Experts surmised that unfavorable federal and interconnection policies, paired with public scrutiny, underestimate the power of battery energy storage systems (BESS) and are short-term problems remedied through advocacy and strategic partnerships.
An April 29 energy storage panel at the US Development and Finance Forum hosted by NPM featured Joshua Rogol of Elevate Renewables, GridStor CEO Chris Taylor, Spearmint Energy Chief Development Officer Peter Rood, Executive Vice President of FlexGen Jason Abiecunas, Cody Guidry, vice president of energy storage at RavenVolt, and Bryan Alperin, partner and managing director at Foss and Company. The panel discussed the fallout from tariffs and public perception after storage center fires in California created a difficult but manageable climate for BESS development.
“I think it’s hard to ignore the tarrif-ying — pun intended — situation that we face right now in term of global trade,” Taylor said. “I think it’s a shorter-term problem than it may seem on the surface.”
He said that he believes the tariffs will come down and that suppliers and supply chains will evolve and change with the volatility of the US market.
“So, I do believe in that, but in the very short term, as I understand it, there are no batteries being loaded on ships anywhere in the world right now on its way to America, full stop,” the GridStor CEO said. “It’s just come to a screeching halt until people get more confidence about what’s going on.”
A fire at a battery storage facility in California is also injecting uncertainty into the battery development market. In 2024, the fire at Vistra Energy’s Moss Landing BESS facility triggered fierce community opposition to storage projects across the country and highlighted the need for safety procedures.
“The fallout from Moss Landing — it’s impacted permitting in lots of places,” Rood said.
Despite the setbacks in local trust, panelists said that California has met its storage goals and now awaits the next milestone to come down. Meanwhile, when looking to other markets for healthy storage potential, Rogol of Elevate Renewables, an ArcLight Capital Partners portfolio company, said New York and Massachusetts hold a lot of promise.
“It’s not just those markets,” Rogol said. “You’re starting to see, as some of the other panelists mentioned, in MISO and SPP, utilities are looking for storage as a way of solving capacity needs, and it’s part of an all-of-the-above solution. We’re seeing co-location of thermal happening. We’re seeing storage as the fastest way to build new capacity, given the queues that exist in many markets, and so we’re seeing sort of like that long-tail demand actually start to pick up across most places in the US.”
Rood emphasized the importance of a well-sited project, stating that location is far more important now than it used to be for storage due to local reception as well as supportive infrastructure. Panelists added that the amount of storage coming online in Texas and California also exacerbates the need for storage as an ancillary recourse during peak periods.
In the PJM Interconnection market, Taylor and Rogol said the grid operator’s Effective Load Carrying Capability (ELCC) rating system underestimates storage resources. As a result, they anticipate programs designed to solve reliability issues and meet demand, like the Reliability Resource Initiative, will rely heavily on gas projects that are slow to market.
“There’s some fairly draconian and frankly stupid ideas that are being floated out there that will be significant deadlines,” Taylor said. “If we can keep those things from happening, it’ll make a big difference in the size of that future market.”
Panelists also noted that strategic partnerships between data center customers and storage developers could be mutually beneficial, as data centers face questions on how they will manage their power load on the grid and storage assets seek to provide relief during peak demand times.
