The US added a record-breaking quantity of vitality storage in 2025, in accordance with a brand new photo voltaic trade report revealed Monday. The expansion of battery storage throughout the US is a uncommon success story for clear vitality in the course of the renewables-hostile second Trump administration—and likewise an indication of how utilities could also be occupied with reorienting electrical grids as demand goes up throughout the nation.
The brand new report, issued by the Photo voltaic Power Industries Affiliation (SEIA), follows one other dataset launched final week by Bloomberg New Power Finance exhibiting an analogous increase in battery development. In 2025, in accordance with the SEIA report, the US put in 57 gigawatt hours of latest vitality storage to the grid, with new installations rising nearly 30 % over the yr earlier than. (As its identify suggests, a gigawatt hour is a measure of vitality saved over time.) That’s sufficient storage, the SEIA report claims, to energy greater than 5 million houses annually.
The report predicts that the market may leap one other 21 % by the tip of this yr, rising by a further 70 gigawatt hours in 2026 alone. These are monster numbers in comparison with lower than a decade in the past, when there was about half a gigawatt of storage on the grid in complete.
Batteries have confirmed remarkably politically resilient. Tax credit for wind and photo voltaic have been minimize as a part of the One Large Lovely Invoice final summer season amid a large-scale assault on renewables from the administration, regardless of opposition from Republican lawmakers with clean-energy tasks of their states. However battery tax credit have been largely spared.
And regardless of Washington’s hostility towards renewable vitality, batteries—together with photo voltaic—noticed important development in some deep crimson states final yr. One of many large renewable vitality success tales of the second is Texas, the place photo voltaic met greater than 15 % of demand all through the summer season, beating out coal for the primary time. The SEIA report predicts that Texas will overtake California this yr to turn into the US state with essentially the most gigawatt hours of storage deployed.
Jigar Shah, a managing companion on the advisory agency Multiplier and the previous director of the Division of Power’s Mortgage Packages Workplace, factors out that Texas’ impartial and largely deregulated energy grid—which operates a lot nearer to a real free-market system than different grids within the nation—has enabled photo voltaic and batteries to soar forward of different choices regardless of resistance within the White Home. (Photo voltaic’s success story is so large that it does even appear to be reaching some voices on the best: Current polling means that MAGA voters assist photo voltaic, whereas Katie Miller, the influential former high communications official for the so-called Division of Authorities Effectivity to whom White Home deputy chief of employees Stephen Miller is married, has been tweeting approvingly about photo voltaic vitality in latest weeks.)
“Texas mainly says, ‘I do not care about your cultural bias,’” says Shah, who was not concerned within the SEIA report. “‘These are the market alerts. You guys do what you need to do. If you wish to construct new coal crops, nice. If you wish to construct batteries, nice.’ And it occurred to be that batteries have been most incentivized by their monetary incentives.”
Whereas batteries and photo voltaic are proving a killer mixture in locations like Texas, nearly all of battery installations final yr, the SEIA report discovered, have been stand-alone ones not linked to particular photo voltaic tasks. The expansion of stand-alone storage is an efficient signal for grids which might be more and more confused by skyrocketing demand.
On a mean day, vitality grids across the US use solely about 50 % of the vitality obtainable to them. This underutilization is by design; the grid wants a considerable amount of capability for days when demand is at its peak. Putting in batteries in any respect ranges of the grid is one option to reap the benefits of the additional vitality that’s not used throughout off-peak days in order that it doesn’t go to waste.
