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China's cumulative new-type energy storage capacity is projected to exceed 370 gigawatts by 2030, an over 1.5-fold increase from the 144.7 GW achieved by the end of 2025, according to a white paper on the energy storage industry released on Tuesday.

In 2025, the last year of the 14th Five-Year Plan period, China added 66 million kilowatts of new-type energy storage capacity, up 51.9 percent year on year, according to the 2026 white paper on energy storage industry. By the end of 2025, the country's total installed and operational new-type energy storage capacity had reached 136 million kilowatts, up 84 percent from the end of 2024. This marked more than 40-fold growth from the end of the 13th Five-Year Plan period (2016-2020), ranking China first in this regard in the world, added the white paper.

"With the rising proportion of renewable energy, there are growing demands for longer energy storage durations. By 2030, the average duration of the cumulative installed capacity will increase from the current 2.58 hours to 3.47 hours," said Chen Haisheng, director of the Institute of Engineering Thermophysics (IET), Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The white paper highlighted that as new energy generation continues to climb, China's power system faces an increasingly urgent need for long-duration adjustment resources. The shift toward an average storage duration of nearly 3.5 hours by 2030 will open major industrialization windows for advanced long-duration technologies.

The white paper noted new energy storage is rapidly evolving from a supplementary power balancing resource into a foundational component of China's power system.

Photo: orient.tm