Energy storage is an outlier in the slowdown in the U.S. clean energy buildout.
The country is expected to add 204 gigawatts of battery storage over the next decade, the equivalent of over 800 gigawatt-hours — and a sharp increase from the 31 GW installed through 2024. The estimates are included in a report released today by BloombergNEF, one of the most comprehensive snapshots of the clean energy industry since it was rocked by the GOP’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.”
The new projections are 25% higher than the ones BNEF released immediately after the OBBB was enacted in July, when the U.S. clean energy sector faced a wave of pessimism about its growth prospects due to the sunsetting of many tax credits. Remarkably, they’re also 6% higher than projections released before the OBBB.
By contrast, both solar and wind projections are lower than they were at the beginning of 2025; wind projections, in particular, are 48% lower. That’s despite the fact that demand for wind, solar, and storage — all perceived as quick-to-deploy options in a moment of unanticipated load growth — remain equally strong.
Isshu Kikuma, energy storage analyst at BNEF and one of the contributors to the report, told Latitude Media that one of the most obvious reasons storage is doing better than solar and wind is the leverage that tax credits provide. “Storage still has a long tax credit timeline, really similar to what the Inflation Reduction Act had,” he said. The full value of tax credits for energy storage will remain in place until 2033, before dropping to 75% in 2034 and 50% in 2035.
Wind and solar projects now face much shorter windows to qualify for tax credits, which is prompting a short-term surge in deployments as projects rush to meet deadlines — but more modest long-term growth projections.
But BNEF’s bullish storage estimates are also due to both the sector’s quick reaction to the policy environment and to the fast ramping of domestic manufacturing, according to Kikuma, who noted that domestic large-scale battery systems’ capacity, which amounted to less than 4 GWh in 2024, is now at over 10 GWh, and is expected to increase to over 60 GWh in 2029.
“With the elimination of subsidies for EV purchasing, battery makers are shifting some of the production capacity from EVs to energy storage,” he said. “Instead of building a greenfield manufacturing plant, they’re changing the purpose of production lines. It’s not an easy task, and you have to clean up the lines because the chemistries are different, but it only takes three to 12 months.”
In June, for example, LG Energy announced it had repurposed part of its existing Michigan EV battery facility into an energy storage production line. Similarly, in September, South Korean SK On agreed to supply batteries for energy storage systems to Flatiron Energy Development, converting some of its EV battery production lines. Meanwhile, the automaker GM is now using some of its EV batteries to develop grid-scale storage with Redwood Materials.
This shift from EV batteries to energy storage was predicted, “but it’s much quicker than we expected,” Kikuma said.
In the short term, the bump in U.S. energy storage deployments is also likely due to a rush to stockpile and build before new tariffs and FEOC restrictions impact imports from China, where the vast majority of the supply chain comes from. Non-EV battery import tariff rates from China, which have already seen a 30 percentage point increase since President Trump took office, are expected to be particularly volatile, and import costs are expected to increase in 2026, when an additional 25% tariff introduced by the Biden administration is still scheduled to take effect.
