Continuously falling battery costs, and rising capacity and usage of clean energy are set to result in booming global stationary energy storage over the next two decades, which will require total investments of as much as US$662 billion.
That’s one the key findings of the latest report on new energies by research company BloombergNEF (BNEF) published this week.
Energy storage installations across the world are expected to soar to 1,095GW, or 2,850GWh, by 2040, compared to a modest current deployment of just 9GW/17GWh as of 2018, according to BNEF’s latest forecasts.
Unsurprisingly, the key driver of the energy storage installation boom will be additionally plunging costs of lithium-ion batteries, which will give financial rationale to additional uses of storage and surging installations of stationary energy storage.
Costs of lithium-ion batteries dropped by a whopping 85 percent between 2010 and 2018, BNEF says, as it expects battery costs to further halve per kilowatt-hour by 2030, thanks to rising demand in two markets—stationary storage and electric vehicles (EVs).
In the energy storage report this year, BNEF has raised its estimates of global investments in storage by more than US$40 billion, said Yayoi Sekine, energy storage analyst for BNEF and co-author of the report. The other major change in BNEF’s predictions this year is that the analysts now think that most of the energy storage capacity will be “utility-scale, rather than behind-the-meter at homes and businesses.”
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Geographically, South Korea is the current market leader, but it will soon cede the crown to China and the United States which will be the two major energy storage markets two decades from now. India, Germany, Latin America, Southeast Asia, France, Australia, and the UK will be the other major energy storage installation hotspots, according to BNEF.
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