All posts tagged: power grid

The US Had a Big Battery Boom Last Year

The US Had a Big Battery Boom Last Year

Published by skeptic

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 …

The Great Big Power Play

The Great Big Power Play

Published by skeptic

Take yourself back to 2017. Get Out and The Shape of Water were playing in theaters, Zohran Mamdani was still known as rapper Young Cardamom, and the Trump administration, freshly in power, was eager to prop up its favored energy sources. That year, the administration introduced a series of subsidies for struggling coal-fired power plants and nuclear power plants, which were facing increasing price pressures from gas and cheap renewables. The plan would have put taxpayers on the hook for billions of dollars. It didn’t work. In subsequent years, the nuclear industry kept running into roadblocks. Three nuclear plants have shut down since 2020, while construction of two of the only four reactors started since 2000 was put on hold after a decade and billions of dollars following a political scandal. Coal, meanwhile, continued its long decline: It comprises just 17 percent of the US power mix, down from a high of 45 percent in 2010. Now, both of these energy sources are getting second chances. The difference this time is the buzz around AI, …