Tamra Reynolds: Hello, I’m Tamra Reynolds, a managing director at CoBank and co-host of Power Plays, a podcast program dedicated to amplifying issues that are important to community power and cooperatives. Most often, Teri and I do this by inviting thoughtful leaders onto our program, but we also spend time engaging with cooperative at different state-wide and national events. One such opportunity occurs each year with the Colorado Rural Electric Association’s energy innovation summit. This year we assembled a terrific panel to provide a Tactical Guide to Battery Energy Storage. I think you’ll enjoy the program.
Teri Viswanath: Battery storage is widely referred to as the Swiss Army knife of the grid, right? It can act as backup supply. It can balance demand and supply. It can be used for ancillary services. It has a number of applications. And especially, when we think about an all-of-the-above moment that we’re living through, I think its value is actually rising. So the conversation we want to have today is really a tactical guide to battery energy storage system deployment.
I’m Teri Viswanath. I’m the energy economist at CoBank, I’ve been very fortunate to be able to bring together an amazing panel. So, I’m joined by Lisa Tiffin. Lisa is the chief commercial officer at Tri-State Generation and Transmission. Also joining us is Petter Skantze, who is a senior vice president of infrastructure at NextEra (that’s the country’s largest developer). Dr. Allison Weiss, who actually heads battery storage research for the consultancy Wood Mackenzie. And then Kailash Raman, who’s part of the strategy team for Form Energy. Form Energy is a long-duration storage manufacturer.
So Allison, I’d like for you to explain to us where battery storage has been and where it’s headed.
Allison Weiss: Energy storage has really grown tremendously over the last few years in the U.S. We had the market double in 2023 and then grow by 50%-plus in the two years after, coming to a record number, 19 gigawatts, that we’re projecting to be installed this year.
There is a noticeable amount of residential there, of course, as well, where C&I stayed small and hasn’t hit its stride yet in the United States, being the most complicated picture of differing economics for every use case and load shape, and tariff structure throughout the country.
Viswanath: I was really surprised….taking a look at your profile, we’re looking at a bit of a dip, right? I think it lends itself to this understanding of what role will battery storage play?
Weiss: We always were projecting a bit of a slowdown in the growth that we’d seen up to this point, as California and ERCOT markets really saturated, and the other markets are ramping up, but a bit slower to keep going in their growth. It’s been challenging everywhere with interconnection. Of course, with generation, that’s slowly getting better with improved regulation from FERC and some AI processing of those requests, helping speed it along, but it’s still a bit of a slow road to get online in many places.
We have also had challenges in part of the supply chain on getting high-voltage equipment. Then, of course, things got a little more difficult going into next year with some of the recent policy changes. Storage came out relatively ahead after the OBBA, keeping the investment tax credit, but it has to meet these material assistance ratios and not have too much of the costs come from China or Chinese-owned companies.
That has an impact on what supply is available going forward for modules, especially as the domestic manufacturing can ramp up, and we’ll go into a little more detail of that later. Also, for ‘26, it’s really also just been the policy uncertainty on tariffs swinging around so wildly and making people pause and wait and see what was going to happen before committing to projects going forward.
That pushed some dates out of ‘26 that might have otherwise been there, and slowing things down a bit more. But the long-term, we do see this growth in the need for flexible capacity for retirements that are happening in systems, load growth that is happening in systems, and generally balancing the renewables that will be growing everywhere, although at different rates in different regions.
Viswanath: I think we’ve talked about the possibility of needing 80 gigawatts, every year, of power supply. When you take a look at 20 gigawatts, wow, that’s a significant part of that particular story.
Kailash, I think representing long-duration storage, I want to understand from a policy perspective, it appears that we’re seeing a wide range of support generally for storage but would like to have you weigh in here.
