Escape Velocity: The energy transition has momentum and will be hard to stop
Not even Trump can slow the shift to renewable energy
This is important. The energy transition - from fossil fuels to electricity - is now . China is leading it. America is trying to stop it. America is willfully being backward. Losing more and more ground to its greatest rival.
I'll be seeding lots on this topic. Trump isn't just destroying out democracy. He's destroying our place in the world. It's astonishing to see that someone can be this stupid.
There are links in the seed.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Gabrielle Merite for Vox
President Donald Trump ran on a promise of more fossil fuels, fewer environmental regulations, and outright climate denial — and now he's following through. His administration is gutting clean energy policy, fast-tracking oil and gas projects, and reshaping environmental policy with sweeping consequences.
At the same time, though, there's another force pulling hard in the opposite direction. A global clean tech revolution — one that powers our homes, our cars, and our lives without wrecking the climate — is already well underway.
The new generation of wind and solar power, batteries, and electric vehicles are on the verge of, or have already achieved, escape velocity , breaking free from the gravity of political capriciousness. In a lot of places, especially in power generation, the cleanest option is also the fastest, the cheapest, and the one most likely to turn a profit. That's true whether or not you care about the climate.
The world is building momentum around clean energy, unlocking ways to grow economies and raise living standards without cranking up the planet's temperature. And every fraction of a degree we avoid means more lives saved, fewer disasters, more stability, and more of the future left intact.
It's 2025 — halfway between now and 2050, the year stamped on basically every major climate target. That puts us closer to those deadlines than we are to Gladiator, Kid A, iMacs, and frosted tips. So it's a good moment to pause and ask: How did we get here? Are we moving fast enough? And what's standing in the way?
In this special project, Escape Velocity, Vox's climate team set out to answer those questions. We looked at the places where climate progress is still speeding up, the breakthroughs changing everything behind the scenes, and the moments where clean tech might overcome political resistance entirely.
The US has played a key role in getting the world to this point. But now, other countries are eyeing the lead. Right now, we're holding a strong hand, but our government is actively sabotaging it. What's at stake isn't just a cleaner future — it's whether the US stays in the race at all. — Paige Vega, climate editor
CREDITS:
Editorial lead : Paige Vega
Editors : Carla Javier, Miranda Kennedy, Naureen Khan, Paige Vega, Elbert Ventura, Bryan Walsh | Reporters : Avishay Artsy, Sam Delgado, Adam Clark Estes, Jonquilyn Hill, Melissa Hirsch, Umair Irfan, Benji Jones, Paige Vega | Copy editors and fact-checkers : Colleen Barrett, Esther Gim, Melissa Hirsch, Sarah Schweppe, Kim Slotterback | Art director : Paige Vickers | Data visualization : Gabrielle Merite | Photo illustration : Gabrielle Merite | Original photography : Annick Sjobakken | Data fact-checking : Melissa Hirsch | Podcast engineering : Matthew Billy | Audience : Bill Carey, Gabby Fernandez, Shira Tarlo | Editorial directors : Elbert Ventura and Bryan Walsh | Special thanks : Nisha Chittal and Lauren Katz
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My initial comments will be other articles from Vox's series.
The charts in the following Comment correct almost all the nonsense about the electricity revolution circulating on the internet.
10 charts prove that clean energy is winning — even in the Trump era
Climate progress is actually good business.
At every light switch, power socket, and on the road, an unstoppable revolution is already underway.
Technologies that can power our lives and jobs while doing less harm to the global climate — wind, solar, batteries, etc. — are getting cheaper, more efficient, and more abundant. The pace of progress on price, scale, and performance has been so extraordinary that even the most optimistic forecasts about green tech in the past have turned out to be too pessimistic. Clean energy isn’t just powering our devices, tools, and luxuries — it’s growing the global economy , creating a whole suite of new jobs, and reshaping trade.
