Kind: Measured report
By Asif Hussain, Founder and CEO, SpecIndex
The construction story with the real permit volume behind it is not EV battery gigafactories. SpecIndex's own database of public bid and permit records shows only three projects nationally since January 2025 that describe an actual battery manufacturing plant, worth $9 billion and concentrated almost entirely in Georgia. The larger and more distributed wave of construction is grid scale battery energy storage: 436 permitted projects across the same period, worth a combined $296 million in tracked value, with New York alone accounting for 298 of them.
That gap, three gigafactories versus 436 storage installations, is itself the finding. It says something real about where battery related construction dollars are actually flowing in 2025 and 2026.
Facts at a glance
- SpecIndex's own database of public bid and permit records shows only three projects nationally since January 2025 that describe an actual battery manufacturing plant, worth $9 billion and concentrated almost entirely in Georgia. (From: the opening paragraph.)
- The larger and more distributed wave of construction is grid scale battery energy storage: 436 permitted projects across the same period, worth a combined $296 million in tracked value, with New York alone accounting for 298 of them. (From: the opening paragraph.)
- The 436 BESS figure is a floor on permitted projects since January 2025, not an estimate of installed or planned storage capacity. (From: Method note and scope.)
New York's 298 projects are grid infrastructure, not one company's build out
Reading the individual permit descriptions behind New York's count makes the pattern clear at once. These are not expansions of a single facility. They are discrete battery energy storage system (BESS) installations, each permitted separately:
"Installation of battery energy storage system (ESS) in OSP as per plans"
"General construction work for exterior battery containment enclosures"
"Curb cut for proposed battery energy storage system building"
"Filing for interior renovations and establishment of S-2 battery storage occupancy"
Most of these are small individually. The filings cover curb cuts, containment enclosures, and occupancy classification work. That is exactly what a distributed grid storage buildout looks like at the permit level: utilities and independent power producers installing storage capacity at substations and interconnection points across a state's grid, rather than one company building one large plant.
The state pattern for storage looks nothing like the gigafactory pattern
The table below puts the storage count by state. New York leads the next state, California, by 263 projects, and the shape of the list is a grid story rather than a factory story.
| State | BESS projects (2025 to present) | Estimated value |
|---|---|---|
| New York | 298 | $233 million |
| California | 35 | $46 million |
| Texas | 31 | $513 thousand |
| Arizona | 20 | No value disclosed |
| North Carolina | 14 | $861 thousand |
| Illinois | 8 | $13.7 million |
Download CSV (the rows above, exactly as shown)
*Source: SpecIndex's own corpus of public bid and permit records, `name` and `description` matched on battery energy storage language, `opened_or_announced_date >= 2025-01-01`.*
New York's dominance here is a regulatory and grid planning story, not a manufacturing story. State clean energy mandates have driven utilities and developers to permit storage capacity across the state's grid at a pace no other state in SpecIndex's corpus comes close to matching.
California and Texas, the two states cited first in national battery storage coverage because of their large scale utility projects, show 35 and 31 permitted projects in this window. That gap is a reminder that permit count and installed capacity are not the same measure, and that a small number of very large California and Texas projects can carry more megawatts than New York's larger project count.
Only three projects in the corpus describe a real gigafactory
The battery manufacturing side of the market, filtered specifically to exclude storage system language, is small in SpecIndex's permit level corpus: two projects in Georgia worth a combined $9 billion, and one additional project in West Virginia. Georgia's pair is consistent with the state's position as one of the most active states nationally for announced EV and battery manufacturing investment. The permit level record still shows the actual construction activity for cell and pack manufacturing plants running years behind the announcement cycle, because announced gigafactory investment has not yet generated the building permit filings that would put it in a public record corpus like this one.
Storage work belongs in Division 26 and Division 48, not in gigafactory tracking
Battery energy storage system construction is a Division 26 (Electrical) and Division 48 (Electrical Power Generation) project by specification content, not a manufacturing building project. Switchgear, battery racks, fire suppression and containment systems dominate the products named in these sections, governed in large part by NFPA 855's stationary storage installation requirements. That is a different manufacturer set than a data center or fab project draws on.
A manufacturer of switchgear, containment enclosures or fire suppression systems evaluating this sector should be reading Division 26 and 48 sections on interconnection and substation adjacent projects, not tracking gigafactory announcements. The gigafactory count in the public record is still too small to be a construction market on its own.
Method note and scope
We counted battery energy storage and battery manufacturing projects in SpecIndex's own database of public bid and permit records. The storage count uses the match rule the article describes above: storage language in the project name or description.
The manufacturing count uses the narrower rule stated in the gigafactory section: filings that describe battery cell or pack manufacturing, with storage system language excluded. The window is the permit window the article states, projects opened or announced since January 1, 2025.
The figures in this article, including the 436 storage installations, the three gigafactory projects, the $9 billion gigafactory value, and the state table, are retained from the original publication and are dated as of the article's original September 2026 count. The corpus keeps growing, so the figures are dated and later counts will differ.
Scope has limits. The corpus captures storage and manufacturing projects that clear a public permitting authority, so it will undercount utility scale storage built on land that does not require a local building permit review.
An announced but not yet permitted gigafactory will not appear here regardless of its public profile. The 436 BESS figure is a floor on permitted projects since January 2025, not an estimate of installed or planned storage capacity.