China’s Batteries Move Beyond Capacity Scale-up: Utility-Scale Storage Could Have Shifted 23 TWh More Clean Power in 2025

Beijing, 16 July – China now operates the world’s largest battery energy storage fleet, and new analysis from Ember shows there is still headroom to do more with it. Used to its full potential, China’s utility-scale batteries could have shifted an additional 23 TWh of clean electricity in 2025 to the hours when the power system needs it most. This is equivalent to roughly powering Singapore’s entire economy for five months. Realising that potential means putting a massive fleet built at record speed to work as a multitool for a power system increasingly built on wind and solar. China’s speed of battery build-out has no global parallel. In December 2025 alone, China added 18.76 GW/65.46 GWh of “new energy storage”, exceeding the full-year additions of the United States, the world’s second-largest market. By the end of 2025, China accounted for over half of global battery energy storage system (BESS) capacity. By the first quarter of 2026, the country had installed almost 150 GW of lithium-ion BESS. In June 2026, China raised its 2030 target for “new energy storage” to 300 GW. This rapid BESS boom had largely been driven by requirements for wind and solar projects to install co-located energy storage, which helped cut China’s curtailment rate and supported renewable grid integration. However, as the sector develops, a mandate-driven growth starts showing its limits. Source: Yearly electricity data, Ember, Electricity Data Explorer, China Energy Storage Alliance • Ember calculation Shifting daily solar refers to the theoretical amout of average daily solar generation increase (total annual solar generation growth divided by the number of days that year) that can be covered by the new battery capacity and redistributed to a different time. This is calculated from the ratio of new “new energy storage” capacity to the daily solar generation growth. In the Chinese policy context, “new energy storage” refers to clean storage technologies excluding pumped hydro storage, the category is currently dominated by batteries. China ended the renewable BESS co-location mandate in February 2025 under Document 136. In January 2026, Document 114 extended national capacity remuneration to standalone BESS, opening up BESS to further revenue support. BESS utilisation rates offer an indicator on the progress beyond capacity expansion and the impact from policy shift. Utility-scale BESS utilisation more than doubled between 2022 and 2025, though a 100-cycle annual gap remained between renewable co-located batteries and standalone systems by 2025. In China’s current market context, co-located batteries, built primarily to support the renewable projects they sit behind, are dispatched less flexibly, follow relatively rigid operational patterns, and cannot yet participate independently in the power market. Standalone batteries, by contrast, are monitored and dispatched directly by the grid to respond to system-wide needs, and with more viable revenue streams, they are utilised significantly more. The value of closing this utilisation gap is substantial. Running China’s 2025 capacity of renewable co-located batteries for an additional 100 cycles could shift an additional 9.5 TWh of electricity over the year, roughly equivalent to the size of Thailand’s solar generation in 2025. To quantify an optimised scenario, if policy reform could push utilisation even further, so that both renewable co-located and standalone batteries reach 350 cycles a year — closer to international standards for optimised utilisation, the shifted electricity could rise by an extra 23 TWh. This is enough electricity to power Singapore for five months. “China has built the world’s largest battery storage fleet in record time — but having the batteries is not the same as using them. The next phase of China’s storage story will be defined not by how many gigawatts are added, but by how well they can support the new power system,” said Siming Liu, Group Strategy Senior Manager, TrinaSolar. Other than utilisation, the application structure is also changing in China’s BESS sector. Driven by the renewable co-location requirements, co-located batteries once made up over 70% of utility-scale BESS capacity. As the market evolves, standalone storage has now taken over as the primary market driver, accounting for 84.7% of new installed capacity between January and April 2026, compared with just 8.4% for co-located systems. BESS is the ultimate multitool for energy systems. It can smooth out supply and demand in the electricity system, help tackle renewable energy curtailment and improve its dispatchability, and provide crucial grid service to maintain grid stability and offer emergency grid support. The goal of putting China’s battery fleet to work is not only to increase utilisation, but also to maximise the various value that BESS can provide to the wider system. Sustaining this transition will depend on how quickly China’s market design matures. Energy arbitrage alone cannot yet support a strong business case for BESS, as spot market price signals remain relatively weak and price caps limit potential returns. A reliable capacity pricing framework, wider adoption of joint clearing between spot and ancillary service markets — an approach already being piloted in Shandong — and grid tariff rules that reflect the bi-directional role of batteries will all be needed to allow BESS stack multiple revenue streams and be rewarded for the full value it brings to the system. “China doubled its battery storage capacity in 2025 against a backdrop of major policy shifts. With so much changing so quickly, now is the moment to watch how these market transitions actually play out,” said Biqing Yang, Energy Analyst for Asia at Ember. “As the power system integrates more renewables, the true value of batteries to China’s energy transition is becoming undeniable. Ensuring policy fully recognises this value and facilitating storage projects to stack revenues will be crucial to driving sustainable, long-term sector development beyond scale expansion.” Read the full analysis.

China’s Batteries Move Beyond Capacity Scale-up: Utility-Scale Storage Could Have Shifted 23 TWh More Clean Power in 2025

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