To keep up with artificial intelligence, Illinois needs batteries big enough to keep its air conditioners running on hot summer nights and to replenish its electrical grid during winter storms lasting for days.
The state took a step in this direction Monday when Richardson Electronics said it would expand production of commercial-scale storage batteries at its factory in La Fox, a suburb west of Chicago.
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Richardson, a diversified manufacturer of power products, expects to sell batteries worldwide. But company officials say they’ll deploy many of their batteries in Illinois because of the state’s hefty tax incentives for renewable power and for batteries that make solar and wind less intermittent.
When layered on top of each other, Illinois and federal tax incentives add up to almost the entire cost of one of Richardson’s storage batteries, said Scott DuBois, director of the company’s storage operations.
The battery, which the company plans to build at its La Fox site next summer, would be able to store 5 megawatts of power and will cost about $3 million. It will be the largest battery ever connected to the grid by an Illinois company, Richardson officials said.
Without more batteries, Illinois will be even more reliant on dirty, expensive electricity imports from other states and more likely to delay the natural gas power plant closures it’s planned for years to clean the air.
“We are depending on out-of-state resources to essentially keep the lights on,” said Matthew Tomc, vice president of regulatory policy and energy supply for Ameren, which serves customers in downstate Illinois.
“There are many states building new generation, but it’s not built yet. So there are reliability issues first and foremost,” Tomc said. “And it raises the risk that you have price spikes seasonally, namely in the summer, right when you’re trying to meet those capacity requirements.”
Tomc’s not alone in sounding the alarm.
PJM Interconnection, the regional grid that includes northern Illinois, 12 other states and the District of Columbia, could face 13 days of service interruptions a year by 2030 in a worst-case scenario, Pennsylvania regulators said last month.
PJM’s longstanding goal has been to have just one day of service interruptions every 10 years.
Prices already are climbing. Commonwealth Edison customers in northern Illinois pay an average residential bill of $141 per month, according to Heatmap News and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. That’s up just 4% since 2021, partly because PJM imposed price caps last year.
Ameren customers downstate pay an average of $224, up 51% in five years. The downstate area is part of the Midwest Independent System Operator grid or MISO, which also serves 14 other states from Mississippi to North Dakota as well as Manitoba.
To blunt further increases, Richardson and its supplier Gotion, a Chinese-owned company with a $2 billion factory in Manteno, Illinois, start with 4,500 battery cells, each about the size of a college textbook.
For their biggest batteries, they will then stack, weld and seal the battery cells, cooling equipment and electronic controls inside a metal box resembling a 20-foot shipping container.
DuBois wouldn’t give a precise estimate for how big Richardson’s battery business will get. But he said he expects exponential growth.
Gil Quinones, ComEd’s chief executive, is thinking big, too. “If the majority of our residential, commercial and industrial customers put in batteries, that’s going to be a big win for the state,” Quinones said.
“It could increase the capacity utilization for the grid we’ve already paid for, and have a chance to really put downward pressure on prices for everybody,” Quinones said.
Because Richardson sees itself as an engineering specialist rather than a high-volume manufacturer, it will focus on customized storage systems for so-called microgrids. These are clusters of solar and wind operators that can either supply electricity directly to nearby users or buy and sell power as a group into the regional grid.
One of the company’s first orders, for example, came from a microgrid serving seven remote communities in Alaska.
Illinois needs more batteries to unlock the full potential of its growing wind and solar capabilities, according to consultants to the Illinois Power Agency and other state regulators in a report last month.
Illinois will need 50 gigawatts of installed solar and wind capacity by 2050 to get close to its goal of using only non-carbon sources to generate electricity by then, the agencies said.
But regional grid operators still regard wind and solar as too intermittent. As a result, the state will be able to count only about 6 gigawatts of its renewable output as the baseload power electricity grids need to operate around the clock.
With additional batteries, Illinois could make its solar panels more productive and reliable by, for example, storing the power they generate during the day and then pumping it into the grid or nearby homes and businesses after the sun goes down.
