Battery Storage Won the Fight Everyone Expected It to Lose

Three years ago, everyone knew what was coming for grid-scale batteries. Fires in Arizona and New York had made the evening news. "Thermal runaway" had entered the vocabulary of people who had never permitted an energy project in their lives. Every trade publication ran the same warning: storage was about to become the most restricted asset class in the build-out.

It didn't happen. And the reason it didn't happen is the most useful thing this industry has learned in a decade. Read against every county where storage is being sited, the restrictive column is this, in full:

• Schenectady County, New York — moratorium active (last action 2025-10-16)
• Onondaga County, New York — proposed moratorium (2026-01-26)
• Gillespie County, Texas — ban enacted (2025-02-24)
• Marion County, Oregon — ban enacted (2025-06-09)
• Orange County, California — restrictions tightened (2026-01-26)

Five counties. That is the entire column. Set it beside the other two technologies, read on the same day from the same ordinances:

County ordinances and board resolutions. Municipal and township action sits below this line and is not counted here.

Data centers are restricted at several times storage's rate, and solar — the technology that spent three years being the political problem — now sits between them.

What happened instead

The counties didn't ignore storage. They wrote rules for it.

• Hundreds of counties are classified major-deployment — storage is being built there at scale.
• A large share have written a standalone BESS ordinance: not a paragraph bolted onto the solar rules, but a dedicated instrument for batteries.
• More still reference NFPA 855, the standard for the installation of stationary energy storage systems, in their ordinance text — comfortably the largest of these three groups.

County ordinance text. NFPA 855 counts ordinances that name the standard; adoption by reference elsewhere would not show up here.

That third group is the whole story, and it's worth understanding why.

Picture the meeting. A county board, a room full of frightened neighbours, a technology nobody in the room fully understands, and a fire on the news last month. The board has to do something. What NFPA 855 gave those boards was an answer that wasn't a ban — an external, professionally maintained, nationally recognised standard they could adopt by reference. Nobody had to invent a setback at 9pm on a Tuesday, or defend a number they'd made up. They could point at a code and go home.

That's the part the forecasts missed. Fire fear turned out to be the reason storage got regulated fast, not the reason it got banned. A ban is what a jurisdiction reaches for when it has nothing else. Storage handed them something else.

The contrast with solar is the lesson

Utility-scale solar was regulated the hard way — county by county, from scratch, with setbacks and acreage caps negotiated in public meetings by people with no template. The result is the map we score today: every county in the country, wildly inconsistent, with far more counties on a worsening trajectory than an improving one, and a persistent stock of moratoria that took state preemption laws to unwind.

Storage arrived a few years later into a landscape that had learned. The trade associations had a standard ready. The model ordinances existed. The result is standalone ordinances across much of the country and five restrictive counties.

That's the lesson, and it generalises: an industry that shows up with a credible code gets regulated. An industry that shows up without one gets banned while the jurisdiction works out what to do. Solar learned this the expensive way. Storage got to watch.

The new risk is guilt by association

That settlement is now under pressure from an unexpected direction. In July 2026, Austin County, Texas adopted a countywide moratorium covering new artificial intelligence data center and battery energy storage system development — one instrument, both technologies. Mesquite, Texas likewise established a single regulatory framework covering data centers and BESS together. (MultiState)

Storage is being written into data-center ordinances because the two now show up together in the same applications, in front of the same boards, drawing on the same substations. The politics of the AI build-out are considerably hotter than the politics of batteries — data-center counties are tightening at overwhelmingly greater rates than they are loosening, and documented local sentiment runs opposed by a wide margin — and a storage project attached to that debate does not get judged on NFPA 855 compliance.

This matters most in Texas, which has the country's densest storage build-out by some distance. It is also the state that on August 3, 2026 froze roughly 250–300 grid-connection requests pending a state audit. (Texas Tribune)

What it means

If you develop storage: the playbook that has worked is a code-compliance playbook — NFPA 855, UL 9540, an emergency response plan, a decommissioning commitment — presented to a board that wants a defensible framework more than it wants a fight. Keep running it. But check, before you file, whether the jurisdiction's data-center ordinance has a BESS clause in it, because that is where your project will actually be judged.

For standalone versus co-located: the case for keeping a storage project procedurally separate from an adjacent data center just strengthened considerably. Shared applications share politics.

And if you build anything else: storage is the worked example of how an industry gets regulated instead of prohibited. Bring the standard with you. Do not make a county invent one on your behalf — it will not invent one you like.

What this analysis does not tell you

Our BESS coverage is a subset of US counties, not every one of them — absence from the restrictive list means no restrictive record in the set we read, not proof that no township in America has banned a battery. Municipal and township actions are under-captured at county granularity: a state's township-level moratoria collapse into far fewer county records. The NFPA 855 finding reflects ordinance text we have parsed; adoption by reference inside a building code we have not parsed would not register. Treat all of it as a floor on regulation and a floor on restriction alike.