China continued to drive global grid-scale BESS commissioning activity in July, as the technology approaches the global installed gigawatt (GW) capacity of pumped hydro.

“It’s the most powerful BESS in the world,” Nick Carter of Akaysha Energy, tells ESN Premium after switching on the Waratah Super Battery in New South Wales, Australia.

Sahand Karimi, CEO of OptiGrid, tells ESN Premium that the majority of BESS projects in the NEM “rarely go fully contracted”.

“We need some form of policy or expansion of the CIS for LDES,” Nick Hawke, director of Australia’s CEFC, tells ESN Premium.

As the BESS industry matures, the trend towards a closening relationship between OEMs and project owners looks set to continue, but system integrators will continue to have a role to play.

Steady price falls the past few years have made lithium-ion BESS a real contender for long-duration energy storage (LDES), and that is now reflected in global project pipelines.

ESN Premium’s deep dive into Japan continues with a look at the complexities of an evolving market underpinned by strong drivers for energy storage.

ESN Premium grills Matt Harper of Invinity Energy Systems on the flow battery company’s new partnership with China’s UESNT.

Japan’s energy storage market is experiencing a wave of significant growth, as ESN Premium hears from Eku Energy and BloombergNEF.

June 2025 saw a total of 7.96GW/22.17GWh of grid-scale BESS enter commercial operations across 109 projects, with over half of that being in China, while the overall first half of the year saw substantial growth.