Chinese solar groups take on the battery market
Why Chinese solar groups are expanding into batteries
China’s major solar-panel makers have driven astonishing growth of solar power around the world in recent years.
Companies such as Longi, Trinasolar and JinkoSolar have pushed down costs and manufactured at huge scale, helping global solar capacity climb from about 1.6 terawatts at the end of 2023 to 2.25TW at the end of 2024.
But many in the sector have suffered heavy losses as they fight to maintain market share: the International Energy Agency estimates the largest manufacturers have made cumulative losses of almost $5bn since the start of 2024.
Some companies in China have started to expand into battery storage over the past few years, helping to smooth out customers’ electricity supplies and diversify their revenues.
Trinasolar and JinkoSolar pushed into batteries earlier this decade. They have now been joined by Shanghai-listed Longi, reinforcing a trend likely to accelerate the rapid adoption of batteries.
Longi, one of the world’s largest solar panel manufacturers, has just taken majority control of Canada-headquartered battery developer PotisEdge, and plans to sell combined solar and battery systems in international markets.
At a launch event for their new energy storage business in London last week, Dennis She, senior vice-president of sales and marketing at Longi, told Energy Source that storage was critical for a “new energy system with solar at its core”.
He added: “Solar energy [now] has much greater penetration in the grid, but we need to add more storage to stabilise the grid.”
In some countries, solar power has grown so quickly that system operators have to contend with a huge surge in power in the middle of the day, while prices turn negative.
That has created huge demand for batteries to help store power and catch up with the growth of solar farms.
She said storage would likely grow faster than solar in the coming years, predicting potential growth of 30 per cent or 40 per cent every year.
Selling combined solar and storage units should push down costs further, he noted, as work such as installation and service procedures would be combined.
Falling costs have pushed the commercial limits of batteries, meaning new installations can typically discharge at full output for longer periods of time.
“We started at two hours; now I think the average is three to four hours. We can even see eight hours,” added She.
In its latest results, published last week, Longi reported losses for the first nine months of 2025 of almost $600mn, which was an improvement on the losses reported in the same period a year earlier.
The company said it sold 63 gigawatts worth of cells and modules during the first nine months of the year, along with 38.15GW of silicon wafers, used to make solar panels.
It comes as the chair of rival Trinasolar said energy storage will help his company “reach a turning point in its performance” before its peers, Bloomberg reported this week.
Longi’s She said he expected the majority of the customers for the company’s new storage business to be utility-scale solar farms, with industrial sites also key customers.
Longi’s expansion into batteries comes as Chinese manufacturers are under pressure from tariffs in the US, while Europe is also planning to tighten foreign investment rules to try to make sure investment delivers jobs and other benefits for local communities.
CATL, the Chinese battery maker, is building a factory in Spain and wants to bring 2,000 Chinese workers to the Zaragoza region, along with using about 3,000 mostly Spanish workers to run the plant.
PotisEdge, Longi’s battery subsidiary, has about 30GW of battery manufacturing capacity in China. Longi has an office in Poland while PotisEdge has “centers of excellence” in Poland and elsewhere in Europe to supply services and training. But Longi has no plans to set up manufacturing in Europe.
She said Europe and China should “work together” on the energy transition, but cautioned Europe needed to put the right policies in place if it wanted more solar panels to be made in the continent.