China triples storage technology for renewable power as Tesla, CATL jump in

The country’s overall capacity in the “new type” energy storage sector surpassed 35 gigawatts (GW) by the end of March this year, representing 12 per cent growth from the end of 2023 and 210 per cent growth from a year earlier, China’s National Energy Administration (NEA) said on Tuesday.

More than half of the sector’s storage capacity comes from large-scale energy storage projects with a capacity of more than 0.1GW, according to the NEA. Northwestern China, with its abundant wind and solar energy, accounts for nearly 30 per cent of China’s in-operation energy storage capacity, the NEA said.

Such projects are necessary to ensure a constant supply of power even when generation from intermittent sources like wind and solar dips. And the need is growing because China’s installed capacity of renewable energy exceeded 1,450GW as of the end of last year, equal to more than half of the country’s total installed power generation capacity, according to the NEA.

China’s national goal is to have 80 per cent of its total energy mix come from non-fossil-fuel sources by 2060.

New-type energy storage refers to the use of batteries as well as other technologies including electrochemical, compressed air, flywheel and thermal energy storage. It does not include pumped hydro storage.

Lithium-ion batteries accounted for 97 per cent of China’s operational energy storage capacity as of the end of 2023, with other emerging technologies accounting for the rest, NEA said.