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.”
Big Tech’s AI arms race is fueling a massive investment surge in data centers with construction worker labor valued at a premium.
Despite some concerns of an AI bubble, data center hyperscalers like Google, Amazon, and Meta continue to invest heavily into AI infrastructure. In effect, construction workers’ salaries are being inflated to satisfy a seemingly insatiable AI demand, experts tell Fortune.
In 2026 alone, upwards of $100 billion could be invested by tech companies into the data center buildout in the U.S., Raul Martynek, the CEO of DataBank, a company that contracts with tech giants to construct data centers, told Fortune.
In November, Bank of Americaestimated global hyperscale spending is rising 67% in 2025 and another 31% in 2026, totaling a massive $611 billion investment for the AI buildout in just two years.
Given the high demand, construction workers are experiencing a pay bump for data center projects.
Construction projects generally operate on tight margins, with clients being very cost-conscious, Fraser Patterson, CEO of Skillit, an AI-powered hiring platform for construction workers, told Fortune.
But some of the top 50 contractors by size in the country have seen their revenue double in a 12-month period based on data center construction, which is allowing them to pay their workers more, according to Patterson.
“Because of the huge demand and the nature of this construction work, which is fueling the arms race of AI… the budgets are not as tight,” he said. “I would say they’re a little more frothy.”
On Skillit, the average salary for construction projects that aren’t building data centers is $62,000, or $29.80 an hour, Patterson said. The workers that use the platform comprise 40 different trades and have a wide range of experience from heavy equipment operators to electricians, with eight years as the average years of experience.
But when it comes to data centers, the same workers make an average salary of $81,800 or $39.33 per hour, Patterson said, increasing salaries by just under 32% on average.
Some construction workers are even hitting the six-figure mark after their salaries rose for data center projects, according to The Wall Street Journal. And the data center boom doesn’t show any signs it’s slowing down anytime soon.
Tech companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft operate 522 data centers and are developing 411 more, according to The Wall Street Journal, citing data from Synergy Research Group.
Patterson said construction workers are being paid more to work on building data centers in part due to condensed project timelines, which require complex coordination or machinery and skilled labor.
Projects that would usually take a couple of years to finish are being completed—in some instances—as quickly as six months, he said.
It is unclear how long the data center boom might last, but Patterson said it has in part convinced a growing number of Gen Z workers and recent college grads to choose construction trades as their career path.
“AI is creating a lot of job anxiety around knowledge workers,” Patterson said. “Construction work is, by definition, very hard to automate.”
“I think you’re starting to see a change in the labor market,” he added.
Reed Hastings may soon pull off one of the biggest deals in entertainment history. On Thursday, Netflix announced plans to acquire Warner Bros.—home to franchises like Dune, Harry Potter, and DC Universe, along with streamer HBO Max—in a total enterprise value deal of $83 billion. The move is set to cement Netflix as a media juggernaut that now rivals the legacy Hollywood giants it once disrupted.
It’s a remarkable trajectory for Netflix’s cofounder, Hastings—a self-made billionaire who found a love for business starting as a teenage door-to-door salesperson.
“I took a year off between high school and college and sold Rainbow vacuum cleaners door to door,” Hastings recalled to The New York Timesin 2006. “I started it as a summer job and found I liked it. As a sales pitch, I cleaned the carpet with the vacuum the customer had and then cleaned it with the Rainbow.”
That scrappy sales job was the first exposure to how to properly read customers—an instinct that would later shape Netflix’s user-obsessed culture. After graduating from Bowdoin College in 1983, Hastings considered joining the Marine Corps but ultimately joined the Peace Corps, teaching math in Eswatini for two years. When he returned to the U.S., he obtained a master’s in computer science from Stanford and began his career in tech.
The idea for Netflix reportedly came a few years later in the late 1990s. After misplacing a VHS copy of Apollo 13 and getting hit with a $40 late fee at Blockbuster, Hastings began exploring a mail-order rental service. While it’s an origin story that has since been debated, it marked the start of a company that would reshape global entertainment.
Hastings stepped back as CEO in 2023 and now serves as Netflix’s chairman of the board. He has amassed a net worth of about $5.6 billion. He’d be even richer if he didn’t keep offloading his shares in the company and making record-breaking charitable donations.
Netflix’s secret for success: finding the right people
Hastings has long said that one of the biggest drivers of Netflix’s success is its focus on hiring and keeping exceptional talent.
