When Demand Rises and Projects Disappear
The U.S. energy transition continues to accelerate. Electricity demand is rising rapidly, driven by data centers, electrification, and AI-driven workloads. At the same time, the pipeline of new power projects is shrinking.
The Cleanview Canceled Projects Report brings this tension into focus.
According to Cleanview, nearly 1,900 power projects were canceled in 2025, representing roughly 266 GW of lost capacity and about $400 billion in unrealized investment. In scale, that volume of canceled capacity approaches one quarter of the current U.S. electricity generation fleet.
These cancellations span solar, wind, battery storage, and other generation resources. Together, they reflect growing pressure across project development, permitting, and execution at a moment when additional capacity is urgently needed.
The scale of attrition reveals a fundamental shift in project viability. Development has become less forgiving. Timelines are tighter, costs escalate faster, and projects face far less tolerance for delay, redesign, or uncertainty. In this environment, the ability to withstand regulatory review, community scrutiny, and operational risk increasingly determines whether projects advance or fall out of the pipeline.
Canceled Capacity and Lost Investment
The magnitude of canceled projects identified by Cleanview is unprecedented.
Across all technologies, the report documents:
- 1,891 projects removed from development
- 266 GW of planned capacity eliminated
- ~$400 billion in stranded investment
This combined loss tightens reserve margins, complicates capacity planning, and absorbs developer capital at a time when new infrastructure is urgently needed.
Battery energy storage accounts for a substantial share of these losses. Roughly 79 GW of canceled capacity comes from storage projects alone, making it one of the most affected technologies in the report. That concentration makes storage an important lens through which to understand where development risk is accumulating.
2025 Power Projects Cancelled by Technology (MW)
Primary Drivers Cancellation Drivers
Cleanview’s analysis focuses primarily on economic and structural constraints, including:
- Interconnection queue delays and escalating network upgrade costs
- Revenue compression across storage and renewables
- Tariffs and supply-chain volatility
- Policy and regulatory uncertainty
- Market saturation and speculative project pruning
These forces dominate the report’s explanation for why projects are being withdrawn. In many cases, projects fail not because demand disappears, but because timelines stretch, costs rise, and financing assumptions no longer hold.
Cleanview also highlights the growing role of local opposition and permitting resistance, particularly in certain regions. This reinforces a broader point: projects increasingly succeed or fail based on their ability to navigate regulatory review and earn approval.
Where Industry Experience Adds Context
While Cleanview documents what is being canceled, it leaves open important questions about why some projects are more vulnerable than others.
Industry experience suggests that risk factors rarely operate in isolation. Economic pressure, interconnection delays, and policy uncertainty tend to compound one another. In that environment, additional sources of friction can become decisive.
This is where safety enters the discussion. Safety concerns often act as a risk amplifier, intensifying other pressures already present in a project’s development path.
Projects facing heightened safety scrutiny are more likely to encounter:
- Extended permitting timelines
- Additional design revisions
- Insurance and underwriting challenges
- Public opposition during siting review
Each delay adds cost, and each redesign erodes margins. Over time, otherwise viable projects can become economically untenable.
Why Battery Storage Projects Feel These Pressures
Battery storage occupies a unique position in the permitting and approval landscape.
Storage projects are frequently:
- Located closer to load centers
- Proposed in denser or mixed-use environments
- Subject to evolving fire codes and emergency planning requirements
- Evaluated under heightened public and first-responder scrutiny
Public concerns often focus on worst-case scenarios, including fire behavior, gas release, and emergency response complexity. Even when these risks are statistically low, uncertainty alone can slow approvals and elevate perceived risk.
In an environment where interconnection queues are long and capital costs are rising, projects that face prolonged review are less likely to survive.
BESS Design Choices That Influence Development Risk
System design does not determine whether a project enters an interconnection queue, but it can influence how smoothly a project moves through permitting and review.
From an industry perspective, safety-forward designs increasingly function as risk mitigation tools, not just technical features. Systems that clearly demonstrate strong thermal control, predictable failure behavior, and reduced emergency response complexity are easier for authorities to evaluate and approve.
