Ever-steeper falls in battery costs and the opportunities opening up for electric vehicle charging prompted Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) to adopt “much more bullish” forecasts on energy storage deployment, the analyst group said.

BNEF expects the global storage market to grow to 942GW/2,857GWh by 2040 – by which time it will be equivalent to 7% of the world’s total power fleet.

The growth will be driven by further declines in capital costs for lithium-ion batteries – another 52% between 2018 and 2030, according to the research group’s Long-Term Energy Storage Outlook.

Yayoi Sekine, energy storage analyst for BNEF, said: “We have become much more bullish about storage deployments since our last forecast a year ago. This is partly due to faster-than-expected falls in storage system costs, and partly to a greater focus on two emerging applications for the technology – electric vehicle charging, and energy access in remote regions.”

The BNEF study names nine nations that will dominate the global storage market – China, the US, India, Japan, Germany, France, Australia, South Korea and the UK. Between them, they will account for two-thirds of installed storage capacity by 2040, it predicts.

Most storage capacity will be utility-scale until the mid-2030s, when behind-the-meter applications come to the fore, BNEF expects.

Transition

BNEF 'more bullish' on storage thanks to cost falls and EVs