On a production line in south-east China, machines paste a black slurry of electrode material on to a copper ribbon just five microns thick — one 20th of the width of a human hair. Further down the line, a team of robots monitored by an AI quality inspection system will turn the strips into battery cells by cutting them with lasers, winding them into rolls and pressing them with a force equivalent to a 23-tonne weight. The factory is at the Ningde headquarters of CATL, the world’s biggest battery producer and a goliath in the electric car industry.
But the large-scale storage batteries these cells will go into are destined not for the world’s roads but for the energy sector. They represent the fastest-growing power technology today, according to the International Energy Agency, the world’s energy watchdog. By driving down battery costs and improving the underlying technology, CATL and other Chinese manufacturers have provided an answer to a longstanding problem with solar and wind energy: their intermittency.
Systems using Chinese batteries are now able to store solar power long after sunset, for example, eroding the need for fossil-fuel generation that until now has ensured round-the-clock electricity supply. “This is the big one,” says Michael Liebreich, a veteran energy analyst and consultant. Reliance on intermittent wind and solar power for the majority of electricity supply seems implausible, he says, “until you realise you have cheap batteries”. The cost of battery packs used in grid-scale storage systems fell by 45 per cent last year alone, according to think-tank Ember.
This year, prices have edged upwards because of tight global supplies of lithium. But the storage capacity of large-scale batteries installed around the world is today 11 times greater than the level five years ago, says the IEA. This year, 40 per cent more large-scale batteries are set to be installed than in 2025, according to analysts at S&P Global.
Chinese producers account for 95 per cent of large-scale storage batteries, says Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. The sector’s rapid growth is strengthening China’s position as the dominant force in low-carbon energy, compounding opportunities for Chinese companies in adjacent markets such as wind and solar generation equipment.
Source: Financial Times Companies · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing