Corrected at 10:08 a.m. on April 9.

After growing steadily since 2004, wind energy's share of new U.S. production capacity decreased in 2009, according to the American Wind Energy Association's annual report.

The 2-percentage-point drop, from 41 percent in 2008 to 39 percent last year, is small but notable after five years of increases. Rob Gramlich, AWEA's senior vice president for public policy, told NationalJournal.com that a small change like this "can be simply the effect of a coal plant or two that happened to come on line in a given year," though he would have to look and see if that was the case.

The natural gas sector's piece of the pie also shrunk, from 47 percent in 2008 to 43 percent in 2009. Coal saw its share of the new generating capacity almost double, from 7 percent to 13 percent, likely explaining the decrease in both natural gas and wind. AWEA got its data from a variety of government and industry sources.

Despite the smaller share of new capacity, total domestic wind energy production grew last year, from 1.3 percent to 1.8 percent. And renewable energy overall, including hydro, solar and biomass, constituted about 10.5 percent of the nation's generation capacity, up from 9.1 percent in 2008. Coal still produces the largest share of U.S. electricity capacity, accounting for roughly 45 percent of the nation's mix in 2009.

Wind industry leaders released the report at a press conference today and pushed for Congress to adopt a federal renewable energy standard, which they say would give the sector the crucial policy stability to continue to grow and create jobs. AWEA President and CEO Denise Bode said that with the health care bill passed, a comprehensive energy and climate bill, which includes a federal RES, is "ripe for passage this year."

CORRECTION: The original version of this report gave incomplete sourcing for AWEA's numbers. AWEA took its numbers from the Energy Information Administration, as was reported, but also from the Solar Energy Industries Association, SNL Financial and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

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