Residential solar deployment is increasing as customers grow tired of unpredictable energy bills.
Using the EIA’s small scale solar project estimates, which includes residential solar, small-scale solar capacity rose:
- From ~36,502 MWac (Dec 2024) to ~37,391 MWac (Mar 2025): net +889.7 MWac (1Q2025).
- From ~39,243 MWac (Sep 2025) to ~40,475 MWac (Dec 2025): net +1,231.5 MWac (4Q2025).
New small scale solar projects rose around 38% from the first quarter of 2025 to the end of last year. MWac means megawatts/alternating current. This is how much electricity capacity can actually be delivered to the grid from these individual units.
As solar gains in the grid due to price stability, and our urgent need for speed when it comes to electric power, Washington needs to be mindful of domestic solar so we are not in the position Europe finds itself in — less reliant on Russian oil and gas, near total reliance on China solar.
China remains the dominant solar manufacturer and controls the entire supply chain, from the polysilicon that goes into making solar cells, all the way up to the solar panel itself. The U.S. is mostly involved in solar panel manufacturing, but we are moving into solar cells manufacturing as well, and need to build the polysilicon supply. For now, that sourcing is China dependent. This is high risk, of course, given the geopolitical tensions of the day.
A recent Reuters article said that some in China were weighing restrictions on solar exports to the U.S., though it is unclear what the exact restrictions would be, if enacted.
A recent bipartisan letter by Sens. Rick Scott (R-FL) and Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) said that any effective policy response to solar needs to consider an entire and fully domestic solar supply chain — spanning polysilicon, ingots, wafers, cells, and modules, and the finished solar panels.
U.S.-based companies know that solar has become the only game in town for quick deployment in an energy starved market. On Tuesday, Suniva announced that it is building a 4.5 GW solar cell manufacturing facility in Laurens, South Carolina. The facility is projected to start producing solar cells by mid-2027. The new facility will bring the company’s total domestic solar cell manufacturing capacity to over 5.5 GW annually.
“The question of where our energy comes from — and who controls the supply chain that delivers it — is among the most consequential questions America faces,” said Matt Card, Suniva’s president.
Solar is the obvious “low hanging fruit” to combat our growing electricity demand.
First, geopolitical risk equals commodity price volatility. That argument is being used in the U.S., Europe and as far away and India as the reason for accelerating renewables. They all frame domestic solar and battery storage as a hedge against oil and gas market instability associated with war and geographic chokepoint risk — like we are seeing now in the Strait of Hormuz.
Second, load-growth urgency and turbine scarcity is reshaping near-term resource narratives among energy investors. Developers and investment analysts all describe gas turbine lead times stretching out five years with new power not coming online from those power plants until 2030. Solar, especially utility-scale solar paired with storage, is framed as the fastest, most readily scalable option.
War, AI, and Grid Stress: Why This Is Solar Power’s Moment
The war in Iran is solar power’s Covid moment.
During the pandemic, and shortly afterwards, Western governments, ours included, looked at world supply chains of everything from basic semiconductors used in cars, to generic drugs, and saw how pandemic lockdowns disrupted them drastically. The auto industry in the U.S. had to furlough workers. U.S. hospitals famously could not get personal protection equipment as basic as nitrile gloves and masks.
Now with oil and gas price fluctuations and potential shortages on the horizon due to war damaged infrastructure in the Gulf states, the benefits of deploying solar and storage are becoming increasingly obvious.
For years, solar power was framed primarily as a climate solution. Today, that framing is changing. Policymakers across the political spectrum—including many in the Trump administration—are increasingly viewing solar through a different lens: as a tool for energy security, supply chain resilience, and industrial strength.
That shift is being driven by three forces happening at once: geopolitical instability, surging electricity demand from artificial intelligence, and mounting stress on the U.S. power grid.
Together, they are reshaping how Washington—and the market—thinks about energy.
As tech companies compete to see who can build the most data centers, the most pressing question today is not can they be built, but how will they be powered?Natural gas turbines are on back order. The fastest way, the only way, is solar. This past month has revealed solar to be a less volatile source of electricity. For countries that produce more of their solar equipment domestically, it means they are less susceptible to geopolitical turmoil.
A new use case has formed for solar energy. It is no longer about lowering greenhouse gas emissions; the story for solar today is all about supply resilience and price stability.
In the political sphere, solar power is emerging as a bipartisan solution to complement other forms of energy. Only two multinational oil companies are investing in the space — both are European. Shell Oil owns Savion, a utility-scale solar developer (not a solar panel manufacturer) and BP’s solar utility Lightsource owns solar farms in about 9 states. But of the top five states with the most solar power capacity, California is the only blue state. The other four are Texas, Florida, North Carolina and Arizona.
