In 2025, the average price of a lithium-ion battery pack was $108 per kilowatt-hour, down 8% from the year prior, according to research firm BloombergNEF’s latest annual survey. It’s the continuation of a long-standing trend: With the exception of 2022, battery prices have declined every single year since 2010, when BNEF began looking at the data.
It’s a crucial metric — something of a skeleton key for the entire energy transition.
Cheaper batteries mean cheaper electric vehicles, and that in turn puts more EVs and fewer gas cars on the road. Cheaper batteries mean you can squeeze more juice out of your solar panels, displacing more planet-warming coal and gas. Cheaper batteries mean cheaper, clean energy — urgently needed in the U.S. as fast-rising utility bills collide with the push to decarbonize our energy system.
You need to look only at battery adoption to understand the impact.
Back in 2016, when batteries were more than triple the cost they are today, electric vehicles accounted for less than 1% of new car sales worldwide. But as the average battery cost per kilowatt-hour plummeted from $365 then to just $108 as of last year, EV sales surged. Last year, more than one-quarter of the new cars sold globally were electric.
Grid storage is a similar story. A decade ago, the sector was marginal, as batteries remained prohibitively expensive to add into the electricity mix. Now, with less expensive batteries available, storage is taking off, and costs are falling especially fast for the segment.
These reductions have largely been driven by China’s massive clean-energy manufacturing apparatus. The country makes a staggering three-quarters of all batteries sold worldwide. Years of churning out head-spinning quantities of lithium-ion batteries have allowed Chinese firms to steadily chip away at costs — and a similar dynamic helps explain the inexorable, essential decline in the cost of solar and wind power, too.
Great Job Dan McCarthy & the Team @ Canary Media for sharing this story.
