China has cemented its status as the undisputed heavyweight champion of the global energy storage sector, successfully transforming itself from an industry follower into the global pacemaker, said industry experts and government officials.

By the end of 2025, the nation's cumulative installed capacity of new energy storage had reached a staggering 144.7 gigawatts, capturing 51.9 percent of the global market — the first time China has accounted for more than half of the world's total share.

This historic milestone, detailed in the recently released Energy Storage Industry Research White Paper 2026 by the China Energy Storage Alliance, underscores a profound paradigm shift.

Driven by relentless technological innovation, a massive pivot toward localized global manufacturing, and aggressive strategic planning by both private pioneers and State-owned behemoths, China is now setting the pace of the global energy transition, it said.

China's energy storage industry has achieved large-scale development, with the number of newly added enterprises reaching a record high and industry capacity continuously increasing, said Chen Haisheng, chairman of CNESA.

Chen emphasized that China's primary energy storage technologies are now largely on par with the most advanced global levels, with lithium batteries, compressed air energy storage and flow batteries achieving international leadership positions.

According to the white paper, new energy storage now accounts for more than two-thirds of China's total domestic power storage capacity, representing a staggering 45-fold increase compared to the end of the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20).

In 2025 alone, newly commissioned capacity reached 66.4 GW, or 189.5 gigawatt-hours. This reflects year-on-year growth of approximately 52 percent in power capacity and 73 percent in energy capacity, marking the fourth consecutive year that China has ranked first globally in newly added installations.

What makes this phenomenal growth particularly noteworthy is the underlying policy environment in which it has been achieved. For years, China's energy storage boom was heavily propelled by administrative mandates that required renewable energy developers to pair their solar and wind farms with a specific percentage of energy storage.

However, at the beginning of 2025, a landmark policy shift occurred, as the National Development and Reform Commission and the National Energy Administration jointly issued a directive aimed at deepening market-oriented pricing reforms for new energy.

This crucial document eliminated the mandatory storage pairing requirements, effectively pushing energy storage out from under the umbrella of an administrative "cost item" and into the fierce arena of a market-driven "value item".

Despite the removal of forced quotas, the industry's growth has accelerated, signaling that the sector's endogenous momentum is rapidly strengthening and that pure market mechanisms are beginning to play a leading role.

Liu Deshun, chief engineer of the NEA, emphasized the government's commitment to this economic transition, vowing to continue accelerating the perfection of market mechanisms for new energy storage, establishing a robust capacity pricing system, and systematically building a reliable capacity compensation mechanism to guide the sector's rational and profitable development.