Ember: national 2030 storage targets reach 822 GW, 45% short of pledge

National 2030 energy storage targets now add up to 822 GW, according to an analysis Ember published on October 15, 2026: a 190% increase on the sum assessed at COP29 in 2024, when 74 countries signed a pledge for 1,500 GW of storage by 2030, and still 45% short of that pledge, Ember's release says. Two entries do most of the work. China's 15th Five-Year Plan for the Development of a New-Type Energy System raised its 2030 target from 130 GW to 460 GW, 300 GW of it new-type storage (mostly lithium-ion batteries) and 160 GW pumped hydro, and the EU added a 200 GW bloc-wide figure in June 2026. Together they account for more than 80% of the total.

Outside China and the EU, little has moved. Among the eight largest targets, India, Spain and Italy have not increased theirs since the pledge was signed, and eight countries and the EU in all have raised their targets or set new ones since COP29. "The overall tripling of storage targets is two markets, not a large-scale shift in how governments are planning for storage," Ember concludes. Its 2030 Global Renewable Target Tracker covers 98 countries and the EU and now records storage targets for 32 of those countries and the EU, current to August 31, 2026.

The tally also counts more than legislation. National storage targets, Ember says, "are sourced from official strategies, plans, executive orders, official projections and credible third-party studies." Australia's 33 GW comes from AEMO's 2026 Integrated System Plan, which Ember describes as "a technical system-planning projection rather than a binding government target." India's 31.8 GW of batteries and 19 GW of pumped storage are derived from projections in its National Electricity Plan 2022-32. India has since drafted a rule requiring co-located storage on new ground-mounted solar and onshore wind plants, a requirement rather than a capacity target.

The EU's 200 GW binds no one

The second-largest entry is softer than its place in the sum suggests. Ember lists the EU's first Tripartite Agreement on Energy Storage as setting "a bloc-wide 2030 target of 200 GW." The agreement itself, signed in Luxembourg on June 26, 2026, adopts 200 GW as an EU-level objective grounded in estimated need: "It is estimated that 200 GW of storage capacities are needed by 2030 to meet the energy system's needs, compared to around 55 GW of energy storage installed as of the beginning of 2026. Achieving this objective will require diverse storage technologies across all timescales, stand-alone or, when cost-effective, coupled with renewables."

What the signatories committed to is nearer-term and non-binding. The agreement aims to raise annual storage deployment in 2026-2028 by at least 20% over the roughly 12 GW installed in 2025, about 45 GW over the three years, and a footnote says its commitments "do not create any legal obligation for its signatory parties." Member states' national pledges cover the same 2026-2028 period; 17 had submitted them and five more were expected to by the end of 2026, according to the Commission's page on the agreement, which says further efforts are required to reach an indicative 30 GW of deployment a year to meet the EU's 2030 energy system needs.

That is where Ember and the agreement part ways. "Spain, Italy, and the other EU members will have to meet the EU-bloc wide target," Ember writes; the agreement sets 200 GW as an objective but no binding obligation to reach it. The difference carries weight in the headline, since the EU figure is nearly a quarter of the 822 GW, by our arithmetic.

Batteries are outrunning the targets

Deployment is already ahead of the paperwork. Storage additions reached a record 118 GW in 2025, 108 GW of it batteries, a 40% increase on 2024, Ember says; China accounted for 54% and the US a further 16%. With 430 GW of storage installed worldwide as of 2025, reaching the 822 GW sum of targets takes 78 GW of additions a year from 2026 to 2030, well below what either 2024 or 2025 delivered. Hold 2025's pace flat through 2030 and storage reaches 1,020 GW, Ember calculates, more than the sum of current national targets.

The pledge is a bigger lift: 214 GW a year from 2026 to 2030, almost double 2025's record and more than BloombergNEF's forecast of 158 GW for 2026, which excludes pumped hydro. Ember still reads it as reachable. Battery additions have grown at almost 80% a year since 2020, and reaching the 1,200 GW of batteries in the IEA's net zero update scenario for 2030 needs annual additions to grow at about a fifth of that rate, though growth slowed to 1.4 times from 2024 to 2025. Battery storage costs have fallen by roughly 20% a year on average over the past decade, Ember says, and Wood Mackenzie said on October 8 that four-hour storage now costs less than open-cycle gas turbines in all 43 markets where it modeled both.

Several big solar markets have no target at all. Of the 20 countries with the most solar capacity, eight have no 2030 storage target, including the US, Germany and Saudi Arabia, which according to the release "are nonetheless already building storage at scale without one." The US has installed roughly 52 GW of utility-scale batteries. Ember's analysis separately puts Saudi Arabia "on their way to a 48 GWh target by 2030," a goal stated in energy that the tracker, which sums gigawatts, does not count. Ember's argument is that even where markets are building, "a storage target would still help signal to investors and ensure the right amount and type of storage is installed where and when it is needed."

"Most other major solar markets still haven't set a 2030 storage target at all. And that's a missed opportunity, because storage targets give investors the certainty to build," said Ember analyst Katye Altieri. The pairing with solar is the point: Ember estimated in August that the batteries it expects the world to add in 2026 could shift up to 34% of that year's new daily solar generation into non-sunny hours.

Ember ties the storage gap to the next pledge on the table. At COP31, Türkiye's presidency is pushing a 35-by-35 Global Electrification Pledge to lift electricity's share of final energy demand from around 20% to 35% by 2035, which Ember says can deliver its climate and energy-security benefits only if the new demand is met by renewables backed by the grids and storage needed for reliability.