Some things just look cool. Like when Tesla’s new Roadster drove up a curved ramp, flipped in midair and leapt over five Teslas on cold-gas thrusters last week. That was cool to see and something I did not think I would witness a car do… well ever. Too bad that skill is not approved for public roads.
I think batteries are cool too, just not in a photo-op kind of way. Batteries now show up in every hour and with every kind of partner. By our count, storage set ERCOT’s clearing price nearly 25% of the time in 2025. On July 22 the fleet discharged a record 12 GW, and real-time prices peaked at $378/MWh against the $5,000/MWh cap hit in 2024. This summer they helped Texas meet a 91 GW record without a conservation call. In CAISO, 9.4 GW of batteries run standalone, roughly 9 GW pair with solar and other resources, and 3.4 GW sit beside gas plants. In my book, the symbiotic (parasitic?) relationship with other established technologies is pretty cool.
Pairing with peakers is just the kind of paradox I enjoy. Batteries are shaving the price peaks in the very hours peakers live on. In California they are turning idle peaker sites into daily earners. Peakers there spend most of the year parked in the garage: Henrietta ran a 1.3% capacity factor over the last year, Hanford 0.6%. The names of the plants matter less than the observation that they were paid to exist (resource adequacy) much more than to generate. That means the point of interconnection (POI) mostly sits idle.
A battery adds revenue streams to the POI the peaker cannot reach. The peaker earns RA and the odd scarcity hour. The battery cycles cheap midday solar into the evening every day and sells regulation and reserves. Surplus interconnection lets it share the peaker’s export limit without a new queue position; only charging needs a fresh study. One wire, several paychecks. No wonder another 4 GW of batteries at gas sites is under construction or holds interconnection agreements in CAISO.
Middle River Power is running the playbook across the state. It added batteries of roughly 100 MW at its Henrietta, Hanford and Malaga peakers in 2025, has 125 MW under construction at Panoche for 2027, and this month bought the 427 MW Panoche plant with plans to hybridize it.
Value scales with the size of the POI, so the best sites pair big interconnections with peakers that rarely run. That points to the Northeast, where we value Milepost’s peaker portfolio at about $0.2 million/MW as 8 GW of batteries take their evening hours. Maximizing the value of these sites may mean adding the same batteries that compressed their value. That’s pretty cool.
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