battery production capacity. • Growing use of low-cost LFP batteries to manufacture affordable EVs has led to a rise in EV battery imports from China in recent months.
This study shows that battery electricity storage systems offer enormous deployment and cost-reduction potential. By 2030, total installed costs could fall between 50% and 60% (and battery cell costs by even more), driven by optimisation of manufacturing facilities, combined with better combinations and reduced use of materials.
Small-scale lithium-ion residential battery systems in the German market suggest that between 2014 and 2020, battery energy storage systems (BESS) prices fell by 71%, to USD 776/kWh.
Are battery storage costs based on long-term planning models?
Battery storage costs have evolved rapidly over the past several years, necessitating an update to storage cost projections used in long-term planning models and other activities. This work documents the development of these projections, which are based on recent publications of storage costs.
Figure ES-2 shows the overall capital cost for a 4-hour battery system based on those projections, with storage costs of $245/kWh, $326/kWh, and $403/kWh in 2030 and $159/kWh, $226/kWh, and $348/kWh in 2050.
Steadily improving economic viability has, in turn, opened up new applications for battery storage. Like solar photovoltaic (PV) panels a decade earlier, battery electricity storage systems offer enormous deployment and cost-reduction potential, according to this study by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA).
Wider deployment and the commercialisation of new battery storage technologies has led to rapid cost reductions, notably for lithium-ion batteries, but also for high-temperature sodium-sulphur (“NAS”) and so-called “flow” batteries. In Germany, for example, small-scale household Li-ion battery costs have fallen by over 60% since late 2014.