As we round the corner toward America’s 250th birthday, it is worth pausing to appreciate how far our nation’s energy story has come. One number captures it, the cost. The first customers in the United States to buy electricity from a commercial power plant paid about 24 cents per kWh. That was 1883, and today, the average U.S. residential rate is around 17.65 cents (Electric Choice, June 2026). Over 140 years, America turned electricity from a luxury good into something woven into nearly every minute of modern life.
As demand surges and the grid strains to keep up, a simple question is on a lot of minds: will the cost of electricity start climbing? That question sits behind nearly every energy decision a large buyer makes today, and some of the most interesting answers trace back to where the story began.
The man charging that 24 cents was Thomas Edison, widely regarded as the father of the electric utility industry. In 1882, he launched the Pearl Street Station in New York, the first commercial power plant of its kind, supplying direct current to 85 customers across a one square mile area. He did not put his plant at the end of a transmission line. He built it in the middle of the load it served, generating power right next to the customers who used it. Keep that picture in mind.
In the decades since, America has danced with a long line of energy partners, from coal and natural gas to nuclear. The most elusive have been the renewables, wind, solar, hydro, and geothermal, whose intermittency the grid was never built to lean on. That is where storage comes in: battery systems, increasingly collocated with solar or wind, let an on-again, off-again resource behave like a dependable one, capturing cheap midday generation and releasing it when demand and prices peak.
The numbers show how fast this is moving. Utility Dive reports a record 9.7 GWh of battery storage installed in the first quarter of 2026, up 32% year over year and the highest first quarter ever, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA). The commercial and industrial segment alone added 648 MWh, and SEIA projects national deployment will reach 613 GWh by 2030. Today, 48% of utility-scale storage capacity is collocated with solar.
Back in January, we wrote about bring your own capacity, companies building behind-the-meter generation to sidestep multi-year interconnection queues. Storage is the piece of that story scaling fastest now. With the grid often unable to connect new load fast enough, large consumers are building generation and storage right at their sites, whether that’s solar-plus-storage, combined heat and power, or full microgrids. What used to be optional has become an operational necessity.
For example, in March Unison Energy and General Mills announced plans to create a new microgrid in Hannibal, Missouri, at one of the foodmaker’s largest manufacturing sites. Unison Energy will finance, build, own and operate the system over a 25-year term. The combined heat and power system not only solves the interconnection problem but also creates efficiencies that reduce costs and emissions. Because the microgrid will provide about 90% of the facility’s electrical load and about 70% of its steam load, it is expected to cut Scope 1 greenhouse gas emissions by more than half and deliver $30 million in savings over 25 years.
Just late last year, Alphabet announced a $4.75 billion acquisition of Intersect Power, a developer that bundles solar with utility-scale storage to power its data centers. More recently, Meta and Enbridge unveiled 365 MW of solar paired with 200 MW / 1.6 GWh of Tesla batteries near Cheyenne, Wyoming, enough to discharge at full power for eight hours.
A company that makes and stores its own power is less exposed to the price swings that hit the grid when fuel costs spike, and less dependent on the grid to keep running. That is what SEIA means in describing storage as insulated from fuel-price shocks. It matters beyond the hyperscalers, too. If the largest buyers in the country are reorganizing how they procure power, that is an early signal for the broader commercial and industrial market. The same pressures reach every large consumer—from rising demand and grid congestion to volatile prices and reliability risk. One caveat is worth planning around. SEIA warns that federal permitting gridlock could slow the buildout, putting a sizable share of projects through 2030 at risk. Time will tell the direction that policy sets.
One of the newest ideas in energy is also one of the oldest. Edison’s first plant at Pearl Street worked because it generated electricity exactly where it was needed, and the frontier of American energy is circling back to that very idea: local generation, paired now with batteries and renewable energy, sitting beside the load it serves. Two and a half centuries into the American experiment, the throughline of our energy story holds. When the demands of the era outgrow the system we inherited, we build the next one.