Grid Batteries Soaring

Industry Discussions Energy & Utilities
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It’s official: Grid batteries broke another record.

More than 13 gigawatts of energy storage was installed across the U.S. last year, per a new report from the Business Council for Sustainable Energy and BloombergNEF. That’s up from the roughly 12 GW installed in 2024.

It’s the latest reminder of the meteoric rise of battery storage, a quick-to-deploy technology that’s key to cutting emissions from the electricity system. Storage enables the grid to bank electricity when it’s cheap and abundant — like when surplus solar is generated in the middle of a sunny day — and deploy it when prices are high and electrons are scarce.

Less than a decade ago, the sector was little more than an intriguing possibility. Energy storage in America mostly meant massive, decades-old pumped-hydro storage projects and a handful of small lithium-ion battery plants.

In 2017, only 500 megawatts of grid battery capacity was online in the U.S.; now, there are individual battery installations larger than 500 MW. Still, the sector had big expectations for itself back then: In 2017, the Energy Storage Association set a goal of reaching 35 GW of storage capacity by 2025.

Last year, the sector smashed that goal, hitting it in July and ending the year with nearly 45 GW of installed capacity.

Increasingly abundant solar power, rising energy demand, and declining battery costs have combined to propel the storage sector to these lofty heights. To date, most utility-scale batteries have been plugged into the grids of Texas and California, two solar-soaked states with radically different approaches to encouraging storage growth.

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The recent boom in renewables and storage in Texas means its grid is much better prepared for bad weather than it was when Winter Storm Uri hit five years ago.

Five years ago, Winter Storm Uri brought the Texas power grid to its knees. Temperatures plunged across the state for nearly a week, power plants froze, natural gas supply lines failed, and the grid operator came within minutes of a total system collapse. More than 4 million Texans lost electricity, many for days. Over 200 people died. It was the worst infrastructure failure in modern Texas history.

In the years since, Texas has quietly built one of the largest renewable energy and battery storage fleets in the world. According to capacity data from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the state has added roughly 31 gigawatts of solar capacity and 17 GW of battery energy storage — enough to power millions of homes. Over the same period, the legislature mandated weatherization of power plants and natural gas infrastructure, ERCOT improved its operational procedures, and new market mechanisms were introduced to better coordinate solar and storage.

The results speak for themselves. Since Uri, the Texas grid has faced three major winter storms that each set new all-time winter peak demand records. In every case, the grid held. No rolling blackouts. No load shedding. No emergency curtailments. Demand kept climbing, and the grid kept delivering.

This track record matters because a prominent Texas think tank, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, has published a widely circulated analysis arguing that ERCOT’s reliance on solar and battery storage is making the grid less reliable in winter. The analysis is authored by Brent Bennett and uses real ERCOT data. But as this article will show, Bennett’s own numbers contradict his conclusions — and the actual performance of the grid over the past five years contradicts them even more decisively.

The following chart I worked up offers a quick summary: Texas’ reliability has increased dramatically in recent years in direct proportion to the renewables and battery storage it has added.

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Three record-setting winters, zero blackouts

The above data tells the story. At the time of Uri, ERCOT had roughly 5 GW of solar and less than 1 GW of battery storage. When Winter Storm Elliott arrived in December 2022, it had 14 GW of solar and 2 GW of storage. By Winter Storm Heather, in January 2024: 22 GW and 4 GW. By Winter Storm Kingston, in February 2025: 30 GW and 9 GW. And now, as we pass the fifth anniversary of Uri: approximately 35 GW of solar and 15 GW of battery storage.

During each of these storms, peak winter demand set a new record — climbing from 74,525 MW during Elliott to 78,349 MW during Heather to 80,525 MW during Kingston. Just three weeks ago, the grid sailed through another major winter storm with over 11,000 MW of operating reserves and ERCOT said it did ​“not anticipate any reliability issues on the statewide electric grid.”

In none of these events did ERCOT order load shedding. This is the track record that Bennett’s analysis asks you to ignore.

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