Compact layouts, consistent cell temperatures, and clearly articulated safety strategies can reduce jurisdictional friction and help projects maintain momentum during lengthy approval processes.
Integrated Safety Strategies: Thermal Control and Gas Conversion
As regulatory scrutiny deepens around battery storage, safety is a gating factor in whether projects move forward. Authorities and first responders now expect system-level strategies that address not just performance, but risk management in the most difficult scenarios: fire behavior, thermal events, and gas emissions.
Immersion cooling represents one critical shift in how projects can meet those expectations. By submerging battery cells in a dielectric fluid, these systems remove heat continuously at the cell level, suppressing thermal escalation before it begins.
This preventative approach eliminates fire propagation risk, simplifies emergency response scenarios, and delivers more predictable thermal behavior. These are key concerns raised during both public and regulatory review.
Complementing thermal control, gas mitigation has become another focal point of evolving codes and emergency planning requirements. Thermal runaway events can release hazardous gases, prompting stricter expectations from permitting agencies.
Technologies such as HazGuard, which actively manage and neutralize those gases in real time, support a system-level architecture that regulators can evaluate with greater confidence.
Together, these integrated safety features—thermal suppression and gas management—help projects reduce jurisdictional friction, accelerate approvals, and remain defensible as codes, interpretations, and expectations continue to evolve.
How FEOC and ITC Are Shaping Project Viability
Battery storage projects are under growing pressure from both market dynamics and regulatory shifts. While collapsing revenues and high interconnection costs are driving many cancellations, federal policy changes are adding another layer of risk to already strained economics.
These include new Foreign Entity of Concern (FEOC) rules and rising domestic content thresholds tied to the Investment Tax Credit (ITC). Starting in 2026, FEOC provisions will bar projects from using key components, such as battery cells and electronics, sourced from companies linked to restricted foreign entities.
At the same time, to qualify for the full ITC, developers must meet increasing domestic content thresholds that started at 45% of manufactured product cost in 2025, rising to 50% in 2026 and 55% in 2027 and beyond. All qualifying steel and iron must be sourced entirely from U.S. suppliers.
Projects that miss these thresholds risk losing the 30% base ITC and the 10% domestic content bonus. For many, that can be the difference between viable and unfinanceable.
EticaAG’s systems are designed to eliminate that risk. All products are fully FEOC-compliant, and beginning in Q4 2026, will be manufactured entirely in the United States using certified domestic supply chains. This ensures alignment with both FEOC and domestic content requirements, helping developers preserve access to the full 40% ITC and bonus credits where applicable.
Safety, Economics, and Build Certainty
Battery project economics are tightening across the industry. Margins are thinner, timelines are less forgiving, and tolerance for redesign is shrinking.
In that environment, safety-driven delays can have outsized consequences. Late-stage changes, extended reviews, or added mitigation requirements often arrive after financing assumptions are locked, leaving little room to recover.
Preventative thermal management also supports long-term economics. Maintaining uniform operating temperatures slows degradation, stabilizes performance, and helps preserve revenue assumptions across the asset life. Operational predictability becomes another form of risk reduction.
What the Cancellations Ultimately Signal
The Cleanview report points to a market correction rather than a retreat from clean energy or storage. Demand remains strong, but the tolerance for delay, uncertainty, and missteps has narrowed significantly.
Projects that move forward are increasingly those that:
- Minimize development friction
- Reduce approval uncertainty
- Preserve economic assumptions under delay
- Build trust with regulators and communities
Safety does not replace sound economics, but it can determine whether a project survives long enough for those economics to matter.
Turning a Warning into a Path Forward
The Cleanview Canceled Projects Report should be read as a warning to developers, owners, and policymakers.
The next phase of battery storage deployment will favor systems designed not only to operate efficiently, but to endure prolonged scrutiny and evolving expectations.
By treating safety as an enabling feature of development rather than a late-stage requirement, projects improve their chances of reaching construction, supporting the grid, and delivering long-term value.
That build certainty is becoming as critical to the energy transition as capacity itself.
