The US battery storage market is expanding rapidly as pressure mounts on the country’s power grid. Trump administration has U-turned to present storage as a tool for affordability and reliability, having previously branded it as a renewable enabling tool.
An August analysis from RMI (formerly known as the Rocky Mountain Institute), a non-profit energy think tank, reported that BESS capacity nationwide “has increased more than 40-fold” since 2018.
As it stands, US battery storage capacity has reached nearly 52GW. Utility-scale battery capacity stood at 43.6GW at the end of 2025, after averaging 70% annual growth over the previous three years.
The Energy Information Administrations (EIA) expects electricity sales to rise by almost 2% in 2026 and the same in 2027, while they report that developers plan to add 24GW of utility-scale battery storage in 2026, compared with a record 15GW in 2025.
Tom Hucker, a senior DOE adviser in the agency’s Office of Energy Dominance Financing said: “At the beginning of the administration they were a little, frankly, less receptive to storage. They thought of it as really a way to get renewable energy on the grid, which I think is great, but it’s not a priority for this administration,”
“Now they have realized it’s a key to affordability and so we are doing a lot of storage deals.”
The DOE’s Office of Energy Dominance Financing currently has more than $289bn (£215bn) in available loan authority, following changes under the Trump administration that broadened eligibility.
While the funding is not dedicated to battery storage, the DOE has already backed projects incorporating BESS, including a $26.5bn (£19.7bn) financing package for Southern Company subsidiaries announced earlier this year.
The package is intended to support power supply in Alabama and Georgia and includes an energy storage component.
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