In 2024, the scale of new grid-connected energy storage projects in China is expected to reach 34.5GW/85.4GWh under the benchmark scenario, and even 43.4GW/107.1GWh under the optimistic scenario.

The recently held "Energy storage Industry 2023 Review and 2024 Outlook" conference released a research report showing that in 2023, China's new energy storage grid-connected projects reached 22.8GW/49.1GWh, which is nearly three times the newly installed capacity of 7.8GW/16.3GWh in 2022. From 2022 to 2023, the domestic market has achieved a rapid growth of over 200% for two consecutive years. At the same time, the scale of new grid-connected projects in 2023 also exceeds the total installed capacity of China's energy storage market in the past 10 years.

Looking forward to 2024, under the continuous promotion of the "14th Five-Year Plan" energy storage development plan, demonstration projects, new energy distribution and storage policies and market mechanism reform, China's energy storage industry will continue to develop rapidly. In 2024, the scale of new grid-connected energy storage projects in China is expected to reach 34.5GW/85.4GWh under the benchmark scenario, and even 43.4GW/107.1GWh under the optimistic scenario, corresponding to a growth rate of 74% and 118% respectively.

Surging market vitality

2023 is a year of surging vitality in the history of China's energy storage development. The driving force of development is inseparable from the improvement of policies - from the state to the local, in 2023, China has introduced more than 100 energy storage related power market policies and market mechanisms, including special energy storage policies, power market trading, auxiliary service markets, industrial development planning, financial support and subsidies, technical standards, new energy distribution and storage. By the end of 2023, 24 provinces and municipalities have announced energy storage development goals, and by 2025, the cumulative installed capacity of energy storage will be 78.3GW.

A total of 29 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities in China have connected new energy storage projects to the grid, and 13 regions have connected new energy storage projects with a scale of more than 1GWh, of which Xinjiang is the largest regional market. A total of 272 owners or developers across the country have realized energy storage projects connected to the grid, and State Power Investment has become the largest energy storage developer in China for the second consecutive year, and the 12 new developers connected to the grid with a scale of more than 1GWh are all central state-owned energy developers. 175 energy storage companies collectively worked to provide energy storage systems for new grid-connected projects, and the top ten companies in terms of supply scale accounted for 57% of the market share.

The rapidly growing demand has also attracted 277 energy storage system suppliers and 379 EPC units to enter the "fight", and the number of participants has more than doubled compared with 2022. The electricity energy market and auxiliary service market in nearly 30 regions have opened up market access for energy storage. In Shandong, Ningxia, Anhui and other places, independent energy storage began to form a profit model combining electric energy market and auxiliary service market; With the higher electricity price difference, the industrial and commercial user-side energy storage in the Pearl River Delta and the Yangtze River Delta has obtained a higher profit level; Provinces with large installed capacity of new energy, such as Northwest China, have begun to formulate relevant compensation terms for auxiliary services for grid-type energy storage.

Capital markets are also buoyant. Harvest Wealth Management equity product manager Wang Guanqing introduced that in 2023, about 400 financing events occurred in the primary market of energy storage, of which about 80 occurred in the field of materials, which is the most popular field, followed by energy storage systems, sodium electricity and other fields. Editor/Xu Shengpeng