Demand for long-lasting energy storage is accelerating and that offers a rare opportunity for U.S. and European clean technology companies to compete with China in its globally dominant battery sector.
Currently, lithium-ion is the dominant type of battery, but many lithium batteries can provide electricity for only about four hours. To get longer coverage, you have to install twice as many. So the search has been on for batteries that can discharge for days — or even weeks. China has built a commanding lead in lithium-ion batteries.
Now installations of long-duration systems are surging as the world looks to better harness renewable energy. Deployments are forecast to almost quadruple this year after a record 2025, according to BloombergNEF.
Those options include batteries using a more eclectic mix of metals, or systems that can store energy in hot bricks, tap the potential of gravity, or compress air into caverns.
“The race is still pretty much open,” and there’s no one-size-fits-all solution, said Frederic Godemel, executive vice president for energy management at Schneider Electric SE, a supplier of power equipment including server racks and cooling technology.
Although China currently accounts for about 72% of cumulative long-duration storage capacity — including almost all installations last year — the U.S. is the second-largest market and expected to ramp up deployments later this decade, as are nations including Germany, India and Japan, BNEF said last month. U.S. installations could accelerate further as the boom in data center construction adds fresh demand for reliable power.
“China leads in scale,” said Yiyi Zhou, a BNEF analyst specializing in energy storage. But “the U.S. has the most diversified type of technology in development.”
Unlike in other areas of clean technology, Chinese companies also have less potential to become major exporters and capture market share overseas. China is focused on a narrower set of technologies than other countries, and long-duration storage — often referred to as LDES — can typically need specific designs for particular locations.
“Long-duration storage is not a commodity like solar panels,” said Zhou. “I don’t expect LDES to be easily exported at a large scale.”
That’s likely to support domestic supply chains, and the U.K. and Italy are among nations already setting policies to encourage deployments. Developing viable and cost-effective methods for 10 to 100 hours or more of storage “should be a priority for governments anticipating future high shares of variable renewable electricity supplies” or weather-related disruptions to hydropower, the International Energy Agency said in a February report.
Long-duration storage technology is “one of the critical missing pieces for deeply decarbonized power systems,” said Kostantsa Rangelova, a global electricity analyst at climate think tank Ember.
Soaring U.S. demand for electricity and a shortage of natural gas turbines, also “opens up a door” for long-duration storage that can complement renewables, said Gabriel Kra, co-founder of Prelude Ventures, a venture capital firm that has invested in Form Energy Inc., a Somerville, Mass.-based startup.
“There is nothing that I see in the evidence or the data that would suggest that Chinese companies, or any particular Chinese company, has any advantage right now,” Kra said.
Form Energy, which deploys iron-air battery technology that can feed electricity to power grids for 100 hours, completed an agreement last month with a data center developer. In February, the company struck a similar deal to supply utility Xcel Energy Inc. for a Google site in Minnesota.
California is set to host one of the world’s largest compressed air energy projects — which works by squeezing air into tanks or natural caverns and releasing it through a turbine to generate electricity. Because long-duration storage assets need both technical expertise and local knowledge, it’s unlikely startups outside China will lose ground to “a Chinese developer coming and competing in our backyard,” said Curtis VanWalleghem, chief executive officer of Toronto-based Hydrostor Inc., the Kern County project’s developer.
“We know this market extremely well, where to put things, and we have the special technology,” he said. “Our solution has a unique value proposition, that when we optimize around it, we can win.”
China will remain the crucial market for long-duration technologies. Its frontrunner companies aren’t domestic battery titans like Contemporary Amperex Technologies Co. Ltd., which are largely engaged in pushing the potential of existing product types.
Zhongchu Guoneng Technology Co., a VC-backed spinoff from the Chinese Academy of Sciences that uses compressed air technology, and Dalian Rongke Energy Storage Group Co., a vanadium-flow battery company, are currently among the nation’s leading firms, according to BNEF. China’s government is also supporting dozens of pilot projects testing alternatives to lithium-based technologies.
Liu and Pike write for Bloomberg.
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