And despite what headlines may say , there’s no sign these trends will reverse. Political and economic turmoil may slow down clean energy, but the sector has built up so much momentum that it’s become nigh unstoppable.
Take a look at Texas : The largest oil- and gas-producing state in the US is also the largest in wind energy, and it’s installing more solar than any other. Texas utilities have come to realize that investing in clean energy is not just good for the environment; it’s good business. And even without subsidies and preferential treatment, the benefits of clean technologies — in clean air, scalability, distribution, and cost — have become impossible to ignore.
And there’s only more room to grow. The world is still in the early stages of this revolution as market forces become the driver rather than environmental worries. In some US markets, installing new renewable energy is cheaper than running existing coal plants. Last year, the US produced more electricity from wind and solar power than from coal for the first time.
If these energy trends persist, the US economy will see its greenhouse gas emissions diminish faster, reducing its contribution to climate change. The US needs to effectively zero out its carbon dioxide emissions by the middle of the century in order to keep the worst damages of climate change in check.
Now, just a few months into Trump’s second presidency, it’s still an open question just how fragile the country’s progress on clean energy and climate will be. But the data is clear: There is tremendous potential for economic growth and environmental benefits if the country makes the right moves at this key inflection point.
Certainly incentives like tax credits, business loans, and research and development funding could accelerate decarbonization. On the other hand, pulling back — as the Trump administration wants to do — would slow down clean energy in the US, though it wouldn’t stop it.
But the rest of the world isn’t sitting idle, and if the US decides to slow its head start, its competitors may take the lead in a massive, rocketing industry. — Umair Irfan, Vox climate correspondent
President Donald Trump does not like wind energy — apparently, in part, because he thinks turbines are ugly. “We’re not going to do the wind thing,” Trump said after his inauguration during a rally. “Big, ugly windmills, they ruin your neighborhood.”
He’s put some power behind those feelings. Within mere hours of stepping into office, Trump signed an executive order that hamstrung both onshore and offshore wind energy developments, even as he has claimed that the US faces an energy crisis. The order directed federal agencies to temporarily stop issuing approvals for both onshore and offshore wind projects and pause leasing for offshore projects in federal waters.
Policies like this will harm the wind industry , analysts say, as will existing and potential future tariffs, which will likely make turbines more expensive . Those policies could also pose a serious threat to offshore developments. But the sector overall simply has too much inertia to be derailed, according to Eric Larson, a senior research engineer at Princeton University who studies clean energy.
“Because costs have been coming down so dramatically in the last decade, there is a certain momentum there that’s going to carry through,” Larson said.
Since 2010, US wind capacity has more than tripled , spurred by federal tax incentives. But even without those incentives — which Congress may eventually try to cut — onshore wind turbines are the cheapest source of new energy, according to the research firm Lazard. In 2023, the average cost of new onshore wind projects was two-thirds lower than a typical fossil fuel alternative, per a report by the International Renewable Energy Agency.
In fact, wind energy might be the best example of how politics have had little bearing on the growth of renewable energy. Texas, which overwhelmingly supported Trump in the recent election, generates more wind energy than any other state, by far . The next three top states for wind energy production — Iowa, Oklahoma, and Kansas — all swung for Trump in the last election, too. These states are particularly windy, but they’ve also adopted policies, including tax incentives, that have helped build out their wind-energy sectors.
Animated image of wind power growth in the US .
“It’s just a way to make money,” Larson said of wind. “It has nothing to do with the political position on whether climate change is real or not. People continue to get paid to put up wind turbines, and that’s enough for them to do it.”
In Iowa, for example, wind energy has drawn at least $22 billion in capital investment and has helped lower the cost of electricity . In 2023, wind generated about 60 percent of the state’s energy — more than double any other source, like coal or natural gas.
