See more from Canary Media’s ​“Chart of the Week” column.

It’s official: Grid batteries broke another record.

More than 13 gigawatts of energy storage was installed across the U.S. last year, per a new report from the Business Council for Sustainable Energy and BloombergNEF. That’s up from the roughly 12 GW installed in 2024.

It’s the latest reminder of the meteoric rise of battery storage, a quick-to-deploy technology that’s key to cutting emissions from the electricity system. Storage enables the grid to bank electricity when it’s cheap and abundant — like when surplus solar is generated in the middle of a sunny day — and deploy it when prices are high and electrons are scarce.

Less than a decade ago, the sector was little more than an intriguing possibility. Energy storage in America mostly meant massive, decades-old pumped-hydro storage projects and a handful of small lithium-ion battery plants.

In 2017, only 500 megawatts of grid battery capacity was online in the U.S.; now, there are individual battery installations larger than 500 MW. Still, the sector had big expectations for itself back then: In 2017, the Energy Storage Association set a goal of reaching 35 GW of storage capacity by 2025.

Last year, the sector smashed that goal, hitting it in July and ending the year with nearly 45 GW of installed capacity.

Increasingly abundant solar power, rising energy demand, and declining battery costs have combined to propel the storage sector to these lofty heights. To date, most utility-scale batteries have been plugged into the grids of Texas and California, two solar-soaked states with radically different approaches to encouraging storage growth.

In the coming years, the storage sector has a smoother path to continued growth than do renewables.

Yes, it faces some challenges. Federal tax incentives are now contingent on compliance with strict but vague anti-China supply-chain rules. Developers also have to deal with tariffs and increasing local opposition.

But, unlike for solar and wind, tax credits for storage were spared in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that President Donald Trump signed into law in July. Also unlike solar and wind, the battery industry has not yet attracted much explicit trash-talking from either Trump administration officials or Trump himself. Storage is also increasingly cheap and fast to build.

These facts, plus the urgent need for new sources of affordable energy as utility bills rise, have the storage industry poised for continued growth in the years to come.

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President Donald Trump has all but dismantled U.S. efforts to curb pollution that’s warming the planet and harming human health.

Yet with every federal blow to climate action, states have launched a counterpunch. Take Colorado: After Trump and congressional Republicans ended federal EV tax credits, the state juiced its own clean-car incentives. California has meanwhile inked a deal with the United Kingdom to cooperate on clean energy and climate efforts. And several other states are considering ​“climate superfund” laws, which seek to hold fossil fuel companies financially responsible for climate change–induced damages.

But instead of doubling down on decarbonization in this critical hour, and despite touting that it has one of the most ambitious climate laws in the country, New York is quietly backing away from its efforts.

The most recent and symbolically loaded move concerns that very same climate law, the 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act. New York’s utility regulator is currently considering suspending its marquee clean-energy goal, which requires the state to get 70% of its power from renewables by 2030 and 100% by 2040.

To be clear, New York is not on track to meet this target anyway. But behind the proposed rollback is a petition, signed by two natural gas company veterans, which claims that the target will jeopardize grid reliability, Gothamist reports. New York’s grid operator has cautioned that power shortfalls are a mounting risk, but environmental advocates point out that the warning doesn’t take a ton of soon-to-connect clean energy projects into account. That includes two offshore wind projects that have been slowed by the Trump administration.

It’s just the latest climate retreat by Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat who is up for reelection this year.

Last year, New York was poised to implement a first-of-its-kind ban on fossil-fueled heating and appliances in new homes and buildings. But in November, just before the rule was set to take effect, the state said it wouldn’t enforce the regulation while a lawsuit continued to play out.

Hochul has also repeatedly delayed the implementation of the cap-and-invest program that’s essential to New York’s emissions goals, leaving what could be billions of dollars for renewables construction and energy-efficiency projects in limbo.

And while Hochul has called for more clean energy and nuclear power to meet rising demand, she has also signaled natural gas is essential to the state’s energy strategy, as she allowed a previously rejected pipeline to move forward.

Hochul’s motive for most of these moves has been clear: She’s worried about rising power prices in the state and has cited a need to ​“govern in reality” amid the federal government’s clean energy assault. But as a warming climate puts New York and the rest of the world increasingly at risk, running in the wrong direction on decarbonization is anything but governing in reality.

More big energy stories

What the endangerment finding rollback means for automakers

The EPA last week revoked the endangerment finding, which underpins the U.S. government’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. This rollback has upended federal tailpipe emissions regulations, which the administration says will curb vehicle prices and save Americans as much as $1.3 trillion by 2055.

But the EPA’s own analysis tells a different story, The Guardian reports. It estimates Americans will rack up more than $1.4 trillion as they buy more fuel, need more repairs, and face increased traffic and noise — essentially negating those touted savings.

And it’s unlikely that U.S. automakers will backtrack on vehicle efficiency like the EPA wants, experts tell The New York Times. The rest of the world is still moving toward electric vehicles, so cars that use more gasoline are the opposite of what other countries — and many Americans — will buy.

Fake public comments are clean energy’s latest threat

As if clean energy didn’t have enough challenges to deal with.

Last June, Southern California’s top air-quality authority rejected a plan that would have pushed the region away from gas appliances. Regulators received tens of thousands of comments opposing the plan, but a Los Angeles Times investigation found at least 20,000 of them appear to have been AI-generated. The agency’s staffers also reached out to some alleged commenters, and at least three said they hadn’t written a comment.

