 For almost every year in the historical record, utilities paid no attention to battery storage. Because of this, the past offers little insight into how quickly utilities will adopt the technology, which helps integrate renewables onto the grid, deliver peak capacity without carbon emissions, instantly adjust the frequency of the system and more. As costs have fallen and early adopters liked what they saw from initial trials, though, the cycle from pilot to evaluation to widespread adoption is speeding up. The storage industry, and advocates of low carbon electricity, have a lot riding on that process. A new analysis sheds some light on how that adoption cycle works. Wood Mackenzie storage researcher Gregson Curtin tallied up utility integrated resource plans from the last three years those are the documents where companies tell the world what power plants they expect to build in the coming years. In 2017, almost none of the 43 utilities that Curtin surveyed expected to build any energy storage. 