Solar is bipartisan. It was the climate change narrative, and the “renewable green energy” moniker, that turned Republicans off to it. But that narrative is no longer an issue. Even Democrats are no longer using it as a reason to deploy anymore.
Solar Moves Beyond the Climate Change Narrative
Since the Iran War began on March 1, multiple elected officials have tied the war and associated price shocks to calls to expand solar deployment. They usually framed solar as a way to reduce exposure to volatile global oil and gas markets.
“Energy prices are too high. Utility prices are too high. We want more solar. We want more battery storage,” said New York governor Kathy Hochul on March 19. She was bemoaning high fossil fuel prices at the time. Hochul said the reasoning behind solar is no longer about climate change.
“This is not the world of 2019,” she said. That was the year New York enacted a law to reduce fossil fuel in the power grid. She is putting those targets on hold because of energy prices and high demand. “We’ll not walk away from our climate goals, but we will make sure that the path we’re on is realistic and fair to the people we serve. If we have a climate policy that leaves families behind, that is not sustainable. Our goal is to keep the lights on, keep the grid reliable, and keep costs down.”
On March 25, Sen. Chuck Schumer (R-NY) also called for more solar. He included nuclear, including funding for fusion energy, seen as the future of nuclear power. Schumer hinted what a future Democratic Party majority, or White House, might be thinking regarding the power grid — create mechanisms that “limit taxpayer expense while maximizing innovation and deployment,” Schumer said. “We must restore and expand support for individuals to produce their own energy, providing security and resilience at home, all while lowering costs.”
After the large snow storms in February in the northeast, Sunrun CEO Mary Powell told Fox Business News that, “Americans need a form of reliable energy to power their homes. And they need price stability.” Sunrun’s business model is mainly to get residential solar on long-term lease contracts. This essentially turns people’s homes into Sunrun power plants with no upfront costs, and a locked-in monthly rate that is contracted to rise at around 3%. Rolling 12 month inflation for electricity as of March 1 was around 5%. “Solar can give customers control over their pocket book,” she said. “We need every electron we can bring onto the grid.”
Currently, there are a handful of solar utility projects waiting to get permits signed, as The New York Times noted in February. Some seem to be stuck in permitting purgatory, with one giant solar project placed on hold in Nevada in October. The Nevada projects could still see the light of day. Florida-based NextEra is part of that development, known as Esmeralda-7, and Nevada is run by Republican governor Joe Lombardo, endorsed twice by President Trump.
Utah’s Republican Gov. Spencer Cox posted on X in October when Esmeralda-7 was paused by the Department of Energy that he thought solar plus battery storage can “be close to baseload power.” Cox wants more solar. Natural gas fired power plants are still on a waiting list for turbines. And nuclear power takes a long time to build.
Natural Gas Utilities: Too Little, Too Late
Natural gas, like nuclear, will be built into the future. Solar can be built today. Even easier, perhaps, is turning residential rooftops into independent power producers. That can happen over a couple of weekends.
Natural gas-fired power capacity planned or under development more than tripled in 2025 to 252 gigawatts, according to Global Energy Monitor. Not all the planned capacity is likely to be built anytime soon.
Turbine back orders are extending beyond five years (it was two years lead time in 2021) and the costs associated with building a natural gas fired power plant are rising. New natural gas power plants are not expected to add to the country’s electric power output until 2030, according to a Woods Mackenzie report.
“Manufacturers are unlikely to be able to deliver the turbines much faster in this timeframe, even with the recent announcements of capacity expansions,” said Patrick Huang, senior research analyst for Woods Mackenzie. Renewables and storage can meet some of that new demand, he said.
Demand for electricity is rising. AI data centers and new homes are being built with electric heating systems instead of natural gas all add to the demand. EVs may be struggling of late, but let gasoline prices hover near $4 a gallon for a while and that will change.
This demand has led to higher prices for natural gas power plants, and longer lead times to get the turbines needed to power them, as Reuters reported on March 2.
Demand for Electricity
War, AI, and grid stress. The domestic power debate is shifting. Solar is a beneficiary of that shift as electricity demand is rising fast.
According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), there’s been a net increase from 2020 to 2025 of around 350 terawatt-hours of demand, or roughly a 10% rise in five years.
Another important metric is peak demand, not just total consumption. U.S. peak load has pushed toward 740–760 gigawatts in recent summers with regional grids like ERCOT in Texas and the PJM Interconnection which captures Virginia and other states hit record peaks from 2021 through 2025.
