BYD Energy Storage has landed one of the largest single battery orders the industry has recorded, agreeing to supply 11.275 gigawatt hours of storage to the clean energy developer Masdar for a renewable power project in Abu Dhabi. The company announced the contract on July 9, describing it in its own release as one of the biggest energy storage deals ever signed. The batteries will form a single station rated at 1,644 megawatts and 11,275 megawatt hours, built around what BYD calls its Haohan energy storage system.
The order is large enough to be hard to picture, so coverage of the deal offered a comparison for readers: 11.275 gigawatt hours is roughly equivalent to the battery packs of about 186,000 electric vehicles, packed into one facility. It also marks a further push into the Middle East for BYD, whose stationary storage arm has been winning contracts at gigawatt hour scale, as Power Technology reported.
The station BYD is supplying sits inside a much bigger undertaking. The wider development is Abu Dhabi’s Round the Clock renewable energy project, jointly developed by Masdar and the Emirates Water and Electricity Company, or EWEC. It pairs a 5.2 gigawatt solar photovoltaic plant with a 19 gigawatt hour battery system, and the developers describe it as the world’s first gigascale round the clock renewable project and the world’s largest integrated solar plus storage project. The aim is to smooth out the intermittency that has long limited solar power, storing energy during the day so the grid can draw steady baseload output after the sun goes down.
Here the numbers need care. BYD’s 11.275 gigawatt hours is a majority of the project’s 19 gigawatt hour storage total, but not the whole of it. The remaining capacity falls outside this contract, so the Chinese manufacturer is furnishing the largest share of the storage rather than the entire project. The distinction matters because the RTC project, not any single vendor’s station, is what carries the record setting labels.
The technology BYD is putting into the desert is its newest. The Haohan system uses the company’s 2,710 ampere hour Blade Battery, its latest cell format, and is run by BYD’s GC Master Energy Management System, which the company says handles real time monitoring, dispatching and predictive diagnostics. BYD has engineered the hardware for the conditions it will face on the Arabian Peninsula, rating it to IP66 for protection against dust and sandstorms and specifying an operating range from minus 30 degrees Celsius to 55 degrees Celsius. Those performance and durability figures are BYD’s own manufacturer claims, and buyers typically confirm such specifications through independent testing and warranty terms rather than taking them at face value.
The reason a project of this shape is drawing attention goes beyond its size. Solar power is cheap to build in the Gulf, where sunshine is abundant and land is plentiful, but it stops producing at night, which has kept fossil fuel plants in the mix to cover demand after dark. A storage bank large enough to run a grid through the evening changes that calculation. If the RTC project delivers baseload renewable power at a competitive price, as Masdar and EWEC intend, it offers a template that other sun rich countries could copy, and it puts pressure on the gas plants that currently provide round the clock supply.
It also shows how central Chinese manufacturers have become to the energy transition. BYD, better known to many consumers as the electric vehicle maker that has overtaken much of its competition, has built its stationary storage arm into a supplier capable of filling orders on this scale, and it is now stacking gigawatt hour contracts across the Middle East. For the buyers, the appeal is straightforward: falling battery prices and available volume let developers commit to storage projects that would have looked prohibitively expensive only a few years ago.
For now the contract is a supply agreement rather than a finished plant, and the specifications that make the Haohan system sound suited to the desert remain BYD’s to prove once the station is built and running. What is already clear is the direction. Masdar and EWEC are betting that a very large battery, paired with a very large solar field, can do a job that until recently belonged to gas and coal, and BYD has won the biggest slice of the batteries that will test whether the bet holds.