January 2025 proved the strongest first month of the year on record for the storage market. Over 13GWh of storage entered operation in the grid market across 81 projects. This marked a year-on-year increase of 94%.

Rho Motion BESS analyst, Pete Tillotson, commented:

“After a record-breaking month in December year on year growth in the global storage market remained strong at the start of 2025. The vast majority of this new capacity deployed in January was in China, which is once again set to drive global BESS deployments in the coming year.”

A strong month to start the year

Rho Motion’s February BESS database saw the number of tracked projects increase to 6,500 with the global project pipeline for the next two years reaching 748GWh.

China topped the table with 9.3GWh deployed, the largest project of which was a 1.2GWh storage project in Hebei Province. However, the largest project in January was a 2GWh BESS project in Saudi Arabia. This comes as the Middle East, in particular Saudi Arabia and the UAE, are building out impressive pipelines of BESS projects.

Three separate non-lithium-ion projects were tracked all of which were vanadium flow batteries located in China, with a total combined capacity of 90MWh.

ESS pairing

A similar resource split occurred in January 2025 as in the entirety of 2024. Standalone grid paired projects made up the majority of projects, while solar paired was the next most popular.

  • Grid paired – 63%
  • Solar paired – 21%
  • Wind paired – 16%

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Average project duration

Of the 81 projects to enter operation in January, one 7.3-hour lithium-ion project entered operation in China and a 5-hour duration project began operation in Chile.

Regional average project duration

  • North America – 2.7 hours
  • Europe – 1.9 hours
  • China – 2.4 hours

More Information

This data is taken from Rho Motion’s Battery Energy Stationary Storage Monthly Assessment. To request a copy of the full report, click here.

Image Credit: Adobe Stock