San Antonio Express-News reports on the growing Texas battery energy storage boom, but some Hill County residents are worried that new battery storage sites will be noisy, increase the risk of fire, and cause environmental damage. The article quotes Texas Advanced Energy Business Alliance's (United's state affiliate) Matthew Boms, who spoke to the importance of battery storage sites in the state.
MASON — Christopher Dyer says his noisy neighbor moved in without warning.
No one knocked at the door of his home about 40 miles northwest of Fredericksburg to ask how he’d feel about living next to a battery energy storage site. Instead, he got an earful of construction noise. That was soon replaced by the sound of air conditioners whirring to keep the batteries cool and the hum of electricity at the facility, which is about 60 feet from his property.
He installed waterfall fountains in his backyard to drown out the racket and the city of Mason built a 10-foot fence around the site. It wasn’t enough, Dyer said. He and his wife, Catherine, don’t even try entertaining on their patio anymore.
“I have absolutely no problem with storing energy,” he said. “We have to do what we can to create the energy. My issue is you don’t put it next to a school, you don’t put it next to a hospital. You don’t put it next to somebody’s house for the sake of convenience.”
Such concerns are becoming common across Texas.
The state is in the midst of a boom in battery energy storage, which industry experts say is helping the often-strained Texas power grid keep up with rapidly increasing demand.
Developers want to build the sites where they’re most needed. That means areas like the Hill Country — where population growth has increased energy demand and added to congestion on transmission lines — are being targeted for more of the projects.
The sites face few regulations, though, and some Hill Country residents are on edge. They’re worried the battery systems will be noisy, increase the risk of fire and do environmental damage. Their message to developers is simple: Not in our backyard.
Energy companies caught in the crosshairs say most developers give residents notice, seek feedback on their plans and that their proposed sites don’t go up near residences or schools. What happened near Dyer’s home in Mason is uncommon and unfortunate, they say.
“We want to be really upfront with people and treat them like we were their neighbors, too, because we’re going to be when we build the project,” said Carolyn O’Brien of Black Mountain Energy, a Washington company planning a site behind an electrical substation in northwestern Kerr County.
The companies are used to criticism, though. They commonly face angry residents crowding into public meetings to voice their opposition.
In June, one such meeting in Kendall County drew 200 people. A Black Mountain Energy meeting in Kerr County in July had 10 residents sign up to speak in opposition. Speakers at both argued the sites don’t support local jobs or otherwise benefit the county and that the often-dry climate of the Hill Country amplifies fire risks.
“I think you’ll find out from the people that speak that you’re not real popular,” Kerr County Commissioner Don Harris told company representatives.
O’Brien, who works in permitting, says she’s sympathetic to the concerns.
“When you have a reaction, it’s going to be like this,” she said. “We get a lot of the same comments whether we’re in Missouri or Wisconsin or Texas.”
Regis Energy Partners, the Houston company that operates the site in Mason, did not respond to requests for comment.
The backlash has grown as the industry booms across Texas.
Just four years ago, the state had few sites like the ones popping up in Mason and elsewhere. Now, nearly 8,800 megawatts of battery storage is connected to the statewide grid operated by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. More than 2,800 megawatts of that was added since last summer alone.
Batteries are still overshadowed by traditional and renewable sources. The grid has access to about 67,000 megawatts of gas-fired generation, 39,525 megawatts of wind, 25,961 megawatts of solar and 14,700 megawatts of coal-fired power.
But the battery boom is just getting started. Operators have applied to connect another 152,000 megawatts of storage capacity to the grid by 2030. It’s coming as ERCOT is projecting record growth in demand for electricity by the end of the decade.
Developers and grid experts say the surge in battery projects is driven by simple economics. The sites are less expensive and can be built more rapidly than traditional generating plants that might be added to keep up with the state’s increasing demand. Battery sites pair well with power generated by wind and solar, which are also growing. And while they often qualify for federal tax credits, grid experts say the industry would be rapidly expanding even without them in Texas’ independent energy market.
Another factor is that ERCOT increasingly relies on batteries to keep power flowing through its creaky grid, said Matthew Boms, director of the Texas Advanced Energy Business Alliance.
“I think there’s a story to be told on how batteries have been saving the grid,” he said. “I think most Texans just don’t know how important batteries have been.”
The stories of the past two summers provide an example.
Through summer and early fall 2023, ERCOT issued 11 requests for energy conservation as demand boomed. After the past year’s growth in batteries, it hasn’t issued any conservation requests in 2024 — even when the grid saw record demand of 85.9 gigawatts on Aug. 20. Nearly half of the capacity to meet that demand came from renewable sources — wind, solar and batteries. When solar power output dwindled after sunset, batteries helped carry the state through the early evening, which is often the grid’s rockiest period.
“Solar and storage saved the Texas summer,” said Stephanie Smith, chief operating officer at Eolian, a California company that has renewable generating and storage capacity in Texas. “We didn’t really have the scarcity events that we had just one year ago, and the heat index was almost as bad most of the summer.”
At the storage sites, hundreds of battery units installed in rows of enclosures that resemble shipping containers are charged with power from the grid, usually when it’s plentiful and less expensive to buy. They’re also often paired with wind and solar farms, where they help make renewable energy more reliable by making it available on demand.
Then, they discharge the juice back onto the grid when it’s scarce, on evenings after sundown when solar power drops off or during periods of unusually high demand.
Batteries also can send out power during an emergency — like when a gas- or coal-fired power plant unexpectedly shuts down and there’s demand to be met — or absorb it when too much is buzzing across transmission lines and causing congestion. That’s important because when a transmission line gets overcrowded, it can cause cascading outages across the grid.
“In the San Antonio or South Texas region, they’re providing grid stability in a really constrained part of the grid, where we especially need more battery storage,” Boms said. “Could that transmission be built? Yeah, probably. It’s going to take several years to build it. In the meantime, batteries are playing a really important role.”
Eolian is in the process of building a site in San Antonio with CPS Energy that will be among the world’s largest stand-alone battery sites — meaning it won’t be tied directly to renewable resources. The new batteries are being placed to act as shock absorbers at ERCOT’s riskiest transmission congestion point, which is near San Antonio. CPS Energy is building new transmission lines to remedy the problem but they won’t be complete until at least mid 2027.
Plant outages or an imbalanced amount of power north and south of the San Antonio circuit can stress it out. It happened last September, when the congested line was blamed for bringing the statewide grid closer to rolling outages than it had been since the winter storms of early 2021.
Key Capture Energy, which is working on a site in Kendall County, was one of the battery providers that dispatched power during that emergency. In total, batteries cranked out 2.2 gigawatts of power into the grid, according to Erica Glenn, Key Capture’s manager of development for ERCOT projects.
“At the time, this was a record for battery energy storage deployment, which has been surpassed several times this summer and fall,” she said.
Battery developers scattering across the Hill Country are pinpointing other congestion points as well. They want the batteries in places they’re needed to support grid reliability. Those locations are also where they stand to make the most profit selling power back to the ERCOT market.
Thus, batteries provide local power, storage companies say and help prevent far-reaching blackouts.
“If we ever find ourselves in a grid emergency condition,” Boms said, “you want to be in a community close to a battery project.”
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