The United States saw a major battery boom last year

The United States added Standard amount of Energy storage In 2025, according to a new solar industry report published Monday. The growth of battery storage across the U.S. is a rare clean energy success story during the renewable-hostile second Trump administration — and also a sign of how utilities are thinking about redirecting Electrical networks With high demand across the country.

New a reportreleased by the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), follows another data set Released last week By Bloomberg New Energy Finance shows a similar surge in battery growth. In 2025, according to the SEIA report, the United States installed 57 GWh of new energy storage into the grid, with new installations growing nearly 30% compared to the previous year. (As its name suggests, a gigawatt-hour is a measure of energy stored over time.) The SEIA report claims that’s enough storage to power more than 5 million homes each year.

The report predicts that the market could jump another 21% by the end of this year, an increase of an additional 70 GWh in 2026 alone. These are huge numbers compared to less than a decade ago, when he was there About half a gigawatt of network storage in total.

Batteries have proven remarkably politically resilient. Tax breaks for wind and solar energy were cut As part of one nice big bill Last summer amid a widespread attack on renewables by the administration, despite Republican lawmakers’ opposition to clean energy projects in their states. But tax breaks on batteries have largely been saved.

Despite Washington’s hostility to renewable energy, batteries — along with solar — saw significant growth in some deep red states last year. One of the big success stories in renewable energy right now is Texas, where solar meets solar More than 15 percent of the demand All summer long, beating coal for the first time. The SEIA report expects Texas to overtake California this year to become the US state with the largest number of gigawatt hours of storage.

Texas’ independent, largely unregulated power grid — which operates more closely to a true free-market system than other grids in the country — has enabled solar and batteries to rise above other options despite resistance in the White House, points out Jigar Shah, managing partner at consulting firm Multiplier and former director of the Department of Energy’s Office of Loan Programs. (Solar’s success story is so big that it seems to reach some right-wing voices: the latter Ballot indicates that MAGA voters support solar energy, while Katie Miller(The influential former 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 energy in recent weeks.)

“Texas is basically saying, ‘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.” Batteries happened to be more motivated by their financial incentives.

While batteries and solar have proven to be a deadly combination in places like Texas, the majority of battery installations last year, the SEIA report found, were standalone and not tied to specific solar projects. The growth of standalone storage is a good sign for networks that are under increasing pressure from rising demand.

On average, power grids across the United States use only about 50% of their available energy per day. This underutilization is by design; The network 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 is not used during peak days so that it does not go to waste.