The US added a record-breaking quantity of energy storage in 2025, in line 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 in addition an indication of how utilities could also be fascinated about reorienting electric grids as demand goes up throughout the nation.
The brand new report, issued by the Photo voltaic Vitality Industries Affiliation (SEIA), follows one other dataset released last week by Bloomberg New Vitality Finance displaying an identical increase in battery development. In 2025, in line with the SEIA report, the US put in 57 gigawatt hours of recent vitality storage to the grid, with new installations rising nearly 30 % over the yr earlier than. (As its title 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 properties annually.
The report predicts that the market might soar one other 21 % by the top of this yr, rising by an extra 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 had been minimize as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill final summer time 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 had been largely spared.
And regardless of Washington’s hostility towards renewable vitality, batteries—together with photo voltaic—noticed vital development in some deep pink states final yr. One of many massive renewable vitality success tales of the second is Texas, the place photo voltaic met more than 15 percent of demand all through the summer time, 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 probably the most gigawatt hours of storage deployed.
Jigar Shah, a managing accomplice on the advisory agency Multiplier and the previous director of the Division of Vitality’s Mortgage Applications Workplace, factors out that Texas’ unbiased 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 massive that it does even appear to be reaching some voices on the appropriate: Latest polling means that MAGA voters assist photo voltaic, whereas Katie Miller, the influential former prime communications official for the so-called Division of Authorities Effectivity to whom White Home deputy chief of workers Stephen Miller is married, has been tweeting approvingly about photo voltaic vitality in current weeks.)
“Texas principally says, ‘I do not care about your cultural bias,’” says Shah, who was not concerned within the SEIA report. “‘These are the market indicators. You guys do what you wish 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 had 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, had been stand-alone ones not linked to particular photo voltaic tasks. The expansion of stand-alone storage is an efficient signal for grids which are more and more careworn by skyrocketing demand.
On a median day, vitality grids across the US use solely about 50 % of the vitality out there 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 technique to benefit from the additional vitality that’s not used throughout off-peak days in order that it doesn’t go to waste.
