On September 12, CLOU Electronics, a subsidiary of Chinese home appliance giant Midea, announced it set up an energy storage company in Delaware, US, aiming to gain an edge in the country's rising energy storage market.

The announcement was made at the Solar Energy International trade show, also known as RE+, in Las Vegas. 

Founded in 1996, CLOU provides core technologies and system solutions in the fields of smart grid, energy storage, new energy vehicle charging and operation, and integrated energy services.

In 2023, the Shenzhen-based company was acquired by Midea as part of the giant's efforts to get further into the energy storage business. Previously, Midea acquired a stake in Hiconics Eco-Energy Technology, an energy storage company headquartered in Beijing.

Prior to the establishment of the US company, CLOU already had a number of projects in the market, including the first large-scale lithium-ion energy storage project in Indiana with a size of 24MW/63MWh, and the largest energy storage plant project in the North American market in Texas with a size of 99MWh.

According to the statistics provided by Orennia, an international consulting organization, all of the top six projects in the United States with the highest operating profit of independent energy storage in 2021 came from CLOU.

The US government has been encouraging the onshoring of clean energy-related production through various policies such as tax incentives and financial support. As a result, manufacturers in Japan, South Korea, and China have followed the trend and shifted part of their production to the world's largest consumer market.

As of April 2023, the registered capacity of electrochemical energy storage in the US reached 30.2GW, an increase of 89% year on year, data from Soochow Securities showed, adding that the US is also the largest market with the highest growth rate outside China.