The wind sector is not without its challenges. In the last two years the cost of wind energy has gone up , due in part to inflation and permitting delays — which raised the costs of other energy sources, too. Construction of new wind farms had begun slowing even before Trump took office. Dozens of counties across the US, in places like Ohio and Virginia, have also successfully blocked or delayed wind projects , citing a range of concerns like noise and impact on property values. Offshore wind, which is far costlier, faces even more opposition. Opponents similarly worry that they’ll affect coastal property values and harm marine life.
Yet ultimately these hurdles will only delay what is likely inevitable, analysts say: a future powered in large part by wind. — Benji Jones, Vox environmental correspondent
It’s hard to think of a natural wonder more unstoppable than the sun, and harnessing its energy has proven just as formidable. The United States last year saw a record amount of clean energy power up, with solar leading the way. Over the past decade, solar power capacity in the US has risen eightfold .
Why? Solar has just gotten way, way, way cheaper, even more than wind.
The main technology for turning sunlight into electricity, the single-junction photovoltaic panel, has drastically increased the efficiency by which it turns a ray of sunlight into a moving electron. This lets the same-size panel convert more light into electricity. Since the device itself is a printed semiconductor, it has benefited from many of the manufacturing improvements that have come with recent advances in computer chip production.
Solar has also benefited from economies of scale, particularly as China has invested heavily in its production. This has translated into cheaper solar panels around the world, including the US. And since solar panels are modular, small gains in efficiency and cost reduction quickly add up, boosting the business case.
There are some clouds on the horizon, however. The single-junction PV panel may be closing in on its practical efficiency limit. Solar energy is variable, and some power grid operators have struggled to manage the spike in solar production midday and sudden drop-off in the evening, creating the infamous “ duck curve ” graph of energy demand that shows how fast other generators have to ramp up.
Still, solar energy provides less than 4 percent of electricity in the US , so there is immense room to grow. Overall costs continue to decline, and new technologies are emerging that can get around the constraints imposed by conventional panels. Across the US and around the world, the sun has a long way to rise. — Umair Irfan
While wind and solar energy have soared upward for more than a decade, storing electricity on the grid with batteries is just taking off.
Grid-scale battery capacity suddenly launched upward around 2020 and has about doubled every year since . That’s good news for intermittent power sources, such as wind and solar: Energy storage is the booster rocket for renewables and one of the key tools for addressing the stubborn duck curve that plagues solar power.
Batteries for the grid aren’t that far removed from those that power phones and computers, so they’ve benefited from cost and performance improvements in consumer batteries. And they still have room to get cheaper .
On the power grid, batteries do a number of jobs that help improve efficiency and cut greenhouse gas emissions. The obvious one is compensating for the capriciousness of wind and solar power: As the sun sets and the wind calms, demand rises, and grid operators can tap into their power reserves to keep the lights on. The specific combination of solar-plus-storage is still a small share of utility-scale projects, but it’s gaining ground in the residential market as these systems get cheaper.
Batteries also help grid operators cope with demand peaks: They can bank power when it’s cheap and sell those electrons when electricity is more expensive. They also maintain grid stability and provide the juice to restart power generators after outages or maintenance. That means there’s a huge demand for grid batteries beyond backing up renewables.
Right now, the main way the US saves electricity on the grid is pumped hydropower , which currently provides about 96 percent of utility-scale storage. Water is pumped uphill into a reservoir when power is cheap and then runs downhill through turbines when it’s needed. This method tends to lose a lot of energy in the process and is limited to landscapes with the ideal terrain to move water up and down.
Batteries get around these hurdles with higher efficiencies, scalability, and modularity. And since they stay parked in one place, energy density and portability don’t matter as much on the grid as they would in a car or a phone. That opens up several more options. Car batteries that have lost too much capacity to be worthwhile in a vehicle can get a second life on the power grid . Designs like flow batteries that store energy by the megawatt-hour and molten salt batteries that stash power for months could outperform the reigning lithium-ion battery. — Umair Irfan
Transportation is the single largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. Fossil fuels currently account for nearly 90 percent of the energy consumption in the transportation sector, which makes it an obvious target for decarbonization. And while it will take some time to figure out how to electrify planes, trains, and container ships, the growth of EVs, including passenger cars and trucks, has reached a tipping point.
