Why Batteries Are the Electric Grid’s Most Powerful Asset

OPED by SEIA, April 18. 2025

The U.S. electric grid is a delicate system that requires a consistent balance between energy supply with energy demand.  

When a heat wave turns on millions of air conditioners, grid operators must turn on additional generation resources to meet this demand. However, ratcheting up large, expensive power plants in response to dynamic demand needs can be slow, inefficient, and prone to failure.  

Enter energy storage. 

Battery energy storage systems allow us to store energy when it is cheap and abundant and then dispatch that energy when demand and prices spike. The power from energy storage systems is firm, flexible, and dispatchable, making it America’s most powerful tool for building an affordable, reliable energy system.  

Here’s how. 

Batteries Make Electricity More Affordable 

To keep prices low for consumers, grid operators work to deploy only the most affordable resources first and then add other more expensive generation as demand rises. 

With energy storage, grid operators can save up the lowest-cost energy — usually solar energy produced during the day — and then dispatch that power, day or night. 

Other energy sources, such as combined cycle gas plants and nuclear facilities, take many hours to change output levels because of the mass of their turbines and the thermal lag of their boilers. These delays mean that customers are paying for electricity that won’t be used — a major system inefficiency that raises energy bills for Americans. 

Alternatively, solar plus storage is the most flexible resource on our grid, allowing system operators to quickly deliver affordable power when and where it’s needed most. In fact, energy storage is the fastest-responding dispatchable resource, with the ability to discharge power in milliseconds, charging and discharging multiple times a day. 

Batteries Improve Reliability and Resiliency 

Battery storage systems are providing critical flexibility and resiliency to the U.S. grids.  

For grid operators, robust battery storage resources provide an already-produced but not-yet-consumed pool of low-cost energy to pull from when energy demand changes. This is also helpful in maintaining power quality and resource adequacy as we add more renewable energy to the system.  

For communities, battery storage can be a lifeline in an emergency.  

During power outages, energy storage can provide critical backup power to emergency shelters, hospitals, homes, businesses and even neighborhoods. When paired with solar, the power of energy storage to keep the lights on is enhanced because the batteries can recharge using solar even if the power outage lasts several days. 

Batteries Are Crucial to Meeting Rising Demand 

As the country looks to achieve energy dominance while also tackling the unprecedented energy demand increases from AI and data centers, building out America’s solar and storage infrastructure will be critical. 

America’s tech giants are investing billions of dollars into solar and energy storage, precisely because these technologies can meet growing demand quickly and affordably at all times of the day. 

The rapid growth of AI requires new generation resources to be up and running fast. No energy technology can be deployed more quickly than solar and storage. A new solar project can be operational in under 18 months, while a new battery project takes approximately 20 months on average. Compared to other technologies that take nearly 4, 7, or even 15 years to plan and develop, the choice is obvious.  

In January, SEIA released a whitepaper on energy storage that set an ambitious goal of building 700 gigawatt-hours of energy storage capacity in the United States by 2030.  

With record increases in energy demand and an American population laser-focused on the cost of living, it is critical that policymakers heed SEIA’s recommendations and support solar and energy storage in all its forms. Robust battery storage resources are crucial to meeting America’s energy demand with firm, dispatchable, affordable power.