As solar and offshore wind projects stall, New Jersey just awarded its biggest incentives to battery storage projects to help reach its climate goals and stabilize electricity prices for consumers.

The New Jersey Board of Public Utilities (BPU) earlier this month announced incentives for three large battery storage projects totaling 355 megawatts under the Garden State Energy Storage Program, or GSESP.

The agency said the projects will provide flexible, on-demand power to the PJM regional grid and are expected to generate more than $169 million in savings for ratepayers over the life of the program.

The award comes as New Jersey looks for energy projects that can come online faster than many other resources. Under state law, New Jersey is supposed to reach 2,000 megawatts of energy storage by 2030.

Energy storage works by saving electricity for later use. The batteries store power when it is plentiful and cheap, then send it back to the grid when demand is higher and electricity is more expensive.

Hitting that target matters more than ever as other clean energy technologies face tougher conditions under the second Trump term, including a federal tax-credit phaseout timeline hanging over solar projects and a virtual ban on offshore wind.

“Storage tax credits remain available. … It reduces the need for increasing state incentives or state support for storage facilities,” Katharine Perry, deputy director of clean energy at the BPU, said in an interview. “We’ve been a little bit more insulated.”

The projects awarded are Woods Landing Storage, a 200-megawatt project in Sayreville; Two Rivers Energy Storage, a 150-megawatt project in Ridgefield; and North America Energy Storage Corp, a 5-megawatt project in Bordentown.

Under the BPU order, Woods Landing would receive $15 million, Two Rivers would receive $12.28 million and North America Energy Storage Corp. would receive $300,000 a year for 15 years. This is a combined $27.576 million annually, or about $413.6 million over 15 years if all three projects meet the program’s conditions and receive their full payments.

The awards are funded through existing clean-energy money collected under the state’s Societal Benefits Charge, which appears as an item on New Jerseyans’ energy bills.

Most of that capacity comes from the Woods Landing battery project developed by Texas-based Jupiter Power at a former coal plant site in Sayreville. Dan Watson of Jupiter Power, the Woods Landing project, said the award was crucial to moving the project ahead.

“This award, it gives us a commitment from the state of New Jersey,” Watson said. “And that long-term commitment is necessary, mainly to finance the project, secure the capital necessary to make this kind of investment.”

For Eric Miller, the New Jersey policy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), an advocacy group, the Woods Landing project also shows how New Jersey can repurpose old fossil fuel sites for new energy infrastructure.

Miller pointed to the Sayreville project’s location on a long-retired coal plant site, where developers plan to reuse existing transmission infrastructure while remediating the property.

“That is an amazing example of environment-friendly, climate-friendly, smart energy redevelopment,” Miller said.

The BPU chose the awards through a competitive process aimed at selecting the most cost-effective projects. BPU’s Perry said Woods Landing “on its face was the most affordable project that we have.” She said the board also looked closely at whether projects would provide a clear net benefit to ratepayers.

The BPU expects the winning projects to be operational in two and a half years, or around 2028. According to Perry, they should help stabilize electricity prices by 2029.

Electricity prices in New Jersey jumped roughly 17 to 20 percent in the summer of 2025 according to state regulators.

State officials have tied those increases to a broader supply-and-demand crunch at PJM Interconnection, the regional grid operator, where demand growth driven mostly by data centers has outpaced the new supplies coming online.

To help control prices as quickly as possible, Perry said the state was deploying what she described as a “whole suite of efforts.” For the BPU, that includes battery storage, solar and other efforts to bring new resources online quickly.

Through her first two executive orders, the state’s newly elected Democratic governor, Mikie Sherrill, declared a state of emergency on utility costs, directed the BPU to freeze residential electricity supply rate increases and deliver bill credits, and ordered the agency to move quickly on expanding solar and battery storage.

The BPU has also opened the next round of applications for the storage incentive program, launching a second solicitation for 645 megawatts of additional capacity. The agency said that round is open to stand-alone storage projects as well as solar-plus-storage projects.