Energy Storage in 2026: Policy Changes, Market Reality, and Long-Term Outlook

If you’re wondering how 2025 policy changes are affecting energy storage demand, this conversation is for you.

Wes Kennedy, instructor of Comprehensive Solar Plus Storage, walks through the key dynamics shaping the market: why storage maintained federal incentives while solar didn’t, what 600+ tariff changes mean for business planning, and why the “gravity of technology” ensures solar and storage will win long-term, despite political obstacles.

This clip comes from a HeatSpring PRO Circle – discussions where PRO members learn directly from industry experts. HeatSpring PRO gives you unlimited access to Wes’s course plus 15 others in energy storage, solar service, building performance, and skilled sales for just $89/month or $890/year. It’s career-building training from the professionals leading the industry.

Transcript below.

Brian: How are the changes in policy that have happened this year changing the demand for energy storage and what kinds of projects you could do?

Wes: Sure. Yeah. So it’s no news to anybody that the new administration is not a fan of renewable energy sources and arguably antagonistic.

Luckily, or maybe luck has little to do with it, energy storage in particular has been somewhat shielded from that executive ire. Specifically, what I’m talking about is the investment tax credits that were kind of the stabilizing growth engine of our industry for so many years expired at the end of this year for solar.

Wind was attacked. Existing projects were just stopped. But energy storage continues to have an ITC carve out. So I think there is a recognition that even if you are a climate denier and don’t believe the hype around renewable sources, I think it’s pretty widely recognized that energy storage distributed widely throughout our entire electrical grid is good for everybody. It really just continues to offer more tools to move energy from place to place, to choose how energy is dispatched and to choose how energy is absorbed.

The cool thing about batteries, going back to some of my early courses with HeatSpring, is it’s both a load and a source. The fact that it can charge and take excess energy off the grid and turn around and discharge, providing energy to the grid, is really what makes energy storage and batteries specifically so valuable.

So over and above the big ITC change, the thing that’s hurt not just the green tech industry, but all industry is just all this shenanigans around tariffs. That’s been a bigger impact because regardless of what the number is, it’s the uncertainty. I caught a little political clip yesterday. There has been over 600 tariff changes since January of last year. So how can an industry or a business plan anything if they just don’t know what things are going to cost? Right? So that’s been the bigger struggle.

In the near term, talking to people – and by near, I mean like now and coming to a close here in two weeks – talking to friends that are in the more solar-focused elements of our industry or in other elements of it, it’s really just been a big rush to get projects qualified for the incentives before they actually fall away. So the term that you’ll hear is safe harboring. There’s various commercial strategies that you can take to get your project far enough along this calendar year to still qualify for the ITC moving into the future year when you actually build the project.

So ironically, most of the people I know in our industry are having one of the best years they’ve ever had. But what’s going to happen next year? I mean, next year is gonna be building out everything that’s in the pipelines, but there’s definitely going to be a lag while things pick back up.

Having said all that, I just wanted to frame that the gravity of technology and adoption of technology and efficiencies within all stages of manufacturing and deployment – the gravity is on our side in the green tech industry. So whatever happens with this administration, even for the next three years, all it’s doing is putting a slight slow on the rate of growth in our industry. It’s not going to collapse the industry. And if anything, it’s like pruning a tree of dead branches. It’s making whatever survives able to be even that much more economically stable.

And we’ve really crossed a threshold for solar and storage in particular, where we’re driving towards just the material cost of the technology of the thing itself continuing to get cheaper. And it’s really inevitable. We will have a solar and battery-based grid. It’s just a matter of will it be 2050 or will it be 2065 or something like this. We’ve won, and we get to have some weird rollercoaster rides along the way. But it’s happening.

Brian: That’s really good perspective.