A growing number of U.S. utilities plan to add energy storage to their resource plans this decade, as declining renewable energy costs and investor and public pressure to curb emissions have significantly changed the market over the past few years. More and more utilities across the United States plan to add more wind and solar capacity and retire coal-fired power plants to start addressing climate change and to take advantage of falling renewable energy procurement costs. And a growing number of those utilities are combining battery energy storage with their new solar and wind capacity plans. The utilities’ integrated resource plans (IRPs) for the next few years include significant growth in battery energy storage. Battery storage deployments are even expected to exceed the utilities’ expectations in their IRPs, according to a new analysis by Wood Mackenzie. The energy consultancy’s analysis of the plans of 43 utilities showed “exponential growth […]