A decade ago, large-scale battery storage was considered the mythical Holy Grail to solving renewable energy’s intermittency woes with sunshine and wind. The early pilot projects remained in their infancy—too expensive to rapidly ramp up.
Today, technology advances and dramatic cost decreases combine to set up battery energy storage as the savior for both renewables and the overarching electric grid as power demand soars and Congress rapidly phases out tax credits for wind and solar energy.
The modern electric grid wastes a tremendous amount of power generation when demand isn’t peaking, and battery systems—whose tax credits were largely spared in President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill—are now here to store that excess power and deploy the electricity as needed when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t gusting or natural gas and coal plants are disrupted, enhancing both grid efficiency and stability. Close to half of all battery storage projects are paired with solar or wind energy projects as part of their symbiotic relationship.
“Without batteries it would be mayhem,” said Izzet Bensusan, founder and CEO of the Captona energy transition investment firm. “The utilities are realizing that without batteries they cannot manage the grid.
“If you don’t have batteries, there’s a chance you may not get power in your home,” Bensusan told Fortune, arguing that the world needs more power—much of which can only come online quickly enough from renewables—and batteries are increasingly necessary for stability.
After record growth in 2024, U.S. battery energy storage systems (BESS) could grow from more than 26 gigawatts (GW) of capacity—enough to power 20 million homes—to anywhere from 120 GW to 150 GW by the end of 2030, depending on the range of projections. The Department of Energy estimates that nearly 19 GW will come online just in 2025 after 10.4 GW were added last year—second in the world after China—although tariff uncertainty may cause a temporary slowdown this year. California and Texas easily lead the way in battery deployment with massive grids and ample land, but the rest of the country is beginning to catch up.
Lithium-ion battery costs have plunged 75% in a decade and the next generation of battery chemistries—sodium-ion, lithium-sulfur, lithium iron phosphate (LFP), and others—are more easily sourced in the U.S. and potentially better aligned with the grid than lithium-ion units initially designed for moving electric vehicles. And battery manufacturers now see grid demand overtaking slumping EV needs in the U.S.
“We’re right at the beginning of the supercycle of investment,” said Cameron Dales, cofounder and president of Peak Energy, which is developing battery storage systems from commonly sourced sodium in the U.S. Dales contends that more than $1 trillion will be spent on BESS growth worldwide over the next 10 years. “We need to get going and build out the capacity. You started to see that over the last two years with the massive growth, but I think we’re at the beginning.”
Painful and beautiful
While the new GOP spending law targets wind and solar power as part of a partisan crusade against renewables, cutting tax credits off after 2027—projects must begin construction by July 2026 or be placed in service by the end of 2027—the key tax credits for large-scale batteries stay in place until 2033 after beginning to phase down in 2030.
One catch is more parts must be manufactured in the U.S.—and less from China, a “foreign entity of concern”—but supply chains are evolving for financial and security needs.
“Energy storage is important whether you’re on the blue side or the red side. Everybody agrees this is critical for the country,” Dales told Fortune.
“We don’t outsource F-16 (fighter jet) manufacturing to another country, and so I think it’s a similar dynamic in batteries,” Dales said. “You need to control the building blocks for how you generate and ultimately store electricity.”
Of note, the U.S. Department of Defense is contracting more with domestic battery manufacturing to power military drones.
Peak has a California manufacturing plant for sodium-ion batteries that utilize abundant U.S. materials without any of China’s dominance of critical minerals. The systems require less cooling so they can operate in harsher temperatures.
After a couple of decades during which U.S. power demand has remained relatively stagnant, domestic electricity consumption is expected to spike by 25% from 2023 to 2035 and roughly 60% from 2023 to 2050, according to the International Energy Agency. A big part of that increase comes from the hyperscalers: Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are investing anywhere from $75 billion to $100 billion each into building data centers for 2025 alone.
The combination of much more demand plus the loss of tax credits is expected to result in more spikes in commercial and residential electricity costs. But incentivized battery storage can at least help mitigate costs.
After all, supply chains for gas-fired turbines for power plants are sold out for the next few years, and new nuclear power is almost a decade out. So, renewables and batteries will represent most of the new power generation for the rest of this decade—regardless of cost.
“I’m going build solar at all costs, and I’m going to charge for it, and people are going to have to pay for it,” Bensusan said. “It can come on online in six to nine months. We don’t really have a choice.”
Evolving dynamics
The new dynamic added to the mix is the improved tax credit environment for battery systems relative to wind and solar, which could change how projects are prioritized.
