SEIA has earned numerous awards for its work and company culture and was named. The association was named a Top Workplace for two years in a row by the Washington Post, and earned a Best Nonprofit to Work For award by the Nonprofit Times.
Despite major policy changes and regulatory roadblocks, solar and energy storage have provided power when communities needed it most. In homes, schools, hospitals, and shelters, solar and storage are delivering real cost savings and greater energy resilience to every corner of the country. Here are the …
TRENTON, NJ — Today, the New Jersey Senate passed A-5264, a bill to streamline and modernize the process for permitting residential solar energy systems. The law takes effect immediately. Following is a statement from …
Follow SEIA
Follow SEIA on social media to get the latest solar and storage updates
About SEIA
The Solar Energy Industries Association® (SEIA) is leading the transformation to a clean energy economy. SEIA works with its 1,200 member companies and other strategic partners to fight for policies that create jobs in every community and shape fair market rules that promote competition and the growth of reliable, low-cost solar power.
Founded in 1974, SEIA is the national trade association for the solar and solar + storage industries, building a comprehensive vision for the Solar+ Decade through research, education and advocacy.
Despite major policy changes and regulatory roadblocks, solar and energy storage have provided power when communities needed it most. In homes, schools, hospitals, and shelters, solar and storage are delivering real cost savings and greater energy resilience to every corner of the country.
Here are the top 25 solar and storage stories of 2025:
In California, “Flex Alerts” used to be common. During periods of high-demand, grid operators would ask consumers to conserve their energy use. But the state has now gone three years without issuing a Flex Alert thanks to a massive buildup of battery storage that stands ready to deploy low-cost energy when demand hits the highest.
During the Northeast’s first heat wave of the summer, energy demand peaked as households cranked up the air conditioning. Thanks to residential solar and energy storage, the grid significantly reduced its reliance on costly, dirty “peaker plants,” keeping costs low for ratepayers without compromising reliability.
When Hurricane Melissa made landfall in Jamaica in the autumn of 2025, the abilities of solar and battery storage to continue supplying energy showed the literal power of distributed generation from solar and storage in disaster-prone regions.
Taking disaster resilience stateside, Dave Newman of Algiers, Louisiana has unlocked massive savings and energy reliability thanks to his investments in solar. Not only does he worry less when a hurricane or tropical storm comes through, but he sees substantial energy savings, too.
In this op-ed, Daniel Giese, SEIA’s Director of State Affairs in Texas, outlines how an influx of solar and storage in the Lonestar State is increasing reliability while reducing costs. In the summer of 2025, the Texas grid projected the risks of a power outage at just 0.5% while summer 2024 had a 16% risk of outage.
In this visually impactive piece, the Financial Times shows the ways that batteries are meeting key energy demands around the world, including the United States. Charts show how battery costs have decreased in recent years and provide critical, low-cost energy from solar during the peak demand hours in the evening.
On the evening of July 29, 2025, over 100,000 California homes in a virtual power plant test administered by Sunrun dispatched 535 megawatts of electricity to the grid, enough to meet half the energy demand of San Francisco, showing the tremendous potential of this innovative grid management system to utilize every electron from distributed energy resources, like residential solar and storage to meet growing demand.
In July, Jeff Tench of Vantage Data Centers testified before the United States Senate on the need for all energy sources, including energy storage, to ramp up America’s generation capacity and power the AI future. “It does need to be a reliable, grid dispatchable source, which I believe can be accomplished with the right combination of energy source for generation and energy storage,” Tench said.
The town of Enfield, North Carolina has an average of 260 sunny days a year, but it also has households living on an income of $24,000 a year. For Mayor Mondale Robinson, building a solar project paired with a battery provides the promise of a brighter future with energy independence and affordable and reliable power.
When Hurricane Helene hit North Carolina in 2024, some communities lost connection to the grid for months. With the help of solar-powered microgrids from the non-profit Footprint Project, they maintained access to power for essential services. Now, the state has stepped in to permanently install these microgrids to give residents peace of mind no matter the storm.
As the federal government expressed skepticism about solar, industry executives pushed back with facts on how the cost-effectiveness and deployment speeds of solar and storage projects make them the catalyst for America to meet rising energy demands.
As the AI race with China heats up, America’s tech leaders need an ample power supply to continue developing their capabilities. But they have a dire warning: without renewable energy, America has no chance to keep up, and China will win.
