The Resilience Atlas: Mapping residential battery storage performance under grid outage risk in the United States

Residential battery energy storage systems (BESS) are increasingly promoted for resilience, yet U.S. deployment remains concentrated in a few high-incentive markets, with limited alignment to actual grid vulnerability. This study introduces the Resilience Atlas, a national-scale simulation framework that evaluates where BESS provides the greatest resilience benefits under probabilistic outage conditions. Using high-resolution load, solar, and reliability data, we assess performance across 48 states in terms of outage mitigation, energy independence, and emissions reduction. Findings reveal a sharp mismatch between current deployment patterns and resilience need. While California leads in adoption, states like Kentucky offer far greater resilience gains per unit of storage. BESS effectiveness also varies widely across regions, shaped by local outage profiles and load characteristics. These results suggest that market-driven deployment strategies may overlook high-need areas. By mapping where storage delivers the greatest resilience value, the Resilience Atlas provides an evidence base for more targeted, need-informed storage policy.