BYD Wins 11.3 GWh Deal for World's Largest Solar+Storage
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- BYD Energy Storage won a contract to supply 11.275 GWh of battery storage for Masdar's Round the Clock (RTC) project in Abu Dhabi, one of the single largest energy storage procurements ever signed.
- The RTC project pairs a 5.2 GW solar array with a 19 GWh battery system designed to dispatch 1 GW of continuous baseload power 24 hours a day — making it the world's largest combined solar-plus-storage plant.
- Chinese suppliers now own the entire 19 GWh: BYD's 11.275 GWh plus Sungrow's 7.5 GWh, with no Western battery makers included despite CATL being named the preferred supplier when Masdar unveiled the project in early 2025.
- BYD's Haohan system uses 2,710 Ah Blade Battery cells with 300% higher capacity than legacy grid-storage cells, packs 10 MWh into a standard 20-foot container, and cuts battery management complexity by 70-80%.
- The Haohan station is rated IP66 for dust and sand, built to run from -30°C to 55°C for Abu Dhabi desert conditions, and pairs with BYD's GC Master energy management system capable of managing up to 15 GWh in a single station.
- BYD separately landed a 12.5 GWh grid-storage contract in Saudi Arabia, part of a broader sweep of Gulf storage projects by Chinese suppliers as prices collapse and BYD pushes sodium-ion costs toward $0.04 per watt-hour.
Why it matters: Chinese manufacturers now own 100% of the world's flagship storage project — 19 GWh out of 19 GWh — shutting Western battery makers out of the highest-profile grid-scale deployment on the planet. The source attributes BYD and CATL's dominance to vertical integration: they produce their own cells, packs, and deployments, a structure the source says gives them a massive cost and scale advantage over competitors like Tesla.
