The Next Trillion-Dollar Clean Energy Business

Decocarbonization the world’s electricity supply will require more than solar panels and wind turbines, which need sun and steady wind to generate power. Grid-scale storage offers a solution to this intermittency problem, but there is too little of it. The International Energy Agency (IEA), an official forecaster, believes that global installed battery storage capacity will have to increase from below 200 gigawatts (GW) last year to over a terawatt (TW) by the end of the decade and almost 5TW by 2050 if the world is to stay on track towards net-zero emissions (see chart 1). Fortunately, however, the business of storing energy on the grid is finally getting a turbocharger.