Re-examining rates of lithium-ion battery technology improvement and cost decline

Abstract

Lithium-ion technologies are increasingly employed to electrify transportation and provide stationary energy storage for electrical grids, and as such their development has garnered much attention. However, their deployment is still relatively limited, and their broader adoption will depend on their potential for cost reduction and performance improvement. Understanding this potential can inform critical climate change mitigation strategies, including public policies and technology development efforts. However, many existing models of past cost decline, which often serve as starting points for forecasting models, rely on limited data series and measures of technological progress. Here we systematically collect, harmonize, and combine various data series of price, market size, research and development, and performance of lithium-ion technologies. We then develop representative series for these measures and employ performance curve models to estimate improvement rates. We also develop a method to incorporate additional performance characteristics into these models, including energy density and specific energy performance metrics. When energy density is incorporated into the definition of service provided by a lithium-ion cell, estimated technological improvement rates increase considerably, suggesting that previously reported improvement rates might underestimate the rate of lithium-ion technologies' change. Moreover, our estimates suggest the degree to which lithium-ion technologies' price decline might have been limited by performance requirements other than cost per energy capacity. These rates also suggest that battery technologies developed for stationary applications, where restrictions on volume and mass are relaxed, might achieve faster cost declines, though engineering-based mechanistic cost modeling is required to further characterize this potential.