The global frame
BloombergNEF recorded 112 GW / 307 GWh of new energy storage additions worldwide in 2025: up 48% on 2024 and the first year annual additions have passed 100 GW. BNEF forecasts a further 41% increase in 2026, to 158 GW / 459 GWh, with annual additions reaching 308 GW by 2036: a trajectory implying roughly 2.9 TW / 10.5 TWh of cumulative global storage capacity by then, up from around 270 GW today.
| 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% of 2025's global total between them. China added 61.1 GW / 173.1 GWh (up 54% year on year); the United States added 18 GW / 54.6 GWh (up 46%). 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.
Where behind-the-meter storage sits in that total
Utility-scale, grid-connected storage still dominates the global tally: roughly 85% 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% 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. As a market matures, the residential share of its own total storage additions rises sharply above the global blended average.
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% on 2024 despite rising battery-metal costs, and a 93% 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% 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 |
Cell manufacturing overcapacity, intense competition, and the continued shift to LFP chemistry are the three forces BNEF credits for the fall. None shows signs of reversing heading into 2026.
Case study: Australia's Cheaper Home Batteries Program
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% 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.
For market forecasting, the detail worth modelling is what happened next: 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 moved volume faster than a tax-credit model dependent on tax liability, and the specific parameters of a rebate shape the size of system a market ends up buying.
A forecasting framework for market assessment
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 and, on the 2025 numbers, the fastest-acting.
What to watch in 2026
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%-by-2030 share, and whether other governments move toward Australia's point-of-sale rebate design rather than the United States' tax-credit model, given how differently the two approaches appear to move volume. 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 is classified in the lithium-ion residential battery decade, and what the grid-scale fleet actually earns is measured quarterly in the TBx Capture Index.