The price of a new EV is nearly equivalent to a new gas-powered car, when you include state and federal subsidies. And the US charging infrastructure is getting better by the day: With over 200,000 chargers currently online, the number is growing . Even though the Trump administration has effectively waged war on the EV transition by pulling funding for charging infrastructure expansion and threatening to end subsidies for new EV purchases, at best those moves may slow a largely unstoppable EV transition in the long term. The automotive industry is all in on the electric transition. Buoyed by strong and growing EV sales trends in China and increasing EV offerings , global demand is growing.
There are signs, however, that the number of people buying EVs in the US and Europe is slowing , even as subsidies remain available. Experts say this is likely due, in part, to more consumer choice, as the number of EV offerings, including off-road trucks and minivans , continues to grow. But even here we see encouraging signs: As more EVs have come to market, more plug-in hybrid models have also appeared. And plug-in hybrids tend to be slightly cheaper and help people deal with range anxiety, the umbrella term for the fear of not being able to find a charger, while still reducing emissions.
“The early adopters who are just all in on that EV tech, they’ve adopted it,” Nicole Wakelin, editor at large of CarBuzz , told Vox in January. “So now it’s up to everybody else to dip their toes in that water.”
Around the world, cheap EVs are surging in popularity. Prices of EV batteries, the most expensive component of the vehicle, are dropping globally even as their capacity grows. That trend is leading to more and more inexpensive EV models hitting the market. China, once again, is leading the charge here. The cheapest model from Chinese front-runner BYD now costs less than $10,000 , and by 2027, Volkswagen promises it will sell a cheap EV in Europe for about $20,000 . Meanwhile, in the US, the average price for a used EV in mid-2024 was $33,000 , compared to $27,000 for an internal combustion engine vehicle. Those Chinese EVs aren’t currently available in the US.
It remains to be seen how far Trump will go to keep America hooked on fossil fuels. It’s clear, however, that more and more people want EVs and are buying them, charging them, and quite frankly, loving them . — Adam Clark Estes, Vox senior technology correspondentFor any of these clean energy sectors to reach their highest potential, there’s an essential requirement they all share: a robust, skilled workforce. The good news for the clean energy industry is that data show the jobs are rolling in.
And while the Trump administration has targeted the wind industry, rolled back some climate-friendly policies, and griped about solar , the administration’s policies have yet to put a dent on positive job growth in clean jobs.
“I expect [the administration] will go after some provisions, but there is quite a bit in the IRA that will be very difficult to repeal since large-scale clean energy investments have been made, and a majority of those in red states whose politicians will not want to give them up,” one former US official told Heatmap News . Republican districts have benefited far more than progressive ones from clean tech manufacturing investments to the tune of over $161 billion , Bloomberg reported. Going after clean jobs would mean stalling economic growth in communities that helped deliver Trump a second term — a move that most would call politically unwise.
The clean industry is growing beyond the United States. Globally, clean energy sectors added over 4.7 million jobs to a total of 35 million from 2019 to 2022 — exceeding the amount of fossil fuel jobs internationally.
While the data bodes well for the industry, there are concerns from workers, unions, and communities that the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy may leave many skilled employees behind. One paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that fewer than 1 percent of fossil fuel workers have transitioned to green jobs, citing a lack of translatable skills — operating an oil derrick isn’t as applicable to installing solar panels, for example. Another paper from Nature found that while some fossil fuel workers might have the right skills for clean energy jobs, the location of green jobs often aren’t where fossil fuel workers are based.
Several policy routes can be taken to create a more equitable transition for these workers, such as funding early retirement programs for fossil fuel workers who lose their jobs or heavily investing in fossil fuel communities where there is potential for creating renewable energy hubs.
