By Summer Maxwell, Bloomberg Green Daily
Demand for batteries has skyrocketed as electricity use across the US swells, driven by data centers’ booming energy needs and increasing electrification. It’s also getting harder to get them connected to power grids.
Falling prices have made batteries more attractive. But after decades of stagnant investment, grids are racing to make the upgrades needed to plug them in, straining supplies of transformers, circuit breakers and other equipment. As those upgrades get delayed, storage projects are piling up in interconnection queues from coast to coast.
Consolidated Edison Inc., a major utility in New York state, for example, says over the past two years the volume of battery storage projects waiting to be connected has grown by 300%. In California, regulators are expecting that holdups to grid upgrades will stall energy projects up and down the state.
“The whole process of interconnecting these new power plants got really log-jammed and bottlenecked,” said Joseph Rand, an energy policy researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “It in some ways broke this historic process of the way transmission grid operators have been operating for almost 20 years.”
Nationwide, some 750 gigawatts of energy storage projects — roughly equivalent to the generating capacity of more than 700 nuclear reactors — are in line to get grid connections, according to the lab’s research. Not all of these projects will get built. Many developers have already abandoned the queue due to delays. Still, the wait is growing; the median was five years in 2025, up from a year and a half in 2015.
The flood of battery projects is expected to continue. Wood Mackenzie, an energy consultancy, projects the US energy storage market will quadruple in the next six years.