What the commission voted down
Sofos Power, a battery storage company based in Birmingham, Alabama, asked Greene County, Missouri for a rezoning, permission to change what a piece of land is legally allowed to be used for, covering 40 acres on North Rocky Lane, so it could build a battery storage plant there. A battery storage plant is a facility that draws electricity from the grid, stores it in lithium ion batteries, the rechargeable kind used in phones and electric cars built at a much larger scale, and sends the power back to the grid later. The county planning board reviewed the request first and recommended against it. On April 6, 2026, the Greene County Commission, the elected body that runs the county, voted 2 to 0 to reject the rezoning outright. Bob Dixon, the presiding commissioner, missed the vote. No source states how much power the plant would have delivered or how much electricity it would have stored, so this article gives none. The fight here was over land, not capacity.
Why battery plants keep showing up
United States utility scale battery storage, systems built to serve the whole electric grid rather than 1 home, grew by an average of 70% a year over the last 3 years, according to the Energy Information Administration, the federal agency that tracks energy data for the country. The country had 43.6 gigawatts of it, a unit of electric power equal to 1,000 megawatts, running by the end of 2025. Operators added 8.3 more gigawatts in the first 6 months of 2026, bringing the nationwide total to nearly 52 gigawatts by the middle of the year.
Source 3 states the mid 2026 figure as nearly 52 gigawatts, shown here as 52. The 3 figures are 3 separate numbers source 3 reports, not a calculation performed for this article.
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| End of 2025 | 43.6 |
| Added first half 2026 | 8.3 |
| Total by mid 2026 | 52 |
Operators told the agency they plan to add 14 more gigawatts in the second half of 2026, 26 gigawatts in 2027, and 14 gigawatts in 2028.
Figures are what operators reported to the Energy Information Administration. They are additions planned on top of the capacity already running, not a replacement for it.
Show the numbers
| Second half of 2026 | 14 |
| 2027 | 26 |
| 2028 | 14 |
Sofos Power says it has more than 3,400 megawatts of its own battery projects in active development, spread across 4 regional power grids, SPP, PJM, ERCOT and MISO, backed by an investment fund of more than 400 million dollars. Greene County was 1 attempt among many the company is making right now.
What the neighbor asked for
Kat Morgan Gaines, a resident whose property borders the proposed site, spoke at the planning hearing before the board recommended denial.
It's not an anti-technology. It's not anti-progress. We definitely need grid resiliency.
Kat Morgan Gaines, a Greene County resident whose property borders the proposed Sofos Power site. Source 1.
She asked the board to slow the process down until questions about what the batteries contain, how they would affect groundwater, and what would happen in an emergency were answered.
Not the only town saying no
In Yorktown, New York, the zoning board of appeals denied a use variance, permission to use land in a way its normal zoning rules do not allow, for a battery storage plant on January 22, 2026. The developer, Yorktown ESS, LLC, sued the town on February 25, 2026, arguing the project should be reviewed under a public utility rule that lets some utility projects bypass certain local review.
This is a private company that wants to damage the character of a residential neighborhood in exchange for money from a public utility.
Ed Lachterman, the Yorktown, New York town supervisor. Source 4.
The town posted its legal defense of that lawsuit on its own website on May 12, 2026. 2 local governments voted on a battery storage plant this year, and both said no.