September 6–12, 2026

What’s Happening

• Homes are becoming part of the power grid. Analysis this week highlighted the rapid rise of residential solar-plus-storage and virtual power plants. Households can increasingly generate, store and sell power, shifting people from passive ratepayers to active energy-market participants. (Reuters)
• Utility-scale battery storage keeps accelerating. Equinor launched its largest U.S. storage project, a 100-MW battery facility in South Texas capable of helping balance growing wind and solar generation. (Express News)
• The grid connection process itself is being redesigned. MISO placed another 7.3 GW of proposed generation and storage into its expedited resource process, attempting to move resources onto the grid faster as electricity demand rises. (MISO Energy)
• Geothermal exploration is getting new tools. The U.S. Department of Energy announced a September 10 prize designed to improve discovery of hidden geothermal systems, alongside workforce programs intended to increase deployment capacity. (The Department of Energy’s Energy.gov)
• Renewables continue gaining structural share. The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects renewable electricity’s share to rise while coal continues declining, even as overall electricity demand reaches new records because of AI, manufacturing and electrification. (Reuters)

System signal: The energy transition is becoming less about installing generation and more about building an integrated distributed energy operating systems, and location.