By Don Dulchinos, Director of Market Facilitation, OpenADR Alliance

The OpenADR Alliance has seen significant growth in solar and storage companies becoming members of the Alliance and connecting to the utility grid. And we have seen a more recent trend in innovation in the solar space. As we published in August:

A next generation of Virtual Power Plants has emerged in 2025, embodying trends which will require more efficient integration with utility grids. Trends include: VPPs that integrate EV charging and other new resources; building management systems aggregated as VPPs; new use cases ranging from grid connected residential HVAC to AI-driven data centers; Community Choice Aggregators that are integrating VPP’s as they begin to act as demand response aggregators, and the emergence of solar panel manufacturers diversifying into VPP creation and management. The OpenADR Alliance (openadr.org) has a unique perspective on these trends as tighter integration calls for scalable information technology connections between utilities and a wider range of innovative distributed energy resources. Read more. 

As I was writing that, the Congress of the United States passed H.R. 1, or the One Big Beautiful Bill, which among other things represented a reversal of U.S. policies encouraging clean energy.  When I attended RE+ in early September, I was eagerly awaiting the Solar Energy Industries Association policy response.  SEIA head Abby Ross Hopper presented what I thought was a very strong and pragmatic response.  Somewhat paraphrased, she said

-       Policy has now fundamentally changed – the Federal government is openly hostile – but we did avoid a worst case scenario. We are still a major Industry - $70 billion a year, and 280,000 jobs. We are still cheaper and faster to market than any other energy source. Solar and storage are essential to the nation’s future, and we deliver faster and cheaper (than, e.g., natural gas power plants.) Tax credit policy was never a sustainable model, and so it’s best for us to pivot.

With that as a starting point, four main points

-       Put storage at the center, not as a supplement to solar, for resilience, flexibility, and reliability.

-       Focus on state policies to counterbalance Federal as needed.

-       Reshore (move to U.S.) the solar and storage supply chain. (This trend was already apparent in many places on the RE+ exhibit floor.) The U.S. is already the third largest solar manufacturer in world.

-       Reimagine the residential solar customer experience: cost reduction, faster installation, faster permitting and getting closer to standardized design and installation which is easier for customers to understand.

-       And finally, SEIA also released 1H 2025 data showing the U.S. installed 18 gigawatts of new capacity in the first six months of the year, and that solar and storage accounted for 82% of all new power added to the grid.

What was missing from SEIA remarks was the impact of grid-tied renewables, a segment of the market where OpenADR has great visibility. Indeed, we noted there were several exhibitors present at RE+ who are working in that direction, including OpenADR members Wevo Energy (Solar Edge), Sol-Ark, Solax, Fortress Power, AISPEX, Franklin WH, and CPower. VPP’s that are grid-connected gain additional financial benefits for themselves and their end-user customers.

And finally, SEIA also released 1H 2025 data showing the U.S. installed 18 gigawatts of new capacity in the first six months of the year, and that solar and storage accounted for 82% of all new power added to the grid. Find more data here.