China's energy storage market to reach 12.5 GW by 2024

The Chinese energy storage market is forecast to be the largest one in the Asia Pacific region by 2024 with 12.5 GW of capacity, Wood Mackenzie says in a new report.

China’s cumulative energy storage deployments are expected to jump from 489 MW/843 MWh in 2017 to 12.5 GW/32.1 GWh in 2024. Last year alone, it added 580 MW/1.14 GWh of capacity and thus ranked as the second largest player after South Korea in terms of annual deployments.

“Although China’s energy storage market is still in its infancy, we can expect to see continued strong growth driven by battery cost reduction, policy incentives and power market reform,” said Le Xu, senior analyst at Wood Mackenzie. He predicts that the cumulative capital expenditure in the storage sector will reach USD 71 billion (EUR 63.3bn) globally by 2024 and China will be responsible for over USD 10 billion of it, or about 14%.

The main growth drivers in the sector last year were policy incentives, whose most notable support was recorded in the front-of-the-metre (FTM) segment. State-owned State Grid Corporation of China was the leader in the FTM market with a 83% share and 452 MWh installed. In the behind-the-metre commercial and industrial (C&I) sector, meanwhile, 513 MWh of capacity was added, or 2.8 times more than in 2017.

According to the report, around 60% of the storage capacity installed to provide ancillary services in 2018 was deployed as standalone, while 14% was linked to coal plants and 19% was coupled with a renewable energy facility.

(USD 1.0 = EUR 0.892)

Choose your newsletter by Renewables Now. Join for free!