The new report, released by the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), follows another dataset released last week by Bloomberg New Energy Finance that showed a similar surge in battery growth. In 2025, the US is set to install 57 gigawatt hours of new energy storage into the grid, a nearly 30 percent increase in new installations from the previous year, according to the SEIA report. (As its name suggests, a gigawatt hour is a measure of energy stored over time.) The SEIA report claims this is enough storage to power more than 5 million homes each year.
The report estimates the market could grow another 21 percent by the end of this year, adding an additional 70 gigawatt hours in 2026 alone. These are huge numbers compared to less than a decade ago, when there was only about half a gigawatt of storage on the grid overall.
Batteries have proven remarkably resilient politically. Tax credits for wind and solar energy were cut as part of the One Big Beautiful bill last summer amid a massive attack on renewable energy from the administration, despite opposition from Republican lawmakers with clean-energy projects in their states. But the battery tax credit was largely saved.
And despite Washington’s hostility toward renewable energy, solar power as well as batteries saw notable growth in some deep red states last year. One of the big renewable energy success stories of the moment is Texas, where solar met more than 15 percent of demand throughout the summer for the first time, overtaking coal. The SEIA report predicts Texas will overtake California this year to become the US state with the most gigawatt hours of storage.
Jigar Shah, managing partner of consulting firm Multiplier and former director of the Department of Energy’s loan programs office, points out that Texas’s independent and largely unregulated power grid — which operates much closer to a true free-market system than other grids in the country — has enabled solar and batteries to overtake other options despite resistance in the White House. (Solar’s success story is so big that it even seems to be reaching some voices on the right: Recent polling shows that MAGA voters support solar, while Katie Miller, the influential former top communications official at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency who is married to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, has been tweeting approvingly about solar energy in recent weeks.)
“Texas basically says, ‘I don’t care about your cultural bias,'” says Shah, who was not involved in the SEIA report. “‘These are market signals. You guys do what you want to do. If you want to build new coal plants, great. If you want to build batteries, great.’ And it turned out that batteries were most incentivized by their financial incentives.
While batteries and solar are proving to be a deadly combination in places like Texas, most battery installations last year, the SEIA report found, were stand-alone that were not tied to specific solar projects. The growth of stand-alone storage is a good sign for grids that are stressed by rising demand.
On an average day, energy grids across the US only use about 50 percent of the energy they have available. This underuse is by design; The grid needs large amounts of capacity for days when demand is at its peak. Installing batteries at all levels of the grid is one way to take advantage of excess energy that is not used during off-peak days so that it is not wasted.
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