Disseminated on behalf of SolarBank Corporation.
The U.S. energy system is changing fast. In 2025, the country is expected to add about 97 gigawatts (GW) of new electricity capacity. Most of this growth will come from solar power and energy storage, showing strong momentum for clean energy, even as fossil fuels remain part of the mix.
A report from S&P Global Market Intelligence says that more than 59 GW of new solar and wind projects are planned for 2025, along with over 31 GW of energy storage. This means nearly 90% of new electricity projects next year will be tied to renewable energy and batteries.
Solar Shines Brightest
Solar energy is growing quickly across the United States. Nearly 49 GW of solar power is in line to connect to the electric grid. That’s enough to power more than 35 million homes for a year.
Texas is leading the solar race, with more than 12 GW of planned solar capacity. Other large amounts are planned in the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) region with 8 GW, and the PJM Interconnection area with over 6 GW.
The growth of solar is being pushed by several things:
- Falling prices of solar panels
- Government tax credits and incentives
- Demand for clean electricity from businesses and households
According to the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), the U.S. solar market grew by 51% in 2023, and similar strong growth is expected in 2025. By 2034, the High Case scenario shows a 17% increase in solar deployment.
Batteries or Energy Storage Take the Grid to the Next Level
Energy storage systems, mostly large batteries, are important because they help store solar and wind power for use when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing. In 2025, over 31 GW of new storage capacity is expected to be built.
California and Texas are the leaders in battery storage. The California Independent System Operator (CAISO) is set to add about 6 GW of storage next year, while Texas plans to add nearly 12 GW.
Storage growth is important because it makes renewable energy more reliable. Batteries can help keep the grid stable and reduce blackouts.
Wind Picks Up, But Slower
Wind energy is still expanding, though not as fast as solar. More than 2 GW of new wind capacity is expected in Texas alone in 2025, and around 2 GW more across the rest of the country.
Offshore wind projects have faced delays due to high costs and supply chain problems, but some are moving ahead. For example, the Vineyard Wind project off the coast of Massachusetts began delivering power to the grid in early 2024 and plans to expand.
Fossil Fuels: Still in the Field
While renewable energy is growing fast, fossil fuels like natural gas and coal are still part of the energy system.
In 2025, the U.S. plans to add 6.4 GW of new natural gas capacity. At the same time, 4.6 GW of older gas plants are expected to retire, resulting in a net gain of 1.8 GW.
Coal power continues to decline. About 6.2 GW of coal-fired power plants are scheduled to shut down in 2025. This follows a long-term trend, as more utilities move away from coal due to high costs and pollution concerns.
Still, some recent government actions could slow coal’s decline. In April 2025, President Trump signed orders calling coal a “critical mineral” and pushed for its use in powering data centers. His administration declared a “national energy emergency” and said the grid was becoming less reliable without coal and gas.
Even so, experts say coal is unlikely to see a big comeback. Most utility companies are not planning to build new coal plants, as they worry about being left with stranded assets—plants that cost more to operate than they earn.
Natural Gas Eyes a Bigger Role
As electricity demand rises, especially from electric vehicles and data centers, natural gas could play a larger role in some parts of the country.
There’s going to be a lot of momentum for natural gas, per Steve Piper, director of energy research at S&P Global Commodity Insights. He noted that areas like the Marcellus and Utica shale regions, which have low-cost gas, could see more gas power plants being built.
Still, challenges remain for natural gas. High capital costs, slow permitting, and supply chain delays could limit how fast new plants are built.
Grid Growth by Region
Each part of the U.S. energy grid has its own plans for new projects in 2025. These include the following:
- ERCOT (Texas): 27 GW of new capacity, with only 574 MW of retirements. Major growth in solar and batteries.
- PJM (Mid-Atlantic and Midwest): 7 GW of new projects, mostly solar. About 3 GW of fossil fuel plants will retire.
- CAISO (California): 10 GW of new capacity, including 6 GW of storage.
- MISO (Midwest): 11 GW of new capacity, mostly solar. Coal retirements are expected.
- ISO New England: About 2 GW of new power, mostly solar and storage.