Clean energy jobs are growing, and it doesn’t have to be at the cost of the 1.7 million workers in the US with fossil fuel occupations. — Sam Delgado
While President Trump has largely been hostile to renewable energy, there’s one clean energy source that the administration actually supports : geothermal.
Geothermal has long lived in the shadows of other renewables — especially as wind and solar have surged. But geothermal’s potential may be greater than any of those, and ironically, being in Trump’s good graces may give this sector the final boost it needs.
If you know President Trump’s motto of “ drill, baby, drill ,” this might not come as a surprise. Geothermal energy is tapped by drilling into the ground and extracting heat from the earth, and it uses similar technology to the oil and gas industry. US Secretary of Energy Chris Wright has long praised geothermal, and the fracking company he oversaw prior to joining the Trump administration invested in Fervo Energy , a company that specializes in geothermal technologies.
Despite the fact that the first geothermal plant was built in 1904 in Italy, the energy source is still in its infancy. In 2023, geothermal energy produced less than half a percent of total US utility-scale electricity generation, far behind other renewables like solar and wind.
Historically, developing geothermal energy has been constrained by geography and relatively few have been built. Most geothermal production happens in the western United States because of the region’s access to underground hot water that can drive turbines isn’t too far from the surface. California dominates the geothermal landscape, with 67 percent of US geothermal electricity generation coming from the state — the outcome of state policy priorities and the right geologic conditions . The regional specificity has been a big barrier to geothermal taking off more broadly.
Then there’s the issue of cost. Compared to solar and wind development and operations, building geothermal plants and drilling is much more expensive. And it currently costs more per megawatt hour than solar and wind.
But these geographic and financial barriers could be broken down. Geothermal companies have been exploring enhanced geothermal , a method that could make it possible to drill for geothermal energy everywhere. Coupling enhanced geothermal with drilling technology and techniques from the oil and gas industry can also help with efficiency and bring down costs — a parallel to how advances in fracking in the early 2000s helped supercharge the US oil and gas industry.
What geothermal lacks in current scale, it makes up for in future potential. Because it’s not intermittent and doesn’t rely on specific weather conditions (the way that solar, wind, and hydropower do) geothermal has a capacity advantage over other renewables . In 2023, geothermal had a capacity factor , or how often an energy source is running at maximum power, of 69 percent, compared to 33 percent and 23 percent for wind and solar, respectively — meaning it’s more capable of producing reliable power.
That advantage could be critical for US decarbonization goals. According to the Department of Energy (DOE), enhanced geothermal has the potential to power more than 65 million homes and businesses in the US.
Right now, stakeholders from energy policymakers to climate scientists to geothermal company executives, are determined to turn potential into reality.
In March 2024, the DOE released a lengthy report on the necessary steps to unlocking enhanced geothermal’s full potential on a commercial scale. In October of last year, the federal government approved a massive geothermal project in Utah that plans to provide power for more than 2 million homes and aims to be operational by 2026 . The company behind the project and one of the leading enhanced geothermal startups, Fervo Energy, secured $255 million in funding from investors just before the year came to a close.
Geothermal also has bipartisan support (and is perhaps one of the few issues that the Biden and Trump administration would share similar views on). And because it’s borrowing technology from the gas and oil industry, it can tap into former fossil fuel workers to staff these plants.
But it’s key to note that getting to take off will be really, really expensive — the DOE projects that it will take $20 billion to $25 billion to get geothermal ready for a commercial breakout by 2030. Geothermal’s breakthrough isn’t assured, but it’s on the cusp of takeoff. If the necessary financial investments are made, and companies can show that advances in technology can be scaled up beyond the western US, it could usher in the age of a geothermal energy revolution. — Sam Delgado, former Future Perfect fellow
One of the biggest misconceptions about the electrical transition is that it will be hard on the grid. This article tells us why that simply is not true.