The incident is similar to what Canary Media’s Kathiann M. Kowalski reported on earlier this month. In Ohio, state regulators may reject a solar farm that received dozens of public comments opposing it. But as the project’s developer found, and Kowalski verified, more than 30 of those commenters appear to have used fake names or lied about living in the county where the solar farm will be built.

Clean energy news to know this week

Another coal-plant prop-up: Documents indicate that the Trump administration will move to let coal plants emit more hazardous pollutants, including mercury, in an attempt to juice the industry. (New York Times)

Chillin’ with Duke Energy: Canary reporter Elizabeth Ouzts let North Carolina utility Duke Energy remotely lower her thermostat in exchange for bill credits, and even in a recent cold spell, Ouzts says she found the savings meaningful. (Canary Media)

Illinois’ nuclear reversal: Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) calls for the state to build at least 2 gigawatts of nuclear capacity, just a month after lifting the state’s long-standing moratorium on nuclear construction. (Bloomberg)

Cancer Alley’s new threat: Louisiana residents already saturated with petrochemical pollution now face a wave of ​“blue ammonia” plants, which will burn fossil fuels and potentially saddle them with even more emissions. (Floodlight)

Power surge: 2025 was a tough year for clean energy in the U.S., but grid batteries still set another installation record as more solar power came online and power demand rose. (Canary Media)

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Heat pumps can save households money on their utility bills and are essential to cutting carbon emissions. The catch? The superefficient appliance can cost thousands of dollars more than a new gas furnace.

Zero Homes aims to change that. The startup just raised $16.8 million to make it cheaper and easier for homeowners to switch to heat pumps.

Founded in 2022, the Denver-based company can scope and size the all-electric systems without ever stepping foot inside a customer’s home. Its digital platform cuts the cost of a heat pump installation by 20% on average, with much greater savings common in hard-to-reach rural areas, according to Grant Gunnison, Zero Homes’ founder and CEO.

Prelude Ventures led the Series A funding round. ​“Homeowners want comfort, and they want it easy,” Matt Eggers, Prelude’s managing director, said in a statement. ​“Zero Homes has built the missing digital infrastructure for home upgrades, making it dramatically easier for millions of homeowners to adopt efficient, modern systems without friction.”

The first step in getting a heat pump is sizing: figuring out how big a system needs to be to efficiently and comfortably heat and cool a home. It’s crucial to get that right. A wrong-size system can lead to worse comfort, bigger energy bills, a shorter appliance lifespan, and a greater risk of health-harming black mold.

Historically, quoting a heat pump system’s size has been a hands-on job. Most heat pump installers visit a home to conduct what’s called a Manual J assessment: the gold standard method to determine how much heating and cooling a building requires to keep occupants comfortable. An in-person visit adds time and expense before customers have even committed to a project. And that, according to Gunnison, unnecessarily inflates heat pump costs.

Reducing those ​“soft costs” is especially important now, as utility bills rise nationwide. Electricity and piped gas prices are the biggest drivers of overall inflation.

The startup aims to cut project costs by eliminating the need for an in-person Manual J step with software. By using the company’s free phone app, an individual can take photos and videos of their home and receive a heat pump quote, with all applicable rebates and tax credits included. Once a homeowner agrees to the price, Zero Homes schedules a vetted contractor to get the system up and running.

Beyond reducing costs, this has the added benefit of being less disruptive to customers than the traditional, on-site procedure, which requires a homeowner to coordinate with an HVAC contractor.

“We want to … be nationwide,” said Gunnison, a former general contractor and an MIT-trained engineer who once worked on satellite communications and remote imaging at NASA.

To achieve that scale, Zero Homes relies on partnerships with independent installers that it subcontracts with. Currently, the company operates in Colorado, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Illinois, and California.

Zero Homes’ approach has gained some traction. The U.S. Department of Energy validated the startup’s remote assessments in 2024, Gunnison reported. The Air Conditioning Contractors of America also that year approved the startup’s software as a tool to perform the organization’s trademark Manual J calculations remotely.

Gunnison declined to share whether the company was profitable, but he did say that its revenue had grown by a factor of 10 from 2024 to 2025. Customer service calls on the installations it has managed are ​“very low,” he added. And Zero Homes’ installer network has expanded to nearly 100 contractor businesses.

“We get rid of a lot of the overhead that costs them a lot of time and heartache, so that they can be successful,” Gunnison noted. ​“We don’t charge them for leads; [we] fill their calendars.”

A number of utilities and power co-ops, including ComEd, Great River Energy, and Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, have hired Zero Homes to deploy heat pumps in their service territories. A couple of local governments have also expressed confidence in the company: Chicago partnered with Zero Homes as part of its Green Homes program, and Colorado is giving the business a $745,000 boost through its economic development office to expand its Denver-area operations.

Several other startups around the country are specializing in heat pump installations, such as Elephant Energy, Tetra, Forge, Quilt, and Jetson — which recently raised $50 million to get its in-house-designed heat pump into more buildings.

Gunnison plans to use the new infusion of capital to double his company’s 25-person headcount this year and improve its software capabilities, he said.

It used to take Zero Homes several days to provide a quote to a homeowner who had submitted a scan. Now that process is complete in about one day. By the end of 2026, the startup aims to slash that time to 30 minutes, Gunnison noted.

“Once we can consistently deliver that, then we will very, very rapidly expand geographically.”

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