Solar-plus-storage is having a global growth spurt

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

Peanut butter and jelly. Batman and Robin. Solar and storage. Some things just go together, and that’s why investors around the world are pouring more and more money into projects that pair rows of solar panels with boxes of grid batteries on the same site.

Colocated renewable energy projects attracted a record $25 billion of investment in the first half of 2026, according to new global data from BloombergNEF. While that category includes any combination of solar, wind, and storage, it’s dominated by solar-plus-storage.

The $25 billion is nearly double the previous record, set in the second half of 2025 — a jump that reflects the rapidly growing interest in batteries.

Solar’s biggest weakness is its up-and-down power generation. Solar farms produce no power at night (duh) and a ton of energy on sunny afternoons — fluctuations that often don’t align with demand. Adding storage to the mix helps solve that problem, allowing a project to act more like a traditional on-demand power plant that ramps up or down depending on power prices and the grid’s energy needs.

BNEF notes that the U.S. is one of the leading countries when it comes to investment in colocated solar-plus-storage. That makes sense: The grid battery sector is thriving in the U.S., just notching its best quarter ever for installations as the cost of battery cells falls and developers get more comfortable with the tech. Nearly half the storage capacity added last quarter was built alongside solar farms.

Although global spending on colocated projects jumped, the sector accounts for a relatively small chunk of overall renewable energy investment — a topline figure that stayed stagnant between the first half of this year and the second half of 2025. Investment in offshore wind, in particular, plummeted over that time period, with BNEF noting that factors like poor auction results in Denmark and Germany cut into the number of projects able to close financing in recent months.

Still, BNEF concludes that ​“the numbers show that the broader growth story for renewables remains intact.” But in order to bring down planet-baking pollution even as demand for energy spikes, the world will need overall clean-energy investment — not just that for colocated projects — to grow fast. 

Canary Media’s ​“Chart of the Week” series is supported by Amazon. Amazon is known for speed and scale. That same approach drives their sustainability efforts. Guided by data and science, and powered by invention, Amazon works backward from ambitious targets to drive measurable progress. Every package delivered, every data center powered, every product designed is an opportunity to make tomorrow better.