There are a ton of links in the original article.
We’ve unlocked a holy grail in clean energy. It’s only the beginning.
The incredible technology is harnessing the potential of solar and wind — and quietly revolutionizing the energy system.
by Umair Irfan
BYD Cube Pro lithium-ion energy storage batteries at the
Crimson Battery Energy Storage Project in Blythe, California, in 2022.
Bing Guan/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The tricky thing about generating electricity is that for the most part, you pretty much have to use it or lose it.
This fundamental fact has governed and constrained the development of the world’s largest machine: the $2 trillion US power grid. Massive generators send electrons along a continent-wide network of conductors, transformers, cables, and wires into millions of homes and businesses, delicately balancing supply and demand so that every light switch, computer, television, stove, and charging cable will turn on 99.95 percent of the time.
Making sure there are always enough generators spooled up to send electricity to every single power outlet in the country requires precise coordination. And while the amount of electricity actually used can swing drastically throughout the day and year, the grid is built to meet the brief periods of peak demand, like the hot summer days when air conditioning use can double average electricity consumption. Imagine building a 30-lane highway to make sure no driver ever has to tap their brakes. That’s effectively what those who design and run the grid have had to do.
But what if you could just hold onto electricity for a bit and save it for later? You wouldn’t have to overbuild the grid or spend so much effort keeping power generation in equilibrium with users. You could smooth over the drawbacks of intermittent power sources that don’t emit carbon dioxide, like wind and solar. You could have easy local backup power in emergencies when transmission lines are damaged. You may not even need a giant, centralized power grid at all.
That’s the promise of grid-scale energy storage. And while the US has actually been using a crude form of energy storage called pumped hydroelectric power storage for decades, the country is now experiencing a gargantuan surge in energy storage capacity, this time from a technology that most of us are carrying around in our pockets: lithium-ion batteries. Between 2021 and 2024, grid battery capacity increased fivefold. In 2024, the US installed 12.3 gigawatts of energy storage. This year, new grid battery installations are on track to almost double compared to last year. Battery storage capacity now exceeds pumped hydro capacity, totaling more than 26 gigawatts.
There’s still plenty of room to expand — and a pressing need to do so. The power sector remains the second-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the US, and there will be no way to add enough intermittent clean energy to sufficiently decarbonize the grid without cheap and plentiful storage.
Power transmission towers outside the Crimson Battery Energy Storage Project in Blythe, California.
Bing Guan/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The aging US grid is also in dire need of upgrades, and batteries can cushion the shock of adding gigawatts of wind and solar while buying some time to perform more extensive renovations. Some power markets are finally starting to understand all the services batteries can provide — frequency regulation, peak shaving, demand response — creating new lines of business. Batteries are also a key tool in building smaller, localized versions of the power grid. These microgrids can power remote communities with reliable power and one day shift the entire power grid into a more decentralized system that can better withstand disruptions like extreme weather.
If we can get it right, true grid-scale battery storage won’t just be an enabler of clean energy, but a way to upgrade the power system for a new era.
How big batteries got so big
Back in 2011, one of my first reporting assignments was heading to a wind farm in West Virginia to attend the inauguration of what was at the time the world’s largest battery energy storage system. Built by AES Energy Storage, it involved thousands of lithium-ion cells in storage containers that together combined to provide 32 megawatts of power and deliver it for about 15 minutes.
“It was eight megawatt-hours total,” said John Zahurancik, who was vice president of AES Energy Storage at the time and showed me around the facility back then. That was about the amount of electricity used by 260 homes in a day.
In the years since, battery storage has increased by orders of magnitude, as Zahurancik’s new job demonstrates. He is now the president of Fluence, a joint venture between AES and Siemens that has deployed 38 gigawatt-hours of storage to date around the world. “The things that we’re building today, many of our projects are over a gigawatt-hour in size,” Zahurancik said.
