World’s Largest Liquid-Air Energy Storage Plant Comes Online in China

A 60-megawatt liquid-air energy storage plant in Golmud, in northwest China’s Qinghai province, was connected to the grid and began generating electricity on October 30, according to state media reports and project developer China Green Development Investment Group (CGDG). The facility, rated at 600 megawatt-hours of storage capacity, is described by its developer as the largest grid-connected liquid-air energy storage plant in the world by both power output and energy capacity.

Ten Hours of Storage Without a Cavern

The Qinghai Golmud project, built in the renewable-rich Qaidam Basin in the Haixi Mongolian and Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, can discharge continuously for about 10 hours. CGDG says the plant can absorb roughly 600 megawatt-hours of surplus renewable electricity a day and feed back about 180 gigawatt-hours a year to the grid, enough to supply around 30,000 households annually.

Construction began in July 2023. The project was developed jointly by CGDG, a state-owned company, and the Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), which had earlier demonstrated the technology at a 100-kilowatt scale. Hualu Engineering & Technology handled engineering design, while China National Chemical Engineering Third Construction carried out the build. The plant was selected for China’s national new-type energy storage demonstration program and listed by the National Energy Administration among the country’s major first-of-a-kind energy technologies.

How Liquid Air Storage Works

The plant charges by running a three-stage centrifugal compressor that pressurizes purified ambient air to about 7 megapascals. Heat generated during compression is recovered and stored as hot water at up to 195 degrees Celsius for reuse, while the compressed air is cooled in stages and liquefied at roughly minus 194 degrees Celsius, then stored in insulated cryogenic tanks held near atmospheric pressure.

To discharge, the liquid air is pressurized, reheated using the stored compression heat, and vaporized; the expanding gas drives turbines connected to generators, while cold energy recovered during vaporization is stored for the next charging cycle. Because the liquid air sits in insulated tanks rather than underground caverns, the technology offers more flexible siting than compressed-air storage, which typically requires specific geological formations such as salt caverns. CGDG also says the plant’s rotating machinery can provide grid inertial support, a service more commonly associated with spinning conventional generators than with battery storage.

CGDG said all major equipment, including the large centrifugal compressors, liquid expanders, cryogenic heat exchangers and control systems, was manufactured domestically.

Part of a Broader Long-Duration Storage Push

The Golmud project sits alongside compressed-air, vanadium flow, sodium-ion and molten-salt thermal storage as part of China’s broader push into long-duration energy storage technologies that can smooth out renewable generation over many hours rather than the one-to-four-hour window typically served by lithium-ion batteries. US battery makers have pursued a similar long-duration strategy through other chemistries; Peak Energy raised $108 million in October to scale sodium-ion battery manufacturing for grid storage applications in the United States. Demand for storage of all durations has been climbing fastest in markets with the largest buildouts of variable renewable generation; China’s power system, the world’s largest, added more renewable capacity in 2025 than any other country, and India’s own battery storage capacity is projected to grow nearly 50-fold by 2032 as it pursues a similar transition.

Sources

• Xinhua, report dated October 30, 2026, on the grid connection of the Qinghai Golmud liquid-air energy storage project — commissioning date and official project description.
• China Green Development Investment Group (CGDG), project statements as reported by state and trade media, including pv magazine, November 6, 2026 — technical specifications, capacity figures and technology description.

Illustrative image. Photo: Kecko from Eastern Switzerland, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons — source