Solar and batteries carried the Texas grid through summer, industry group says, after the state added 3,440 megawatts in six months

Texas got through a hot summer of heavy air-conditioning demand without a grid scare, and the solar industry says panels and big batteries are a main reason.

"Summers really have become a non-event now in Texas just because of the growth of solar and storage in the state," Daniel Giese, who directs Texas affairs at the Solar Energy Industries Association, told the San Antonio Express-News in a story published Sunday.

The numbers

The figures come from a new report by the trade association and Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, as described by the Express-News:

• Texas installed 3,440 megawatts of solar generating capacity from January through June, keeping its place as the top state for new solar, a ranking it has held since 2023.
• The state added 3.8 gigawatt-hours of utility-scale battery storage through June, bringing it to 33.1 gigawatt-hours. California still has more installed storage, at 62 gigawatt-hours, but Texas is on pace to add the most storage of any state in 2026.
• Most of the storage Texas added in the first half came from standalone projects not tied to a solar farm; only a small share was paired with solar.

Giese said the Texas solar market is expected to double over the next five years. He also argued that standalone batteries help hold down power prices by soaking up cheap electricity and releasing it when demand peaks.

Data centers and transmission

Much of the new demand on the grid is coming from data centers built for artificial intelligence, which can go up faster than traditional industrial plants, Giese said, and solar and storage can be built quickly enough to keep pace.

The grid operator has also pushed storage. In May, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas created a one-time, $25 million incentive program that pays $1,500 a year for each megawatt of storage, according to the newspaper. An ERCOT report found added batteries could ease transmission bottlenecks by up to 10% in parts of West Texas and the Panhandle, the Express-News reported.

The assessment of the summer comes from the solar industry's trade group, which promotes solar and storage. Nationally, solar installations in the second quarter were up 45% from a year earlier, and battery storage rose 23% to a record 20.2 gigawatt-hours, according to a separate report from the association and Wood Mackenzie.

Sources

expressnews.com