Last year, the largest storage facility to come online in the US was California’s Edwards & Sanborn Project, which can dispatch 33 GW for several hours. That’s roughly equivalent to the electricity needed to power 4.4 million homes for a day.
It wasn’t a steady climb to this point, however. Overall grid battery capacity in the US barely budged for more than a decade. Then, around 2020, it began to spike upward. What changed?
What could a giant battery do for your city?
One shift is that the most common battery storage technology, lithium-ion cells, saw huge price drops and energy density increases. “The very first project we did was in 2008 and it was on the order of $3,000 a kilowatt-hour for the price of the batteries,” said Zahurancik. “Now we’re looking at systems that are on the order of $150, $200 a kilowatt-hour for the full system install.”
That’s partly because the cells on the power grid aren’t that different from those in mobile devices and electric vehicles, so grid batteries have benefited from manufacturing improvements that went into those products.
“It’s all one big pipeline,” said Micah Ziegler, a professor at Georgia Tech who studies clean energy technologies. “The batteries in phones, cars, and the grid all share common characteristics.” Seeing this rising demand, China went big on battery manufacturing and, much as it did in solar panels, created economies of scale to drive global prices down. China now produces 80 percent of the world’s lithium-ion batteries.
The blooming of wind and solar energy created even more demand for batteries and increased the pressure to improve them. The wind and the sun are often the cheapest sources of new electricity, and batteries help compensate for their variability, providing even more reason to scale up storage. “The benefits of this relationship are apparent in the increasing number of power plants that are being proposed and that have already been deployed that combine these resources,” Ziegler said. The combination of solar plus storage accounted for 84 percent of new US power added in 2024.
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s biggest solar and battery storage plant,
the Eland Solar and Storage Center in the Mojave Desert.
Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Battery solar energy storage units, right, at the Eland Solar and Storage Center in 2024.
Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
And because grid batteries don’t have to be small enough to be mobile — unlike the batteries in your laptop or phone — they can take advantage of cheaper, less dense batteries that otherwise might not be suited for something that has to fit in your pocket. There’s even talk of giving old EV batteries a second life on the power grid.
Regulation has also helped. A major hurdle for deploying grid energy storage systems is that they don’t generate electricity on their own, so the rules for how they should connect to the grid and how much battery developers should get paid for their services were messy and restrictive in the past. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s Order 841 removed some of the barriers for energy storage systems to plug into wholesale markets and compete with other forms of power. Though the regulation was issued in 2018, it cleared a major legal challenge in 2020, paving the way for more batteries to plug into the grid.
Eleven states to date including California, Illinois, and Maryland have also set specific procurement targets for energy storage, which require utilities to install a certain amount of storage capacity, creating a push for more grid batteries. Together, these factors created a whole new businesses for power companies, spawned new grid battery companies, and fertilized the ground for a bumper crop of energy storage.
What can energy storage do for you?
Energy storage is the peanut butter to the chocolate of renewable energy, making all the best traits about clean energy even better and balancing out some of its downsides. But it’s also an important ingredient in grid stability, reliability, and resilience, helping ensure a steady flow of megawatts during blackouts and extreme weather.
The most common use is frequency response. The alternating current going through power lines in the US cycles at a frequency of 60 hertz. If the grid dips below this frequency when a power-hungry user switches on, it can trip circuit breakers and cause power instability. Since batteries have nearly zero startup time, unlike thermal generators, they can quickly absorb or transmit power as needed to keep the grid humming the right tune.
Grid batteries can also step in as reserve power when a generator goes offline or when a large power user unexpectedly turns on. They can smooth out the hills and valleys of power load over the course of the day. They also let power providers save electricity when it’s cheap to produce, and sell it back on the grid at times when demand is high and power is expensive. It’s often faster to build a battery facility than an equivalent power plant, and since there are no smokestacks, it’s easier to get permits and approvals.
