Date of Award

Spring 5-31-2026

Document Type

Thesis (Undergraduate)

Department

Quantitative Social Science

First Advisor

Herbert Chang

Second Advisor

Bryan Bollinger

Abstract

Utility-scale battery storage is accelerating at an unprecedented pace as the world increasingly relies on renewable energies to power grids. Demand for data centers has produced record-high electricity demand, and utility-scale batteries are becoming crucial in supporting the grid and the variability of renewables. As a result, analysis on the efficacy of policy drivers of battery storage will provide the field with a roadmap for the most impactful policy solutions to spur battery storage deployment. This paper estimates the effect of state battery storage mandates on cumulative installed battery capacity using a staggered difference-in-differences (DiD) design following Callaway and Sant’Anna (2021), which accommodates heterogeneous treatment effects across adoption cohorts and avoids the negative-weighting bias that plagues two-way fixed effects (TWFE) estimators in staggered adoption settings. I construct a balanced panel of all 48 contiguous U.S. states (excluding Oregon due to its virtually zero mandate) from 2010 to 2025 and find that mandates statistically significantly increase 1 + cumulative deployed capacity by approximately 2.37 log units or 973.96% relative to the counterfactual of no mandate. This result is also corroborated when analyzing cumulative battery capacity normalized by average state electricity consumption, showing a 3.94% increase in battery MW share of consumption for treated states. Furthermore, I find that mandate effects have slow dynamic effects materializing over four years post signing, more stringent mandates produce larger effects, and mandates have no detectable effect on battery duration.

Download

Share

COinS