As part of the TaiyangNews & SNEC Solar Leadership Conversations 2025 at SNEC 2025, TaiyangNews Managing Director Michael Schmela sat down for an exclusive interview with the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of ESS Europe at CATL, Hank Zhao. One of the earliest employees at CATL, Zhao traced the company’s journey as a formidable name in the battery and storage space, and shared its future roadmap.
TaiyangNews: Hank, you have been with the company since the beginning. You were the employee number 48. Can you tell us a little bit about what has happened in the last 14 years at CATL?
Hank Zhao: I actually worked for CATL for almost 15 years, from the very beginning, and it has been a very interesting and very exciting journey, I would say not only for the company, but also for my career. I spent my initial 11 years in the automotive industry catering to the European customers. Since 2021, I started to move from the automotive to the energy storage division.
TaiyangNews: In Europe, solar has reached some maturity. This means that the industry now needs flexibility in this market as we see increasingly negative electricity prices, solar capture rates going down, and lagging legislation and infrastructure. Battery storage is faster and more efficient. How do you see the market development, both globally and specifically in Europe? What’s CATL’s strategy to drive the stationary storage market?
Hank Zhao: We are quite actively doing business in the global market, including Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and many other regions. From our point of view, we see a strong demand not in one region, but in different regions. Take Europe, for example. We do see that the market volume, growing from now to 2030. Different countries will have a big increase in the installed capacity. In the Middle East, we have signed the biggest project in the world which includes 5.2 GW solar capacity plus 19 GWh battery energy storage in Abu Dhabi with Masdar. In Australia, we have signed a big contract with Quinbrook for a long-duration storage with a total capacity of 24 GWh. With these numbers, we see the market is booming.
TaiyangNews: As a market leader in the storage space, what's CATL's strategy to drive the market forward, on which levels are you trying to do that?
Hank Zhao: In 2023 and 2024, we achieved around 40% and 36.5% of global market share, respectively, for energy storage battery. For us, it's very important to always listen to the market to understand what our clients need. There are 3 most important factors for us – high performance, high safety and high reliability. These are critical requirements for grid-scale storage to support the national grids. At CATL, we apply our learnings from the past more than 10 years in the global automotive segment, the methodology of developing a good product and quality management system. We also keep improving our manufacturing facilities, with a focus on quality and control in the process. So, we try to ensure top-level quality and top-level safety performance in the industry. This is our key strategy.
TaiyangNews: Let's talk about the safety of the devices. How are you addressing all the safety and security needs?
Hank Zhao: Safety is the most important thing both for automotive and energy storage industries. To ensure the safety of our products, we keep investing in the R&D, along with testing and validation. Over the past 10 years, we have invested $10 billion as R&D investments to ensure that we have the best technology and best design. Only good design is not enough.
For us, safety is not something that comes into the picture when you build a new product and get a UL certification. What matters is how the product will work after 3 years, after 5 years, after 20 years. Therefore, we are more focused in the whole lifecycle reliability and safety. At CATL, we conduct long-term testing which means that we have to test the product from the components to the whole system in combination with different scenarios, different use cases, temperatures, humidity, and power level to make sure that we can really ensure the safety and reliability for the product’s lifecycle for 20 years, not just as a brand-new product.
TaiyangNews: How can the industry, as a whole, make sure that safety doesn't have to be a concern anymore? Do we need stricter standards, testing requirements, which will also increase costs? What would you recommend?
Hank Zhao: I believe that the whole industry does need to have a better structure of standards and policy. From my point of view, automotive is a very good benchmark in terms of the structure of the standards and policy. If you look at the global OEMs like BMW, Volkswagen, Toyota, they have built very comprehensive, very high-level standards, and a policy system for the entire supply chain – not only for battery, but every single component must fulfill a good entry level of standards or policy. If you look at the current status of storage, I don’t see a very good level of policy and standard metrics, or structure globally.
In some regions like China, the government has already done a lot of work, but most of the other markets in the world still need to further improve on this point.
TaiyangNews: So when you talk about the safety of batteries, it's really country-dependent at the moment. What kind of standards and test requirements do they impose?
Hank Zhao: I think it's not country-dependent. It's more global. We should have a very good group of standards or policies to shape the industry at a global level. Different countries might have different special requirements, but global standards should have basic requirements to improve their current status.
TaiyangNews: Last month, Europe's largest battery storage trade fair, ees Europe, took place in Munich as part of The smarter E, where CATL launched its zero-degradation energy storage container TENER Stack and the energy storage rack Tenor Flex was launched in 2024. Why did you release TENER Stack at ees Europe and not here at SNEC, which takes place in China, a much bigger market?
