2025 in the energy world was the year of responding to a shifting supply chain and policy landscape. For 2026, the challenge will be building things fast enough and keeping them running. Here are my hot takes for 2026:

1. 1

   The land-grab to deploy batteries will hit the cold reality that these systems require high reliability operations and maintenance to return project value. This creates a massive opportunity for companies that can manage energy assets reliably at scale.People are going to realize that there are only so many electricians available to service the gigawatts of energy storage hardware in the field. A base level of human maintenance will always be required for energy systems but the market has not optimized the amount of manual effort. This presents an ideal slot for automation to succeed.

2. 2

   Every serious real estate company will unveil a strategy to solve the power problems their tenants face. Loads will try their best to locate proximate to utility scale nuclear, hydroelectric, and geothermal projects. Every demand response aggregator or EV management service will attempt to manage microgrids. Every generator, inverter, switchgear, and battery company will attempt to serve data centers. Every company that makes batteries is going to try and figure out how to turn those into utility or industrial scale Battery Energy Storage Solutions (BESS). Customers will pay generous $/kWh for BESS if delivery is rapid and reliability is high. Including utilities, who will procure more BESS as poles and wires alternatives.

3. 3

   Energy affordability will become a household topic and a political hot potato. New factories are going to begin experiencing delays in getting up and running due to utility delays and will begin to get more vocal.

4. 4

   Regulatory and policy fun continues…The interest in BESS to alleviate grid stress is going to run up against moratoriums on large format batteries in major California and Texas jurisdictions, resulting in a need to figure out how to get these projects permitted in a streamlined manner. Project developers and systems integrators will have to work cooperatively with fire departments to get BESS where they need to be to solve grid issues. Confusion around Investment Tax Credits (ITC) may have a cooling effect on transferability, even for fully valid projects.

5. 5

   The cool-off in the personal EV market will continue but autonomous EV fleets and the Tesla Semi will begin rolling out at scale. This will lead to more power demand. Increasing power costs are going to lead to a resurgence in interest in conducting peak shaving to combat demand charges at industrial facilities.

6. 6

   Flexibility is dead, long live firm flexibility! Large load customers will cool off on curtailment-based flexibility and instead, will want batteries and generators to backstop the power available from the grid. Half a dozen new utilities will join PG&E, SCE and National Grid to test Flexible Interconnection.

7. 7

   With all the uptake in distributed energy resources and off-grid data centers, an acute shortage in inverters and transformers will result in a boost for those racing to build Solid State Transformers (SST) and new inverter designs. A variety of batteries and generators- basically any and all available, are going to be cobbled to get projects out quickly. A major supply chain interruption will occur. The companies that are robust to this disruption will survive and thrive.I am confident that at least one nuclear fission energy company will build a Small Modular Reactor (SMR) that achieves the DOE’s target for criticality by July 4, 2026. Batteries plus nuclear fission energy represent a strong solution to supply clean and abundant power in the coming decade.

2026 won’t be remembered for financing announcements or theorizing, it will be remembered for what actually got built and kept running. Capital, technology, and ambition are no longer the bottlenecks; execution is. In 2026, the energy transition stops being aspirational and starts being accountable.