Grid battery packs are now cheaper than car battery packs, for the first time

Grid storage overtook cars on price in 2025

BloombergNEF, a market research firm that surveys battery prices worldwide every year, tracks lithium ion battery packs, the assembled units of battery cells that store energy inside a vehicle or a building. Its 2025 survey found stationary storage, batteries installed in one place and connected to the electricity grid rather than moving a vehicle, averaged 70 dollars per kilowatt hour, a kilowatt hour being the unit that measures how much energy a battery can store. That made stationary storage the cheapest segment the survey tracks, for the first time. Battery electric vehicle packs averaged 99 dollars per kilowatt hour the same year, the cheapest within transport but no longer the cheapest of every segment. Across every chemistry and every use, the overall market average fell 8% in 2025 to 108 dollars per kilowatt hour, a record low.

Cars barely moved while storage collapsed

A year earlier, the story pointed the other way. The 2024 BloombergNEF survey found battery electric vehicle packs crossed below 100 dollars per kilowatt hour for the first time that year, at 97 dollars, while the 2024 overall market average stood at 115 dollars per kilowatt hour. Since then, the car figure barely moved, rising 2 dollars to 99. Stationary storage did the opposite, falling 45% over that same year, the sharpest decline BloombergNEF recorded in any segment it tracks. Energy storage news, a trade publication that independently reported the 2025 survey, ties the storage price collapse to China, where cell factories built specifically for stationary storage reached about 557 gigawatt hours of annual capacity, a gigawatt hour being a large unit of stored energy, roughly double world demand for that use.

One thing we're watching is how new tariffs on finished battery products may lead to distortionary pricing dynamics and slow end-product demand.

Yayoi Sekine, head of energy storage at BloombergNEF. Source 2.

A car cannot use the same cheap chemistry as easily

The reason a grid pack can chase cost this hard while a car pack cannot is not a mystery. Sandia National Laboratories, in a chapter of the United States Department of Energy Energy Storage Handbook, states lithium iron phosphate, a battery chemistry called LFP for short that uses iron and phosphate instead of nickel, manganese and cobalt, stores less energy for its size and weight than other common chemistries. That lower energy density limited early use of LFP in electric vehicles, where every kilogram of battery competes against range. Low cost, driven by the absence of cobalt, and resistance to overheating made LFP the chemistry the storage industry adopted instead, because a battery bolted to the ground never has to be light.

The demand this price collapse is feeding

The falling price is landing on top of fast growing demand, at least in the United States, the only market with a specific figure among the sources read for this article. The United States Energy Information Administration, a federal statistics agency, states utility scale battery storage capacity, the batteries large power companies connect directly to the electricity grid, grew by an average of 70% a year over the last 3 years. It reached 43.6 gigawatts of operating capacity at the end of 2025, a gigawatt being a large unit of electrical power. After 8.3 gigawatts were added in the first half of 2026, total capacity reached nearly 52 gigawatts by the middle of the year.