Industry can electrify or sunset. “Work is hard.” The energy potential is well above the demand curve, just have to build the orchestration infrastructure (low carbon generation, batteries, transmission, district heating, flexible load demand response, etc). Enough sunlight falls on the Earth in thirty minutes to power humanity for a year, the inability to harness this potential energy is the problem being solved for. It's easy to go faster: simply direct fossil fuel capital and subsidies to the technologies I enumerate above. To not go faster is a choice. We could make different choices.

https://cleantechnica.com/2026/08/30/poland-coal-capacity-tr...

https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/poland/

https://pyrtkoanalytics.com/poland-in-the-energy-transition-...

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/12/29/poland-projected-to-r...

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/PL/fifteen_minutes

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci... (already out of date due to solar PV deployment velocity, >3TW of solar PV has been installed globally as of this year)

The World Crossed a Major Solar Milestone [3TW] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49151977 - August 2026

(Poland is expected to add 3-4GW of solar per year, and has hundreds of GWs of combined wind [onshore and offshore] and solar PV potential)

batteries allow cheaper energy costs. How does that hurt industry

The government likes to get in front of a parade and pretend they are leading it.

> What's a "GW of battery storage capacity"?

This is the maximum amount of power it can dispatch. I think they use it intentionally so they can compare it to other generation sources.

For example this spreadsheet [1], with data for 2023, contains figures for "power capacity megawatts" and "energy capacity megawatthours".

1. https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/electricity/batterystor...

Depends on who you are talking to. Battery engineers tend to talk about capacity as storage potential (energy). The rest of the energy industry (resource planners, developers, manufacturers, etc.) talk about capacity in power terms (instantaneous discharge.)

When you see people talking about Lithium-based chemistries, you'll often only see power terms because they are almost always for 2-hr projects. Nowadays you'll see more differentiation between 2-hr/4-hr/6-hr storage (and a few interesting companies doing 100-hr+).

Unpacking the headline - A 600MW project of 4-hr lithium is 2.4GWh of storage capacity. The capacity rating of this project is 600MW, the storage capacity (2.4GWh) is an ESS specific attribute.

Another important dimension to capacity is how much accredited capacity your project has. Usually projects are only given credit based on some set of historic averages of how much system load the asset actually serves (e.g. if you for some reason had a battery could only discharge at high noon every day, 200GW of this resource would in a sane world have an accredited capacity of near 0 because it's completely coincident with existing solar.)

Paying a wind company billions of dollars in damages is basically a wash, they spend that on another installation.

Show me where any politician on either side has made a real impact on any of these charts: https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/united-states...

The US is switching to cleaner (coal -> gas) energy, renewables (solar and wind), and BESS almost entirely because it's cost effective and cheaper than the alternative.

> The market does not fix the administration paying wind projects billions of dollars to stop development.

This would be the politicians I mentioned.

> The market does not fix the administration forcing coal plants to stay open even when they are losing money.

This would be the politicians I mentioned.

> The market does not fix the administration cancelling grants for clean energy projects and subsidies for electric cars, and adding tariffs to solar panel imports.

This would be the politicians I mentioned.

> And US car manufacturers are enthusiastically moving away from their efficiency goals.

I was unaware car makers were part of the energy supply industry.

> That market is not moving quickly to renewables.

Most car makers are creating more and more electric cars, some makers are committing to 100% electric soon. Increasingly energy efficient ICE cars take engineering time and money to make, money they'd rather not spend. By not making them spend it, they won't. They'd do the same for safety features if we let them.

And none of that results my core statement which is the energy supply market (and you knew that's what I was talking about because that's literally the topic) is still moving to renewables. More renewables come online every month.

The market is doing its best to ignore the administration.

Most of the coal plants forced to delay retirement aren't producing energy. They sit idle with minimal staff.

The US manufactured 70 GWh of grid battery storage in 2025 and is expected to make 145 GWh in 2026. That still does use a lot of imported cells, but US cell production is expected to reach 96 GHw per year by the end of this year.

Recent polls found that 47% of Americans plan to buy an EV within the next 5 years, and 35% say they are seriously considering one for they next car.

By age 75% of 18-34 year olds expect to buy an EV in the next 5 years. 23% of those 65 and older expect to.

I don't think US car makers are going to ignore that.

They are currently beefing up their hybrids. Ford expects by 2030 for about half its cars to be a mix of hybrids, extended range vehicles, and EVs. GM says they plan to introduce PHEVs across the lineup by late 2027/early 2028.

Ford and GM also are using the time between now and when we get an administration that is sane to divert the engineering teams that worked on their first generation EVs to skunkworks projects to design small very cheap EVs that can compete on price with Chinese, Japanese, and Korean cars by 2028.

They also believe that when sanity returns they will be able to scale up their new EVs fast enough to not lose out.

I dunno. I vacillated on that. It's something like 45–50 GWh nameplate currently installed, and ERCOT has 177 GW / 371 GWh of active planned battery projects in the interconnection queue. BESS are used for peaker-like capacity and load balancing, so GW is actually a pretty relevant number here.