Tesla, LG Chem tipped to dominate massive battery storage market
By Giles Parkinson on 8 February 2017
The US firm Tesla and South Korea’s LG Chem are tipped to dominate the US battery storage market, which is expected to be worth as much as $US50 billion by 2020.
Analysts at investment bank Morgan Stanley suggest Tesla and LG Chem are best positioned to take big market shares in a market that it predicts will grow faster than most others expect.
Morgan Stanley says the “addressable” battery storage market in the US is 85GWh, or around $US30 billion. But if regulators come on board and allow it to compete in deregulated power markets, then that forecast is nearly doubled to 140GWh or more than $US50 billion.
The analysts predict that Tesla and LG Chem are likely to snaffle 30 per cent of this market each, although it doesn’t rule out that either party could gather a 50 per cent share. In the former, it depends on the success of its Gigafactory. For the latter, it would require its own US manufacturing base.
The US market, however, will be just a fraction of the global market – which the Morgan Stanley analysts expect will be 7 to 8 times bigger. China alone is expected to have double the market size of the US in battery storage.
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