- Canadian solar doubled its energy storage shipments to 1.79GWh in 2022, although it expects significantly lower growth in 2023.
- The signed contract already carries about US$1 billion, which is increasing rapidly every quarter.
The PV module manufacturer’s energy storage system integrator subsidiary CSI Energy Storage contributed around 6% of total sales, with the rest from solar module shipments. However, that ratio is likely to grow with significant growth in its battery storage business and a much larger pipeline than for solar. It increased its contracted battery storage order book to US$1 billion as of the start of 2023, while its overall battery storage development pipeline is 47GWh, compared to 25GW for solar. Based on the revenue ratio to GWh shipments, that storage pipeline could equate to over US$11 billion in long-term revenues.
However, the company provides FY2023 guidance of 1.8-2GWh of battery storage shipments in 2023, meaning growth between 0.5% and 11.7%, with 5% as a mid-point. The wider battery storage market, on the other hand, is expected to roughly double deployments in 2023. Much of this is down to moving from a white labelled utility-scale energy storage product to its manufactured Solbank product, announced in September, and the long lead times in the sector.
Commenting on this, CSI Solar president Yan Zhuang said: “2023 is going to be a transition year for our battery storage shipments, especially considering the longer order fulfilment lead times for battery storage compared to solar. This is why we expect flat deliveries year-over-year in 2023. However, we have very strong visibilities over our long-term growth.” Canadian Solar CEO Shawn Qu added that the lower growth reflects. This year’s transition from white label to our manufactured products.”
Zhuang later expanded: “So we need to work on certification and bankability. So that’s the pipeline we have today is more towards the second half of this year, not the first half of this year. So in terms of recognition and shipments, it’s very much skewed to the end of this year. And however, if you look at our signed contract, the signed contract already carries about US$1 billion, which is increasing rapidly every quarter. So we’re expanding our total storage SolBank capacity towards 10GWh by [100%]. The reason behind this is that we’re not going to have enough capacity next year. So next year will be the real growth. This year is a transition.”