- NYISO (New York): 1.4 GW of new capacity, with gas retirements.
- SPP (Southwest Power Pool): 6 GW of new capacity, mainly from solar and gas.
- Non-ISO/RTO areas (Southeast and Western U.S.): 33 GW of new capacity, including 17 GW of solar and 11 GW of storage.
Toward a Cleaner Grid
Overall, the U.S. is set to add nearly 86 GW of new net power capacity in 2025. Most of this will come from solar and storage. These technologies are key to cutting emissions and meeting climate goals. And one company that stands out in this field is SolarBank Corporation (Nasdaq: SUUN) (Cboe CA: SUNN) (FSE: GY2).
SolarBank is a leading independent renewable energy developer focused on distributed and community solar projects in Canada and the U.S. The company specializes in solar, battery storage, and EV charging solutions for utilities, municipalities, commercial clients, and homeowners.
Notably, SolarBank completed a $41 million USD deal with Honeywell for three New York-based solar projects and began work on a 1.4 MW rooftop project for Fiera Real Estate in Alberta. Major community solar initiatives include the Geddes, Greenville, and Nassau projects in New York, set to power thousands of homes. In Nova Scotia, SolarBank is developing up to 31 MW of solar capacity with TriMac Engineering, targeting 4,000 households.
Looking ahead, SolarBank is advancing projects in New York, Pennsylvania, and Nova Scotia, including agrivoltaic systems that combine solar power with farming. These efforts highlight the company’s role in accelerating the clean energy transition through innovative, community-based solar solutions.
However, fossil fuels are still needed to meet rising demand and ensure grid reliability. Policymakers and energy companies face tough choices as they try to balance clean energy growth with keeping the lights on.
Even with political shifts, experts say the energy transition is moving forward. Market forces, customer demand, and lower costs for renewables are driving long-term change.
As more projects get built in 2025, the U.S. will come closer to a cleaner energy system—one that can power homes, businesses, and vehicles while cutting carbon pollution.
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READ MORE: Trump’s New Tariffs Wipe Out $2.5 Trillion: How Can It Stall America’s Clean Energy Future?
This report contains forward-looking information. Please refer to the SolarBank press release entitled “SolarBank Announces 2024 Highlights” for details of the information, risks and assumptions.
Disclosure: Owners, members, directors, and employees of carboncredits.com have/may have stock or option positions in any of the companies mentioned: None.
Additional disclosure: This communication serves the sole purpose of adding value to the research process and is for information only. Please do your own due diligence. Every investment in securities mentioned in publications of carboncredits.com involves risks that could lead to a total loss of the invested capital.
Please read our Full RISKS and DISCLOSURE here.
The post U.S. Solar and Energy Storage Set for Major Growth in 2025 appeared first on Carbon Credits.
Most businesses that decide to act on their net-zero targets reach the same point of friction. Buying carbon credits has meant tracking down brokers, sitting through sales calls, and requesting a quote just to learn a price, sometimes with limited proof of what you are buying.
The earnings calls that quietly reframed climate from sustainability question to operating risk.
Three earnings calls in the last 18 months tell the story without any help from a press release.
Hershey, May 2024: cocoa price exposure compresses margin, and the company attributes part of the cost shock to West African weather. Olam, July 2024: coffee climate exposure quantified in the annual report. JBS, January 2025: supply chain climate disclosures expanded materially in response to investor pressure and regulatory expectation. None of these companies issued the announcement as climate news. They issued it as financial news. The climate-linked supply chain risk did not arrive with a sustainability framing; it arrived as a P&L line.
You are probably reading this article because you suspect the same thing is happening to your business. This piece walks through what is showing up on which earnings calls, how procurement and finance leaders are quantifying the exposure, and what serious corporates are doing about it before the regulator asks.
Where climate risk has already appeared in earnings
The pattern is consistent across resource-intensive sectors. A weather event compresses supply, the price spikes, the cost flows through the income statement, and the analyst on the call asks whether the event is anomalous or structural. Increasingly, the honest answer is the second one.
