25 Ways Solar and Storage Met Critical Energy Demands in 2025 

December 26, 2025

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:  

1. Los Angeles Times: California invests big in battery energy storage — and leaves rolling blackouts behind (October 17, 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. 

2. WBUR: How Rooftop Solar Is Helping New England Stay Cool During the Heat Wave (June 24, 2025) 

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. 

3. New York Times: After Jamaica’s Disastrous Storm, Solar Power Is a Bright Spot (November 8, 2025) 

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. 

4. WVUE-FOX: New Orleans homeowner has little concern about power outages thanks to his ‘solar addiction’ (June 2, 2025) 

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. 

5. Dallas Morning News: Solar and Battery Storage Are Strengthening the Texas Grid (August 26, 2025)  

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. 

6. Financial Times: How Mega Batteries Are Unlocking an Energy Revolution (October 13, 2025) 

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. 

7. Inside Climate News: Virtual Power Plants Showed Up for Their Biggest Test Yet. Here Are the Results (August 14, 2025) 

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. 

8. E&E News: Data Center Exec: Anti-Renewables Stance a Mistake (July 24, 2025) 

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. 

9. Canary Media: The Rural N.C. Mayor Betting Big on Clean Energy to Uplift His Hometown (April 15, 2025) 

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. 

10. Asheville Citizen-Times: Small-scale power grids were a ‘lifeline’ in WNC after Helene. They may become permanent (October 10, 2025) 

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. 

11. New York Times: Want Cheap Power, Fast? Solar and Wind Firms Have a Suggestion. (March 17, 2025) 

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.  

12. Financial Times: Donald Trump’s Attack on Green Energy Could Hurt Us in AI Race, Data Centres Warn (May 6, 2025)  

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.  

13. Canary Media: A Heat Wave Hit New England’s Grid. Clean Energy Saved the Day. (July 8, 2025)  

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. 

14. Texas Tribune: Texas’ $7.2 billion loan program for gas power plants has approved two projects in two years (August 26, 2025) 

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.” 

15. Inside EVs: Tesla Just Opened Its Biggest Supercharger Station Ever—And It’s Powered By Solar And Batteries (November 25, 2025) 

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. 

16. KTTV-FOX: UCI Health makes history by opening nation’s largest all-electric hospital (December 10, 2025) 

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.  

17. Utility Dive: Booming solar and storage are propping up Puerto Rico’s grid this summer (July 22, 2025) 

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. 

18. Canary Media: Massachusetts Test Shows Big Savings From Free Heat Pumps and Solar (July 17, 2025) 

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. 

19. Utility Dive: Virtual Power Plants Helped Save the Grid During Heat Dome (July 16, 2025) 

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. 

20. Utility Dive: Meta, Silicon Ranch partner on solar farm for South Carolina data center (August 22, 2025) 

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. 

21. Semafor: The US can’t win the AI race without renewables (April 29, 2025) 

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. 

22. POLITICO: Energy powerhouse to Republicans: Don’t ‘take renewables off the table’ (June 10, 2025) 

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.  

23. Inside Climate News: Texas Grid Increasingly Meets Growing Demand With Renewables (November 1, 2025) 

“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.  

24. Blue Ridge Public Radio: West Asheville’s new “energy island”: Firestorm Books goes off-grid (December 19, 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. 

25. Tech Crunch: Redwood Materials launches energy storage business and its first target is AI data centers (June 26, 2025) 

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).