Trump Flips from Opposing Battery Storage to Encouraging its Use

Battery storage has gone from an afterthought to a selling point inside the Trump administration, even as the same White House has spent the past year fighting other parts of the clean energy buildout. The nonprofit energy research group RMI, once known as the Rocky Mountain Institute, found that the country’s battery storage fleet has multiplied more than forty times over since 2018.

Utility-scale installations climbed to 43.6 gigawatts by the close of last year, a stretch during which the sector expanded by roughly seventy percent annually for three straight years running. Counting every category of storage, the U.S. now has close to 52 gigawatts installed nationwide.

Expansion on this scale is set to keep accelerating. Federal energy forecasters expect the country’s electricity consumption to tick up by nearly two percent this year and again next year, a demand curve that’s pushing developers to plan 24 gigawatts of new utility-scale storage installations for 2026 alone, up from the previous high-water mark of 15 gigawatts set just last year.

Officials now frame storage’s purpose very differently than they once did. Tom Hucker, a senior adviser at the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Dominance Financing, said early officials mostly saw storage as a vehicle for expanding renewables, something he called valuable but low on the administration’s list of priorities. Storage is now viewed as essential to keeping electricity affordable instead, he said, prompting a surge of financing agreements.

A lending pool exceeding $289 billion currently sits under that financing office’s control, expanded after Trump officials loosened the criteria determining who can access it.

Although none of that capital is set aside specifically for storage, the office has already put money behind projects that fold it in, among them a multibillion-dollar arrangement backing Southern Company’s utility subsidiaries as they expand power infrastructure across two Southeastern states, with a battery component built into the financing.

Since taking office, Trump officials have paid several offshore wind developers, including TotalEnergies and a BlackRock-backed venture, well over $2 billion combined to abandon leases and redirect that investment toward fossil fuels.

Billions more in clean energy grants have been canceled, and permitting for new wind and solar projects on federal land has tightened considerably, moves critics say have driven up consumer electricity bills even as the White House frames its energy agenda around affordability.

Administration officials counter that Biden-era subsidies had artificially propped up renewables projects at taxpayer expense, and that unwinding them restores a more level playing field for competing energy sources. Grid math, not ideology, seems to explain storage’s newfound favor: unlike wind or solar, it doesn’t generate electricity on its own, making it easier for the administration to cast it as a neutral reliability tool rather than a renewable-energy mandate.

Hopefully, the change of heart will gradually trickle down into funding support to various companies like GeoSolar Technologies Inc. that are focused on expanding the footprint of renewable energy around the country.

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