Pace of growth helps maintain renewable energy when weather conditions interfere with wind and solar
Faced with worsening climate-driven disasters and an electricity grid increasingly supplied by intermittent renewables, the US is rapidly installing huge batteries that are already starting to help prevent power blackouts.
From barely anything just a few years ago, the US is now adding utility-scale batteries at a dizzying pace, having installed more than 20 gigawatts of battery capacity to the electric grid, with 5GW of this occurring just in the first seven months of this year, according to the federal Energy Information Administration (EIA).
This means that battery storage equivalent to the output of 20 nuclear reactors has been bolted on to America’s electric grids in barely four years, with the EIA predicting this capacity could double again to 40GW by 2025 if further planned expansions occur.
Batteries have output power capacities as well as storage capacity. For grid-scale applications it’s common to list both. The EIA announcement that this article is referencing only focused on power capacity, which is directly comparable to a traditional power plant. The EIA could have provided some additional information, but the article is technically correct and doesn’t mix units.