Technological evolution always leads to reduction in the cost of manufacturing components over time: depending on the type of product or material, the reduction can be more or less consistent, but the rule that the passage of time makes technologies more and more accessible tends to remain valid.
That’s what it is for lithium-ion batteries, used in many consumer electronics products and currently underpinning electric vehicles. According to the estimates made by the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Vehicle Technologies Office American, the cost of batteries has progressively decreased from 2008 to 2021, reaching one contraction of as much as 87% in these 14 years.
If in 2008 the price per kWh of a battery was quantified, at the value of the dollar of the time, at 1,237 dollars in 2021 we have reached a cost per kWh which has dropped to 157 dollars. The fastest decline was recorded in the years 2009 to 2013, with a transition from just under $ 1,200 per kWh to just under $ 400 per kWh, but it is clear how this dynamic continued in subsequent years up to the present value.
In light of the current trend, the descent to the $ 100 threshold for each kWh of capacity of the battery will still take many years: the variations tend to be much less consistent now than in the past, as the graph clearly shows. It is therefore difficult to expect substantial reductions in the costs of battery packs of electric vehicles but their slow and steady decline: just think that the threshold of 200 dollars per kWh was reached in 2019 therefore in 2 years the estimated average cost has decreased by about 20 %.
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