In a story for the site Our World in Data, Hannah Ritchie cites a new paper by by Micah Ziegler of MIT and Jessika Trancik of MIT and the Santa Fe Institute, for the Royal Society of Chemistry, showing how dramatically the price of battery storage has come down—and continues to fall.
The most common type of battery—for huge electric-grid storage installations, for tiny mobile-phone batteries, for all-electric cars, and for most uses in between—is the lithium-ion battery. As the story and the RSC technical paper report, by 2018 the cost of these batteries was only 3% of what it had been in 1991. Here is a chart from Ritchie’s story:
From Our World in Data.
That chart ends three years ago, in 2018. The fascinating part of both the Our World in Data report and the Royal Chemical Society paper is their assessment that as volume and demand go up, prices will continue to fall. This chart is from the scientific paper, matching past observations and predictions with likely future trends.
From the Royal Society of Chemistry paper, 2021.
Three years ago, in testimony that led the Washington DC City Council to approve, unanimously, a phase-out of obsolete, highly polluting two-stroke gas-powered leaf blowers, witnesses discussed the “battery revolution.” They said that auto companies like Tesla (and now GM and Ford), portable phone makers like Apple and Samsung, operators of major electric utilities, and other companies were all driving a cycle of accelerating improvement in price, portability, and power of small batteries. It would be absurd to think that Ford can aspire to make a battery-powered F-150 pickup truck, but lawn companies cannot switch to battery power for their devices.
This change is coming, and thanks to these authors for showing that is it arriving even faster than many expected.