This energy form may sound geeky but will giant batteries solve the state’s energy crisis?

• Energy bills have been increasing across the country and Indiana utiities are looking towards battery storage to ease costs.
• Giant batteries are plugged into the energy grid and charged by wind or solar power. They then later serve as a source of energy.
• Not everyone is enthused, however. Some compare the systems to data centers and say they do not want battery storage projects near them.

An obscure and slightly geeky type of energy is integral to the state’s plan for addressing the looming energy crisis. 

As demand for energy skyrockets nationwide, state officials and utilities have been looking for a solution. All the while, Hoosiers are feeling the squeeze. Statewide, energy bills increased by an average of more than $28 a month this year, and they have spiked more than 40 percent since 2020 across the county.

Enter battery storage, a term that tends to elicit more confusion than relief.

While the concept of battery energy storage systems might seem murky, they’re really just oversized batteries that look like they were made for a giant.

“Just like you have batteries at home, and you can use them when you need them,” Suzanne Jaworowski, Indiana’s secretary of energy and natural resources, said.

The batteries can be plugged into the energy grid and charged by resources like solar panels when the sun is out. Later, when the sun dips and panels have gone quiet, the batteries discharge the stored energy as needed.

While the technology often appears tacked on to lists of renewable energy resources like wind and solar, battery energy storage systems are finally having their own moment. Many believe that battery storage will be a boon to Indiana: It’s cheap, it’s clean and it could help solve a piece of the state’s energy conundrum. 

“We have in recent years and for a long time been an ‘all of the above’ policy, where we use everything that we have,” said Jaworowski. “Battery storage is a new tool that we have in our disposal — and it’s a great tool.”

MISO, the agency that runs the electric grid from Minnesota to Louisiana, has seen a flood of proposals for battery storage projects. As of May 2025, stand alone batteries account for more than 10 percent of MISO’s queue of proposals waiting for approval to plug into the grid. And AES Indiana, a utility that provides electricity for much of the Indianapolis area, is modeling how major utilities can use the technology.

Environmental advocates meanwhile welcome the missions-free energy source that promises to mitigate fossil fuel use.

“We see batteries as a significant piece of the puzzle in the context of preventing a massive buildout of gas plants,” said Kerwin Olson, the executive direction of the Citizens Action Coalition, a consumer advocacy organization in Indiana. 

Not everyone, however, loves the idea of battery storage. Some people confuse these systems for data centers, which look similar and require a fair amount of space, and finding a home for new projects can be difficult. A battery storage proposal in Hamilton County got shut down in July, in large part because locals were concerned it could spark lithium battery fires, which can be dangerous and difficult to put out.

Still, there has been a noticeable uptick across the board in enthusiasm for battery storage projects. The United States had 300 megawatts of installed battery capacity in 2014. Ten years later, the nation had 28,584.

A grid under stress 

It’s no secret that the region’s electric grid is feeling pressured. Most people attribute it to the nation’s growing, seemingly insatiable, demand for more energy. 

There’s been outcry from both Democrats and Republicans in Indianapolis as utilities try to raise rates, and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation issued a warning to MISO that the grid could be at risk long-term.

“Electricity costs are going to keep going up because demand’s going to keep continue rising,” Jaworowski said. “That’s being forecasted throughout the entire country.”

Mike Deising, a spokesperson for MISO, said that the non-profit grid operator foresees enough energy generation to meet demand for this year and next. After that, though, things get dicey.

Industrial complexes, residential growth, onshore manufacturing and the electrification of modern life all contribute to the surge in energy demand. But data centers have entered the picture as a wild card.

“The data centerpiece is really that new unknown variable,” Deising said. “How big are they going to be and how quick are they going to want to build?”

One large data center can suck as much energy off the grid as the entire city of Indianapolis, Deising said. Smaller data centers are more comparable to cities like Fort Wayne.

“If you add 10 of those, that’s 10 large cities you’ve just added to the grid,” Deising said. Indiana currently has an estimated 75 data centers, varying in size and energy usage, according to datacentersmap.com.

While MISO has approved plenty of energy generation projects that could be built out to support the beleaguered grid, Deising said that finding homes for them has proven difficult. Wind and solar are especially tricky: Forty of Indiana’s 92 counties have bans or limits on commercial wind projects and 24 counties have similar restrictions on new solar installations.

Jaworowski also pointed to the decline of coal plants along with the rise of renewable energy as another issue for the grid; wind and solar can’t produce energy all day long the way coal can.

“People have been really rallying to support renewables, and I love renewables,” Jaworowski said. “It’s a wonderful resource to get energy from the wind and the sun. But it is not 24 hours, it is intermittent. There’s just no other way about it. It is not a base load source of electricity.”

Some officials and utilities argue keeping coal plants online or adding natural gas plants to the mix is a reasonable solution. Others think that the environmental and public health cost of fossil fuels justifies pushing for a new path forward — like a heavy investment into battery technology.

Many battery energy storage systems hold up to four hours’ worth of energy, often created by renewable resources, that can be discharged when the sun sets or wind settles. Multiple batteries can address longer gaps in energy production when their discharges are staggered.

Battery “storage is a powerful tool to prevent the buildout of more fossil fuel infrastructure,” Olson said. “We need to do everything we can to keep fossil fuels in the ground.”

Batteries help ratepayers, too

For some, the issue is less about mitigating climate change. Jaworowski, who is excited about battery storage, called some environmental regulations imposed on coal plants “overkill” and said that there has been a “war on fossil fuels.” 

Most stakeholders realize that batteries provide savings and stability, and customers of Northeastern REMC, who live west of Fort Wayne, have seen benefits already. 

Eric Jung, the cooperative’s president and CEO, said Northeastern REMC turned to the technology a few years ago because of the staggering costs of energy transmission. The priciest six hours a year — when transmission lines are clogged as Hoosiers race to warm up on chilly mornings or cool off on hot summer evenings — comprise almost a third of the cooperative’s total costs.

So now, the cooperative does things differently. When houses go dark and demand dips, power prices often nosedive. That’s when Northeastern REMC can start charging their batteries. Come morning, when prices are soaring, the cooperative can discharge the cheap energy that was stored overnight and save their customers money. They now offset about 20% of their peak load through battery storage. 

Some major utilities have also turned to battery energy storage systems. In Indiana, AES is at the forefront.

The utility introduced the first grid-scale, battery-based energy storage system to the state in 2016. The battery, which sits at the Harding Street Generation Station in Indianapolis, can hold 20 MW of energy.

Officials at the utility are increasingly relying on battery storage as they map out the future, and they choose batteries “in a lot of cases, as the least costly option,” said Patrick Maguire, the senior director of commercial at AES.

AES added one of the largest battery energy storage systems to the MISO grid earlier this year, and more are coming. The utility’s 2025 integrated resource plan, filed last week, included a plan to add hundreds more megawatts of battery storage to the AES portfolio if large load customers, like data centers, come online.

But despite environmentalists’ hopes, the plan might still include natural gas. This is partly because battery storage is still new and can only store limited megawatts. According to Jaworowski, the technology just doesn’t exist yet to eradicate the need for power generation that can supply energy 24 hours a day.

“Maybe someday we’ll get there with a utility scale battery that can do a lot more,” she said. “But right now, we are not there.”

IndyStar’s environmental reporting is made possible through the generous support of the nonprofit Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust.

Sophie Hartley is an IndyStar environment reporter. You can reach her at sophie.hartley@indystar.com or on X at @sophienhartley.