Around eight o'clock on the evening of July 22, the Texas power grid faced the hardest hour in its history. Demand that day hit an all-time record of more than 91 gigawatts. And the sun was going down on schedule, the way it does. Grid people call what is left after you subtract wind and solar from demand the net load, the part something else has to cover. At that hour it peaked at nearly 76 gigawatts, another record.
Two summers ago, a night like that ended in panic pricing. In August 2024, real-time wholesale prices in Texas hit the market's $5,000-per-megawatt-hour cap. This July, on a harder night, they topped out at $378.
What changed is sitting in fenced lots across the state, in rows of steel boxes that look like shipping containers. That evening, Texas batteries discharged nearly 12 gigawatts, a record for the grid, and about 8 gigawatts more at the evening peak than during the previous demand record, in August 2024. The analysts at Grid Status wrote that the extra battery discharge over the evening peak "helped to limit the RT price volatility seen in years past." That is the dry way of saying the scariest hour on the grid got a lot less scary.
This month the national numbers caught up with what Texas felt. A new report from the Solar Energy Industries Association and Benchmark Mineral Intelligence says the United States installed 20.2 gigawatt-hours of energy storage in the second quarter of 2026, the most in any quarter on record. MIT Technology Review put it in household terms: enough to cover the daily electricity needs of about 700,000 homes. The country now has about 165 gigawatt-hours of storage in total, and the report expects 71 more to be installed this year alone, up a fifth from last year.
The shape of the boom
A record total can hide a lopsided record. Of that 20.2 gigawatt-hours, 18 came from utility-scale projects, with Arizona, California, Utah, and Texas each adding more than 2.5. Commercial and industrial batteries, the kind behind a business's meter, also set a record, and MIT Technology Review reports that data centers accounted for about three-quarters of the new commercial systems. Batteries at homes went the other way. Residential installations fell 27 percent from the same quarter last year, and home installations for all of 2026 are projected to fall 16 percent.
The federal tax credit for home battery systems ended at the end of 2025, and homeowners rushed to install before the deadline. Benchmark's Shan Tomouk expects home installations to recover by the end of the decade, but for now the story of the year is plain: the big batteries are booming, and the small ones are not.
Last October I wrote about the battery in your basement, about thousands of home systems linked together in software and acting like invisible power plants. I still think it is one of the most interesting ideas on the grid. But this year's data says the bottom-up grid I described is growing more slowly than the top-down one, and the money is moving toward whoever can buy storage by the gigawatt-hour.
That matters for a reason beyond fairness. A utility battery in a fenced lot makes the whole grid steadier. But when a storm knocks down the line to your street, the battery forty miles away cannot keep your refrigerator cold. A home battery can. Resilience at the scale of the grid and resilience at the scale of a building are different products. Tax credits for nonresidential batteries have largely survived; the one for homes did not. So data centers, which can afford to guard their own uptime, are putting record amounts of storage behind their own meters, while ordinary households, without the credit, are buying less of it.
The fine print
Three items, read out loud.
Batteries do not make electricity. They move it in time. Only 44 percent of the storage installed last quarter was paired with solar; the rest is standalone, charging from whatever the grid is running on at the moment. On a sunny grid that can mean clean noon power saved for dinnertime, but the battery itself does not guarantee it.
The hours are short. Grid Status notes that Texas batteries "tend to have only 1-2 hours of duration." On July 22, battery output fell off around 10 p.m., and real-time prices rose right on cue. Batteries have conquered the early evening. The long night, and the windless winter week, are still unsolved problems.
And the boxes are mostly Chinese inside. According to MIT Technology Review, nearly all the systems coming online use cells made in China, even when they are assembled into finished systems here. Starting this year, storage tax credits require projects to limit their reliance on Chinese batteries, and Tomouk says new American factories likely won't meet demand until around 2030, so prices could rise in the meantime. A boom built on imports that the tax code is now discouraging is a boom with a bump ahead.
None of that undoes the record. "This is one of the strong sectors in the US," BloombergNEF's Isshu Kikuma told MIT Technology Review. Tomouk was more specific about the quarter: "It really came down to a handful of big projects." Both are true at once, and the second is the one I will keep watching.
When I wrote in April that the solar century had arrived quietly, I said the sun still sets on schedule and that storage was the piece still finishing its trip down the cost curve. This summer, in Texas, you could watch that trip happening in real time. The sun went down on the most demanding night in the state's grid history, and for a couple of hours, rows of steel boxes picked up the slack. Twelve gigawatts after sundown. The next job is making sure some of that power ends up in the basements, too.
