China To Lead APAC Energy Storage Market, Reach 12.5 GW by 2024

China’s 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.

The country’s cumulative energy storage capacity expected to skyrocket from 489 megawatts (MW)/843 megawatt-hours (MWh) in 2017 to a mammoth 12.5 gigawatts (GW)/32.1 gigawatt-hours (GWh) in 2024. This represents an increase in the installed base of 25 times.

China 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%.

However, Wood Mackenzie expects this to change beginning in 2020 after China’s National Energy Administration announced that the ancillary services market will be transitioning from a basic compensation mechanism to a market integrated with spot energy prices by 2020. Combine this with the inherent maturation of energy storage technology and Wood Mackenzie is expecting China’s energy storage market to experience “exponential” growth through to 2024.

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

According to Wood Mackenzie data, 60% of Chinese storage projects deployed to participate in ancillary services in 2018 were deployed as stand-alone projects, while 14% were deployed paired with coal plants, and 19% were renewables + storage projects. This last was driven by utilities, which deployed 105 MWh of storage — paired either with solar projects or hybrid solar and wind projects.