Last year, the smart money had the American energy sector investing a cool $100 billion (with a “b”) in battery storage for sustainable energy. Today, those batteries aren’t just supporting wind and solar, they’re propping up AI data centers – and the investments are just getting bigger.
Whether you love AI (wrong) or hate AI (correct), it’s probably here to stay – with some estimates indicating that AI data centers could represent 17% of total US energy consumption by 2030. (!) That has huge implications for the battery energy storage system (BESS) market, and the original $100 billion estimate we covered last year? That’s looking pretty conservative now.
That’s because the ACP estimate focused on building a domestic battery manufacturing base, with companies like LG planning to build out more than 16 GWh of capacity annually from its existing production lines in Holland, Michigan.
Today, analysts at Benchmark expect the US to deploy more than 600 GWh of energy storage by 2030, with annual installations nearly doubling again as AI-driven power demand continues to accelerate.
“At the end of 2025, the US had 137 GWh of utility-scale storage, 19 GWh commercial and industrial, and 9 GWh residential,” writes Power Systems Technology.
