Arizona is having a grid battery growth spurt. Will that last?

California and Texas have led the charge on America’s grid battery revolution. Now, a third state is racing to catch up: Arizona. The Grand Canyon State installed more battery capacity than every state besides Texas over the first half of 2026, per a Canary Media analysis of U.S. Energy Information Administration data.

It’s the continuation of a trend from last year, when Arizona also edged out California in both storage and utility-scale solar additions. In recent months, Arizona welcomed three new battery projects with 250 megawatts/​1 gigawatt-hour of storage each — Beehive, Catclaw, and Pediment — plus several smaller ones. 

Arizona also effectively tied Florida for the second most solar installations in the first half of this year (again following Texas) and rounded out its portfolio with 300 MW of gas power and 500 MW of wind.

To be clear, Texas and California still have far more solar and storage plugged into their grids. Battery storage has already helped both states avoid grid shortages heading into heat waves or cold snaps, and pushed wholesale prices down by offsetting more costly gas power with cheap solar generation stored from sunnier hours. But Texas and California were the only states that had managed to unlock perennial multi-gigawatt battery construction until now.

Arizona is currently expanding the map of grid storage dynamism — though some renewable energy advocates worry that a recent turn against clean energy in the state could cause the growth to fizzle out.

Texas and California are special cases. Texas lets batteries compete in an open, deregulated market for energy, and investors flooded in when they saw there was good money to be made. California painstakingly funded years of storage policies to complement the state’s grid decarbonization goals, mandating that utilities invest in batteries while making new gas plants nearly impossible to build.

Arizona doesn’t have a Texas-style free market for energy; its customers are served by a handful of vertically integrated monopoly utilities, namely Arizona Public Service (APS), Tucson Electric Power, and the Salt River Project. Nor does the state boast a California-style mandate or policy apparatus. Indeed, the state’s elected board of utility regulators just went out of its way to eliminate the meager renewable-energy target that had been on the books for two decades.

But Arizona does have ample sunshine and clear, dry weather, making solar the obvious winner for cheapest kilowatt-hour of electricity. In such places, a rapid buildout of solar projects leads to diminishing returns — unless you use batteries to store up surplus solar during the sunniest hours of the day.

To properly understand the boom in battery construction today, one must look back to market conditions around five years ago, when the utilities were awarding the contracts for these plants, said Autumn Johnson, executive director of the Arizona branch of the Solar Energy Industries Association.

In 2018, the Arizona Corporation Commission chastised APS for relying too heavily on gas power plants in its long-term planning, prompting the company to take batteries seriously as a cost-effective source of peak power. The Biden administration passed the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, solidifying a decade’s worth of tax credits for installing solar and batteries. Within a few years, all the state’s major utilities had pledged to decarbonize their fleets by mid-century.

The wave of storage projects built in recent years is the result of contracts the utilities signed in those heady times, Johnson said. 

But the political landscape in Arizona and nationally has shifted since then, casting a pall over the future of the state’s solar and storage buildout.

The Trump administration gutted Biden’s climate law last year, though it preserved tax credits for batteries specifically. APS abandoned its own climate goals. The utility regulator is picking performative fights with clean energy instead of pushing the utilities to be more ambitious. The state legislature this year proposed ​“a record number of terrible energy bills,” Johnson said, including ones to mandate that 85% of electricity capacity come from dispatchable or baseload sources (not intermittent renewables) and to label wind and solar farms a ​“public nuisance” if they fall within 4 miles of a residential property.

And while the utilities can’t change the fundamental economics of solar and batteries, they can change how they assign contracts, Johnson noted.

APS, the biggest battery builder in the state, said in a July planning session that it was excluding four-hour duration batteries from modeling for its long-term energy plans, limiting the options to those with six to eight hours of duration. Four-hour batteries have in recent years become the standard type of peaker plant getting built in California and Arizona, but now APS seems to be taking them off the table. Adding more hours of energy discharge provides greater coverage for the grid but increases construction costs.

“Given all the changes, will we keep our top spot in five years?” Johnson asked of Arizona’s energy storage leadership. ​“I’m not sure it will be a long-lived reign at the top.”

At the very least, construction will continue at a rapid clip through 2026, according to the EIA data, anchored by the nearly finished Maricopa Energy Center, which includes a 550-MW/2.2-GWh-hour battery. Seven battery projects are already under construction for 2027 completion, ranging from 100 MW to 300 MW. Utilities will need to be signing new contracts now to keep the momentum going into the 2030s.