“If you’re going to win the championship, you got to have incredible talent in every position. And that’s how we think about it,” he told CNBC in 2020. “We encourage people to focus on who of your employees would you fight hard to keep if they were going to another company? And those are the ones we want to hold onto.”
To secure top performers, Hastings said he was more than willing to pay for above-market rates.
“With a fixed amount of money for salaries and a project I needed to complete, I had a choice: Hire 10 to 25 average engineers, or hire one ‘rock-star’ and pay significantly more than what I’d pay the others, if necessary,” Hastings wrote. “Over the years, I’ve come to see that the best programmer doesn’t add 10 times the value. He or she adds more like a 100 times.”
That mindset also guided Netflix’s leadership transition. When Hastings stepped back from the C-suite, the company didn’t pick a single successor—it picked two. Greg Peters joined Ted Sarandos as co-CEO in 2023.
“It’s a high-performance technique,” Hastings said, speaking about the co-CEO model. “It’s not for most situations and most companies. But if you’ve got two people that work really well together and complement and extend and trust each other, then it’s worth doing.”
Netflix’s stock has soared more than 80,000% since its IPO in 2002, adjusting for stock splits.
Netflix brought unlimited PTO into the mainstream
Netflix’s flexible workplace culture has also played a key role in its success, with Hastings often known for prioritizing time off to recharge.
“I take a lot of vacation, and I’m hoping that certainly sets an example,” the former CEO said in 2015. “It is helpful. You often do your best thinking when you’re off hiking in some mountain or something. You get a different perspective on things.”
The company was one of the first to introduce unlimited PTO, a policy that many firms have since adopted. About 57% of retail investors have said it could improve overall company performance, according to a survey by Bloomberg. Critics have argued that such policies can backfire when employees feel guilty taking time off, but Hastings has maintained that freedom is core to Netflix’s identity.
“We are fundamentally dedicated to employee freedom because that makes us more flexible, and we’ve had to adapt so much back from DVD by mail to leading streaming today,” Hastings said. “If you give employees freedom you’ve got a better chance at that success.”
“For over thirty years, I had a hard cut-off on Tuesdays. Rain or shine, I left at exactly 5 p.m. and spent the evening with my best friend. We would go to a movie, have dinner, or just go window-shopping downtown together,” Randolph wrote in a LinkedIn post.
“Those Tuesday nights kept me sane. And they put the rest of my work in perspective.”
The spots gave it away. Just like a human fingerprint, the rosette pattern on each jaguar is unique so researchers knew they had a new animal on their hands after reviewing images captured by a remote camera in southern Arizona.
The University of Arizona Wild Cat Research and Conservation Center says it’s the fifth big cat over the last 15 years to be spotted in the area after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. The animal was captured by the camera as it visited a watering hole in November, its distinctive spots setting it apart from previous sightings.
“We’re very excited. It signifies this edge population of jaguars continues to come here because they’re finding what they need,” Susan Malusa, director of the center’s jaguar and ocelot project, said during an interview Thursday.
The team is now working to collect scat samples to conduct genetic analysis and determine the sex and other details about the new jaguar, including what it likes to eat. The menu can include everything from skunks and javelina to small deer.
As an indicator species, Malusa said the continued presence of big cats in the region suggests a healthy landscape but that climate change and border barriers can threaten migratory corridors. She explained that warming temperatures and significant drought increase the urgency to ensure connectivity for jaguars with their historic range in Arizona.
More than 99% of the jaguar’s range is found in Central and South America, and the few male jaguars that have been spotted in the U.S. are believed to have dispersed from core populations in Mexico, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Officials have said that jaguar breeding in the U.S. has not been documented in more than 100 years.
Federal biologists have listed primary threats to the endangered species as habitat loss and fragmentation along with the animals being targeted for trophies and illegal trade.
The Fish and Wildlife Service issued a final rule in 2024, revising the habitat set aside for jaguars in response to a legal challenge. The area was reduced to about 1,000 square miles (2,590 square kilometers) in Arizona’s Pima, Santa Cruz and Cochise counties.
Recent detection data supports findings that a jaguar appears every few years, Malusa said, with movement often tied to the availability of water. When food and water are plentiful, there’s less movement.
In the case of Jaguar #5, she said it was remarkable that the cat kept returning to the area over a 10-day period. Otherwise, she described the animals as quite elusive.
“That’s the message — that this species is recovering,” Malusa said. “We want people to know that and that we still do have a chance to get it right and keep these corridors open.”
Politics8 years ago