The U.S. battery storage market recorded its strongest quarter ever after adding 20.2 gigawatt-hours of new capacity during the second quarter of 2026, according to the US Energy Storage Market Outlook report published by the Solar Energy Industries Association and Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. This brought additions during the first half of the year to 30.8 gigawatt-hours, an increase of 23% compared with the same period in 2025.
Utility Projects Lead Growth
The largest share of the expansion came from grid-connected batteries, with utility-scale projects adding approximately 18 gigawatt-hours in the second quarter. This included seven projects with a capacity of one gigawatt-hour or more: four in Arizona, two in California, and one in Utah.
Arizona alone recorded a record addition of 6.2 gigawatt-hours, followed by Texas with 3.8 gigawatt-hours and California with 3.6 gigawatt-hours. Solar projects were paired with 44% of new utility-scale storage capacity, while the remaining 56% consisted of standalone storage projects.
What Is Changing in Practice?
Batteries allow electricity to be charged when supply is abundant and prices are relatively low, then fed back into the grid when demand and prices rise. This role becomes increasingly important during heat waves, when higher air-conditioning consumption coincides with declining solar power production in the evening hours.
According to the report, storage systems supplied the U.S. grid with more electricity during the first eight months of 2026 than they supplied throughout all of 2025. Operating utility-scale storage capacity also increased from 88 to 165 gigawatt-hours during the first 18 months of Donald Trump’s administration, with the report emphasizing that these figures do not attribute investment decisions for individual projects to any particular administration.
Geographic Expansion and Higher Forecasts
Storage growth is no longer confined to California and Texas, according to Shan Tomouk, BESS and power sector official at Benchmark Minerals. The report points to growth in the development pipeline in Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, Colorado, and other states. More than 74% of the capacity that entered service in the second quarter was also located in states won by Donald Trump in the 2024 election.
Strong demand prompted Benchmark to raise its forecast for U.S. capacity through 2030 by 11.5% to 683 gigawatt-hours. It now expects approximately 71 gigawatt-hours to be added during 2026, an increase of nearly 20% over 2025. Data centers could become an important source of future demand, as their developers move toward combining batteries with solar or wind power, and sometimes gas generation, to address grid constraints and rapidly changing loads.
Contrast Between Residential and Commercial Storage
The momentum did not extend to the residential sector to the same extent; U.S. homes added only 657 megawatt-hours in the second quarter, a 27% year-over-year decline. The report partly links the decline to the repeal of the federal 25D residential clean-energy tax credit and to homeowners accelerating installations during 2025 before the incentive changed. Benchmark expects residential installations to decline 16% in 2026 after surging 56% in 2025.
By contrast, the commercial and industrial sectors added approximately 1.8 gigawatt-hours in the second quarter. The domestic manufacturing base also expanded: Tesla began operating its third Megafactory in Texas, with annual production capacity of 50 gigawatt-hours of Megapacks, and began shipping units that use domestically manufactured lithium iron phosphate cells.
Editorial reading: The figures reveal a practical shift in the U.S. storage market from a story concentrated in two states to broader infrastructure tied to grid reliability and rising demand, rather than merely to the addition of renewable sources. However, the report does not establish that the growth resulted from the policy of a specific administration, and the decline in residential storage illustrates this segment’s sensitivity to tax incentives and changing rules; therefore, the 2030 forecasts remain linked to projects’ ability to reach service and to the continuation of actual demand.