Peak demand drives new plant construction, of which solar has dominated the landscape so far.
Since 2020, the rebound post-Covid, coupled with growth in steel production, cloud computing and AI data workloads has led to increased industrial demand for electricity. Data centers are expected to double their share of domestic electricity use by 2023, according to the EIA.
Residential Solar Deployment Rising
Residential solar deployment is increasing as customers grow tired of unpredictable energy bills.
Using the EIA’s small scale solar project estimates, which includes residential solar, small-scale solar capacity rose:
New small scale solar projects rose around 38% from the first quarter of 2025 to the end of last year. MWac means megawatts/alternating current. This is how much electricity capacity can actually be delivered to the grid from these individual units.
As solar gains in the grid due to price stability, and our urgent need for speed when it comes to electric power, Washington needs to be mindful of domestic solar so we are not in the position Europe finds itself in — less reliant on Russian oil and gas, near total reliance on China solar.
China remains the dominant solar manufacturer and controls the entire supply chain, from the polysilicon that goes into making solar cells, all the way up to the solar panel itself. The U.S. is mostly involved in solar panel manufacturing, but we are moving into solar cells manufacturing as well, and need to build the polysilicon supply. For now, that sourcing is China dependent. This is high risk, of course, given the geopolitical tensions of the day.
A recent Reuters article said that some in China were weighing restrictions on solar exports to the U.S., though it is unclear what the exact restrictions would be, if enacted.
A recent bipartisan letter by Sens. Rick Scott (R-FL) and Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) said that any effective policy response to solar needs to consider an entire and fully domestic solar supply chain — spanning polysilicon, ingots, wafers, cells, and modules, and the finished solar panels.
U.S.-based companies know that solar has become the only game in town for quick deployment in an energy starved market. On Tuesday, Suniva announced that it is building a 4.5 GW solar cell manufacturing facility in Laurens, South Carolina. The facility is projected to start producing solar cells by mid-2027. The new facility will bring the company’s total domestic solar cell manufacturing capacity to over 5.5 GW annually.
“The question of where our energy comes from — and who controls the supply chain that delivers it — is among the most consequential questions America faces,” said Matt Card, Suniva’s president.
Solar is the obvious “low hanging fruit” to combat our growing electricity demand.
First, geopolitical risk equals commodity price volatility. That argument is being used in the U.S., Europe and as far away and India as the reason for accelerating renewables. They all frame domestic solar and battery storage as a hedge against oil and gas market instability associated with war and geographic chokepoint risk — like we are seeing now in the Strait of Hormuz.
Second, load-growth urgency and turbine scarcity is reshaping near-term resource narratives among energy investors. Developers and investment analysts all describe gas turbine lead times stretching out five years with new power not coming online from those power plants until 2030. Solar, especially utility-scale solar paired with storage, is framed as the fastest, most readily scalable option.
The China Problem—and the Policy Opportunity
China dominates the global solar supply chain, from polysilicon refining through ingots, wafers, and solar cells. The United States, by contrast, has historically been strongest in upstream production while losing downstream manufacturing to foreign competitors.
That imbalance creates a structural vulnerability.
If domestic solar cell and module production remains weak, U.S. polysilicon producers will continue to depend on foreign manufacturers as their primary customers. That undermines both the solar industry and the semiconductor ecosystem that relies on scale production of high-purity silicon.
This is why policy matters.
A recent bipartisan letter from Senators Rick Scott and Tammy Baldwin made the point clearly: any effective response must address the entire solar supply chain—from polysilicon to wafers, cells, and finished modules—not just one segment in isolation.
The administration’s ongoing Section 232 investigation into polysilicon presents a critical opportunity to do exactly that.
Getting Policy Right
Solar is now central to solving America’s near-term energy challenge. But deploying solar alone is not enough.
The United States must ensure that the supply chain behind it is domestic.
That means:
Partial measures will not work. Focusing only on polysilicon risks reinforcing dependence rather than eliminating it.
A full supply chain approach—covering polysilicon, ingots, wafers, cells, and modules—is essential.
The Bottom Line
The U.S. power debate is changing. The question is no longer whether solar will be built. It is whether the United States will build it—or import it.
Solar is no longer just an environmental issue. It is an industrial policy issue. It is a national security issue. And increasingly, it is the only solution available at the speed required to meet demand.
America, we have a power problem. At the moment, solar is the solution.
MADE IN AMERICA.
CPA is the leading national, bipartisan organization exclusively representing domestic producers and workers across many industries and sectors of the U.S. economy.
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