The EIA's March 24, 2026 Electric Power Monthly confirmed that U.S. power developers plan to add 86 gigawatts of utility-scale generating capacity to the grid in 2026 — nearly doubling the 53 GW installed in 2025, and the largest single-year capacity addition in over two decades. Solar leads with 43.4 GW, or 51% of the total. Battery storage follows at 24 GW, representing 28% of planned additions. Wind accounts for 14%.
The context is a decade of compressing costs colliding with an accelerating demand curve. The IEA's Electricity 2026 report, published in February 2026, documents the global arc: utility-scale battery power capacity grew more than 12 times between 2020 and 2024, rising from below 10 GW in 2019 to exceed 120 GW by 2024. Over that same period, the global average cost of batteries fell from approximately $511 per kilowatt-hour in 2019 to just below $213 per kilowatt-hour in 2024 — a 58.3% decline in five years. The IEA projects global electricity demand will grow at an average of 3.6% per year between 2026 and 2030, roughly 50% faster than the previous decade's pace, driven by EV adoption, data centres, AI workloads, and industrial electrification. That demand signal, landing on a grid built for a different era, is why 2026's build numbers look the way they do.
The battery figures deserve particular attention. The EIA projects U.S. utility-scale battery storage capacity will rise from approximately 28 GW at the end of Q1 2025 to 64.9 GW by the end of 2026 — more than doubling in roughly 20 months. Cumulative U.S. storage additions over the prior five years exceeded 40 GW, per EIA data. The 2026 additions are geographically concentrated: Texas accounts for 53% of planned battery installations at 12.9 GW, followed by California at 14% (3.4 GW) and Arizona at 13% (3.2 GW) — together approximately 80% of the national total. ERCOT entered 2026 with 13.9 GW of commercially operational battery storage, surpassing California for the first time, and the EIA projects ERCOT load growth of approximately 21% between 2024 and 2026, driven substantially by data centre and industrial demand. Among the year's flagship projects: Tehuacana Creek 1 Solar and BESS in Texas, pairing 837 MW of solar PV — the largest solar project expected online this year — with 418 MW of co-located battery storage. Lunis Creek BESS in Jackson, Texas, at 621 MW, and Clear Fork Creek Solar and BESS in Wilson, Texas, at 600 MW, follow. Approximately 48% of current U.S. storage capacity is co-located with solar, a structural response to curtailment and the need to shift midday generation into the evening demand window. (Battery storage is now priced at roughly $117 per kilowatt-hour domestically, according to an Energy People Group synthesis of EIA data — less than a third of 2023 levels, though the EIA's own battery storage market trends update, released March 17, 2026, covers installation cost trends in detail without providing a single national average.)
Ken Bossong, Executive Director at the SUN DAY Campaign, said of the EIA's March 24 data: 'EIA's data show that the Trump Administration utterly failed to stop the nation's transition to solar, wind, and battery storage during its first year in office. The second year of the Trump Administration is projected to be even more lop-sided in favor of clean energy.' FERC Chairman Swett, addressing PJM's co-location and large-load interconnection order, said: 'Clarifying new rules will help release the bottleneck of large load investments across the PJM footprint.' The IEA, in Electricity 2026, offered a more structural caution: 'Much of the world's battery supply chains are concentrated in China. Such high geographic concentration creates considerable risks in terms of supply security, given the growing role batteries play across energy systems and the wider economy, calling for greater efforts to diversify supply chains and to boost innovation.'
For grid operators, the implications of this build cycle are not uniformly positive. The IEA estimates that more than 2,500 GW of projects — renewables, storage, and large loads including data centres — are stalled in grid connection queues worldwide. Grid investment has lagged generation investment structurally, and congestion-related curtailment is rising across multiple power systems. The IEA calculates that meeting electricity demand through 2030 will require annual grid investment to increase approximately 50% from today's $400,000,000,000. Grid-enhancing technologies — dynamic line rating, dynamic transformer rating, advanced power flow control, topology optimisation, and storage as a transmission asset — could, according to IEA analysis, unlock sufficient capacity to connect 450 to 700 GW of advanced-stage projects currently stuck in queues. Broader regulatory reforms alongside those technologies could extend that figure to 1,200 to 1,600 GW globally. A concurrent arXiv preprint from Li, Yang, and Wang (arXiv:2603.25192v1, March 26, 2026) addresses the transient stability dynamics specific to co-located grid-following renewable plants and synchronous condensers — a technical problem that grows more acute as co-located configurations become the dominant build format. The 48% co-location rate in the current U.S. fleet is not a ceiling; it may be a floor.
Three signals will clarify whether 2026's record build delivers what the data currently projects. First, watch ERCOT's monthly battery interconnection reports through Q3 2026 — Texas carries more than half the national storage target, and any permitting or interconnection delays in ERCOT will show up there first. Second, track the IEA's grid investment monitoring series for whether the 50% annual investment increase required by 2030 is being mobilised in capital budgets this year; the gap between generation spending and transmission spending has been widening for three consecutive years. Third, watch FERC's progress on interconnection queue reform implementation across non-PJM regions — the queue backlog of 2,500-plus GW is a global figure, but the U.S. portion alone represents years of delayed clean capacity, and regulatory clarity on co-location standards will determine how much of the 2026 pipeline actually synchronises to the grid on schedule.