Battery prices fall about 19% every time global production doubles

A battery pack cost 1,400 dollars a kilowatt hour in 2010

A kilowatt hour is the unit that measures how much energy a battery can store. A lithium ion battery pack, the complete unit that goes into a car or a home storage box, cost 1,400 dollars for every kilowatt hour it could hold in 2010, according to the International Energy Agency, an intergovernmental body that tracks global energy data. By 2023 that had fallen to less than 140 dollars, a drop of 90% the agency states directly. BloombergNEF, a market research firm that runs an annual survey of battery prices, measured the same 2023 figure at 139 dollars per kilowatt hour. Its survey then recorded 115 dollars in 2024, a 20% fall from the year before, and 108 dollars in 2025, a further 8% fall and the lowest the firm has recorded. Across the full 15 years the price fell about 92%, a figure this publication worked out by comparing the International Energy Agency 2010 number against the BloombergNEF 2025 number, since neither organisation states one figure spanning the whole period.

The fall follows a rule, not a single breakthrough

Our World in Data, a research organisation that compiles long run datasets, reports that battery prices follow what researchers call a learning rate. Since 1998, every time the world has doubled the total number of lithium ion batteries it has ever built, the price has fallen by about 19%, a rate the organisation says is close to the 20% rate solar panels have shown over the same kind of doubling. Its own dataset, running back to 1991, tracks a different level of the battery, the cell alone rather than the finished pack, and on that measure the price fell from 9,210 dollars per kilowatt hour in 1991 to 78 dollars in 2024, a 99% drop. Evelina Stoikou, an energy storage senior associate at BloombergNEF and lead author of its price survey, said this in the firm own November 2023 release.

In the many years that we've been doing this survey, falling prices have been driven by scale learnings and technological innovation, but that dynamic has changed.

Evelina Stoikou, energy storage senior associate at BloombergNEF and lead author of its annual battery price survey. Source 2.

A pack costs more than the cells inside it

A battery pack is not just cells. It also carries the casing, the wiring and the thermal management system that keeps the cells at a safe temperature, and each of those adds cost on top of the cells themselves. BloombergNEF own November 2023 survey shows the gap for the same 2023 vehicles. A battery electric vehicle pack averaged 128 dollars per kilowatt hour, while the cells alone inside those packs averaged 89 dollars. A pack built with lithium iron phosphate, a cheaper battery chemistry, averaged 130 dollars per kilowatt hour, against 95 dollars for its cells alone. A price report that does not say whether a figure is a pack price or a cell price is not comparable with one that does, and mixing the 2 makes a price fall look bigger or smaller than it really is.