Battery storage isn’t emerging—it’s accelerating.

In 2024, the U.S. added 11.9 GW of grid-scale capacity. In 2025, that figure is projected to hit 18.2 GW—a 53% year-over-year surge. Globally, Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) deployments are expected to grow 76% this year, reaching 69 GW / 169 GWh.

Yet, while investment soars, execution is struggling to keep up. Not because batteries are failing—but because the disciplines around them still operate in silos. Civil, structural, high-voltage, geotech, electrical, controls—all sequenced, rarely integrated.

And in BESS, what breaks isn’t the battery. It’s the seams between systems.

Scale Breaks Silos

Utility-scale BESS projects are growing fast. Systems that once topped out at 20 MW now routinely exceed 300 MW, pushing into territory previously reserved for peaker plants. In 2025 alone, the U.S. is projected to deploy 18.2 GW of battery storage—a 53% increase over 2024. Yet many projects are still delivered using legacy engineering sequences built for much smaller systems.

That approach no longer works. With more than 1,030 GW of hybrid and storage capacity stuck in interconnection queues, speed to market is critical. Every day lost to rework, redesign, or misalignment pushes a project’s commercial risk.

Integrated engineering compresses delivery timelines. It empowers parallel workflows, early discovery, and site-specific responsiveness—so every team operates from the same playbook at the same time.

The Foundation is the Failure Point

Each BESS container weighs over 80,000 pounds, and sites often deploy dozens, if not hundreds, of these containers. Yet many foundations still rely on outdated solar specs, with structural and geotech input arriving too late to shape layout or load planning.

The result? Cracking, pooling, code violations, and costly rework. And, more often than not, the issue is process, not product. Civil teams optimize for density but overlook access. Geotech comes in after pads are drawn. Structural loads miss HVAC weight or fire lanes. In siloed workflows, no one’s designing the system—just their slice of it.

Integrated engineering fixes that. It ensures foundations are coordinated across disciplines, not just compliant, but constructible, resilient, and ready for repowering.

Bidirectionality Changes Everything

Unlike traditional generation assets, BESS operates as both load and source, adding complexity across power conversion system (PCS) logic, relay protection, energy management system (EMS) coordination, and Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) communication. According to the Department of Education (DOE), misconfigured controls and poor system integration now rank among the top causes of utility-scale storage failures.

These aren’t isolated software bugs. They’re predictable outcomes of fragmented engineering. When HV, SCADA, EMS, and protection schemes are designed in isolation, mismatched settings and incompatible logic not only impair performance but can also trip the system during normal operation.

Integrated system design anticipates bidirectional behavior across every layer. That’s how you prevent black start failures, control gaps, and grid noncompliance before they ever occur.

Design Once, Flex for the Future

Procurement volatility, shifting tariffs, and evolving IRA incentives make one thing clear: designs must be built to change. But many projects lock in battery formats, inverter specs, and layout densities before anything’s been purchased.

That rigidity limits options, delays execution, and raises long-term costs, especially when BESS degradation averages 1.5–2.5% per year. Augmentation isn’t optional. It’s inevitable. If your project wasn’t engineered with expansion in mind, you’ll be forced to retrofit capacity at high cost—or risk leaving value on the table.

Integrated engineering future-proofs the asset. It accounts for layout phasing, thermal expansion, switchgear capacity, and multi-chemistry support, so your project isn’t just code-compliant. It’s built to last.

FastGrid: Built for the Full Arc of Storage

Battery storage isn’t like solar. It’s heavier, more software-driven, and more vulnerable to failure when disciplines operate in silos. That’s why we engineered our BESS practice around true full-stack delivery—with real-time, cross-functional collaboration from dirt to dispatch.

FastGrid was built to solve what legacy engineering can’t: integration.

What we deliver:

• Site-to-substation engineering, from grading and drainage through SCADA and protection
• Parallel execution across civil, structural, geotechnical, HV, and controls—never in sequence
• Flexible foundations that support up to five battery chemistries without redesign
• Augmentable layouts with fire-safe spacing, thermal zoning, and trenching for future capacity
• Revenue-aligned HV design, tailored to real use cases—arbitrage, regulation, and capacity
• Constructability by design, grounded in EPC experience, not just modeling theory

In storage, failure isn’t a surprise—it’s what happens when systems are engineered in isolation.

Ready to stop coordinating and start integrating? Let’s talk.