In addition to more batteries, the Ameren service area downstate will need 9 gigawatts of out-of-state imports by 2045, according to the Sept. 24 consultant report to the IPA.
That’s more than half the Ameren area’s total requirement of 16 gigawatts of round-the-clock power in 2045.
The ComEd service area will need 4 gigawatts of out-of-state imports, or about 13% of its baseload requirement.
The imports will include power produced by new natural gas plants that Illinois ratepayers will help build in other states. Illinois can’t build these plants because of the state’s clean air rules.
Texas, with 18 gigawatts of installed, utility-scale battery storage capacity, and California, with 16 gigawatts, already are far ahead of Illinois, which has just 102 megawatts (or 0.1 gigawatts), according to Cleanview, a market research company based in Henderson, Colorado.
Illinois needs to quickly deploy more power sources of all kinds, since its total installed electricity capacity will have to double by 2050 to keep up with artificial intelligence, consultants for the IPA and other agencies reported on Sept. 24.
For Richardson Electronics, the batteries becoming indispensable components of clean power stations are just one part of a diverse product portfolio.
Arthur Richardson founded the company in 1947 to sell surplus military vacuum tubes to the fledgling television and radio industries. His son Edward took over in 1974 and continued adding engineering and technical support that the company still views as its greatest strength.
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Edward’s mother, Florence, worked at the company until she was 95 years old. Edward, who’s now 84, said in an interview he’s trying to beat his mother’s record.
Today, Richardson makes components for everything from synthetic diamond and semiconductor manufacturing to CT medical scanners, microwave tubes, wind turbines and battery-powered locomotives.
This diverse portfolio generated $229 million in revenue for Richardson in the fiscal year that ended in May, the company said in a news release.
But it leaves Richardson with a factory that, from the inside, looks more like Santa’s workshop than one big assembly line.
Endless white corridors separate the different business units. Workers using the ancient art of glass blowing to make vacuum tubes sit a few feet away from others making customizable visual displays for hospitals and airports.
It all looks chaotic. But Richardson insists that cross-pollination is one of the company’s great strengths. The battery packs Richardson developed for railroad locomotives, he said, resemble and lay the groundwork for its utility-scale storage batteries, he said.
At 80 gigawatt-hours of battery-storage production capacity per year, industry leader Tesla already dwarfs what Richardson is planning. But even for Richardson, these battery-storage opportunities could generate an additional $1 billion in revenue, said Bobby Brooks, a Northland Securities stock analyst in Minneapolis.
For its utility-scale batteries, Richardson “is targeting smaller municipal, utility and data center applications …, a niche market that larger competitors often ignore,” Brooks wrote in a July 28 report.
As things stand now, Illinois could face shortages and even bigger price increases as soon as 2028, the IPA and other agencies reported in December.
The agencies will issue a draft of an Integrated Resource Plan on Nov. 16, just one day before regulators return to Springfield to talk about, among other things, whether and how to regulate electricity and water use at data centers.
The Integrated Resource Plan will cover not just how much electricity the state will need, but also how to generate it through new nuclear, fossil-fuel, renewable, and geothermal projects, how to incentivize it through long-term purchasing contracts, and how to ship it via additional transmission lines.
The plan could include more efficiency programs, like curtailing data center operations on hot days and paying residential customers to insulate their attics. But conservation won’t be the main thrust.
“For Illinois to meet its broader decarbonization goals across sectors, we need to be in a growth mode here. The system needs to get bigger,” said Nathan Miller, a consultant helping regulators develop the Integrated Resource Plan, on a Sept. 24 webcast.
“You can’t just skinny and shimmy and reduce load to keep the system small.”
The Integrated Resource Plan will spark a year-long debate not just over the agencies’ conclusions but also over their research methods and assumptions.
For example, Scott Bernstein, co-founder of the environmental group Center for Neighborhood Technology, worries the agencies are basing their computer models on weather trends using only data collected from 1990 through 2024.
This methodology could underestimate El Niño’s potential impact, Bernstein said. El Niño is a periodic Pacific Ocean warming trend that experts say could bring intense heat throughout the Northern Hemisphere in the summer of 2027, and more wildfires to the western U.S.
