Energy · Battery Storage

Battery Cell Cost

Lithium-ion cells fell 99% in real terms, the engine under the EV.

• $9,210/kWh → $78/kWh, 1991–2024
• LFP chemistry shift cut costs further
• A cell, not a finished pack
• Reversals in 1994, 2008, 2012, 2022 are real

This is the price of a lithium-ion battery cell, the component doing the actual energy storage, and it is the single decline that made electric cars and grid storage possible. It fell from $9,210 per kilowatt-hour in 1991, when Sony first commercialised the technology, to $78 in 2024: a factor of 118, or 99.2%. Every figure is in constant 2024 dollars, so none of the fall is inflation; it is real. The series is the academic reconstruction maintained by Rupert Way, built on Ziegler and Trancik’s learning-curve dataset and extended with BloombergNEF and Avicenne Energy figures, so it holds one consistent basis across the whole span. That consistency matters, because the drop is not perfectly smooth: cells got dearer in 1994, 2008, 2012 and again in 2022 when lithium and nickel prices spiked, and a single consistent basis preserves those reversals instead of smoothing them away. The decline follows a learning curve, with price falling a roughly fixed percentage for every doubling of cumulative production, lately helped by the shift to cheaper lithium-iron-phosphate chemistry. One note on what this measures: a cell is not a finished pack. Once you add the module housing, wiring, cooling and management electronics, the pack costs more. BloombergNEF’s headline pack price was $108/kWh in 2025, on a different and shorter series that only starts in 2010.

Source: Way / Ziegler & Trancik / BNEF, via Our World in Data

Download the data: battery_cost.csv · battery_cost.json

All curves · The chart is drawn in your browser and needs JavaScript. Every number it plots is in the table above.