A storage industry vibe-check after a month of Trump 2.0 

The dust has settled from Trump’s inauguration, but his policies are already making waves across the renewables industry.  

It’s as yet unclear what’s next for American energy storage. 

Hugh McDermott, the senior vice president of business development and sales at ESS, Inc., described the industry as in a broad “wait-and-see mode.” 

“The horizon’s going to be a little cloudy over the next three to six months because you have some uncertainty in the marketplace with the new administration,” added Vincent Ambrose, the CCO of FranklinWH Energy Storage.  

“The underlying economics of our value proposition hasn’t changed,” he said. “As long as you have a better, faster, less expensive product, you win in the marketplace regardless of the policy environment.” 

Jason Abiecunas, the senior vice president of business development at FlexGen, told ESS News at the Intersolar and Energy Storage North America Conference that he was seeing a lot of new entrants into the battery space.  

“You walk around the exhibit hall, and there are numerous names making battery boxes or inverters that you probably haven’t heard of before,” he explained. “The birth of new suppliers is great, but we will also probably see the death of some as the industry grows and matures.”  

The industry remains wary of the possibility of federal incentives like the IRA’s Investment Tax Credit (ITC) ending up on the chopping block. But many predict the ITC and others won’t be axed entirely, just altered.  

“Most industry veterans would agree the tax credits for investing in energy storage projects look set to survive,” said McDermott, adding it could even be strengthened to raise minimum domestic content levels.   

Joe Zhou, the CEO of geomechanical energy storage company Quidnet Energy, affirmed policy adjustments won’t have a “start or stop type of impact” on the industry’s growth.  

“The dominant drivers of growth in the energy industry are data centers and AI,” he said. What’s going to move the needle the most, he explained, is the pace of AI adoption. From that perspective, “the administration’s stance could be very constructive for the industry.”  

“Across the grid, there remains a tremendous need for storage for reliable, dispatchable capacity,” echoed Abiecunas. “The demand curve hasn’t slowed down; we’re continuing to see projects move forward because they’re delivering real value to energy investors, consumers, utilities and the grid.” 

Bigger projects with larger capacities are also on the rise. Abiecunas expects to see an increase in duration for battery projects.  

Still, connecting those projects to the grid poses another challenge.  

“We’re not going to be able to deploy renewables at the speed and scale we want without a robust transmission corridor,” explained Brian Nelson, the head of renewables at ABB, noting that regulatory reform could speed up permitting and development.  

“I’m optimistic that changes at the federal government will help deploy new transmission, which will help energy storage development and firm up the grid capacity we already have.” 

And the industry’s growth has caught too much momentum to cease entirely.  

“We’ve already lived through one Trump administration,” said Ambrose, noting that Trump’s ‘drill, baby, drill’ approach can’t compete with renewable energy. “Even if gasoline gets cheaper by a buck a gallon, that’s not going to stop EV adoption. We’ll be fine in the short-term and even in the longer term.”