Last year wasn’t all bad. There were strides forward in the energy industry and new records set.
In the third quarter of 2020, a record was set for new U.S. battery installations when 476 megawatts of storage resources were deployed. That is a 240% increase over the previous record, which was set in the second quarter of 2020.
These big “batteries” are important as the electric industry moves to more wind and solar resources. The wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine, but energy storage units that capture the energy and that release power when it is needed help solve that problem.
Industry experts are predicting that the new third quarter record will not stand for long. The country’s largest utility, NextEra Energy, plans to spend $1 billion on storage systems in 2021.