(Bloomberg) —
For years, Americans have been blanketing their homes with scads of solar panels. Now, they’re adding a growing number of batteries to store that electricity and protect against blackouts.
Battery storage in US homes surged by 64% in 2024 compared to the previous year, outpacing increases in commercial and utility installations, according to new data from Wood Mackenzie and the American Clean Power Association, a trade group. These storage units are now in about half a million homes and collectively hold 3,028 megawatt-hours of electricity.
“The market has pretty much doubled in two years,” said Wood Mackenzie research analyst Hanna Nuttall. “That’s a pretty significant rate of growth.”
Homeowners are socking away power for a number of reasons, particularly to avoid fluctuating electricity rates and blackouts. Those with solar panels, meanwhile, can power their homes more cheaply by keeping the electrons they generate instead of selling them back to the grid, which typically pays lower rates than the retail price of electricity.
Solar and storage go hand in hand and the vast majority of home batteries are wired to an array of panels, Nuttal said.
It also helps that costs for storage systems have plummeted, in part because battery makers have switched to cheaper chemical recipes. Utilities, for example, saw battery costs drop by 16% in the past year, according to Wood Mackenzie. Prices for a residential solar array have fallen as well and are near an all-time low.
Despite the jump in home battery installations, the US trails Europe. In Germany and Italy, over 70% of new home solar arrays are hitched to batteries and many older systems are as well. In the US, meanwhile, there are now almost 5.3 million homes with solar but only about 10% have battery storage.
The US battery boom is concentrated in sunny places — namely California and Texas. However, it’s starting to spread in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic as well.
“It’s definitely the more technologically savvy people who are springing for storage,” Nuttall said. “But in states where resiliency is a challenge, that’s where we’re seeing more general adoption.”
Puerto Rican homeowners, for example, have been buying battery storage to keep the lights on during hurricane season.
There’s something for utilities to like as well. As data centers and extreme weather increasingly tax power grids, every battery that stores energy at home has the potential to lower a demand spike by a tad. Likewise, when extreme weather takes down part of the grid, fewer angry people light up power company call centers with complaints.
US grid disruptions aren’t likely to abate anytime soon as climate change exacerbates wildfires and heat waves. BloombergNEF expects residential storage to continue to climb in the next five years due to more frequent power outages and higher prices during demand peaks.
However, the battery expansion could slow if the Trump administration follows through on its pledge to throttle clean energy subsidies. At the moment, homeowners can capture a 30% federal tax credit for solar and battery installations, a vestige of the 1978 oil crisis extended by the Inflation Reduction Act.
Higher tariffs could weigh on battery buying as well. Nuttall says nearly all of the US residential batteries contain imported cells.
To contact the author of this story:
Kyle Stock in Denver at kstock6@bloomberg.net
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