U.S. energy storage market posts record 18.9 GWh in Q2 on surging data center demand

The U.S. energy storage market hit a new high in the second quarter of 2026, installing 18.9 gigawatt-hours of battery capacity, according to a report from Wood Mackenzie and the American Clean Power Association. Most of this growth is happening at the utility scale, driven partly by rising power demand from data centers, but there's a piece here that touches homeowners directly: home battery systems.

Residential battery installations had a strong quarter too, adding nearly 1.2 gigawatt-hours of capacity. While the number of households installing batteries grew only slightly, the batteries themselves got bigger, pushing energy capacity up 48% compared to a year earlier. California, Texas, Puerto Rico, Arizona, and Illinois made up most of these home installations. If you're in one of those states and considering battery storage, this suggests installers are increasingly offering larger systems than before.

That said, analysts expect the residential segment to shrink slightly over the full year, pointing to policy changes and reduced incentives as the reason. If you're weighing a home battery purchase, it may be worth checking your state's current rebate or incentive rules, since those shifts appear to be cooling demand even as the technology itself scales up. On the industrial and commercial side, a wave of installations tied to a California billing-policy deadline earlier in the year has settled down, with gains in states like Hawaii and New Mexico offsetting a slight national dip. Overall, forecasters now expect the broader storage market to keep growing over the next five years, but the residential piece of that picture looks more uncertain in the near term.