Cocoa is the cleanest example. The 2023 to 2024 West African harvest fell sharply on the back of erratic rainfall and disease. Cocoa futures more than tripled. Companies with concentrated West African sourcing absorbed the cost; companies with diversified sourcing absorbed less. The exposure was not climate as ESG topic. It was climate as cost of goods.
Coffee follows the same pattern. Brazilian and Vietnamese harvests have moved on weather more sharply across the last several seasons. Roasters with long-tenor supplier relationships and origin diversification have managed the volatility; roasters with spot-market exposure have not. Wheat, sugar, palm oil, beef: the same dynamic in different commodities, a pattern the IPCC AR6 Working Group II report projects will intensify across agricultural systems through mid-century.
What this means: climate risk is no longer a footnote in the 10-K. It is a line item the CFO has to explain on the call.
The three commodity exposures that hit margin first
For most companies with material Scope 3 exposure, three exposures dominate the near-term P&L risk.
- Concentrated single-origin sourcing in a climate-vulnerable region. If your tier-one supply for any material commodity sits in one geography, you have a concentration risk that climate amplifies. Diversification across origins is the obvious hedge, but it takes years to build and requires relationships you cannot acquire by tender.
- Supplier financial fragility under climate stress. Smallholder farmers, who supply a large share of the global cocoa, coffee, and palm oil market, do not carry the balance sheets to absorb yield shocks. When yields collapse, they exit. When they exit, your supply base shrinks, and the surviving suppliers raise prices. The risk is structural, not cyclical.
- Logistics and storage exposure to extreme weather. Hurricane disruptions to Gulf shipping, drought-driven Panama Canal restrictions, flooding in European inland waterways: each of these has moved input costs in the last three years, a pattern documented in Munich Re’s natural catastrophe data. The exposure shows up as a one-quarter event in the financial press but accumulates over time on the cost line.
TCFD and ISSB disclosure changes
The disclosure architecture has now caught up with the risk. The Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, whose recommendations are now embedded in the ISSB’s IFRS S2 climate standard, requires companies to disclose climate-related risks across physical and transition categories, with quantification where possible.
For physical risk specifically (the climate-linked supply chain risk you are reading about), the disclosure must address both acute exposures (extreme weather events) and chronic exposures (gradual changes in temperature, precipitation, and growing seasons). The disclosure must address the time horizon over which the risk is material, the parts of the value chain exposed, and the financial impact under different scenarios.
The CSRD imposes similar requirements under European law, with double materiality (both financial and impact materiality) embedded in the assessment. The practical effect: your auditors and your investor relations team now need a defensible answer to the climate-linked supply chain risk question, and the answer needs to be quantified.
What procurement and finance can do now
Three actions matter near-term.
Map your exposure. Most companies do not have a clear view of which tier-one and tier-two suppliers sit in which climate-vulnerable geographies. Without the map, you cannot quantify the risk, and without the quantification, you cannot disclose it credibly. The map is the foundation, and World Resources Institute climate risk research provides useful public tooling to start.
Diversify and deepen, in that order. Diversification across origins reduces concentration risk, but the deeper move is to invest in the resilience of the suppliers you already have. Regenerative practices, agroforestry, soil health interventions: these reduce yield volatility under climate stress and protect your input cost trajectory.
Embed the climate spend inside procurement, not outside it. Treating climate risk as a sustainability cost line subordinates it to the ESG budget. Treating it as a procurement and resilience investment puts it in the budget that matters, which is the cost-of-goods budget that the CFO defends quarterly.
Nature-based supply chain investments are the asset class designed for exactly this purpose. They sit inside the value chain, they reduce climate-linked supply risk, they generate verifiable Scope 3 reductions, and they produce the documentation an auditor and a regulator can both test.
If you are quantifying climate-linked supply chain risk in advance of the next earnings cycle or the next disclosure period, the carbon and sustainability experts at Carbon Credit Capital can help you map your exposure and structure a Dual-Value Model response that addresses reduction, resilience, and disclosure-readiness in a single program. Schedule a consultation.
More and more small and medium-sized businesses are hearing the same question from their larger customers: What is your carbon footprint? That question now travels down entire supply chains, and it arrives next to tender requirements, certification criteria, and rising customer expectations.
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