Picture a nor’easter rolling into Worcester at two in the morning. Marisol just finished a twelve-hour shift as a home health aide. She walks into Lafayette Place, the apartment building she shares with her mother, and the lights flicker, then die. Normally that means a scramble: flashlights, a cooler for the fridge, and worry about the machine her mother’s doctor prescribed to help her breathe at night.
This winter, that scramble won’t happen. A new battery storage program just put $40.3 million into keeping the power on at 36 sites across Massachusetts, and Lafayette Place is one of them. When the grid goes down, the batteries switch on automatically. No generator to start. No gas to find at 2 a.m.
A Battery Storage Program Aimed at the Buildings That Need It Most
The Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources built this battery storage program, called Advancing Massachusetts Power, to protect the places people can least afford to lose power. Of the 36 awards, 28 fall under the “community resilience” category. Together they add roughly 10 megawatts and 44 megawatt-hours of storage. That’s enough to carry critical loads through a multi-day outage.
Ten of those awards went to affordable or public housing. Seven went to schools, including Falmouth High School, Hopkinton High School, and Cape Cod Technical High School. Water and sewer plants in Springfield and Lowell got batteries too, so a storm doesn’t knock out clean water on top of everything else.
State officials were blunt about who outages usually hit hardest.
“The vast majority of this funding is headed to environmental justice communities, which typically are burdened by longer power outages, an aging grid, and higher energy bills.”
What This Saves You, in Real Dollars and Real Time
A multi-day outage costs more than most people realize. A full fridge and freezer can spoil within 48 hours, and replacing that food easily runs $200 or more. Miss a work shift because there’s no hot water or a working stove, and the real price climbs higher. For a building on battery backup, none of that math applies. The lights stay on. The fridge stays cold. Marisol’s mother keeps breathing easy.
Schools benefit just as much. Picture David, a science teacher in Hopkinton, rescheduling two lost teaching days after last winter’s ice storm. This year, the battery in his school’s basement means the building keeps running when the grid doesn’t. A closure isn’t just an inconvenience. Working parents scramble for childcare, and kids lose classroom time they don’t get back. With battery backup, a school can double as a warming center for the whole neighborhood instead of shutting its doors.
Cities save money too. Every hour a diesel generator doesn’t run is fuel the town doesn’t buy. Every peak-demand spike a battery covers is a charge that doesn’t land on the municipal budget. That’s one more reason property taxes don’t have to climb every time storms strain the grid.
- Ten housing communities, including Lafayette Place in Worcester and Heritage Apartments in Boston, keep lights, elevators, and refrigerators running through outages.
- Seven schools, from Cape Cod to Hopkinton, can now serve as emergency shelters instead of closing.
- Water utilities in Springfield and Lowell keep treating drinking water no matter what the weather does.
Part of a Bigger Shift
This isn’t happening in isolation. U.S. battery storage capacity topped 52 gigawatts by summer 2026, according to Microgrid Knowledge’s coverage of the announcement. It’s on pace to hit 70 gigawatts by early 2027, growing at roughly 70 percent a year. State officials say Massachusetts batteries supplied more electricity to the grid in the first eight months of 2026 than in all of 2025 combined. Every megawatt-hour of battery power is a megawatt-hour a fossil fuel peaker plant doesn’t have to burn, and those plants tend to sit in the same neighborhoods this program is targeting. Fewer hours running means cleaner air for the people who live closest to them.
Massachusetts isn’t alone in this bet. California’s PG&E is building similar community microgrids for its most outage-prone towns, and Illinois recently structured a battery storage deal that could save homes up to $2,800.
If your town doesn’t have a program like this yet, that’s worth raising at the next city council meeting. A $40 million investment sounds big until you compare it to what one bad ice storm costs a state in spoiled food, missed workdays, and school closures. Next to that, the batteries are the cheap part.
Related Reading
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- Healey-Driscoll Administration: $40 Million to Power Critical Facilities During Outages
- Microgrid Knowledge: Massachusetts Invests $40 Million in On-Site Battery Storage