Tesla and lithium-ion top new long-duration storage leaderboard, Energy Dome in the mix

An analysis of the long-duration energy storage (LDES) scene, focusing on technologies with at least eight-hour durations, shows the top two providers today globally are lithium-ion battery makers Tesla and Chint Power.

The new leaderboard by Sightline Climate, being developed over the past 15 months, according to the firm, gives a snapshot right now of leaders in LDES across factors including technology performance, financial profile, deployment track record, and economics and cost.

Lukas Karapin-Springorum, a research analyst at Sightline who introduced the LDES leaderboard to ESS News, said efforts to accurately rank players have been focusing on the core factors that matter to find the names that stakeholders like utilities, banks, and investors need to know right now.

“I haven’t seen many comparisons that are really apples-to-apples across the things that actually matter. For me, that’s capex, lifetime, and round-trip efficiency,” said Karapin-Springorum.

“When I think about which vendors have traction, I care about how many projects they have post-final investment decision, not just announcements. How many megawatts are under construction or operational? Over about 15 months, I built a database of publicly available and verifiable cost estimates from press releases, grant documents, and regulatory filings. That forms the nucleus of the cost side of the leaderboard. We do take vendor-supplied data, but we verify it against publicly available information, and there’s analyst discretion around what’s marketing spin versus what’s real,” he added.

“Vendors then earn points by reaching final investment decision (FID), improving pricing, and improving their technology. That’s why the methodology allows movement.”

LDES Leaderboard details

In this first release, Sightline sent four separate views of the leaderboard, with a classic top five and a score breakdown that provides some insights into the part-by-part scoring of technology, finance, deployments, and economics.

The top two spots are held by Tesla and Chint Power, separated by a single point. The score breakdown appears to show both scored the same on tech, finance, and deployments, with economics the only differentiator.

Chint has been quick to win post-FID points by being chosen for one of Australia’s first eight-hour duration projects, a Lightsource bp project at the 49MW/562MWh Goulburn River Solar Farm in New South Wales. That one project boosting Chint implies that the leaderboard will see quick fluctuations as major projects are awarded.

The next players in the list include Milan-based Energy Dome and its CO2 battery, with its LDES technology involving charging by using low-price, clean grid electricity to move gaseous CO2 to be stored under pressure in its liquefied form, making it a mechanical storage system.

Dropping back from the top three is Highview Power and Hydrostor; Highview Power offers a liquid air energy storage solution, while Hydrostor offers compressed air energy storage (CAES).

“Long-duration lithium-ion batteries are the incumbent, and they’re setting the bar,” said Karapin-Springorum. “They have strong round-trip efficiency, strong capex, and we’re seeing real projects post-FID, particularly supported by policy in places like New South Wales and California.”

Hydrostor is one company likely to jump up the leaderboard thanks to deployments set to come online, including its 200 MW/1.6 GWh Silver City Energy Storage Centre project in Broken Hill in remote Australia, and its 500 MW Quinte Energy Storage project in Ontario’s Lennox and Addington County.

Excluding lithium

To provide further depth to the discussion, Sightline did send through a view of the leaderboard that excluded lithium-ion projects, showing ESS Tech and Sage Geosystems sitting sixth and seventh on the rankings.

ESS Tech is an Oregon-based iron flow battery manufacturer that had previously restructured and hired a new CEO in early 2025.

Sage Geosystems is a geothermal company, and just this week it announced it had received $97 million in Series B funding from Ormat Technologies and Carbon Direct Capital, and had teamed up with Swiss electrification and automation specialist ABB to ramp up its growth efforts.

“We’re tracking more than 120 vendors. A handful of those will actually scale… I think we’re going to find out who the winners are over the next 12 months, and just in the next six months, we’ll see key decisions in the UK, New South Wales, and Ontario, and that’s where scale really starts to matter,” noted Karapin-Springorum.

“Mechanical storage is doing very well. Liquid CO₂, liquid air, and adiabatic compressed air are currently among the top five,” noted Karapin-Springorum. “It’s a fundamentally different approach to long-duration energy storage, and each of these technologies has a theoretical case for why it should be cost-effective and scalable. Mechanical storage is a bit like the ‘small modular nuclear reactor’ of long-duration storage. It’s fleet-based, it needs standardization, and it benefits from some economies of scale, but it won’t follow the same cost curve as lithium-ion.”

Sightline said paying clients can access the full dataset underpinning each leaderboard, including deeper dives into each of the four scoring areas, geography, and ways to compare costs.