Battery Storage Additions Rival Historic Gas-Power Buildout, IEA Data Show

SYDNEY/BEIJING, Sept 15, 2026 - (ACN Newswire) - Global battery storage additions reached about 108 gigawatts in 2025, up roughly 40% from a year earlier, International Energy Agency data show. The volume rivals the record annual buildout of gas-fired power capacity set in 2002.

In markets with high rooftop-solar penetration, growth has been especially rapid in the residential and small-commercial segment, where storage is increasingly used to manage local supply-demand imbalances rather than purely as emergency backup power. Australia illustrates the shift.Growth is fastest in the residential and small-commercial segment, where storage is increasingly used to manage local supply-demand imbalances rather than purely as emergency backup power.

Australia illustrates the shift. High rooftop-solar penetration has pushed midday wholesale power prices to negative or near zero in roughly a fifth of trading intervals on the National Electricity Market, market data show.

Evening demand ramps, meanwhile, have grown by as much as 2 gigawatts in some mainland states. The imbalance has changed the economics of exporting household solar. Federal and state subsidy programs introduced in 2025 cover a significant share of battery installation costs.

Australia's Clean Energy Council reported that residential battery installations surpassed 268,000 units in 2025, up 260% from a year earlier. Even so, only about one in ten of the roughly 4.3 million Australian households with rooftop solar has storage installed — a gap that industry participants say points to a large untapped market.

A Widening Set of Entrants

The convergence of electric-vehicle adoption, rooftop solar and home battery storage has drawn interest from companies outside the traditional utility and battery-manufacturing sectors. Financing, insurance and mobility-services providers that already have relationships with households — particularly those that own electric vehicles — are among those evaluating the category, industry participants say, as storage shifts from a hardware-led sale toward one that combines hardware, software, local installation and ongoing service.

Companies in adjacent sectors have signaled early interest in the space. Cheche Group Inc. (Nasdaq: CCG), a Beijing-based technology platform serving China’s auto-insurance industry, disclosed this month a non-binding term sheet for a proposed strategic investment in a residential solar-and-storage business with operations in Australia and Singapore. The term sheet does not obligate the company to complete a transaction. Any investment would remain subject to due diligence, the negotiation and execution of definitive agreements, and regulatory and other approvals, including from Nasdaq. There is no assurance that a transaction will be completed. If completed, the investment would leave residential storage as a potential longer-term growth option for Cheche Group, alongside its existing auto-insurance and mobility services. Households that already own electric vehicles are also the more natural buyers of rooftop solar and home batteries, which is why an auto-insurance platform would look at the category at all. In high-solar markets where most rooftop systems still have no battery attached, that overlap is why the category is seen as having substantial room to grow.