Of late, more battery systems were co-located with solar farms. Now, more developers might build battery systems and pair them with ancillary solar power instead, said Ravi Manghani, senior director of strategic sourcing for Anza Renewables, which develops software platforms for solar and BESS.
“We might be entering a paradigm where energy storage would actually drive solar growth,” Manghani said. “Up until now, solar was driving the energy storage option. That switch may have flipped because of the way the tax credits phase out.”
While wind power pairs well with battery systems, the highs and lows of gusty weather patterns are harder to predict than the sun and the daily rotation of the Earth. That’s why most new solar farms are paired with battery storage.
While most rechargeable battery systems are designed to hold four or six hours of electricity, they can be built to hold 10 hours or more—it’s just costly. But even four hours of electricity deployed when people come home from work and energy usage spikes in the early evening is extremely beneficial for the grid.
“It’s like getting a washer without a dryer. These things really reinforce each other,” said Aurora Solar cofounder and CEO Chris Hopper about the natural pairing of solar and batteries.
Still, while many solar and wind projects will sget built with or without tax credits, at least 20% fewer will become reality than anticipated, according to projections. Those losses could still impact battery deployment.
And, while costs continue to fall and domestic manufacturing for batteries ramps up, much more progress is still needed—and faster.
Silicon Valley’s Lyten is betting on building BESS using lithium-sulfur batteries with materials from the U.S. and Europe—negating any needs for nickel, manganese, cobalt, and graphite, which are all critical minerals dominated by China.
“To really get to that next jump that we call mass-market energy storage where you can deploy these very economically everywhere around the world, you need another step change down in battery costs,” said Keith Norman, Lyten’s chief sustainability officer. “Our bet on lithium sulfur is that, in the long term, the lowest cost materials are going to win.”
Already focusing on battery-cell manufacturing in California and a planned lithium-sulfur “gigafactory” in Nevada, in July, Lyten just acquired Europe’s largest BESS manufacturing operation in Poland from Northvolt. Lyten also aims to add more BESS manufacturing in the U.S., Norman said.
“We do believe renewables are going to keep going forward, and almost all of that is going to be paired with batteries. What we’re seeing is just an insatiable demand for more power,” Norman said.
“In a world where the tax credits are going to be harder to come by you really need to juice the economics as much as possible for renewables. That really leads you to needing energy storage so you can get every electron that asset produces turned into value.”
MacKenzie Scott has arguably been the biggest name in philanthropy this year—and has nonstop been making major gifts to organizations focused on education, DEI, disaster recovery, and many other causes.
This week alone, several higher education institutions announced major gifts from the billionaire philanthropist and ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos—donations totaling well over $100 million. In true Scott fashion, many of these donations are the largest single donations these schools have ever received.
The donations announced this week include:
$50 million to California State University-East Bay
$50 million to Lehman College (part of the City University of New York system)
$38 million to Texas A&M University-Kingsville
$17 million to Seminole State College
All four institutions are public, access-oriented colleges that enroll large shares of low‑income, first‑generation, and racially diverse students and function as minority‑serving institutions or similar engines of social mobility. They fit MacKenzie Scott’s broader pattern of directing large, unrestricted gifts to colleges that serve “chronically underserved” communities rather than already wealthy, highly selective universities.
Scott, who is worth about $40 billion and has donated over $20 billion in the past five years, has doubled down this year on causes that the Trump administration has cut deeply, such as education, DEI, and disaster recovery.
“As higher education, in general, works to find its way in an uncertain environment, this gift is a major source of encouragement that we are on the right path,” Lehman College President Fernando Delgado said in a statement.
Scott also made one of the largest donations in HBCU Howard University’s 158-year history with an $80 million gift earlier this fall, and a $60 million donation to the Center for Disaster Philanthropy after Trump administration’s cuts to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)—an organization Americans rely on for help during and after hurricanes, wildfires, tornadoes, and floods.
“All sectors of society—public, private, and social—share responsibility for helping communities thrive after a disaster,” CDP president and CEO Patricia McIlreavy previously told Fortune. “Philanthropy plays a critical role in providing communities with resources to rebuild stronger, but it cannot—and should not—replace government and its essential responsibilities.”
Trust-based philanthropy
Scott accumulated the vast majority of her wealth from her 2019 divorce from Bezos, but is dedicated to giving away most of her fortune. She’s considered a unique philanthropist in today’s environment because her gifts are typically unrestricted, meaning the organizations can use the funding however they choose.
