Beside a sprawling solar panel factory in the eastern Chinese city of Suzhou stands a drab two-storey building that few people ever enter. Inside, stark rows of batteries store cheap electricity while the city sleeps each night. In the morning, when energy use and prices go up, the batteries release their power to the factory next door, reducing its electricity bill.<\/p>\n
When this demonstration project started operating in 2017, it was a proof of concept for energy storage, an industry that was about to receive explicit support from the national government and which seemed sure to grow<\/a> alongside renewable energy for decades to come.<\/p>\n Two-and-a-half years later, stalling reform, shifting policy and a slowing economy had put the sector in crisis even before the coronavirus pandemic struck. \u201cIt\u2019s gotten very difficult to do energy storage,\u201d says Paul Man, general manager of Anxin, an energy storage company, which is part of the Golden Concord energy conglomerate that owns the Suzhou solar panel factory. \u201cIf government policy doesn\u2019t change, energy storage won\u2019t be doable in China.\u201d<\/p>\n According to industry group China Energy Storage Alliance (CNESA), newly installed battery-powered storage capacity shrank by nearly a quarter year-on-year in 2019. Companies whose sole business is energy storage \u201care under enormous pressure to survive, regardless of the epidemic,\u201d says Wang Si, senior policy research manager at CNESA. \u201cSome smaller companies will go bankrupt.\u201d<\/p>\n