GlobalData Projects Sixfold Surge in Global Battery Storage by 2030 as Long-Duration Economics Take Hold
With China and the US commanding nearly three-quarters of installed capacity, the push to extend storage beyond four hours is reshaping wholesale power markets.
Global battery energy storage system capacity is projected to grow sixfold between 2025 and 2030, expanding at a compound annual growth rate of 42%, GlobalData reported Monday (2026-07-28). China and the United States held a combined 74.6% of installed BESS capacity at the end of 2025, anchored by large-scale utility procurement and clean energy mandates that have given both markets a manufacturing and deployment lead that other regions will struggle to close quickly.8
Batteries are already reshaping intraday price formation, and the push toward longer durations will deepen that effect. In the first quarter of 2026, batteries set marginal wholesale prices nearly a third of the time in markets where they operate, helping pull average wholesale electricity costs down 12%, PV Magazine Australia reported in June (2026-06-04). Four-hour systems drove that initial compression.2
But the industry is already moving past that threshold. On June 1 (2026-06-01), the Tumbleweed project in California's Kern County became the first major U.S. battery installation capable of discharging for up to eight hours, twice the previous commercial standard, Canary Media reported.3
Australia illustrates the trajectory. Victoria's state-owned utility described its first four-hour battery investment as a "standout" success for compressing the morning and evening peaks of the solar duck curve, then in June (2026-06-12) announced it was turning its focus to non-lithium technologies with durations of eight to twelve hours. A four-hour battery smooths the evening ramp; a twelve-hour system begins to cover overnight baseload — a fundamentally different market product with different revenue streams.5
In Berlin, researchers are working through what longer-duration storage might require chemically. Philipp Adelhelm's lab at Humboldt University runs rows of coin-sized test cells, each with slightly different compositions to probe which have the most potential for Europe's expanding grid, Montel reported Sunday (2026-07-27). The gap between laboratory promise and commercial deployment is still wide, and timelines for emerging chemistries to reach grid-scale cost parity with lithium-ion remain unclear.7
A parallel demand signal is arriving from data centres. Executives at battery start-ups told the Financial Times in early July (2026-07-02) that AI computing facilities are increasingly relying on battery storage to manage power surges, with some U.S. hyperscalers drawing on systems sized in the hundreds of megawatts. The application differs from grid arbitrage — backup and surge management require different charge-discharge profiles — but it competes for capacity on the same order books that grid developers are trying to fill.6
Major battery manufacturers are reorienting toward grid storage. OilPrice.com reported in June (2026-06-10) that companies along the EV supply chain are expanding and diversifying their storage divisions, partly because the Trump administration's stance on clean energy has injected uncertainty into EV demand while utility contracts have held. The shift accelerates cost reduction for buyers but also tightens manufacturing capacity in the near term.4
On the policy side, the U.S. Department of Energy set a goal to reduce the cost of utility-scale, long-duration storage by 90% within a decade, backed by federal research and domestic manufacturing incentives, according to speakers at a DOE panel held Thursday (2026-05-14). DOE officials compared the initiative to the department's SunShot programme on solar. That comparison carries an implicit caution: SunShot succeeded largely because Chinese manufacturing scale drove costs down independently of the federal programme. Whether U.S. long-duration policy retains that ambition under the current administration is uncertain more than two months on from that panel.1
The geographic concentration embedded in the sixfold growth projection is a supply risk the headline number obscures. If export controls or supply chain disruptions affect the China-U.S. axis, costs in Europe and the Asia-Pacific could diverge sharply from benchmark. European utilities have shown early appetite for eight-plus-hour procurement, but no major domestic BESS manufacturer has emerged at comparable scale. The next concrete signal will come from whether European long-duration tender rounds, when they arrive, attract competitive bids from non-Chinese suppliers at prices that actually close.8,7