112 gigawatts, up 48 per cent
BloombergNEF recorded 112 GW / 307 GWh of new energy storage additions worldwide in 2025, up 48 per cent on 2024 and the first year annual additions have passed 100 GW. BNEF forecasts a further 41 per cent increase in 2026, to 158 GW / 459 GWh, with annual additions reaching 308 GW by 2036.
| Year | Additions (GW) | Additions (GWh) | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | 112 | 307 | Measured, BNEF |
| 2026 | 158 | 459 | BNEF forecast |
| 2036 | 308 | n/a | BNEF forecast |
China and the United States accounted for close to 70 per cent of 2025's global total between them. China added 61.1 GW / 173.1 GWh, up 54 per cent year on year; the United States added 18 GW / 54.6 GWh, up 46 per cent. The remainder is diversifying quickly, with gigawatt-hour-scale projects now under construction or commissioned in Saudi Arabia, South Africa, the Netherlands, Chile and the UK.
Behind the meter is the minority
Utility-scale, grid-connected storage still dominates the global tally: roughly 85 per cent of 2025's additions by BNEF's count. Residential and commercial-and-industrial storage (together, "customer-sited") is the smaller, distributed remainder, but BNEF projects it will grow to approximately 25 per cent of all global installations by 2030.
The global blend understates how dominant residential storage already is in mature markets. In Germany, 2.9 GW / 5.8 GWh of the country's 3.8 GW / 7.6 GWh in total 2025 storage additions were residential systems: roughly three-quarters of everything the country installed that year. On this data, a market that clears the five variables set out below belongs on a majority-customer-sited modelling path, and the 25 per cent global figure reads as a blended floor for a maturing market.
The price curve
BNEF's 2025 Lithium-Ion Battery Price Survey put the global average pack price, all segments, at US$108/kWh, down 8 per cent on 2024 despite rising battery-metal costs, and a 93 per cent decline from the roughly US$1,474/kWh BNEF recorded in 2010. Inside that headline, the segment specific to behind-the-meter storage moved further and faster: stationary storage pack prices fell to US$70/kWh, down 45 per cent year on year, making stationary the cheapest lithium-ion battery segment of any kind for the first time, cheaper than electric-vehicle packs.
| Segment | 2025 price (USD/kWh) | YoY change |
|---|---|---|
| All segments (global average) | $108 | −8% |
| Stationary storage | $70 | −45% |
| China (domestic average, all segments) | $84 | n/a |
| North America premium over China | +44% | n/a |
| Europe premium over China | +56% | n/a |
BNEF credits the fall to cell manufacturing overcapacity, competition, and the continued shift to LFP chemistry.
Australia installed 221,000 in a year
SunWiz's 2026 Australian Battery Market Report recorded 221,000 residential battery systems installed in 2025, a threefold increase on 2024, delivering 4,790 MWh of new capacity and taking battery ownership to 4.6 per cent of Australian homes. Average system sizes nearly doubled over the year.
The catalyst was the federal Cheaper Home Batteries Program (CHBP), a point-of-sale rebate launched 1 July 2025. By May 2026 the program alone had driven more than 400,000 home battery installations and 11.2 GWh of cumulative residential capacity, running at roughly 2,000 installations a day, a volume the Australian government reported as matching everything added to the country's utility-scale grid battery fleet over the same 12 months. In December 2025 the program was expanded from an original $2.3 billion estimate to $7.2 billion over four years, targeting more than 2 million households installing a battery by 2030 for an estimated 40 GWh of additional capacity.
2,000 a day
The run rate of Australia's Cheaper Home Batteries Program by May 2026: residential installations matching everything added to the country's utility-scale battery fleet over the same 12 months.
Then a rebate restructure effective 1 May 2026 shifted the subsidy to favour smaller systems, and the average installed battery size fell from around 28 kWh to around 25 kWh within weeks. Subsidy design, not just subsidy size, is a first-order variable: a point-of-sale rebate, available regardless of tax position, produced the steepest first-year ramp in this report's data, and the specific parameters of a rebate shape the size of system a market ends up buying.
The variables that recur in every market
Reading the 2025 data across markets, the same handful of variables recur wherever behind-the-meter storage moves from early-adopter niche to mainstream purchase. For evaluating any market's readiness or trajectory, five variables carry most of the explanatory weight:
| Variable | What it explains |
|---|---|
| Retail electricity price level | Sets the ceiling on how much a battery can plausibly save; higher retail prices shorten payback independent of battery cost. |
| Feed-in tariff / export-value erosion | As exporting solar to the grid earns less, storing and self-consuming it becomes comparatively more attractive. |
| Battery pack cost curve | The BNEF price curve above; falling costs progressively expand the addressable market. |
| Subsidy existence and design | Whether a subsidy exists at all, and whether it is a point-of-sale rebate or a tax credit, changes both volume and the size of system bought (see Australia, above). |
| Installed base of rooftop solar | Behind-the-meter storage is overwhelmingly co-installed with or retrofitted to existing solar; a market's solar penetration is the precondition for its storage retrofit potential. |
Germany's high retail prices and eroding feed-in tariff moved it first; the United States' 2022 Inflation Reduction Act extended a federal tax credit to standalone batteries, and California's NEM 3.0 cut the value of exporting solar the following year; Australia's CHBP is the newest of the three; its first-year ramp is the one the case study above measures.
The benchmark every 2026 headline meets
BNEF's own 2026 forecast, 158 GW / 459 GWh globally, is the benchmark every other 2026 storage headline should be read against. For behind-the-meter storage specifically, the metric to track is how quickly customer-sited storage closes in on BNEF's 25-per-cent-by-2030 share, and whether other governments move toward Australia's point-of-sale rebate design, given the pace of its first year. Deeper, market-by-market projections for Germany, the United States and emerging markets are in development for future reports. The chemistry and safety stack behind this fleet has its own classification report, the lithium-ion residential battery decade, and what the grid-scale fleet earns is measured quarterly in the TBx Capture Index.