YOU LOVE TO SEE IT: Batteries Are So Back

Friends:

Good things are happening! The battery boom is on track to usher in a green energy revolution, exclusionary homeowner associations are set straight, public-sector retirees defend their health care, and Europe’s leftists grab the wheel.

Rock the boat.

Broaching The Battery Bottleneck

The U.S. battery market is on track for its best year yet — a positive sign for the green energy transition, since batteries improve reliability and expand the availability of renewable energy.

In what some experts are calling the U.S.’s long-awaited “battery boom,” the sector is off to its best-ever start in a year. The government’s top power authority had predicted that the country’s storage capacity would double this year, and fortunately, it’s on track to do so. In the first quarter of 2024, nearly 1.3 gigawatts of battery storage was installed at power plants, homes, and commercial facilities across the nation. 

Battery capacity is an essential part of the green energy transition, reducing the strain on the nation’s ailing power grid, improving local energy self-sufficiency, and storing renewable energy in off-peak hours. Batteries are especially useful at storing renewable energy when it’s plentiful, like what’s generated by solar panels on sunny days, so the grid can maintain capacity at crucial hours of peak demand at other times, such as rainy days.