In the weeks following the Northeast heat waves, the numbers came out on solar and storage’s performance. Consumers were estimated to have saved upwards of $20 million total through the abundance of solar energy being harnessed for the grid and stored up in batteries for usage during peak demand times.
After the Texas grid faced catastrophic failures during Winter Storm Uri, the state created a fund to boost energy supply through natural gas. But after two years, the fund had only approved loans for two projects, totaling only 578 megawatts out of the 62,500 megawatts needed by 2030. However, “the state is on course to meet those electricity demands, but largely through advancements in solar technology and battery storage, which are significantly cheaper than natural gas power plants to install.”
Tesla may be most famous for its electric vehicles, but they are active in the solar and energy storage space, as well, including its new 168-stall charging station powered entirely by solar and storage. To learn more about the company’s solar and storage portfolio, especially in the residential space, listen to SEIA’s recent podcast episode with Colby Hastings, Tesla’s Senior Director of Residential Energy.
In Orange County, California, an all-electric hospital is pioneering a healthier future with affordable and reliable energy, with solar playing a critical role in the power supply.
This summer, the outage-prone electric grid of Puerto Rico was able to keep the lights on every night during a two-week stretch thanks to the first operational behind-the-meter virtual power plant in Latin America and the Caribbean. On the night of July 8, the island’s utility dispatched roughly 48 megawatts of energy from 70,000 batteries. Puerto Rico’s solar revolution took hold following the devastating outages from Hurricanes Irma and Maria, with 175,000 homes now hosting residential solar and another 160,000 of those having storage as well.
For low-income residents of Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard, a pilot program provided solar panels to 55 households which, combined with heat pumps for many of them, led to an average of $150 per month in energy savings. One participant noted her ability to run the air conditioning all summer without worrying about the costs.
The impact of solar and storage on summer heatwaves continued with this Utility Dive piece on the impact of virtual power plants. These distributed energy tools helped suppress the amount of extraordinary demand the grid had to meet, saving money and strengthening reliability in the process.
When tech giant Meta built a new data center in Aiken, South Carolina, it helped provide for the additional power it would demand, too. The company partnered with solar developer Silicon Ranch to install a 100-megawatt installation in the state, with the partnership between the two companies exceeding 1,500 megawatts.
The AI race between America and China will be won by whomever is able to meet the substantial energy needs to feed technological progress. The power suppliers responsible for delivering energy to data centers cut straight to the reality that renewables like solar combined with batteries are the quickest and most affordable ways to get abundant power to America’s tech leaders.
John Ketchum is the CEO of one of America’s largest power producers. At the POLITICO Energy Summit in June, he issued a dire warning to lawmakers: if our country takes renewables “off the table,” a power shortage will ensue. In other words, as gas turbine wait times grow and nuclear plants go through years of development, renewables like solar are the only way to meet rising demand and remain competitive with China.
“In the first nine months of 2025, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) saw record demand on the grid compared with the same period in previous years.” But the Lonestar State is meeting those demands thanks to an influx of solar, which together with wind generation met more than a third of ERCOT’s electricity demands in the first nine months of 2025.
Firestorm Books in Asheville is one success story of the microgrids provided by the Footprint Project. By combining their own solar panels with an inverter and energy storage supplied by Footprint, Firestorm can now serve as a 24/7 resilience hub during future natural disasters. Learn more about how the Footprint Project brings lifesaving solar power following natural disasters from co-founder Will Heegard on SEIA’s Good Energy podcast.
With 12 megawatts of solar generating capacity and 63 megawatt hours of storage capacity, Redwood Material’s microgrid supplies power to a data center run by AI infrastructure company Crusoe that contains 2,000 graphics processing units (GPUs).
WASHINGTON, D.C. — New data from the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) shows that the entire solar supply chain has been reshored and U.S. manufacturing capacity has grown across every s…
“This is a community of professionals that is committed to the cause of bringing cost-effective power onto the grid.” Josh Dorfman, President, American Wire Group In this episode of Goo…
Twiggy Mendenhall is the Senior Policy Associate of Solar & Energy Storage at CleanCapital, a renewable energy investment firm who develops, constructs, owns and operates, and invests in solar…
Sign up for the SEIA Weekly Array to get the latest solar and storage news straight to your inbox
Solar Energy Industries
Association
1425 K Street, NW, Suite 1000
Washington, D.C. 20005
Phone 202-682-0556
Email [email protected]
