Opinion | How battery storage development can wean China off fossil fuels

As China’s green transition faces external and domestic hurdles, a focus on energy storage capacity will help Beijing meet climate targets

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A staff member from the Institute of Rock and Soil Mechanics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences patrols the 300MW compressed air energy storage station in Yingcheng city, central China’s Hubei province, on December 24, 2024. Photo: Xinhua

Published: 5:30am, 6 Feb 2025

Criticism against China’s energy sector over its fossil fuels usage has lessened lately – and with good reason. The country leads the world in renewable energy development, with more to come. In 2023, China had installed an impressive 301 gigawatts (GW) of renewable energy, led by wind, solar and hydropower.

Its 180GW of utility-scale solar and 159GW of wind power under construction last year was nearly twice as much as the rest of the world combined, according to a Global Energy Monitor report. In May 2024, renewables accounted for 44 per cent of overall energy used for China’s electricity production. By 2030, that share could grow to nearly half of all power production.

China is also making gains in energy storage. Its capacity for new energy storage systems more than tripled in 2023 alone. The country is the world’s largest market for energy storage, followed by the US and Europe, according to a Carbon Brief article citing Bloomberg New Energy Finance. China has already surpassed its target of reaching 30GW of new energy storage types by 2025, two years earlier than planned.

Battery storage helps renewable energy proponents push back against assertions from the oil and gas industry that renewables are unreliable because they are intermittent energy sources. Some claim that the sun only shines for a certain number of hours per day and the wind is only strong enough to drive wind turbines some of the time. As such, there are power gaps.

China’s energy sector is growing so fast that the pace of plant installation is not matched by usage capacity, meaning clean energy is wasted.

Workers produce 18MW offshore wind turbines in Fuqing, Fujian province, on August 8, 2024. Photo: Xinhua

Battery storage changes that dynamic, especially in China. It works by converting electrical energy into chemical or kinetic energy while discharging reverses the process. Simply put, it stores energy for later usage. Energy storage can be accomplished with hydro technology, batteries, the compression of air and solar thermal systems.