It's Tuesday. For two decades the story of clean power was one number falling, year after year. This year, for solar and batteries alike, that number went the other way.
In today's edition:
📈 Solar's cost curve just bent the wrong way
⚡ Battery gluts, gas-field data centers, and a home-storage push
💰 $26 billion says data centers now own climate tech
🏛️ The White House wants a bigger promise from Big Tech
📊 Who actually wants a data center next door?
The Big Story
Tariffs push US solar and storage costs higher, Lazard finds
Lazard's 2026 Levelized Cost of Energy report, the firm's roughly twentieth annual edition, finds the cost of new clean power rose for the first time in years. Unsubsidized utility-scale solar climbed 18% year on year to a range of $40 to $98 per MWh, and standalone four-hour battery storage jumped to $210 to $292 per MWh. The bank pins the reversal on higher capital costs, higher interest rates, tariffs on lithium-ion imports, and Foreign Entity of Concern rules that are cutting off low-cost Chinese cells and rerouting supply through Southeast Asia. Even after the increase, solar remains among the cheapest sources of new generation in most US markets.
"We've been publishing this report for nearly 20 years, and while utility-scale solar LCOEs are up 18% from last year, they remain 81% lower than in our first edition."
Unsubsidized utility-scale solar came in at $40 to $98 per MWh, up from $38 to $78 in 2025, still below new gas combined-cycle ($51 to $129 per MWh) and far below new nuclear ($175 to $255 per MWh).
Standalone 100 MW, four-hour battery storage rose to $210 to $292 per MWh, roughly 27% higher than 2020, as tariffs and FEOC restrictions push cells to higher-cost supply chains.
Onshore wind stayed the lowest-cost renewable at $37 to $99 per MWh, while solar paired with storage ran $61 to $156 per MWh.
Lazard now adds a "cost of firming intermittency" reflecting how grid operators credit solar's effective load-carrying capability, and says solar still competes with new gas even after that adder.
Source: pv magazine USA
Quick Hits
Small bites from across the grid.
A looming battery glut, a data center that skips the grid, and home storage you snap together like Lego.
China could produce more batteries than the entire world can use by 2030, a Carnegie Endowment analysis warns, projecting Chinese cell capacity of 5,862 to 6,720 GWh against global demand of 4,000 to 5,100 GWh, with about 98% of lithium iron phosphate output already inside China, and it urges selective cooperation over full decoupling. pv magazine USA
Argentina awarded 700 MW of four-hour battery storage across 20 projects in its nationwide AlmaSADI tender after drawing 235 bids totaling 8.3 GW, with Genneia taking 421 MW and DQD Energy 149.5 MW, and average prices falling to about $8,427 per MW-month from $10,000 to $12,000 a year earlier. Energy-Storage.news
Mindstream Energy pitched a 400 MW gas-fired data center built behind the meter inside Jordan's Al Risha gas field, aiming to serve Jordanian and wider MENA compute demand straight from the wellhead rather than the grid. Data Center Dynamics
SolarEdge opened US orders for Nexis, a modular residential solar-and-storage platform it likens to Lego bricks, with 5 kWh battery blocks that stack to 80 kWh and an install the company says takes under 30 minutes, ahead of a July 15 US launch livestream. Electrek
Canadian Solar launched an upgraded EP Cube residential and light-commercial storage line with hybrid inverters, modular LFP cells, and up to 200 kWh of capacity per system. pv magazine USA
The Capital Stack
Climate tech's best half since 2022, and data centers are the reason
Climate-tech venture funding hit $26.1 billion in the first half of 2026, up 55% year on year and the strongest first half since 2022, according to CTVC's new H1 report with Currence. Low-carbon data centers took 34% of all the capital, concentrated in two megadeals (DayOne's $4.5 billion and NScale's $2 billion), while Series C nearly quadrupled to a record $10.5 billion as clean-firm-power IPOs from Fervo and X-energy set records. Deal count, meanwhile, fell to a five-year low, with the ten biggest rounds taking 42% of the money.
Source: CTVC
Also in the capital stack:
Infineon and LS Electric signed a non-binding MoU to co-develop direct-current power infrastructure for AI data centers, targeting solid-state transformers, solid-state circuit breakers, and power-conversion systems for on-site storage, pairing Infineon's power semiconductors with LS Electric, which holds about 60% of South Korea's data-center power market. Data Center Dynamics
Policy Watch
The White House is preparing to convene utilities, data-center operators, and state governors for an expanded voluntary pledge that data centers pay for the generation, transmission, and distribution their loads require, building on March's Ratepayer Protection Pledge signed by Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, and xAI; expect more states to follow Oregon, Florida, and Oklahoma in formalizing data-center rate classes. Data Center Dynamics
Australia's AEMC opened a consultation on minimum-system-load market rules that could reshape the revenue case for grid-scale batteries in the National Electricity Market, as booming rooftop solar drives midday operational demand toward zero and forces new rules for how storage and other resources are dispatched and paid. Energy-Storage.news
Chart of the Day
Who actually wants a data center next door?
With Americans now overwhelmingly opposed to local data centers, Heatmap went looking for the minority who would welcome one. The profile skews male, over 50, and toward 2024 Trump voters, but it is far from monolithic: about a third are Harris voters and about a third are women, and the group is roughly four times likelier than the public to have voted third-party in 2024 (8% versus under 2%).
Source: Robinson Meyer, Heatmap (Heatmap Pro poll by Embold Research), July 13, 2026.
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