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As of May 7, 2026, utility-scale battery storage has become one of the fastest-growing pieces of the U.S. electricity landscape. These systems — essentially giant versions of the lithium-ion battery inside a smartphone — now account for nearly 30% of all new energy capacity added to the grid, a bigger share than new natural gas plants or wind farms. But the technology is also stirring localized backlash after several high-profile fires in New York. More than 80% of the country’s battery-storage moratoriums are in New York, and developers say projects equal to a large nuclear plant’s output are stuck in limbo. Here are the key facts behind the debate.
A utility-scale battery storage installation is not a single battery. It’s a system of thousands of small lithium-ion cells packed together inside what looks like a standard shipping container. The facility charges up when electricity on the grid is abundant and discharges that electricity when demand jumps.
The concept is simple: store energy when nobody needs it, then release it at the moment people start turning on air conditioners or charging electric vehicles. These systems can ramp up in seconds, much faster than a natural-gas peaker plant that needs time to fire up and synchronize.
Federal data from the Energy Information Administration shows the U.S. grid now has about 10 times more battery storage than it did five years ago. Most of that growth has happened in states where solar power produces a lot of midday electricity. In California and Texas, batteries tend to charge in the late morning, hold that energy through the afternoon, and then send it back to the grid after sunset when demand rises and solar generation fades.
New York is different. It doesn’t have the same level of solar generation as those western states, so batteries there are being marketed mostly as a reliability tool — a fast-acting backup that can prevent local blackouts when transmission lines are stressed or a power plant trips.
Gov. Kathy Hochul has been one of the loudest advocates for expanding battery storage in New York. Her administration sees storage as a way to modernize an aging grid and make room for renewable energy without waiting for new transmission lines to be built.
Solar farms only generate when the sun is shining, and those hours don’t always line up with peak demand. On a hot summer afternoon, households are using a lot of power, but solar production may already be tapering off as the sun drops. Batteries can capture solar energy earlier in the day and release it later — an advantage that wind and solar alone can’t provide.
There’s also a rare point of agreement between Albany and Washington. Legislation pushed by congressional Republicans last year rolled back federal incentives for wind and solar development, but battery storage programs were mostly left intact. That bipartisan appeal is unusual in today’s energy policy landscape.
According to the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, the doubling of Texas’s battery capacity between 2024 and 2025 played a major role in improving grid reliability there. That kind of outcome is exactly what New York officials are hoping to reproduce, even if the state’s renewable generation is still less abundant.
The biggest obstacle to battery storage acceptance is the threat of fire. Lithium-ion batteries of any kind — whether in a phone, an electric vehicle, or a grid facility — carry a fire risk because they store large amounts of energy in a small space. Overheating or a manufacturing defect can trigger a chain reaction known as thermal runaway, where one cell ignites and heats up the cells around it.
New York learned this the hard way. In 2023, three battery storage facilities caught fire. A blaze in the Jefferson County village of Chaumont burned for days before it was contained. Another fire at a facility in East Hampton on Long Island raised concerns about water contamination because firefighters used large volumes of water to douse the flames.
A March report from the National Institute of Standards and Technology said battery energy storage fires “appear to be the most severe type of lithium-ion battery fire incidents due to the high energy density involved.” That finding helped push New York to overhaul its fire code.
Under the new rules, developers must provide annual training to local fire departments, prepare emergency response plans for each site, and make sure an expert on battery systems can be reached within 15 minutes and physically present within four hours if a fire breaks out. Developers have also stopped putting battery systems inside enclosed buildings, because that tends to concentrate heat and make fires harder to control.
Fire departments have changed their tactics too. Instead of hitting a battery facility with massive amounts of water, firefighters now often stand back and let the fire burn out in a controlled way. The strategy is based on a simple calculation: letting a battery system burn in place keeps responders safer and pushes most contaminants into the air rather than into nearby groundwater or soil.
Wayne Melton, chief of the Orange County Hazardous Materials Response Team, put it bluntly: “If we allow it to burn, then all the bad stuff goes up and away, and it’s not a problem for us down where we are, where we live.”
At the most recent battery storage fire in New York that Melton responded to, air monitoring turned up no harmful levels of pollutants, and no evacuations were needed.
By raw numbers, battery storage fires are still extremely rare relative to how many facilities exist. The Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit that gets much of its funding from energy companies, tracks failures from news reports and other public records. Its data shows that the failure rate at utility-scale battery storage sites has dropped by 99% since 2018. That improvement is largely the result of better manufacturing standards, smarter thermal management, and stronger state fire codes adopted after early incidents.
But the EPRI dataset is not perfect. Because it relies on news coverage, some smaller fires or equipment malfunctions may never make it into the stats.
UL Solutions, a product-safety certification company, studied lithium-ion battery fires across all sectors in 2024 and found that energy storage systems accounted for less than 1% of those incidents. The vast majority involved consumer devices like smartphones, e-bikes, and laptops.
That doesn’t mean community concerns should be dismissed. A battery facility is a much larger concentration of stored energy than a phone or an EV. The consequences of a malfunction are bigger, and the firefighting tactics needed to handle it are more specialized. Local officials are right to demand training and planning. The question is whether the risk can be managed well enough to justify the benefits.
While lithium-ion batteries dominate the conversation, several other storage technologies are being developed in New York. One of the most notable is compressed-air storage.
A compressed-air facility uses electricity during periods of low demand to compress air, which creates heat. The heat is stored in tanks, and the cool air is pushed into a deep underground cavern. When the grid needs power, the air returns to the surface, is heated again, and expands rapidly to spin a turbine. The process sounds technical, but it has real advantages: these systems can discharge for eight hours or more, while most battery systems are designed to deliver only four hours.
Hydrostor, a Canadian developer, is building a compressed-air project in Lewis County. Unlike battery facilities, which can operate with minimal staffing, compressed-air sites require dozens of full-time workers and a large construction crew — a plus for local economies but a bigger logistical lift.
There are trade-offs. Batteries can react in seconds, while compressed-air systems take several minutes to respond. Batteries also degrade over time, losing capacity as they are cycled. Compressed-air systems, by contrast, are expected to maintain their performance over decades without hazardous-waste issues or fire risks.
Jon Norman, president of Hydrostor, summed it up by comparing the two technologies to a phone that doesn’t hold a charge as well as it used to. “When I look at my iPhone, it’s not exactly living up to its manufacturer warranty in terms of how it holds a charge,” he said. “Battery storage is a very similar technology that way.”
Neither technology is perfect, and the U.S. energy grid will likely need a mix of both. What matters most is that storage is no longer an experimental niche. It has moved to the center of how the grid balances supply and demand — and that means the debate over its safety and reliability is only going to intensify.
