Augmentation and end-of-life disposal look set to grow in significance in the next few years in the US, with nearly 1.5GW/3GWh of BESS projects now four years old or more.
The deployment of large-scale battery energy storage systems (BESS) has ramped up in the US since 2021 with annual installations in the multiple gigawatt range since then, culminating in a whopping 7.9GW installed last year. But projects put into operation before then may be more noteworthy to those with an interest in end-of-life solutions and augmentation.
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Data from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) below shows the quantity of large-scale projects deployed in from 2011-2020, totalling nearly 1.5GW/3GWh, all of which is by now at least c.3.7 years’ old.
2021 saw deployments skyrocket, to around 2.5GW/10GWh according to the US EIA’s data, and that is already or fast-approaching three years of operation.
| Year | MW installed | MWh installed |
| 2011 | 16.8 | 17.3 |
| 2012 | 61.5 | 50.3 |
| 2013 | 9.5 | 6 |
| 2014 | 22 | 14.3 |
| 2015 | 103.7 | 172.8 |
| 2016 | 180.7 | 232.1 |
| 2017 | 131.2 | 293.7 |
| 2018 | 198.4 | 511 |
| 2019 | 195.2 | 529.4 |
| 2020 | 574.5 | 1,116.9 |
| Total 2011-2020 | 1493.5 | 2,943 |
There are a select few projects that came online earlier, but the vast majority of the several hundred that pre-date 2021 in the US EIA’s dataset came online from 2011 onwards.
Why do these figures matter?
Projects typically require their first capacity additions—called augmentation—after three to five years of operation as those systems degrade, with a full battery replacement after 15-20 years. Augmentation is something companies are increasingly having to think about, and all 1.5GW/3GWh could be potential opportunities.
In an interview at Intersolar Europe in June, system integrator Wärtsilä’s VP of energy storage & optimisation Andy Tang told us the company would be doing its first major project augmentation later in 2024. Fluence has also started to discuss augmentation on recent analyst calls. The UK’s largest BESS owner Gresham House is doing a major augmentation round this year, which it discussed with us recently.
End-of-life solutions for BESS is also a growing topic as systems age and companies try to set themselves up to maximise returns. This is perhaps more relevant for early-stage pilot or demonstrator projects which may not have an adequate use case today to warrant augmentation. Some of these projects may well no longer be online at all.
Notable projects
Augmentation or decommissioning can of course come much sooner than the above timelines especially for projects deployed with earlier battery technologies.
These include the McHenry BESS project in Illinois, deployed in 2015 with BYD batteries which new company Kore Power announced it would completely ‘repower’ with new batteries last year. Details about that at that time were scant and enquiries from Energy-Storage.news yielded little in the way of a response. Kore reported the project as a 20MW/44MWh one but the US EIA’s data lists it as 19.8MW/7.8MWh.
Most projects of scale deployed during the early part of this period were primarily for backup power or frequency response services, with no energy trading at all. They were subsequently often sub-1-hour systems with a higher megawatt (MW) figure than megawatt-hour (MWh) figure, while the trend has reversed since 2015.
This higher ratio of MW to MWh in the very earliest projects meant they degraded much faster, since any sustained discharge at full power represented a much greater share of the BESS’ overall energy.
Another 2015 project which was in the headlines last year was the Kaua’i Island Utility Cooperative’s (KIUC) Anahola BESS in Hawaii, which battery recycling company Redwood Materials announced it would decommission and recycle. When commissioned it was described as a having a power output of 6MW, while Redwood said it had 4.6MWh of storage capacity.
PJM helped drive early energy storage market
While ERCOT and CAISO now dominate the grid-scale BESS market in the US, it was actually the transmission system operator (TSO) for a dozen states in the eastern US, PJM, that helped drive the market in the early days.
The graph below shows BESS installations from 2011-2020 split out by TSO territory, with PJM in pink. Most installations were in PJM in 2011, 2013, 2014 and 2015, driven by its procurement of BESS for frequency response services. The McHenry project was one of them.
Notable early projects
Alongside the McHenry and Anahola projects, other notable projects in PJM which are approaching ten years of age are the Beech Ridge Energy Storage and Meyersdale projects (the latter pictured above).
The 31.5MW/12.5MWh Beech Ridge project was commissioned by independent power producer (IPP) Invenergy in November 2015, also using BYD BESS.
The 18MW/12.1MWh Meyersdale project was originally built by IPP NextEra Energy Resources but sold to Quinbrook Infrastructure Partners as part of a portfolio in 2019. A full battery replacement for the project was done by NextEra using LG Chem (which eventually spun out its battery business into LG Energy Solution) just before the deal.