Batteries have already proven useful for overstressed power networks. As temperatures reached triple digits in Texas last year, batteries provided a record amount of power on the Lone Star State’s grid. ERCOT, the Texas grid operator, didn’t have to ask Texans to turn down their power use like it did in 2023. Between 2020 and 2024, Texas saw a 4,100 percent increase in utility-scale batteries, topping 5.7 gigawatts.
Jupiter Power battery storage complex in Houston in 2024.
Jason Fochtman/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images
Grid batteries have a halo effect for other power generators too. Most thermal power plants — coal, gas, nuclear — prefer to run at a steady pace. Ramping up and down to match demand takes time and costs money, but with batteries soaking up some of the variability, thermal power plants can stay closer to their most efficient pace, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and keeping costs in check.
“It’s kind of like hybridizing your car,” Zahurancik said. “If you think about a Prius, you have an electric motor and you have a gasoline motor and you make the gas consumption better because the battery absorbs all the variation.”
Another grid battery feature is that they can reduce the need for expensive grid upgrades, said Stephanie Smith, chief operating officer at Eolian, which funds and develops grid energy storage systems. You don’t have to build power lines to accommodate absolute maximum electricity needs if you have a battery — on the generator side or on the demand side — to dish out a few more electrons when needed.
“What we do with standalone batteries, the more and more of those you get, you start to alleviate needs or at least abridge things like new transmission build,” Smith said. These batteries also allow the grid to adapt faster to changing energy needs, like when a factory shuts down or when a new data center powers up.
On balance this leads to a more stable, efficient, cheaper, and cleaner power grid.
Charging up
As good as they are, lithium-ion batteries have their limits. Most grid batteries are designed to store and dispatch electricity over the course of two to eight hours, but the grid also needs ways to stash power for days, weeks, and even months since power demand shifts throughout the year.
There are also some fundamental looming challenges for grid-scale storage. Like most grid-level technologies, energy storage requires a big upfront investment that takes decades to pay back, but there’s a lot of uncertainty right now about how the Trump administration’s tariffs will affect battery imports, whether there will be a recession, and if this disruption will slow electricity demand growth in the years to come. The extraordinary appetite for batteries is increasing competition for the required raw materials, which may increase their prices.
Though China currently dominates the global battery supply chain, the US is working to edge its way in. Under the previous administration, the US Department of Energy invested billions in energy storage factories, supply chains, and research. There are dozens of battery factories in the US now, though most are aimed at electric vehicles. There are 10 US factories slated to start up this year, which would raise the total EV battery manufacturing capacity to 421.5 gigawatt-hours per year. Total global battery manufacturing is projected to reach around 7,900 gigawatt-hours in 2025.
Lithium battery modules inside the battery building at the Vistra Corp. Moss Landing Energy Storage Facility in Moss Landing, California, in 2021.
David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images
There’s also a long and growing line of projects waiting to connect to the power grid. Interconnection queues for all energy systems, but particularly solar, wind, and batteries, typically last three years or more as project developers produce reliability studies and cope with mounting regulatory paperwork delays.
The Trump administration is also working to undo incentives around clean energy, particularly the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. The law established robust incentives for clean energy, including tax credits for stand-alone grid energy projects. “I do worry about the IRA because it will change the curve, and quite honestly we cannot afford to change the curve right now with any form of clean energy,” Smith said. On the other hand, Trump’s tariffs may eventually spur even more battery manufacturing within the US.
Still, utility-scale energy storage is a tiny slice of the sprawling US power grid, and there’s enormous room to expand. “Even though we’ve been accelerating and going fast, by and large, we don’t have that much of it,” Zahurancik said. “You could easily see storage becoming 20 or 30 percent of the installed power capacity.”
What will the next book you publish going to be about? You could have posted this one on my BOOKS group. LOL Just kidding. It's just that I have a preference for Executive summaries.