Hank Zhao: At SNEC, we'll also launch some new technology products. The storage market is booming globally and different. Europe, the US, and China have different regulations and different requirements. We will analyze the requirements from different markets and develop the products to fulfill the local market demand. For the new Tener Stack product, we investigated the market demands in Europe for more than 2 years and we heard from different customers about their needs. So, very typically in Europe, most of the customers have limited land. They are quite sensitive with regard to noise, and a super heavy product is challenging to transport without compromising safety. For this purpose, we developed this new product, TENER Stack, to make our local customers happy.
TaiyangNews: Let's talk about energy security, which is increasingly becoming a topic all around the world where nations feel that they want to be energy-secure, they love to be independent. That's obviously not entirely possible, but at least they want to have some level of security. How does CATL respond to these needs, especially since it is also related to production in local markets?
Hank Zhao: We do see this strong demand from different regions. People always talk about local production, for which we provide support. In 2019, we started to build our first overseas plant in Germany in Thuringia with 14 GWh annual production volume. In 2022, we started to build our second European plant in Hungary with 100 GWh, and then we officially launched our 3rd European plant in Spain’s Zaragoza in 2024. So, in Europe, we already have 3 plants either in production or under construction. And in Indonesia, we also have set up a new battery plant in 2024. So you see, we are always open to sharing our knowledge of battery design and manufacturing to support the local customers to build local production capacity.
TaiyangNews: You cooperate with automakers in Europe for such facilities. What does it look like there when we talk about the stationary battery market?
Hank Zhao: For automotive, we have 2 different chemistries that we can produce in Europe – Nickel-Manganese-Cobalt (NCM) and Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP). Our production line is also designed as a flexible line, so it can really adjust in the future if you want to switch from automotive cells to storage cells. Hence, technically it's no barrier or bottleneck for us to support local production, both for EV and for storage.
TaiyangNews: At the moment, the stationary products still come out of China, but theoretically, you could also switch once the demand is big enough?
Hank Zhao: Yes, theoretically or technically, it is feasible.
TaiyangNews: Let's also talk a little bit about your zero accidents in your energy products, once again coming back to safety. How do you achieve this?
Hank Zhao: First of all, I want to state a fact, which is that we have delivered more than 260 GWh of energy storage products globally, and we have had zero accidents to date. This achievement is due to our very top-level R&D resource and our test and validation methodology and facilities. We have more than 22,000 R&D talents and more than 1,000 engineers focused only on testing. Every day, their job is to conduct testing at a different level to assess if the battery is good or not. It is not based on a prediction or theoretical calculation. We have to do long-term safety reliability testing, but it takes a lot of heavy investments to achieve this level of safety, and a lot of our competitors probably don't have this level of investment in long-term testing to identify long-term risks. This is the key difference.
TaiyangNews: You mentioned the 2 technologies you offer. What is your technology roadmap at the moment, and what does it mean in terms of performance, in terms of reliability for your products?
Hank Zhao: In terms of reliability, as I already mentioned, we offer 20 years or more of lifecycle for our products. In terms of our technology roadmap, for the automotive battery, we have NCM, we have LFP, and we have sodium that is already available in the market. For storage, LFP is the mainstream right now, but in the future, sodium will also play an important role in some application scenarios. Hence, both LFP and sodium are now very clear as our next step. And in our R&D lab, we still have other chemistries, other secret weapons under development. We will introduce them to the market at the right time, for the right application.
TaiyangNews: In terms of products, what's your focus in the stationary market, and what ranges are you offering, capacity-wise? How big can it go?
Hank Zhao: For CATL, we have the capability to deliver the whole scope of products but our main volume comes from utility-scale applications. This means that the size can range from a few MWh to a few GWh, as I just mentioned before, in the Middle East we got a 19 GWh project on one site, and a 24 GWh in Australia, although we do have some small projects like in Germany with 10 MWh, 20 MWh capacities. So we have a big range for different applications, different grid levels. Depending on the needs of the clients, we can design the system or solution.
TaiyangNews: A final question. There was recently a blackout in Spain and Portugal in southern Europe, where the grid collapsed. Some directly blamed intermittent renewables, solar and wind, for this, although it could not be confirmed, even though the grid is still lagging in accommodating renewable energy. Do you think massive amounts of batteries could be a smarter solution than building GWs of gas power plants, like Germany is planning at the moment?
Hank Zhao: The root cause analysis of the blackout is still being ascertained, but I think the whole industry has this common sense that battery energy storage, especially the grid-forming, can play a very important role in supporting the grid in times of an emergency. In Germany, they are planning to set up some new gas power plants. That can for sure increase the base load with some good flexibility, but this is kind of time-consuming. Considering time and flexibility, battery energy storage is still a very important option. I don't see them in conflict with each other, since both stabilize the grid, but battery energy storage is obviously much cleaner. As the world moves towards renewables like solar and wind, battery energy storage will become more and more important and will gradually replace conventional fossil fuel energy production facilities in the long term.
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