An upgrade of the European Energy Storage Inventory offers new functionalities visualising the energy storage technologies and its pace of deployment.
Since its launch in March 2025, the Inventory has rapidly become a reference platform for monitoring energy storage deployment across Europe. The tool combines a real-time dashboard with an interactive map of storage projects across technologies, supporting a clearer understanding of how flexibility resources are evolving in the EU power system.
Continuously refined, the platform now offers two new features. The most important addition is the “evolution of deployment” module, which allows users to visualise how energy storage capacity is developing over time from 2026 onwards.
This marks a shift from real-time snapshot to a more comprehensive tracking tool, enabling stakeholders to better understand investment trends, commissioning rates and the acceleration of storage deployment across Member States.
A second major enhancement is the integration of both power (GW) and energy capacity (GWh) indicators directly into the dashboard. This dual perspective is essential to capture the performance of storage technologies.
While some assets are optimised for power-intensive services such as grid balancing and frequency control, others provide energy-intensive services like long-duration storage and renewable integration. Presenting both dimensions offers a more complete view of system flexibility and technology complementarity across Europe.
These improvements come at a time of significant market evolution. Pumped hydrostorage remains the dominant installed technology, while battery storage is expanding rapidly and shaping the future project pipeline.
The increasing number of commissioned battery projects reflects a broader shift towards more modular, distributed and quickly deployable storage solutions.
What’s the state of energy storage across the EU?
The upgraded Inventory complements a growing body of analytical work by the JRC, including a new study assessing how energy storage is integrated into National Energy and Climate Plans (NECPs) and network development plans across the EU-27.
The analysis reveals persistent asymmetries across Member States. While countries such as Belgium, Estonia, Greece and Ireland show strong alignment between national targets and network planning, others display significant gaps between deployment levels and policy recognition. Notably, some Member States with high storage penetration — such as Austria and Bulgaria — treat storage only marginally in key planning documents, while others with limited operational deployment — such as Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands — have already introduced quantified targets or explicitly assess storage as an alternative to grid reinforcement.
Overall, the integration of storage into planning frameworks remains uneven, with only a subset of NECPs including quantified targets. This highlights a persistent planning–deployment gap: as storage deployment accelerates, it has not yet been fully mainstreamed in system planning — limiting its potential to reduce network investment needs, ease congestion and support higher shares of renewable energy.
By combining enhanced real-time monitoring with structured policy analysis, the European Energy Storage Inventory provides stronger evidence-base for EU energy planning. The new functionalities—particularly the deployment evolution view and the dual GW/GWh perspective—offer a more dynamic and comprehensive understanding of how storage is shaping Europe’s energy transition.
