The US added a record 20.2 GWh of battery storage in just 3 months

In Australia, the real value of these big batteries is not necessarily to provide emergency power, but more to respond in milliseconds to variations in demand and to smooth out the 5 minute spot market.

Having a sink and a source for spikes aids grid stability and somewhat helps to reduce the need to build more infrastructure to handle transmitting power from the generators during those peaks.

It also helps avoid the viability of gas powered generators which are very expensive and carbon intensive.

I'm glad they're reporting it as the energy storage capacity and not the power output capacity. Too many news sites like to report the power output capacity in stories like these, which is horribly misleading, and then often they also frame it as though this is equivalent to adding actual power generation to the grid, which is even more misleading.

It's impressive to see the battery capacity growing on ElectricityMaps over the years : https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/US-CAL-CISO/yearly

But why is the utilization rate so low? It was barely 0.8% of electricity in California last year.

Edit: Got the answer, the batteries fire up around 6pm during the evening peak at around 9GW for ~25% of the total consumption. We would need approximately 5x more batteries and renewable power to move out of carbon-intensive production entirely.

Politically force datacenters to consume only solar and battery. Instead of total collapse, we now have tremendous amounts of cheap energy when the bubble implodes. That seems like the only way to hedge the bet on AI.

Makes sense. With battery technology improving and being the cheapest it's ever been, why not? This is probably the direction most countries will go in the future.

One thing that would really help batteries is permitting reform. The BAAJA reform bill would really help not just the batteries themselves but the transmission lines which are far more difficult to construct thank to an insane system and lots of lawsuits.

Obviously there are a variety of sizes and configurations, but if you assumed 3.5MWh per 20ft container, that's 5771 containers, and if you assumed a PCS container per two battery container, that's 8656 containers, just for an idea of the scale.

Presumably this is only capacity connected to the grid, and doesn't include isolated data centre builds?

For comparison, US grid capacity is about 1250 GW, average usage 500 GW.

So, this adds over two minutes of average usage.

https://seia.org/research-resources/energy-storage-market-ou... says total storage now is about 200 GWh, or about 25 minutes of average demand.

Am I correct to assume all these grid batteries are all made in China as well?

Lots of folks are going with lithium, including myself. I'm adding two more 16 kWh batteries to my home system. It just makes sense.

I wonder how much medium- to long-term storage has been installed this year. Batteries are fantastic, but we need better ways to store excess wind and solar for dark winter days when there's no sun or wind.

It's nice to see more storage being added, but we have keep thr order of magnitude in mind: the peak electricity demand for the US is 750GW, so the added storage for the past 3 month corresponds to just 96 seconds of peak consumption.

There's still a very long way to go !

That's one third of what China added in December, 2025:

https://cleantechnica.com/2026/07/16/chinas-batteries-move-b...

Batteries are great but every country still needs generation to charge them up. Some of the big gentailers build very little new generation capacity.

How many batteries in parallel would you need to capture the power of a lightning strike?

That's 60 Wh per person in the U.S.

I am long on EVs, battery power and solar. Among the few silver linings in the otherwise dystopic hellscape timeline we're heading down now.

For comparison, 20.2 GWh is what the Grand Coulee Dam can produce in 4 hours of operation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Coulee_Dam

How many minutes does your average AI data center last on that amount?

Building out batteries and solar farms. Balancing the need for peak load demands against the steady state of steam generators. Racing to get nuclear going before running out of space for solar panels.

Is this real or are we living in a Factorio livestream?

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