and 199, passed in July 2025 — and the Delaware Supreme Court upheld those laws unanimously on May 26, 2026, a decision widely described as a blow to local control. Coastal and environmental permitting for the cable landing runs through DNREC, while offshore procurement sits with the State Energy Office under the 2024 statute.

The friction is measurable. As of June 2026 Sussex County was tracking 59 solar-related conditional uses — only 14 permitted, and none yet under construction — with a Council member flagging roughly 3,600 proposed acres of solar and urging rooftop alternatives instead. The county deferred a solar farm decision near Selbyville in April 2026, and its Planning & Zoning Commission deferred a series of arrays in February 2026. We track every active dispute on our Delaware opposition tracker.

Data Centers Are Rewriting the Demand Curve

The emerging force reshaping Delaware energy policy is not generation — it is load. Delmarva Power has identified four data-center projects under review: a roughly 1,200 MW project and a ~300 MW project in New Castle County, a ~100 MW project in Kent County, and an undetermined-size early-stage proposal. A separate Delaware City concept, "Project Washington," envisions about 6 million square feet of data center drawing up to ~1,200 MW at full build. For a grid that generates only ~5.4 TWh a year, that is a staggering amount of new demand.

The regulatory system is scrambling to keep up. On December 19, 2025, Delmarva Power proposed new rates and study requirements for "large load" customers using more than 25 MW, and the Delaware PSC opened a tariff docket for interim large-load rules — including a pause on certain new interconnections in Delmarva territory until the tariff is set. The pressure is regional, not just local: across PJM, data centers drove 63% of the price increase in the 2025/2026 capacity auction, about $9.3 billion in higher costs across the RTO.

That same interconnection system is throttling the clean supply side. Delmarva Power's queue is a key bottleneck for solar, with some projects facing more than four years between application and in-service dates — a big part of why Sussex County has dozens of approved conditional uses but nothing under construction.

Frequently Asked Questions

The Outlook: Bet on the Ocean, Not the Farm Field

Delaware's clean-energy trajectory is unusually easy to read because it has so few options. In-state land-use politics — Sussex County's farmland restrictions, the central-Delaware moratorium, and three-year permit expirations — combined with a Delmarva interconnection queue that can run past four years, mean utility-scale solar will keep crawling. The gap between 59 tracked conditional uses and zero projects under construction is the whole story in one statistic.

That leaves offshore wind carrying the state's decarbonization ambitions almost by itself. With the Delaware Supreme Court having cleared US Wind's onshore substation in May 2026 and the Energy Solutions Act authorizing 800-1,200 MW of procurement, the megawatts that matter for Delaware's 40% RPS will come off the Atlantic, not out of its remaining farmland — assuming construction holds to its 2026 start and roughly 2028 in-service targets. Meanwhile data-center load, a possible ~1,200 MW single project among them, is arriving faster than either the grid or the tariff rules were built to handle. The next few years are less about whether Delaware builds clean power than whether it can import, interconnect, and site it fast enough to keep up with the demand landing on its wires.