Global battery storage capacity is expanding at a pace that increasingly shapes electricity systems worldwide. According to the Energy Institute's 2026 Statistical Review of World Energy, installed battery energy storage system capacity reached 301.7 gigawatts in 2025, up from 182.0 GW in 2024 — a one-year increase of nearly 120 GW, or 65.8%.

The data come from the final installment of a multi-part analysis by Robert Rapier examining the major findings of this year's Statistical Review, published by OilPrice.com. The Review itself is one of the most widely used datasets in global energy: it was published by BP from the early 1950s until the Energy Institute took it over in 2023. Earlier installments in the series covered:

• Energy Demand Outpaced the Transition in 2025
• Global Emissions Hit a New Record as U.S. Emissions Rebounded
• The U.S. Is Both the World's Top Oil Producer and Top Consumer
• The U.S. Supplied 93% of Global LNG Export Growth in 2025
• Global Coal Use Hit a Record in 2025, Even as Coal Power Declined
• China Drives Global Nuclear Power Generation to a New Record
• Renewables Are Booming. So Why Aren't Fossil Fuels Declining?

Battery storage was saved for last in the series because the technology is newer and still much smaller than the major energy sources covered in the earlier articles. Measured by growth, however, batteries may be the most remarkable story in the entire Statistical Review.

A Decade of Extraordinary Growth

Viewed over a decade, the numbers become almost difficult to believe. Global installed battery capacity stood at just 1.9 GW in 2015. In ten years, it increased by a factor of about 158, which works out to an average annual growth rate of roughly 66%. That expansion tracks a steep decline in costs: industry surveys such as BloombergNEF's annual battery price survey show lithium-ion pack prices falling on the order of 90% since 2010, largely as electric-vehicle manufacturing scaled.

Why Batteries Are Becoming So Important

That growth is closely connected to another major trend: the extraordinary expansion of solar power. Solar generation has become cheap enough to deploy at enormous scale, and in 2025 it surpassed wind in global electricity generation for the first time. But solar has an obvious limitation: its output peaks during daylight hours, and electricity demand does not disappear when the sun goes down.

Battery storage changes that equation. A battery can absorb electricity when generation is abundant and return it to the grid later, when electricity is more valuable. That capability can help shift solar production into evening demand periods, reduce curtailment, provide frequency regulation, smooth short-term fluctuations, and reduce the need to start other generating resources during periods of high demand.

An important distinction applies to the Statistical Review data. Capacity is reported in megawatts, which measures how much power the battery fleet can deliver at a given moment. It does not indicate how much total energy the batteries can store, which would be measured in megawatt-hours. A 100-MW battery capable of operating for one hour is quite different from a 100-MW battery that can operate for four hours. The figures therefore should not be interpreted as a complete measure of stored energy, but they provide an excellent picture of how rapidly battery power capacity is being added to electric systems.

China Accounts for Nearly Half the World's Capacity

As with solar, wind, and increasingly nuclear power, China dominates the battery-storage numbers. China finished 2025 with about 144.1 GW of installed battery capacity, representing nearly 48% of the global total. A year earlier, China's capacity stood at 79.5 GW, meaning the country added almost 64.6 GW in a single year — more than half of all the new battery capacity installed worldwide.

The longer-term growth is even more dramatic. China had only about 115 MW of battery capacity in 2015; its 2025 total was more than 1,200 times larger.

Most of China's capacity is front-of-the-meter storage, meaning large systems connected directly to the electric grid rather than batteries installed behind a customer's meter. China's front-of-the-meter capacity reached nearly 134 GW in 2025. That fits within the context of China's enormous renewable buildout: the country is simultaneously adding solar panels, wind turbines, nuclear reactors, transmission, and batteries at a scale unmatched anywhere else. China is also home to the world's largest battery manufacturers, including CATL and BYD, giving its storage expansion a deep domestic supply chain.

The U.S. Is a Distant Second, but Growing Rapidly

The United States ranked second with 56.6 GW of installed battery capacity in 2025, representing almost 19% of the global total. U.S. capacity increased from 34.7 GW in 2024 — a gain of more than 21.9 GW, or about 63% in a single year.

The U.S. market is also more balanced between utility-scale and behind-the-meter installations than China's. Front-of-the-meter capacity reached approximately 43.3 GW, while behind-the-meter capacity totaled about 13.3 GW. A decade ago, total U.S. battery capacity was only about 354 MW; the 2025 figure is roughly 160 times larger. Deployment has been heavily concentrated in Texas and California, which together host most of the country's utility-scale battery fleet.

China and the United States together now account for about two-thirds of the world's installed battery capacity. The two countries also supplied more than 70% of the increase in global capacity last year.

Europe and Australia Are Scaling Quickly

Europe collectively finished 2025 with about 57.7 GW of battery capacity, slightly more than the United States. Germany was Europe's leader at 17.5 GW, followed by Italy at 9.2 GW and the United Kingdom at 9.0 GW. Germany's market is notable because most of its capacity is behind the meter: of its 17.5 GW total, roughly 14.4 GW was installed on the customer side of the meter — a pattern consistent with the country's large rooftop-solar market, where household batteries are commonly installed alongside panels.

Australia also stands out. Battery capacity nearly doubled during 2025, rising from 6.6 GW to 12.6 GW. That gave Australia more than 4% of worldwide capacity despite a relatively small population, and it comes in a country with one of the world's highest rates of household solar adoption.

Dramatic percentage increases are appearing elsewhere as well, although from much smaller bases. Saudi Arabia jumped from just 35 MW in 2024 to more than 2 GW in 2025, largely through new front-of-the-meter capacity. Chile more than doubled to approximately 2 GW.

Utility-Scale Storage Is Growing Fastest

The global totals also show an interesting shift in where batteries are being installed. Rapier calculates roughly 224 GW of front-of-the-meter battery capacity worldwide in 2025, versus about 78 GW behind the meter. That means approximately three-quarters of global battery capacity is now on the grid side of the meter. Front-of-the-meter capacity increased by roughly 72% in 2025, compared with about 51% growth for behind-the-meter systems.

The shift marks an important evolution. Batteries are not merely becoming more common in homes and businesses; they are increasingly becoming pieces of utility infrastructure. Ten years ago, batteries were still frequently discussed as something that might eventually allow large quantities of intermittent renewable power to be integrated into the grid. Increasingly, that is no longer a theoretical discussion — the infrastructure is actually being built.

The Big Picture

Battery storage remains small when compared with the enormous generating fleets built around coal, natural gas, nuclear, hydro, wind, and solar. Batteries are also not an energy source. They do not generate a single kilowatt-hour, and every unit of electricity they return to the grid must first have been generated somewhere else.

That, however, misses their importance. Batteries can change when electricity is available, and as solar becomes an increasingly important part of global generation, that capability becomes much more valuable.

The 2026 Statistical Review shows a global energy system that remains heavily dependent on fossil fuels even as renewable generation expands at extraordinary rates — a tension that has been a recurring theme throughout the series. Battery storage sits directly in the middle of that tension. It cannot eliminate the intermittency of renewable energy, nor can today's batteries replace every form of dispatchable generation. But storage can make rapidly growing solar and wind resources more useful to the grid. Successive editions of the Review will show whether deployment continues at this pace as solar capacity expands, and whether future reporting captures storage duration in megawatt-hours as well as power capacity in megawatts.

Going from 1.9 GW to more than 300 GW in a decade suggests the market has reached a very different stage. Battery storage is no longer an experiment at the margins of the electric grid. It is becoming part of the grid itself.

By Robert Rapier, OilPrice.com