America's solar industry is booming, showing its biggest growth ever in 2016, and it appears set to break additional records in the years ahead, according to a new industry report.

The solar sector nearly doubled the amount of solar power installed last year compared to 2015, GTM Research and the Solar Energy Industries Association said in their annual analysis of the US solar sector.

Indeed, more solar power was added last year to the nation's electricity grid than any other source of energy - a milestone for the burgeoning industry. It's the latest evidence that solar, which was once considered an alternative form of energy, has arrived as a central player in America's energy portfolio.

The sector's growing scale is also steadily lowering its cost. Prices for solar are 18 percent below what they were in 2015 and 63 percent lower than five years ago.

SEIA's president and CEO Abigail Ross Hopper said it is hard to overstate the year's gains.

"Prices dropped to all-time lows, installations expanded in states across the country and job numbers soared," she said in a statement. "The bottom line is that more people are benefitting from solar now than at any point in the past, and while the market is changing, the broader trend over the next five years is going in one direction - and that's up."