Home battery storage in China in Pakistan

The combination of a glut of lithium, a key battery material, and overcapacity of lower-tier China-made batteries has created a flood of cut-price battery energy storage systems for lower-income countries such as Pakistan.

The battery storage systems are still too expensive to be adopted as widely as solar has been in Pakistan in the near future. But distributors say prices are falling rapidly and demand continues to grow.

Lucky is investing roughly Rs1.5bn ($5.3mn) to convert a rubble-strewn site into a 20.7MW unit (22.7MWh) supplied by the world's biggest battery maker CATL, which can hold enough energy to power up to 20,000 homes for an hour. The battery energy storage system will be Pakistan's largest to date, Lucky said.

Faaz Diwan, director at Karachi-based Diwan International, one of Pakistan's largest solar and battery distributors, said the cost of the BYD batteries he sold had fallen by more than a third since last year to about Rs275,000 for a 5kWh unit that is enough to power a small house.

The battery storage system will help factories to more cheaply extend their operations beyond daylight hours and scale back the use of fossil fuels, compensating for reliability issues from the grid's renewable sources.

Households that can afford solar panels are switching off. Since 2015, Pakistan has drawn in billions of dollars' worth of sovereign-backed loans to finance new power plants and signed long-term liquefied natural gas deals with QatarEnergy and Italy's Eni.