Massachusetts Paid $56 per Kilowatt-Hour for One Storage Grant and $833 for Another in the Same Round

Massachusetts awarded $4.5 million for an 80 megawatt-hour battery at Berkshire East Mountain Resort and $1.44 million for a 1.728 megawatt-hour battery at Mohawk Trail Regional School.

The first works out to roughly $56 per kilowatt-hour of state money. The second is roughly $833.

Both came out of the same round. The Healey-Driscoll administration announced $40.3 million across 36 projects under the Advancing Massachusetts Power Energy Storage program, split across three tracks: Community Resilience, Safety and Education, and Long Duration. The recipients named by the state include schools, affordable housing, community centers, municipal facilities and a wastewater treatment plant.

The spread. Springfield Water and Sewer received $2.5 million for a 2,500 kW / 10,030 kWh system at a wastewater plant, or roughly $249 per kilowatt-hour. Mohawk Trail’s 250 kW / 1,728 kWh school system drew $1.44 million, or roughly $833. Berkshire East’s 4 MW / 80 MWh sodium-iron-chloride system drew $4.5 million, or roughly $56.

Across the three projects the state itself detailed, the implied subsidy rate falls by more than an order of magnitude as system energy capacity rises. That is the arithmetic of the disclosed awards, not a published program formula: the state has not, in the announcement materials, set out a per-kilowatt-hour rate or a stated ceiling that produces the pattern. What the three data points establish is that a single round can value one kilowatt-hour of installed storage at $56 in one building and $833 in another, and that the difference tracks system size rather than technology, owner type or region.

The school block. The Mohawk Trail configuration, 250 kW paired with 1,728 kWh, is a recognizably standard commercial block: roughly seven hours of duration at rated power, sized to a building rather than to a grid service. A school district with a daytime-peaked load and a gymnasium or cafeteria doubling as a shelter is close to the median case for that configuration. The state has, in effect, published what it is willing to pay for one: $1.44 million against a $1.7 megawatt-hour system, which is capital subsidy heavy enough to move a marginal payback into a straightforward one.

Long duration. Berkshire East took the round’s largest single award for a sodium-iron-chloride system at 4 MW and 80 MWh, a twenty-to-one energy-to-power ratio that is not a demand-charge asset. At that duration the system is a multi-day outage resource, and the chemistry is not lithium iron phosphate. Massachusetts funded it in a track separate from Community Resilience, which indicates the state is treating long-duration and novel chemistry as a demonstration category with its own budget rather than as a competitor to building-scale lithium.

Training as a line item. The third track, Safety and Education, funds first-responder and municipal-official training rather than hardware. Few state storage programs carry such a track.

The distinction matters because the binding constraints on building-sited storage over the past year have sat outside the equipment specification. Orangetown, New York attached a battery moratorium to building permits and certificates of occupancy. New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation linked elevated PFOS near an East Hampton wellfield to a 2023 battery fire. Moss Landing burned a second time in modules awaiting removal. Each of those turned on permitting posture, local response capability and containment, none of which a UL listing resolves.

Funding the officials who make those calls is a use of storage money that competes directly with hardware dollars inside the same appropriation.

The national context. The Q3 2026 US Energy Storage Monitor from the American Clean Power Association and Wood Mackenzie recorded 18.9 GWh of storage installed in the United States in the second quarter of 2026, a record. Utility-scale accounted for 4.7 GW and 17.6 GWh of it. Residential was 676 MW. The community, commercial and industrial segment, the one Massachusetts is buying here, was 48 MW, down 2 percent year over year.

The same report forecasts 27 percent annual growth for the C&I segment through 2031, against 8 percent for utility-scale and 9 percent for residential, on a cumulative market of 207 GW and 715 GWh. Average duration across the whole market moved from 2.8 hours to 3.5 hours.

A segment that shrank 2 percent in the most recent quarter is forecast to grow at more than three times the rate of the segment currently installing a hundred times more capacity. The forecast assumes a constraint releases. It does not identify which one.

The Massachusetts round is one account of what release might look like. The buyers are institutions rather than merchant developers. The stated purchase reason is keeping critical facilities powered through outages rather than arbitrage or demand-charge reduction. And $249 to $833 per kilowatt-hour of public capital is covering whatever the underlying economics left open, at three of the buildings where the state disclosed both the award and the system size.

What is not yet public. The announcement materials name three projects with both dollar figures and nameplate specifications. The remaining 33 awards, the per-track totals, the number of projects in each track and any per-award cap are not broken out in the state’s release. Those figures determine whether the $56-to-$833 range observed here is the program’s full spread or a narrow slice of it, and whether the Community Resilience track absorbed most of the $40.3 million or merely most of the project count. Until DOER publishes the full award table, the range should be read as three verified points, not a distribution.

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