The European Union’s recent trade restrictions on Chinese-made solar inverters may foreshadow similar measures targeting battery energy storage systems, according to the former head of BESS products at Northvolt, creating a potential opening for European manufacturers to capture a larger share of the continent’s rapidly growing storage market. The inverter duties, imposed after an anti-subsidy investigation concluded that Chinese producers benefited from unfair state support, have already reshaped procurement strategies across European solar developers. If Brussels replicates that approach for batteries — where Chinese firms dominate global cell and pack production — it would fundamentally alter the economics of energy storage deployment in Europe.
The strategic logic is straightforward: energy storage is now recognised as critical infrastructure for the EU’s decarbonisation targets, much as solar PV was a decade ago. Dependency on a single geopolitical supplier for a technology that underpins grid stability, renewable integration, and energy security is increasingly viewed as untenable by policymakers in Berlin, Paris, and Brussels. The Net-Zero Industry Act and the European Battery Alliance have already signalled political intent to build a domestic value chain; trade policy is simply the enforcement mechanism catching up to that ambition.
For European battery makers — both established players and new entrants — the signal is clear: the window to establish cost-competitive, at-scale manufacturing is narrowing. Northvolt’s well-documented struggles to ramp its gigafactory in Skellefteå illustrate the execution risk. Yet the alternative — continued reliance on imported LFP packs from CATL, BYD, or EVE Energy — carries its own political and supply-chain risks. Developers and EPCs are already diversifying supplier lists, and some utilities have begun specifying non-Chinese content in tenders ahead of any formal regulation.
The cost implications cannot be ignored. Chinese BESS solutions currently carry a 20–30 per cent price advantage over European-made alternatives, driven by scale, vertical integration, and mature supply chains. Any trade barrier that closes that gap artificially will raise levelised cost of storage for European projects, potentially slowing deployment at a moment when the grid needs every megawatt of flexibility it can get. The policy challenge for the Commission will be calibrating protection without paralysing the very transition it seeks to secure.
Read the full report at Energy Storage News.