Watts the Holdup? Pew Charts a Path to Grid Relief

Pew Charitable Trusts says 217 GW of distributed clean energy is ready to deploy. The only thing standing in the way is policy

8 May 2026

One in six American households is behind on its electricity bill. About 40% of adults say the cost of power weighs on their finances. Meanwhile, the grid they depend on was designed for a world without data centres the size of airport terminals, electric trucks, or the particular demands of a warming climate. The gap between what the system can do and what it must do is widening fast.

Into this uncomfortable space steps the Pew Charitable Trusts, whose research playbook published on April 28th lays out six concrete steps for unlocking what it calls distributed energy resources (DERs): rooftop solar, battery storage, small-scale wind, and devices that can feed power back into the grid when demand peaks. The report estimates that 217 gigawatts of such capacity will be added in the United States between 2024 and 2028, roughly equivalent to the entire existing stock of coal-fired power plants. None of it requires building a new long-distance transmission line.

The playbook, developed over 18 months with a bipartisan advisory council, clusters its recommendations around three goals: integrating DERs into formal utility planning cycles, cutting the permitting delays that hold back rooftop and community solar, and using distributed technologies to keep the lights on when storms strike.

"Incorporating DERs into the grid can relieve pressure, add stability, and provide price relief. The challenge remaining is a policy problem, not a technology one." – Audrey Zibelman, former chair of the New York Public Service Commission and advisory council co-chair

State legislatures appear to agree, at least in principle. Adopted DER policies jumped 79% in 2025 compared with the prior year. By December, 24 states and Washington DC had community solar frameworks on the books. Virginia went further, requiring its largest utility, Dominion Energy, to run a virtual power plant pilot drawing on up to 450 megawatts of aggregated residential and commercial assets.

That is progress, though it remains modest by global standards. In Australia, rooftop solar alone supplies 14% of national electricity. American adoption, by comparison, still looks tentative. The economics are not the problem: DERs can scale faster and at lower cost than conventional grid expansion, which demands years of planning and enormous capital outlays. The obstacle, as Pew's report makes plain, is a tangle of outdated rules, slow permitting offices, and utility planning processes built long before a household battery was a plausible grid asset. Whether lawmakers move quickly enough to untangle it is, as ever, the harder question.