WASHINGTON — Within three years, a surge of large-scale battery projects is expected to come online on Texas and California power grids as developers seek to store electricity produced by those state’s sprawling wind and solar farms.
The Department of Energy has estimated that 21 gigawatts of storage capacity will plug into U.S. power grids before 2026, more than two-and-a-half times the amount now in operation. Almost 8 gigawatts of batteries are expected to be built in Texas.
The boom in battery development comes as weather-dependent wind and solar energy becomes an increasingly large part of the U.S. power grid, requiring an alternate power source when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining.
As renewable energy has grown over the past decade, natural gas-powered turbines have shouldered a lot of that load. But as…