Global BESS installments increase 29% y-o-y

Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, specialising in battery supply chain research and insights, reports that 12.7GWh of new operational capacity entered operation in October 2025.

Operational Capacity

The grid-scale BESS market saw 12.7GWh of new capacity enter operations globally in October 2025, a y-o-y increase of 29%. China led new operational capacity with just under 8.8GWh of utility scale BESS being added0 – a m-o-m increase of 72% – including one giga-scale vanadium flow battery. The US saw the next largest monthly capacity additions to the grid with 2.3GWh entering operations. This is a m-o-m decrease of 40%, however this was up y-o-y verses October 2024 by 13%. Australia saw 980MWh enter commercial operations in the form of the second phase of the Waratah Super Battery in NSW, however technical issues regarding transformer failures have reduced the operating power to 350MW until 2026. Europe saw just under 500MWh of new grid-scale capacity commissioned which includes a 260MWh project in Bulgaria with Hithium acting as system integrator. Global YTD deployments have reached 156GWh, a y-o-y increase of 38%.

Snapshot grid BESS installations in YTD 2025 (Jan-Oct 2025) vs YTD 2024 (Jan-Oct 2024), YTD %

• Global: +38%• China: +27%• Europe: +21%• North America: +21%• ROW: +242%

Planned Capacity

Project pipelines continue to grow, with just under 75GWh being proposed or announced in October 2025 – a m-o-m increase of 5%. Total global project pipeline additions YTD have reached 732GWh, increasing 23% y-o-y against the same period in 2024.

The largest project to enter the pipeline this month was the Yan’an Wenergy Electricity Shaanbei-Anhui HVDC Project at 4.2GWh. Another 16 giga-scale projects were announced, 12 of which are in Australia which continues to be one of the hottest energy storage markets globally. Over 16GWh of projects had technology providers assigned to projects and 32GWh entered construction globally. Four projects of 1GWh or over entered construction in September, including Masdar’s huge 19GWh project in Abu Dhabi. The Middle East has one of the largest growth rates in the world in 2025 in terms of BESS capacity installed, and has also reflect similarly rapid construction times to those only seen in China.

Notably, over 30GWh of pipeline capacity was cancelled in October, including over 5GW planned at the Esmerelda 7 Solar project in Nevada. The majority of these cancellations were in China relating to regional policy changes over the past few months. For the remainder of 2025, over 153GWh is in the pipeline and scheduled to enter operation. Project delays and cancellations will continue to bring this number down towards the end of the year.

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