Amherst lies in northeastern Colorado, about seven miles from the Nebraska border. It has a Lutheran church, a gas station and string of 110-foot-foot tall elevators that can store 2.8 million gallons of grain, mostly sorghum and corn.

In about a year, Amherst will be storing electricity, too. Highline Electric, the electrical cooperative serving farms and homes in that part of Colorado, will be able to draw upon two megawatts of battery storage.

From the farming towns overlying the Ogallala Aquifer to the pinyon-and-juniper slopes above Durango and the cities between, utilities are rushing to embrace storage. They save money, partly by allowing the utilities to stock up on cheap renewable energy and then drawing on the batteries during times of peak demand. Like most things, electricity costs most when in highest demand on hot afternoons and evenings.

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Colorado as of January this year had 459 MW of battery capacity according to Clearview, a data-tracking company dedicated to the clean energy transition. That is far behind California’s 14,583 MW. Colorado, though, has had a far more rapid rate of growth. It had gained 102 times as much battery capacity by 2025 as compared to the 30-fold increase in California. But batteries are politically agnostic. Texas, a politically red state, had an adoption rate of 4,100 percent.

Batteries have stored electricity since Thomas Edison was tinkering in his New Jersey laboratories a century ago. Only in 2012, however, was the first utility-scale application battery storage project implemented in the United States.

Colorado’s first foray into battery storage arrived in 2018. United Power wanted to see how lithium-ion batteries might be integrated. It was a small affair, just four megawatts of Tesla batteries, located behind chain-link fences in an area about the size of a suburban garage. This was along I-25 about 25 miles north of Denver,

United’s deployment of batteries remained Colorado’s largest until early 2023. Holy Cross Energy then briefly took the lead with a slightly larger array of batteries.

Xcel Energy by the end of March will have 200 MW of battery storage available. The company expects to have 1,725 MW of capacity by 2028. Tri-State, Colorado’s second largest electrical generator, plans 550 MW in Colorado and another 150 in New Mexico.

Fort Collins-based Platte River Power Authority, Black Hills Energy and Colorado Springs Utilities are also adding utility-scale batteries.

Robin Lunt likens the role batteries are playing in energy to that of refrigeration in food supply chains.

“You can move lettuce from California to the Midwest if you have refrigeration. And if you don’t, you’re just betting on the weather,” said Lunt, chief commercial officer for Denver-based Guzman Energy. “Storage is a new tool that smooths out the volatility that currently exists with energy.”

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Taking a national perspective, Dennis Wamsted, an analyst with the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, sees the “blistering pace of the buildout of solar and battery storage” continuing for at least the next two years. “This allows renewables to gain more market share from coal and gas in U.S. power markets,” he said in a new report he co-authored.

“Battery storage is about to change how the utility industry operates, and it will be for the better,” said Wamsted.

Sharp declines in prices have been crucial in spurring rapid deployment of utility-scale four-hour batteries. Bloomberg NEF, a research organization, reported that costs in 2025 fell more than 27 percent even as other clean energy costs rose.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed by President Donald Trump in 2025 gutted many elements of the Inflation Reduction Act signed into law by President Joe Biden in 2023. Tax credits for battery storage were largely spared, however, and will benefit Highline and other not-for-profit electric cooperatives.

Mark Gabriel, the chief executive of United Power, calls batteries a game changer. United’s 6 percent annual growth in demand ranks highest of all Colorado electrical utilities. Wind generation remains the least expensive energy but requires transmission from mostly distant locations. That transmission is costly and typically takes a decade or more to build, Gabriel points out. Renting space on transmission lines is like driving in the toll lane of a highway.

Gas is another option, and United managed to get its natural gas plant near Keenesburg on line in July 2025 after being commissioned just 20 months earlier. The same plant might take three to five years now because of constricted supply lines.

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Batteries have tightened supply chains, too, and somewhat heightened prices of late. But they can be installed within 10 months. Too, they can use existing infrastructure. In other words, no new transmission lines needed.

Substations are commonly located in areas where demand for electricity is congregated. “It’s in the distribution system that the batteries have real value,” said Gabriel.

United expects to have 319.5 MW of battery storage in 2027, enough to meet 40 percent to 50 percent of electrical demand.

To be clear, batteries have encountered problems. The first work by Holy Cross Energy near Glenwood Springs did not go well. Those batteries are now being replaced. Two other installations by Holy Cross in its service territory along Interstate 70 have worked as expected.

In southwest Colorado, La Plata Electric ran into resistance in concerns about wildfire from batteries. Defenders of batteries say new designs and technologies have reduced the risks of wildfire.

Today’s technology could become supplemented by new forms of storage within a few years. Companies, several of them based in metropolitan Denver-Boulder, are working on new forms of storage. As well, Xcel expects to move forward with a 100-hour iron-air storage project at Pueblo in the next year.

“As we move to a much higher percentage of renewables on the grid, storage takes on a role that is more and more important,” said Will Toor, director of the Colorado Energy Office. “When you think about how we will keep the lights on in the future in a grid with high amounts of renewables, storage just gets more and more important.”

Allen Best produces Big Pivots, which tracks energy and water transitions in Colorado. This article was extracted from a longer piece at BigPivots.com about batteries.