Chinese battery giant Contemporary Amperex Technology said it inked a deal with solar and energy storage firm Zhongcheng Dayou Industrial Group to establish an energy storage project with a total investment of CNY10 billion (USD1.4 billion) by 2030.

The project's energy storage capacity should be at least 3.5 gigawatt-hours by 2025, CATL said yesterday, noting that the two partners have established a special working group.

Zhongcheng Dayou, under state-backed Dayou Guolian Holdings Group, has laid out 'user-side plus grid-side' energy storage businesses, covering photovoltaic and energy storage, and has set up several independent energy storage power stations in China.

With highly complementary businesses, the pair will carry out the project through resource integration, energy storage industry fund, and others, said Wu Fafu, chairman of Zhongcheng Dayou.

As an important means of solving the instability of new energy, the energy storage field has promising development prospects with the carbon peaking and carbon neutrality strategies and the rapid increase in the proportion and scale of new energy, according to industry insiders.

CATL's battery shipments reached around 100 GWh in the third quarter, with energy storage batteries accounting for 20 percent, it said in a report on Oct. 19. The Ningde-based firm is developing more integrated and more economical EnerD series batteries and is applying them across China, it noted.