The energystorageindustry is set to rise dramatically — for those companies that can play the long game.
Bloomberg New Energy Finance released a report Tuesday that forecasts the global energy storage market will “double six times” from now to 2030, from a meager starting point of less than 5 gigawatt-hours last year, to more than 300 gigawatt-hours and 125 gigawatts of capacity by the end of the next decade. An estimated $103 billion will be invested in energy storage over that time period.
The trajectory for energy storage mirrors the market expansion that solar went through from 2000 to 2015, when the share of solar PV as a percentage of total generation doubled seven times.
This rapid global growth rate tracks well with the U.S. energy storage market forecast from GTM Research, which projects a twelvefold growth in the U.S. alone between 2016 and 2022, to reach 7.2 gigawatt-hours, or 2.6 gigawatts, of capacity.
This growth is going to be driven by both cost reductions for batteries and associated systems, and a rising need for more gigawatts of flexibility to manage the ups and downs of an increasingly wind- and solar-powered grid, according to BNEF energy storage analyst and lead report author Yayoi Sekine. “With so much investment going into battery technology, falling costs and with significant addition of wind and solar capacity in all markets, energy storage will play a crucial part in the energy transformation,” she said.
On the cost side, BNEF sees utility-scale battery systems falling from about $700 per kilowatt-hour in 2016 to less than $300 per kilowatt-hour in 2030. That’s in line with other projections that see stationary storage benefiting from investments into the mass manufacturing of lithium-ion batteries for consumer electronics and electric vehicles.
On the demand side, 70 percent of global capacity through 2030 will be installed in eight countries: the U.S., China, Japan, India, Germany, U.K., Australia and South Korea. The primary driver in each will be managing an increasingly renewable and intermittent energy resource mix.
Earlier this month, BNEF released a report that illustrated how some of the most renewables-rich markets will be pressed to incorporate energy storage at record scale. The report found that “future energy systems in the U.K. and Germany with very high levels of variable renewable generation must be complemented by flexible resources, including energy storage.”
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