Massachusetts’s Electric Distribution Companies filed three long-term storage contracts with the state Department of Public Utilities for approval, the first tranche under the Section 83E Round I procurement. Combined, the contracts cover 1,068 MW and 4,472 MWh of four-hour lithium-ion storage across three projects, all sited on former fossil-fuel infrastructure.
The three projects:
- Trimount (Jupiter Power): 700 MW / 2,800 MWh at a former oil terminal in Everett. Offtake is split 200 MW to Fitchburg Gas & Electric and 500 MW to National Grid Massachusetts. Commercial operation is targeted later this decade.
- Energizar (Flatiron Energy): 250 MW / 1,000 MWh on a former industrial site in Chelsea. Target commercial operation Q2 2027.
- Salt Cod (Flatiron Energy): 168 MW / 672 MWh on the Montaup Power Plant site in Somerset, a decommissioned coal and oil generator. Target commercial operation end of 2028.
A fourth selected project, Rhynland Energy’s 200 MW River Mill, did not clear to a long-term utility contract in this filing.
Three things are worth pulling out.
First, the site-reuse pattern. Every project the utilities filed occupies former fossil-generation or fuel-handling land. That is not incidental. Brownfield sites with existing high-voltage interconnections cut years off the timeline that new greenfield projects lose in queue. In a state where ISO-NE interconnection studies routinely run past five years, sites with pre-existing points of interconnection are the fastest path from contract to energization, and they are the sites the winning bids consistently locked up.
Second, the duration. All three are four-hour systems. That matches where the ISO-NE capacity accreditation and winter-peak reliability discussions have been heading and gives the projects a full capacity-market revenue stream on top of the state contracts. Longer-duration technologies were not selected in this round, which reads as the DPU-approved bid stack telling developers that four-hour lithium-ion is the shape utilities want to pay for right now.
Third, the ratepayer math. The utilities’ financial analyses show modest bill reductions for most customers over the five-to-fifteen-year contract window, which is the political frame regulators need to approve the filings. Massachusetts is targeting 5 GW of storage by 2030 (Governor Healey’s additional 5 GW-by-2035 target sits on top), so this 1 GW filing is roughly a fifth of the near-term goal in a single procurement round.
The broader read-through: state procurement is the pull-forward mechanism doing most of the work in the storage buildout right now, and the marginal MWh being contracted is a four-hour lithium-ion system on a brownfield with utility offtake. That combination is what refiners, cell makers, and integrators with US manufacturing footprint get paid to serve. It is also the profile that the current bonus-credit stack under Section 48E rewards most cleanly, which keeps developers pointed at the same design envelope for the next several procurement rounds.