The US set a record for new energy storage installations in 2025, adding 57 gigawatt hours to the grid, a nearly 30% increase from the previous year. This growth occurred despite a politically hostile environment for renewables, with battery tax credits largely spared from cuts.
The report predicts continued rapid expansion, with storage capacity expected to jump another 21% in 2026. Texas is highlighted as a major success story, where market-driven grid policies have enabled significant solar and storage growth, positioning it to become the national leader in deployed storage.
A key trend is the rise of stand-alone battery installations not tied to specific solar projects, which helps grids manage soaring demand and utilize existing infrastructure more efficiently by storing excess off-peak energy.
Main Topics: Record US energy storage growth; political resilience of batteries; Texas as a leading market; the rise of stand-alone storage; grid optimization benefits.
The US added a record-breaking amount of energy storage in 2025, according to a new solar industry report published Monday. The growth of battery storage across the US is a rare success story for clean energy during the renewables-hostile second Trump administration—and also a sign of how utilities may be thinking about reorienting electric grids as demand goes up across the country.
The new report, issued by the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), follows another dataset released last week by Bloomberg New Energy Finance showing a similar boom in battery growth. In 2025, according to the SEIA report, the US installed 57 gigawatt hours of new energy storage to the grid, with new installations growing almost 30 percent over the year before. (As its name suggests, a gigawatt hour is a measure of energy stored over time.) That’s enough storage, the SEIA report claims, to power more than 5 million homes each year.
The report predicts that the market could jump another 21 percent by the end of this year, increasing by an additional 70 gigawatt hours in 2026 alone. These are monster numbers compared to less than a decade ago, when there was about half a gigawatt of storage on the grid in total.
Batteries have proven remarkably politically resilient. Tax credits for wind and solar were cut as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill last summer amid a large-scale attack on renewables from the administration, despite opposition from Republican lawmakers with clean-energy projects in their states. But battery tax credits were largely spared.
And despite Washington’s hostility toward renewable energy, batteries—along with solar—saw significant 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, beating out coal for the first time. The SEIA report predicts that Texas will overtake California this year to become the US state with the most gigawatt hours of storage deployed.
Jigar Shah, a managing partner at the advisory firm Multiplier and the former director of the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, points out that Texas’ independent and largely deregulated power grid—which operates much closer to a true free-market system than other grids in the country—has enabled solar and batteries to soar ahead of other options despite resistance in the White House. (Solar’s success story is so big that it does even seem to be reaching some voices on the right: Recent polling suggests that MAGA voters support solar, while Katie Miller, the influential former top communications official for the so-called Department of Government Efficiency to whom White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller is married, 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 the 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 happened to be that batteries were most incentivized by their financial incentives.”
While batteries and solar are proving a killer combination in places like Texas, the majority of battery installations last year, the SEIA report found, were stand-alone ones not connected to specific solar projects. The growth of stand-alone storage is a good sign for grids that are increasingly stressed by skyrocketing demand.
On an average day, energy grids around the US use only about 50 percent of the energy available to them. This underutilization is by design; the grid needs a large amount 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 the extra energy that’s not used during off-peak days so that it doesn’t go to waste.
“The only way to really get more out of the grid that we've already paid for is to put batteries on both sides of the grid,” says Shah. “When the grid is underutilized, we use it more by charging batteries. And then we use those batteries to reduce those peaks that happen two to three hundred hours a year.”
The growth of data centers provides another opportunity for batteries to take off. Per the SEIA report, behind-the-meter installations—storage installations that aren’t connected to the larger grid—were also a driver of growth this year. Behind-the-meter power is taking off as a strategy for data centers impatient with long lead times to connect to the grid, although much of that behind-the-meter power demand is being met, separate research shows, by gas.
Despite all this promise for the industry, there could be some bumps in the road ahead. The One Big Beautiful Bill did reinforce restrictions around manufacturers based in China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea; China’s oversize share in the solar and battery supply chains could prove a problem. The SEIA report also cautions that project cancelations—due in part to the tax credits for solar being cut short last year—could severely cut the amount of storage problems in the pipeline for this year.
And with an administration that tends to make heel turns on industries that the president has decided he doesn’t like, there’s always a risk for technology associated with renewable energy.
Shah says that preventing this will rely on those in power getting on the same page about how batteries can help alleviate pressure on the grid and drive prices down.
“The administration in 2025 was obsessed with the concept of natural gas [solving] all problems,” he says. “Going into 2026, where the president is really under siege around affordability, you're finding that all of the people who are in charge of solving this problem have become way more sober.”
Meridiano
