– added the United States Record amount of energy storage in 2025, according to a up-to-date report on the solar industry released Monday. The expansion of battery storage across the U.S. is a occasional tidy energy success story under a second Trump administration hostile to renewables, and a sign that utilities may be thinking about reorienting electric grids as demand grows across the country.
Recent reportreleased by the Solar Energy Industry Association (SEIA), is based on a different data set released last week by Bloomberg Recent Energy Finance showing a similar raise in battery growth. According to the SEIA report, the United States installed 57 gigawatt-hours of up-to-date energy storage on the grid in 2025, with the number of up-to-date installations increasing by almost 30 percent compared to the previous year. (As the name suggests, a gigawatt-hour is a measure of energy stored over time.) According to the SEIA report, that’s enough to power more than 5 million homes a year.
The report predicts that the market could grow by another 21 percent by the end of this year, adding an additional 70 gigawatt-hours in 2026 alone. These are terrible numbers compared to less than a decade ago when this happened about half a gigawatt total storage space in the network.
Batteries have proven remarkably politically resilient. Tax credits for wind and solar energy were cut under the One Substantial Handsome Bill last summer after the administration’s sweeping attack on renewable energy sources, despite Republican lawmakers’ opposition to tidy energy projects in their states. However, battery tax breaks have been largely spared.
And despite Washington’s hostility to renewable energy, some deep red states saw significant battery growth last year – along with solar power. One of the biggest success stories in the field of renewable energy today is Texas, where solar energy has come together over 15% of demand throughout the summer, mining coal for the first time. The SEIA report predicts that Texas will overtake California this year to become the U.S. state with the most installed gigawatt-hours of storage.
Jigar Shah, managing partner at consulting firm Multiplier and former director of the Department of Energy’s Office of Lending Programs, 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 allowed solar and batteries to outpace other options despite resistance from the White House. (Solar’s success story is so extensive that it even seems to reach some voices on the right: recent questionnaire suggests that MAGA voters support solar energy, while Katie Miller, the influential former top communications official at 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 power in recent weeks).
“Texas is basically saying, ‘I don’t care about your cultural biases,'” says Shah, who was not involved in the SEIA report. “‘These are market signals. Do what you want. If you want to build new coal plants, great. If you want to build batteries, great.’ And it just so happened that batteries were most motivated by financial incentives.”
While batteries and solar are proving to be a lethal combination in places like Texas, the SEIA report shows that most battery installations last year were stand-alone installations, not tied to specific solar projects. The development of autonomous warehouses is a good signal for chains that are increasingly burdened by rapidly growing demand.
On average, power grids across the United States apply only about 50 percent of available energy per day. This underutilization is by design; the network needs a lot of power on days when demand is highest. Installing batteries at all levels of the grid is one way to apply extra energy that isn’t used on off-peak days so it doesn’t go to waste.