“She practices trust-based philanthropy,” Anne Marie Dougherty, CEO of the Bob Woodruff Foundation previously told Fortune. Scott has donated $15 million to the veteran-focused nonprofit organization in 2022, and made a subsequent $20 million donation this fall.
Scott is also considered one of the most generous philanthropists, and credits acts of kindness for inspiring her to give back.
“It was the local dentist who offered me free dental work when he saw me securing a broken tooth with denture glue in college,” Scott wrote of her inspiration for philanthropy in an Oct. 15 essay published to her Yield Giving site. “It was the college roommate who found me crying, and acted on her urge to loan me a thousand dollars to keep me from having to drop out in my sophomore year.”
Netflix’s agreement to buy Warner Bros. in a $72 billion deal marks a seismic shift in Hollywood, handing the streaming giant control of iconic franchises such as Batman and Harry Potter and triggering an immediate backlash from theater owners and the jilted Ellison family behind Paramount. The bombshell transaction, struck after a bidding war that ensued after David Ellison’sunsolicited bids several months ago, positions Netflix ever more at the center of the Southern California entertainment business that the Northern California company disrupted so famously decades ago.
The deal will see Netflix acquire Warner Bros. Discovery’s film and TV studios and its streaming operations, including HBO Max, in a deal with an equity value of roughly $72 billion, or about $27.75 per share in cash and stock, valuing Warner Bros. at $82.7 billion. The agreement followed a heated auction in which Netflix’s bid edged out offers from Paramount Skydance and Comcast, both of which had pushed to keep the storied Warner assets in more traditional hands.
Two days before Netflix won the bidding, Paramount hinted at its fury with a strongly worded letter to WBD CEO David Zaslav, arguing the process was “tainted” and Warner Bros. was favoring a single bidder: Netflix. Paramount called it a “myopic process with a predetermined outcome that favors a single bidder,” Bloomberg reported, although Netflix’s bid is understood to be the highest of the three.
Another angry group is theater owners, who have famously warred with Netflix for years over the big red streamer’s reluctance, even refusal to follow traditional theatrical-release practices. Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos has adamantly defended Netflix’s streaming-forward distribution, saying it’s what consumers really want. At the Time 100 event in April of this year, Sarandos called theatrical release “an outmoded idea for most people” and said Netflix was “saving Hollywood” by giving people what they want: streaming at home.
Cinema United, the trade association which represents over 30,000 movie screens in the U.S. and 26,000 internationally, immediately announced its opposition to Netflix acquiring a legacy Hollywood studio. The organization’s chief, Michael O’Leary, said it “poses an unprecedented threat to the global exhibition business” as Netflix’s states business model simply does not support theatrical exhibition. He urged regulators to look closely at the acquisition.
Deadline reported that other producers are warning of “the death of Hollywood” as a result of this deal. Several days earlier, Bank of America Research’s analysts had surveyed the landscape and concluded that as a defensive move, Netflix would be “killing three birds with one stone,” as its ownership of Warner Bros’ would be a daunting blow to Paramount and Comcast, while taking the Warner legacy studio out of the running. The bank calculated that a combined Netflix and Warner Bros. would comprise roughly 21% of total streaming time—still shy of YouTube’s 28% hold on the market, but far greater than Paramount’s 5% and Comcast’s 4%.
What’s known and what’s still at play
As part of the deal, Netflix will retain the studio that controls the superheroes of DC, the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, and HBO’s prestige brands. Other details on what will happen to the standalone streaming service HBO Max were scant, with the companies saying only that Netflix will “maintain” Warner Bros. current operations. The companies expect the transaction to close after regulatory review, with Netflix projecting billions in annual cost savings by the third year after completion.
The deal will not include all of Warner Bros. Discovery, according to the press release announcing the acquisition, which said the previously announced plans to separate WBD’s cable operations will be completed before the Netflix deal, in the third quarter of 2026. The newly separated publicly traded company holding the Global Networks division will be called Discovery Global, and will include CNN, TNT Sports in the U.S., as well as Discovery, free-to-air channels across Europe, plus digital products such as Discovery+ and Bleacher Report.
On a conference call with reporters Friday morning, Sarandos said Netflix is “highly confident in the regulatory process,” calling the deal pro-consumer, pro-innovation, pro-worker, pro-creator and pro-growth. He said Netflix planned to work closely with regulators and was running “full speed” ahead toward getting all regulatory approvals. He added that Netflix executives were “tired” after “an incredibly rigorous and competitive process.” Alluding to Netflix’s traditional resistance to big M&A, Sarandos added that “we don’t do many of these, but we were deep in this one.”
