National Storage Plans Fall Far Short of COP29 Target, Ember Finds

Governments’ combined storage targets add up to just 822 GW by 2030 — roughly 678 GW below the 1,500 GW goal that 74 countries endorsed at the COP29 climate summit in Baku. A new Ember report shows that although national plans have nearly tripled since 2024, they remain well below even BloombergNEF’s projection of 1,200 GW by the end of the decade.

The gap signals that international pledges have yet to translate into national strategies of matching scale. Reaching the 822 GW aggregate would require roughly 78 GW of new installations each year — a pace that global markets have already exceeded. In 2025 alone, the world brought 118 GW of storage online, with battery storage accounting for 108 GW of that total.

China and the European Union dominate the pipeline, their combined targets representing over 80% of planned global capacity. China raised its goal to 460 GW; the EU set an objective of 200 GW. Meanwhile, large markets such as India, Italy, and Spain have not revised their targets since Baku. Spain’s national energy and climate plan, PNIEC, still lists 22.5 GW without distinguishing between battery systems and pumped hydro.

Ember warns that without expanded storage, power systems will struggle to shift electricity across hours, limit forced curtailment of generation, and manage grid congestion. The obstacle, the think-tank argues, is not the pace of construction — which already surpasses what government plans actually require — but the ambition of those plans themselves.

Source: PV Magazine USA