Solar and battery storage are on track to break more records in 2024

The U.S. will build twice as much solar and storage as last year

One rule of thumb when looking at technology adoption is that growth rates tend to slow down as a new innovation saturates the market.

When Apple sold a million iPhones in 2007 it was relatively easy to sell 10 times more the following year. But if the company had sustained that growth rate, every human on Earth—including toddlers like my son and elderly folks like my 95 year old grandma—would have had an iPhone in less than 4 years.

In order to mitigate climate change, clean energy technologies will have to sustain high growth rates over long periods of time. Eliminating fossil fuels in a couple decades and remaking our physical world will require a speed of transition that has no precedent.

So far solar and batteries are proving that they are up to the task.

Last year, the U.S. added a record 19.3 GW of utility-scale solar capacity—72% more than in 2022. It’d be reasonable to assume that after a record year, the annual growth rate would fall this year. Instead, the U.S. is on track to add 38 GW of new capacity this year, nearly twice as much as last year, according to Cleanview data.

As adoption has become more widespread, solar energy’s growth rate has expanded instead of slowing down.

Through last month, developers in the U.S. had already added 17.3 GW of new solar capacity in 2024. Another 20.7 GW worth of projects are currently under construction and expect to come online this year.

The growth of battery storage—a more nascent technology—is even more significant. Last year, the U.S. added 6.6 GW of utility-scale storage to the grid. This year, the country is on track to add 14.7 GW—123% more than in 2023. Here too, growth is accelerating.

The growth of battery storage is showing no signs of slowing down either. Today, the U.S. has a little more than 20 GW of storage on the grid. By the end of next year, total capacity will double, according to Cleanview data.

Eventually, the growth of solar and storage will slow down. But pessimists and pundits have been predicting that time will come soon for more than a decade. And each year, they’ve been wrong.

History has shown that these two technologies can grow faster and for longer than even the most bullish analysts expect.

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