Influential entertainment journalist Matt Belloni of Puck previewed the likely deal on Bill Simmons’ podcast on Spotify’s Ringer network (which recently struck a deal to bring some video podcasts to Netflix), and they speculated about potential problems inside Netflix that brought the deal to a head. In conversation about how defensive the move is, Belloni said Netflix is “doing this for a reason” and may have reached a “stress point” because it hasn’t been getting traction with its own moviemaking efforts after 10 years of trying. (Netflix has also been agonizingly close to an elusive Best Picture Oscar, with close calls on Roma and Emilia Perez, the latter of which was derailed in a bizarre social-media controversy.) Belloni also acknowledged the criticism that Netflix has struggled to create its own franchises, also after years of trying.
Sarandos highlighted Netflix’s homegrown franchises while announcing the deal, arguing that Netflix’s ” culture-defining titles like Stranger Things, KPop Demon Hunters and Squid Game” will now combine with Warner’s deep library including classics Casablanca and Citizen Kane, even Friends.
The biggest losers in the bidding war may be David Ellison and his father, Oracle co‑founder (and long-time Republican donor)Larry Ellison, whose Paramount‑Skydance empire had been widely seen as a front‑runner to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery. David Ellison, has since reportedly been pleading his case around Washington, meeting Trump administration officials as allies float antitrust and national‑interest concerns about giving Netflix control of such a critical studio.
While Netflix has tried to calm regulators by arguing that a combined Netflix–HBO Max bundle would increase competition with Disney and others, the Ellisons and their supporters are signaling they will continue to press for tougher scrutiny or even intervention. Large M&A has made a big comeback in 2025 as the Trump administration has been notably friendlier to big deals than the deep freeze of the Biden administration, making this deal an acid test for just how true that is when a company with deep ties to the White House gets jilted.
[Disclosure: The author worked internally at Netflix from June 2024 through July 2025.]
The future of work as we know it is hanging by a thread—at least, that’s what many tech leaders consistently say. Elon Musk predicts AI will replace all jobs in less than 20 years. Bill Gates says even those who train to use AI tools may not be safe from its claws. And then there’s Klarna’s CEO, Sebastian Siemiatkowski, who is even warning workers that “tech bros” are sugarcoating just how badly it’s about to impact jobs.
But according to one LinkedIn exec, that’s simply not what the data is showing.
With hundreds of millions of workers hunting for jobs and employers posting open roles in real time, LinkedIn acts as one of the clearest barometers of what’s actually happening on the ground—and its managing director for EMEA, Sue Duke, is not buying the AI apocalypse narrative.
“That’s not what we’re seeing,” Duke revealed at the Fortune CEO Forum in The Shard in London. When asked about an AI-induced hiring slowdown she insisted that the opposite is actually true.
“What we’re seeing is that organizations who are adopting and integrating this technology, they’re actually going out and hiring more people to really take advantage of this technology,” Duke explained.
“They’re going out and looking for more business development people, more technologically savvy people, and more sales people as they realize the business opportunities, the innovation possibilities, and ultimately the growth possibilities of this technology.”
LinkedIn exec breaks down exactly what employers are looking for from new hires in 2026
For those looking to make the most of the job market’s shift, Duke says there are two key areas to upskill in.
The first, no surprise one, is AI skills. Whether that’s literacy, tooling, prompt-writing, or more technical capabilities, “we continue to see those AI skills being red, red hot in the labor market,” she said.
With companies racing to integrate automation into products and workflows, that demand isn’t cooling anytime soon—no matter what industry you’re looking to work in. “We see a huge demand for those skills across the board, economy-wide, across all sectors, and tons of companies looking for those,” Duke added.
As AI takes over many administrative tasks, it’s putting the spotlight on job functions that bots can’t do. “Those unique human skills,” Duke said, is the second area of focus for employers. “They remain rock solid, constant at the heart of hiring desires and demands out there. They’re not going away either.”
She called out communication, team building, and problem solving, as some of those human skills that will stand the test of time: “They’re the ones to invest in.”
And ultimately, the skill employers are zeroing in on most isn’t technical at all—it’s adaptability. Bosses know the tools will change faster than job titles. What they want is someone who can change with them.
“The most important thing for job seekers to think about is the mindset that you’re also bringing to the table,” Duke concluded.
“What employers are really looking for is that growth mindset and understanding that this technology is moving very, very quickly, and we need adaptability. Adaptability is right at the top of those most in-demand skills, so making sure you’re bringing that mindset, bringing that agility with you, that’s going to be hugely important.”
Politics8 years ago