BESS Deployments Soars To Over 13 GWh With 94% YoY Rise

BESS Deployments In January Over 13 GWh Globally With 94% YoY Rise

By Chitrika Grover/ Updated On Mon, Feb 24th, 2025

bess

January 2025 proved to be the strongest first month on record for the expanding energy storage market. Over 13 GWh of storage entered operation in the grid market across 81 projects, marking a year-on-year increase of 94%. It also shared an update on the Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) deployment during this period.

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 start to the year

Rho Motion’s February BESS database recorded an increase in the number of tracked projects to 6,500, with the global project pipeline for the next two years reaching 748 GWh. China topped the table with 9.3 GWh deployed, including the largest project—a 1.2 GWh storage project in Hebei Province. However, the largest project in January was a 2 GWh BESS project in Saudi Arabia. The Middle East, particularly Saudi Arabia and the UAE, is building out an impressive pipeline of BESS projects. Additionally, three non-lithium-ion projects were tracked, all of which were vanadium flow batteries located in China, with a total combined capacity of 90 MWh.

ESS pairing

A similar resource split occurred in January 2025 as in the entirety of 2024. Standalone grid-paired projects made up the majority, followed by solar-paired projects.

The Rho Motion’s report stated, “Grid-paired projects accounted for 63%, solar-paired projects for 21%, and wind-paired projects for 16%. Among the 81 projects that entered operation in January, one 7.3-hour lithium-ion project commenced operations in China, and a 5-hour duration project began operation in Chile. The report also highlighted regional average project durations: 2.7 hours in North America, 1.9 hours in Europe, and approximately 2.4 hours in China.”