China has released details of dozens of pioneering energy storage projects under development as it looks to build out capacity to match its booming wind and solar sectors.
China’s “extraordinary” growth in green power was recently hailed by the International Energy Agency as helping keep the COP28 climate summit’s goal of tripling renewables by 2030 within reach.
Last year, China commissioned as much solar as the entire world did in 2022, while its wind power additions also rose by 66% year-on-year.
This has put pressure on its energy storage sector to match the pace and add enough capacity to help balance the country’s grid between periods of high and low generation from renewables.
China’s National Energy Administration last month released details of 56 pilot projects that it said demonstrated the diversified and high-quality energy storage sector in the country.
The largest of these by megawatt hours is a 300MW/1800MWh compressed air energy storage project located in China’s northern Gansu province. Several other compressed air energy storage projects were also listed with similar capacities.
There were more than a dozen lithium-ion battery storage projects listed, the largest of which is a 550MW/1100MWh facility listed in China’s Inner Mongolia region.
Many of the projects are meanwhile using redox flow battery chemistries to store energy.
Also listed is a 10MW/80MWh carbon dioxide energy storage pilot project. A similar project is currently being developed in Italy, with the developer winning the backing of Bill Gates' energy innovation vehicle and the EU.
A 26MW/100MWh gravity energy storage project in Jiangsu Province, just north of Shanghai, is also identified. Although the listing doesn’t specify the project developer, it appears likely to be the 100MWh facility that was commissioned last year by Switzerland-based Energy Vault in the same location.
Finally, there are also three projects using flywheels for energy storage listed, the largest of which boasts 100MW of capacity. Flywheels have been around for a long time in the energy storage market but have failed to gain much traction up until now.
It was also recently announced that China is planning to turn electric vehicles into mobile batteries that would support the grid and help bring more green power online, with trials of a new two-way charging system due to begin in major cities next year.
