New Nature Climate Change article on recent progress in electric vehicle batteries
One of the biggest issues affecting the viability of electric vehicles is the cost of battery storage. A new article in Nature Climate Change explores the recent data on the cost of batteries, finding an average rate of decline of about 8% per year since 2006 and a learning rate (the percentage decline in per unit cost per doubling of cumulative production capacity) of between 6 and 9%. With production of such batteries growing rapidly, the decline in costs per unit in the next few years should be substantial.
For comparison, the learning rate for solar photovoltaics has been about 20% for several decades, and the cost per watt of solar panels fell by about two thirds from 2008 to 2013.
I’ve reproduced Figure 1 from the article above. There is always a lot of uncertainty with such data, because so much of it is proprietary, but this article does a good job of trying to make those data comparable.