Kailash Raman: When we think about what is the role of long-duration storage and multi-day storage, I think simply put, this is a firm reliability asset for the grid, right? We are in a moment where there is an unprecedented need for firm capacity on the system across the country. Twenty years ago, if you talked to grid planners, operators about what kept them up at night from a reliability perspective, it was really centered around, can we meet peak demand during the single hottest summer afternoon of the year?
If we look at the planning problem now, it has fundamentally changed, where really the greatest reliability risks on the system are tied to these multi-day weather systems.
All of these point towards this overwhelming need for dispatchable resources, resources that frankly look like a peaker plant, something you can turn on and run through any sort of reliability event, whether it lasts for a few hours at a time or days at a time. That’s the problem that we really set out to solve at Form Energy. We are manufacturing a 100-hour duration battery system based on a low-cost iron-air chemistry.
I think the easiest way to think about it is it’s a reservoir of energy for the grid. Grid operators can dump electrons into this reservoir when there’s low-cost energy available, often in your shoulder seasons in the spring and the fall, and then flexibly draw from that reservoir during the periods of greatest grid stress.
Viswanath: As we take a look at duration, what we see is the cost begins to rise. It’s a hard comparison, Kailash, because part of it is we want to do this apples-to-apples comparison. If I do a natural gas combined cycle, I have an expectation of what cost is. But here, it looks like it’s a moving target. When we think about storage, the costs, as we move up in duration, tend to be more. Talk us through the costs of long-duration storage.
Raman: We use an iron-air chemistry where the fundamental materials really are iron, air, and water. That’s what allows us to achieve really an order of magnitude reduction relative to lithium-ion in the cost on a dollar per kilowatt-hour basis. The other important thing is, we are able to step down the cost curve pretty quickly. It’s because we have 13 gigawatt hours of contracted deployments that will be coming online in the coming years.
We’re already seeing major cost savings as we move from our first-of-a-kind deployment to our second-of-a-kind, third-of-a-kind. Just like we saw in the early days of lithium ion, we are very quickly stepping down that cost curve.
Viswanath: That’s super helpful. We billed this panel as a tactical guide. Lisa, when we started off the conversation about storage, you first talked about, “What kind of storage do you want to talk about? Is it residential? Is it commercial? Is it utility? Is it all of the above?”
Lisa Tiffin: At Tri-State, the strength of Tri-State and our 40 utility members is the diversity of those members and the diversity of our territory. That comes over into the resource planning process. Batteries are a great example of that type of diversity.
When it comes to batteries, it’s just like for technology, it’s all of the above; for batteries, it’s all of the above. Many of our members have already had demand response programs. We now have demand response programs that incentivize our members to let Tri-State vertically integrate the resources. That includes batteries. That can be behind-the-retail-meter batteries. That can be distribution-level batteries. Then we have our Board Policy 115, which allows our members to self-supply up to 20%. Batteries are a part of that play as well. That’s distribution-level batteries.
Then, also, we have Bring Your Own Resource, which allows for distribution or utility-scale batteries, and then, of course, our regulated resource planning process, which brings on utility-scale.
All of these programs with our members, every member doesn’t have to do it, but any member that does it can benefit the membership as a whole, not just that member’s system.
Viswanath: When we were getting ready for the panel discussion, Kent’s great about saying, “Okay, well, I also want you to discuss not just the opportunities, but what are the challenges? What are the challenges with deployment?” Maybe just give us the highlights of some of those challenges.
Tiffin: When you’re a wholesale supplier and you have member systems that are the retail supplier, you have to develop system processes, programs and tools that are going to work for the membership.
We have now put in place this year a DERMS platform, which is a distributed energy resource management system. That’s how we’ll be managing our DR platform. Our DR includes batteries. We’ll be able to have the 24/7 desks reaching into that platform to manage various DR resources, including behind-the-retail batteries. It could also be distribution-level batteries. That’s a big part of the process.
