Storage is the second largest thing in this region and almost none of it is built

The catalogue holds 6,767 published records across the Gulf, South Asia and South East Asia. Ranked by capacity, the order is not the one the coverage suggests.

• Hydro: 1,868 records, 327.8 GW
• Wind: 1,968 records, 310.4 GW
• Storage: 124 records, 132.2 GW
• Solar: 1,503 records, 106.6 GW

Storage is third by capacity on 124 records. Solar needs 1,503 records to reach 106.6 GW and still comes fourth.

The part that matters

Of that 132.2 GW of storage, 10.2 GW is operating, across 16 of the 124 records. Everything else is announced, in feasibility, or under construction. Ninety two percent of the capacity has not been built.

Compare the others at the same moment:

Solar's pipeline is mostly delivered. Storage's is almost entirely a promise. That is not a criticism of anybody; it is what a young asset class looks like in a public record. It does mean that a storage figure quoted from a national target and a storage figure quoted from operating plants are different numbers by a factor of thirteen, and press coverage rarely says which one it is using.

Hydro is the largest and the least discussed

327.8 GW across six countries, led by India at 122.1 GW over 662 records, Pakistan at 53.2 GW, Nepal at 31.5 GW over 223 records. Nepal alone holds more hydro capacity on record than this catalogue holds solar in the entire Gulf.

Refinancing an operating hydro fleet and funding a greenfield storage pipeline are different businesses with different counterparties, and the region's headline "renewables" number contains both.

How to check this

Every figure above is a count of published records in a free database, each one naming the public dataset it came from. Nothing is modelled and nothing is estimated. Where a record's source does not publish a capacity, it contributes nothing to these totals rather than an assumption.

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