Pete Tillotson

In California, virtual power plants (VPPs) have been given a boost via two bills signed by outgoing Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom. The bills give VPPs both a market to sell into and a reason for utilities to buy from them. Newsom vetoed a separate bill for a community state solar program the same day.

A White House Executive Order (EO), published on 26 August, has declared a national emergency, citing national security risks relating to hardware and software in the US power system made overseas. This new measure, EO 14420 is the second attempt to put such a measure into place after the previous Trump administration’s EO 13920 in 2020. The new order is broader in scope, including software as well as hardware, and sets a 120-day deadline for the Department of Energy to set implementation guidelines. Benchmark senior BESS research analyst Pete Tillotson said the order could be “highly disruptive to the US grid should it be implemented to its fullest extent”.

Google has announced it will purchase all the power generated from the first two phases of Cypress Creek's Steel River Energy Center in Arkansas. The project comprises 1.6GW of solar paired with 1.9GWh of battery storage, with a potential third phase raising storage to 2.9GWh by 2029. Power will flow to the grid via the utility Entergy Arkansas rather than directly to Google's facilities, offsetting load from existing and planned data centres nearby whilst serving Google’s clean power procurement needs via the power purchase agreement (PPA).

The battery energy stationary storage (BESS) market has grown significantly over the last five years, with this growth is set to continue. Benchmark’s BESS database has now surpassed 10,000 unique projects, both operating and in the pipeline. This is nearly nine times the number of projects Benchmark tracked in the May 2022 edition of the BESS database. The average size of the projects in the database has increased significantly, too, from 193MWh in 2022 to 316MWh today.

Prevalon Energy, a US-headquartered battery energy stationary storage (BESS) manufacturer, has been acquired by solar and energy project software integration company Nextpower for US$365 million. Nextpower offers energy management systems as well as hardware for solar energy projects, and with this acquisition is looking to gain market share in the solar-plus-storage co-location market. Prevalon was formed in 2024 as part of a joint venture between Mitsubishi Power and EES, although Mitsubishi has been in the energy storage market since the early 2010s. It currently has 6.4GWh of energy storage deployed, predominantly in the US, Chile, the UK and Japan.

Northern Virginia is undergoing one of the biggest current infrastructure buildouts in the US as part of its data centre market expansion. Dominion Energy, an energy company and electricity supplier to several northeastern states headquartered in Virginia, grew its contracted data centre capacity to 51GW, up 2.5GW since Q4 2025 and three times the capacity contracted as of July 2023.

The US Department of the Interior (DOI) announced last week that South Korean battery manufacturer LG Energy Solution (LGES) has secured a US$4.3 billion battery electric stationary storage (BESS) cell supply agreement with Tesla.

Earlier this month, Chinese OEM EVE Energy announced that  the world’s first 100MWh-class battery energy storage system (BESS) grid-side project – Ruite New Energy Lingshou BESS –  utilising 628Ah cells has officially entered operation.