As far as deploying and managing more at the utility-scale level, as I mentioned, we’re just getting started there. What we are doing in our resource plan is we are bringing in batteries between 2027 and 2030. Some of these batteries are coming in a little bit ahead of the capacity need, but there’s many economic value streams for batteries. We can bring them on earlier, leverage them in the many markets we’re a part of, optimize our renewables, help cover our peak, help cover extreme weather. And while we’re doing that, we’re seeing the value, and we’re giving those operators on the desk time to train, learn and adapt as we get into a situation where we actually have batteries for a reliability purpose.
Viswanath: Petter, I know that your team has had a lot of experience with regard to deployment. I’d love to hear just a bottom line, where have we experienced problems with deployment? I think the other part is a partner and a collaborator. What are you guys doing to address those problems?
Petter Skantze: Storage is a really, really exciting resource for the system. It’s exciting because of the things we talked about. It’s got all of these critical things that we’re looking for now. It’s got speed. We can deploy it really quickly. It’s cost-efficient. It’s an affordable resource for the system. That’s so critical right now. It’s flexible. Each one of those also comes with its own challenges to actually capture that.
Let’s talk about them. Speed to market is so important. Storage is actually quick because it’s a short build cycle, and we can put it online quickly. Like every other energy resource that we have, you’re dealing with a grid interconnection. You’re only ever as fast as you can actually get onto the grid.
Now, storage, that’s where we can get a little more creative with storage. We spend a lot of time citing storage at our existing renewable projects because they are interconnected to the grid, but they don’t actually fully use that interconnection.
We talk about affordability. Storage is the lowest cost, often, resource. But we talked about some of the challenges in sourcing these, some of the supply chain challenges. It’s only ever as good as what you can secure. Having a secured supply chain, having that certainty locked in so that you’re not halfway through your project and you realize you can’t get that storage battery delivered or the balance of system, getting your inverters, getting all those other pieces. You need to have a really, really robust, locked and diversified supply chain locked in.
Then the third thing we’d highlight is, look, storage. You talked about the Swiss Army knife, Teri, which is a great analogy. It is a really flexible resource. It does a lot of interesting things. It doesn’t usually exactly solve the need that you have, meaning if you’re adding a data center to the system, the battery isn’t going to solve it, right? We need energy and capacity, but it’s going to make everything else on your system work better.
We can put that storage facility at a renewable plant to make it more levelized and match our load better. We can actually put it at the load. We can put it at the load that’s a hard time getting supplied in the load pocket, or even behind the fence. You look at some of these data centers, and they have these really fast transient power characteristics. The chips will calculate something, and it will turn, and they will suddenly drop down, and a battery can actually levelize that. It can actually make it less disruptive to the system.
Then we can put the battery on different parts in our transmission system in a way that alleviates congestion. It could actually free up an existing gas plant, for instance, to run better. We’ve done studies with similar customers where just putting batteries in different areas can free up hundreds of megawatts of existing capacity on our other generating resources.
Now, what’s the challenge with that?
Well, the challenge is that only shows up if we’re in our planning process, we’re out there looking for all these opportunities. That’s when that Swiss Army knife becomes really, really powerful.
Viswanath: Kailash, from a manufacturing perspective, you’re always going to hear about safety concerns? I’d love to have you just opine there.
Raman: I think, as you pointed out, the only way the storage industry can continue to scale is if we manage safety. That is non-negotiable for us as an OEM and certainly top of mind in everything we do. I think two things I’ll say about safety. I think the first thing it comes down to is, what is your fundamental technology design? Obviously, not all batteries are the same.
I think at Form, we were very intentional from day one around designing a battery system that is very safe, fundamentally. We are building iron-air batteries. They use a water-based electrolyte. They have no mechanism for dendrite growth. There’s no pathway to thermal runaway. A lot of the common mechanisms that lead to battery fires in the industry are not chemically possible within this system.
