When we look at the BloombergNEF battery chart we see a decreasing pack price, but is the Pack to Cell Cost Ratio changing?
The Volta Foundation report [2] the following view for the average Li-ion battery pack price drop of 20% from 2023 to a record low of $115 /kWh in 2024:
- Cell manufacturing overcapacity
- Economies of scale and reductions in underlying costs from incremental manufacturing improvements such as yield/quality
- Low raw material and component prices
- Adoption of lower-cost LFP batteries
- Slowdown in EV sales growth
This post has been built based on the support of and sponsorship from: Quarto Technical Services, Eatron Technologies and About:Energy
The average price of cells to pack is considered to be around 70% with a well optimised pack achieving 80%. Using the above values we can replot this as a ratio.
This shows that the average of 70% cell cost stands. The improvements from 2019 to 2022 in reducing the costs of “everything else” other than cells was brought about by the focused design and engineering approaches that included:
- reduced module count
- cell to pack
- optimised BMS hardware
- single layer pack design
However, from 2022 onwards we have seen the relentless pressure on cell costs and reducing the cost of everything else below $30/kWh being perhaps a step too far on quality.
References
- Lithium-Ion Battery Pack Prices See Largest Drop Since 2017, Falling to $115 per Kilowatt-Hour, BloombergNEF
- 2024 Annual Battery Report, Volta Foundation
See also: Costs