Why solar energy storage capacity has nearly doubled since Trump took office

Energy storage — the big batteries that charge up solar power to use at night — has nearly doubled since President Donald Trump took office.

That might seem surprising, since this administration is less supportive of renewable energy than former President Joe Biden’s was. But the Solar Energy Industries Association reported Tuesday that the second quarter was the biggest in U.S. history for adding new storage capacity, and analysts aren’t surprised.

Energy storage capacity in the U.S. went up 14% in just the spring of this year. Now, it’s at a total of 165 gigawatt hours, says Tim Pawlenty, CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association, which released the report.

“That is the equivalent of enough storage capacity to power 6 million homes for a day on a single charge,” Pawlenty said.

There are two main reasons storage is taking off now.

One: “There's a lot of money to be made for energy storage,” said Caspian Conran, an energy economist at Baringa.

That’s even after the Trump administration has cut billions of dollars from clean energy subsidies. Conran said the energy transition has passed phase one.

“We're now definitely in phase two, where, frankly, a lot of this tech on the RES side is commercially viable without subsidies,” he said.

The other driver: all of a sudden, the country needs a lot more power than it used to.

“The data center build-out is relatively new,” said Philip Krein, who teaches electrical engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “And that pressure is going up really quickly.”

Krein said this is an economically viable way to meet the data center demand, no matter who’s president.

Plus, electric customers aren’t thinking that much about politics when their monthly utility bill comes in the mail, said Brian Korgel, director of the University of Texas at Austin Energy Institute.

“People in Texas, they talk about where the electricity comes from, but at the end of the day, they just want their lights on,” Korgel said.

The report even has proof of that: Three-quarters of the new energy storage capacity added in the second quarter of this year was added in states that voted for President Trump.