More than 13 gigawatts of energy storage was installed across the U.S. last year, per a new report from the Business Council for Sustainable Energy and BloombergNEF. That’s up from the roughly 12 GW installed in 2024.
It’s the latest reminder of the meteoric rise of battery storage, a quick-to-deploy technology that’s key to cutting emissions from the electricity system. Storage enables the grid to bank electricity when it’s cheap and abundant — like when surplus solar is generated in the middle of a sunny day — and deploy it when prices are high and electrons are scarce.
Less than a decade ago, the sector was little more than an intriguing possibility. Energy storage in America mostly meant massive, decades-old pumped-hydro storage projects and a handful of small lithium-ion battery plants.
In 2017, only 500 megawatts of grid battery capacity was online in the U.S.; now, there are individual battery installations larger than 500 MW. Still, the sector had big expectations for itself back then: In 2017, the Energy Storage Association set a goal of reaching 35 GW of storage capacity by 2025.
Last year, the sector smashed that goal, hitting it in July and ending the year with nearly 45 GW of installed capacity.
Increasingly abundant solar power, rising energy demand, and declining battery costs have combined to propel the storage sector to these lofty heights. To date, most utility-scale batteries have been plugged into the grids of Texas and California, two solar-soaked states with radically different approaches to encouraging storage growth.
In the coming years, the storage sector has a smoother path to continued growth than do renewables.
Yes, it faces some challenges. Federal tax incentives are now contingent on compliance with strict but vague anti-China supply-chain rules. Developers also have to deal with tariffs and increasing local opposition.
But, unlike for solar and wind, tax credits for storage were spared in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that President Donald Trump signed into law in July. Also unlike solar and wind, the battery industry has not yet attracted much explicit trash-talking from either Trump administration officials or Trump himself. Storage is also increasingly cheap and fast to build.
These facts, plus the urgent need for new sources of affordable energy as utility bills rise, have the storage industry poised for continued growth in the years to come.
Great Job Dan McCarthy & the Team @ Canary Media for sharing this story.
