CATL and Gresham House Establish Global Strategic Partnership

Chinese battery giant CATL announced on December 22 that it has reached a long-term agreement with Gresham House Energy Storage Holdings PLC, a specialist alternative asset management group based in London, involving the supply of up to 7.5 GWh in battery energy storage systems (BESS). The two sides will endeavour to increase the scope to 10 GWh of BESS for use in utility-scale energy storage.

The symbiotic, long-term strategic partnership between CATL and Gresham House, as one of the first CATL has entered into with owners of BESS assets, represents a trailblazing form of collaboration in the energy storage industry. This partnership of two large players in their respective areas will enable the acceleration of the deployment of BESS, a crucial technology for enabling the deployment of renewables on an even larger scale and achieving global carbon neutrality targets.

SEE ALSO: CATL’s German Factory Begins Battery Cell Production

The energy storage business operations of CATL are growing rapidly. In October this year, it successively signed two large orders for energy storage projects in the United States. Among them, it reached an agreement with Primergy Solar LLC, a US utility and distributed photovoltaic and energy storage development operator, to exclusively supply batteries for Gemini photovoltaic and energy storage projects. The project has received total investment of $1.2 billion. After the project is completed, it will become one of the largest photovoltaic energy storage projects in the US.

According to the company’s semi-annual report, in the first half of the year, CATL’s energy storage system achieved operating income of 12.736 billion yuan ($1.83 billion), accounting for about 11% of total revenue, a year-on-year increase of 171.41%. In 2021, the overall revenue of this sector will be 13.62 billion yuan, with a year-on-year growth rate of 601%, becoming the sector with the highest growth rate of CATL. The company disclosed that since the start of the energy storage business in 2020, by the first half of 2022, the cumulative shipments have exceeded 33GWh.

A report by Zheshang Securities stated that the global energy storage market is booming, and electric power, household and portable use sectors are important application scenarios. On December 12, the GGLB Energy Storage Annual Conference stated that the global energy storage battery shipments in 2022 will be about 125GWh. In 2025, global energy storage battery shipments are expected to exceed 390GWh – the same figure in 2021 was only 48GWh. The energy storage market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 68% from 2021 to 2025.