Projected Global Demand for Energy Storage

This chapter describes recent projections for the development of global and European demand for battery storage out to 2050 and analyzes the underlying drivers, drawing primarily on the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook (WEO) 2022. The WEO 2022 projects a dramatic increase in the relevance of battery storage for the energy system. Battery electric vehicles become the dominant technology in the light-duty vehicle segment in all scenarios. In the electricity sector, battery energy storage emerges as one of the key solutions to provide flexibility to a power system that sees sharply rising flexibility needs, driven by the fast-rising share of variable renewables. The ongoing decline in the cost of battery packs is crucial to this. It enables electric vehicles to compete on cost with their internal combustion engine counterparts in more and more use cases while making stationary battery energy storage a cost-competitive choice for the provision of flexibility and secure capacity. The projected rise in battery production leads to a strong increase in demand for critical minerals like lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite, copper, or manganese. Increasing the supply of these critical minerals in lockstep with demand is essential in order for battery costs to continue to decline.