I think the second piece to safety from an OEM perspective that’s sometimes overlooked is building partnerships and trust with the local community. What that looks like is really from early on, building trust with local fire departments, emergency response teams, making sure they understand all the nuances of your equipment, and in the unlikely event of an emergency, making sure they are ready to address that event.
Viswanath: That’s helpful. I want to stay upstream for just a minute. Allison, when we think about the components and the landscape for battery supply, the battery components, and we think about the cost of a U.S. battery is about double the cost that it is in China. Let’s talk a little bit about where the supply is coming from.
Weiss: To make sure that they qualify for the ITC… They have to have a growing percent, 55% next year, growing to 75% by 2030, be essentially not from China or Chinese-owned because that’s the foreign entity of concern category that’s relevant for batteries.
Even if the cell is made here, we’re going to have to think about the components, especially as that ratio scales up through time, and where they’re going to procure those. 97% of cathodes we see here are going to still be made in China. That’s going to potentially raise costs as they try to do alternate sourcing for those components for domestic cell manufacturing here.
Viswanath: Lisa, from a buyer’s perspective, what are the challenges right now of sourcing material and sourcing equipment?
Tiffin: As we’re looking to procure the 650 megawatts of standalone and hybrid storage in our recently approved resource plan, we’re not looking for ownership. We are looking at energy storage agreements with many developers. That was the key for us is diversity in suppliers, because we know there is going to be some risk for sourcing and upstream.
Viswanath: Petter, I think that opens up an interesting avenue. if we actually look for your organization to be able to take on that risk, talk to us a little bit about the upstream supply situation, and how do you manage that?
Skantze: The supply chain really has moved from being an important part to being an absolutely critical core competency. To your point, we have customers who need these projects. They need to be able to say they’re going to be affordable to their members and customers. The only way to do that is to be able to lock in a broad base of options in your supply chain, all the way to the source.
I think for batteries, interesting enough, this chart is absolutely right. There’s been historically one that’s very heavily sourced in the Far East and in China. Interestingly, batteries has also had, from a supply chain side, actually a pretty good story. We’ve actually been able to bring that supply chain increasingly into the U.S. We’re seeing manufacturing of batteries happening here, probably more so than we’ve seen on some other areas like solar.
We’ve also been able to leverage the fact that it’s not just the energy industry. You’re dealing with transportation and energy, and that’s pulling it in. We’ve leaned into that a lot. We’ve been able to secure a lot of our future supply domestically in the U.S. We also have been able, with our scale, to go out to those new manufacturers and saying, we’ll take your supply for many years going forward. We can give them that certainty that this is worth investing in here. There’ll be demand for it going forward.
That, in turn, lets us go back to our customers and say, “Hey, you will have less risk.” It’s interesting, Allison, you showed the chart with the declining battery supply or projects in ‘26 and ‘27. We really don’t see that. We see the reverse. Our demand is actually increasing. In part, it is because we have the supply. We know we can supply the projects. We can go to our customers and give them that certainty of price and value coming in. That’s going to be really, really important.
Viswanath: Allison, I’m pretty sure Wood Mackenzie has a great database that talks a little bit and follows the RFP process. Tell us a little bit about what we can sleuth from the database at Wood Mackenzie for battery projects right now.
Weiss: We actually run RFPs for utilities throughout the country. We collect a lot of that data, and that feeds into our modeling on costs and other aspects of the market. We are seeing, beyond just prices declining through time, which has been nice and actually helps with some of this stuff. Even if ITC is at risk, you really only have to look a year back, and you’re at battery prices that would have been the same as losing the ITC now, so that helps.
We’re also seeing an increasing move similar to what Tri-State was talking about, where utilities don’t necessarily want to own the assets but rather are going to have a contract for the asset. We see the majority of battery storage being owned by IPPs now in the country.
It’s gone the farthest with the big IOUs in California, where they are not even necessarily taking control of the asset through a toll but are rather just contracting for capacity and then the arbitrage value of the resource in the market. Even in other places, seeing these assets are relatively complicated to own and build and operate in the most efficient way. Seeing that held with people who have the most experience, keeping doing that, but the utilities taking advantage of that flexible asset being part of their mix.
