Supply Chain Bottlenecks Delay US Grid Battery Installations

America’s electricity grids, after decades of stagnant investment, are racing to make the upgrades needed to plug in the batteries, but supplies of key equipment are straining. The demand for batteries has skyrocketed as electricity use swells, driven by booming data centers and growing electrification. Getting batteries connected to power grids has become harder, and storage projects are piling up in interconnection queues from coast to coast.

“The whole process of interconnecting these new power plants got really log-jammed and bottlenecked,” said Joseph Rand, an energy policy researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Consolidated Edison Inc., a major utility in New York state, says the volume of battery storage projects waiting to be connected has grown by 300% over the last two years. Nationwide, some 750 gigawatts of energy storage projects—roughly equivalent to the generating capacity of more than 700 nuclear reactors—are in line to get grid connections, according to the laboratory’s research. Not all of these projects will be built; many developers have already abandoned the queue because of delays. The median waiting time increased to five years in 2025, up from a year and a half in 2015.

The flood of battery projects is expected to continue. Wood Mackenzie, an energy consultancy, projects the U.S. energy storage market will quadruple in the next six years. But shortages in key equipment have driven up construction costs and timelines for grid upgrades, leaving utilities struggling to build fast enough. A drought of skilled workers is further slowing them down.

In California, PG&E Corp., the state’s largest utility, told regulators in January that long lead times for specialized equipment were a key driver of delays. Procuring certain breakers could take nearly four years, according to the utility, which reported a 300% increase in its interconnection workload. In Northern California, holdups to circuit breaker upgrades at a substation in Solano County led to projected delays for two battery projects worth a combined 450 megawatts. Transmission line work in the Bay Area has put another 800 megawatts of energy storage at risk of delay, PG&E said.

Last year, New York’s Con Ed started requiring developers to help pay for upgrades if their projects would push power demand and strain infrastructure. The new methodology drew criticism. According to a survey by the trade group New York Battery and Energy Storage Technology Consortium (NY-BEST), it raised costs by an average of $21 million per project, a 14-fold increase. At least 25 projects have been canceled as a result, the group said. Battery advocates have appealed to state regulators to get Con Ed to abandon the new policy.