Since the state deregulated its electricity markets in 1997, agencies like the Illinois Commerce Commission have lacked the authority to impose higher rates to fund new power plants and efficiency programs. Last year, the legislature restored some of the agency’s authority to build long-term procurement contracts into the rates customers are paying.
Tomc said he understands why clean air advocates don’t want to delay closing natural gas power plants. But he said the state needs to seriously consider this option.
Such a delay would set back Gov. JB Pritzker’s environmental aspirations.
In their Sept. 24 report, consultants for the IPA and other agencies analyzed delaying 23 gigawatts of fossil-fuel plant closings scheduled since Pritzker championed the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act in 2021.
These delays could affect an original list of up to 87 different fossil-fuel plants, or about a third of the state’s total installed generating capacity.
About a third of the delays already have happened because PJM, the regional grid operator, has requested them, or because natural gas plants in Elwood and elsewhere have been sold to municipal electricity coops to which CEJA restrictions don’t apply.
The precise air quality impact is hard to gauge since regulators could decide to simply stretch out rules that limit some natural gas plants to 30 hours of operation per year, as opposed to canceling the restraints altogether.
But delays in natural gas closings could dwarf the renewable progress Pritzker says has been made. In a Sept. 23 news release, he said he’d brought 2.4 gigawatts of renewable power online in Illinois since 2021.
The prospect of delayed natural gas closures brings back painful memories for activists like Mayra Mendez, executive director of Clean Power Lake County.
Mendez spent nine years pressing for the 2022 shutdown of an NRG Energy coal plant on the lakefront in downtown Waukegan, partly because studies showed a third of the city’s children were then suffering from asthma.
Delaying the closing of a natural gas plant in nearby Zion will mean more harmful emissions in an area that still gets an ‘F’ or failing grade from the American Lung Association for lung-scarring ozone pollution, she said.
Mendez supports the so-called POWER Act, which, among other things, would speed up grid connections for data centers that build their own clean power stations when investing in Illinois.
“The state of Illinois has a duty to put guardrails on these data centers,” Mendez said. “There should be no economic growth on the backs of communities that have suffered industrial burdens for many, many years.”
Even if Illinois delays its natural gas plant closings, the state will need more batteries, and Richardson is rushing to provide them.
In May, the company agreed to provide engineering and marketing support for both utility- and neighborhood-scale batteries made by Gotion. Going forward, Gotion will act as one of three battery suppliers for Richardson.
Even with Gotion’s low-cost batteries, Richardson couldn’t begin to compete without hefty tax incentives and other subsidies.
These include a 40% federal tax credit for batteries made in former coal-reliant areas like Kane County, three different kinds of state subsidies and rebates from ComEd for providing distributed generation.
By 2045, the downstate Ameren area will need 8 gigawatts of batteries capable of supplying the grid for four hours to provide reliable service, consultants for the IPA and other state agencies said last month.
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ComEd’s northern Illinois service area, meanwhile, will need 12 gigawatts of four-hour battery storage by 2045, the consultants said.
But batteries also run intermittently, so the ComEd service area can count only about 8 gigawatts of its battery capacity as baseload, or round-the-clock, power, according to the report.
Bloomberg New Energy Finance, a New York-based research group, predicts global battery-storage deployments will grow 41% in 2026 to 158 gigawatts as the average price falls by 31%. Long-term utility-scale batteries, or those lasting six hours or more, will contribute just 2 gigawatts of that total, mostly in China, since the technology is still in its infancy.
In the U.S., high costs and restrictions on Chinese-made components are slowing battery-storage growth, according to BNEF. Battery storage systems cost $219 per kilowatt-hour in the U.S. compared to $73 in China, BNEF said.
Richardson, the company’s chief executive, said he’s eager to help Illinois and the rest of the U.S. play catch-up. By boosting Illinois, he could help double the size of his company.
“What we want to do is to grow about 15% a year. If we put that on top of where we are, in five years it’d be $500 million (in annual revenue). I’d be quite happy with that.”
John Lippert is a freelancer.