Viswanath: That’s actually really interesting. Going back, instead of an ownership model, we are seeing a contract model. Petter, your experience, and especially as we’re thinking about implementation, how is that process evolving?
Skantze: This journey for us began really a decade ago. We were putting our first batteries in play. They were relatively small batteries, maybe 10, 20 megawatts. We’ve been through this cycle before with wind, with solar. We knew there were going to be growing pains. Storage was no different.
Storage, you need to be putting it in play in different conditions. You need to be watching and observing them over really multiple years just to understand the issues that can arise.
You need to be working with your vendors and suppliers, and understanding of what components can fail, how quickly do they respond when they do, what does that do to your reliability to be able to, again, really confidently underwrite that for our customers. It’s been a great exercise. We now have 4 gigawatts of storage installed as of the end of last year. We’re rapidly increasing that.
Now, in the last two quarters, we put another 3 gigawatts into our backlog that we know is going to be really critical for our customers. They need that to support that load growth. They need it to be performing. We’re very confident with that history; we’re going to be able to do it.
Viswanath: Petter, you hinted at this. The large loads we’re seeing may not be your grandfather’s large load. But on the nature of the load that’s coming into the marketplace, how does storage meet that need?
Skantze: If you talk to that hyperscaler data center developer, what are they looking for? They’re looking for three things. They’re looking for speed. How quickly can I get onto the system? They’re looking for certainty that the power solution is going to show up when their data center shows up. When we spend $1 billion on the power solution, they spend $4 billion to $5 billion on the data center solution, and they really don’t want it to be sitting around.
I think what storage can do around that construct is a couple of things. One, on the speed side, is we can deploy that storage resource a lot faster than we can deploy a large-scale gas-fired plant, for instance.
Usually, that’s also a lot more affordable. We’re using the assets we have better, we’re getting there quicker, and it’s more affordable for the overall system. Then they need to be complemented over time with the other solutions that we can bring on when we have it. We’re buying ourselves time to get a really good, efficient solution out there.
Storage is a bit unique. It really does have that speed, cost, and flexibility advantage that makes it really not the single solution, but a part of almost any solution that we look at right now for large loads.
Viswanath: Lisa, how do you think about storage in your portfolio, and how does it complement the other generation resources that Tri-State is bringing to the table?
Tiffin: I’m going to go a little off script and first talk about large load.
Viswanath: Please.
Tiffin: I just want to say whether you’re keeping the grid up today, serving the customers that are out there now, or if you’re doing high-impact load, no one technology is the answer. It’s going to take a little bit of all technologies. You have to have a utility-driven process to do that. I think storage can be part of the solution, and I think co-located storage, storage being brought by these data center developers, is definitely part of that solution. Tri-State has modified our bring-your-own-resource tariff to allow for that.
We’re working through the high-impact load tariff process right now. Storage is part of the solution, but not all utilities are the same. Not all regions are the same. You can move a little bit of the power around the grid, but ultimately, there is a way to approach reliability that does not change—if anything, it intensifies when you bring on loads of these sides. It’s the responsibility of utilities to make sure that we’re adhering to that.
Viswanath: I think that’s great. Honestly, I think that’s the perfect close.
I think you guys have really helped in terms of our own understanding. If everyone can thank our panelists, you guys have been amazing. Thank you so much.
Reynolds: As you’ve heard from our experts, batteries provide dispatchable resources that can be turned on and run through reliability events—whether lasting hours or days—helping utilities maintain stable operations during grid stress. I hope all of you have enjoyed this listening session from the Colorado statewide summit. As we close out the year, Teri and I want to thank you for joining us this year and invite you to come back and join us again in 2026. We have a great lineup of content and look forward to engaging with you then. Have a happy and healthy New Year.
