Lithium-ion battery costs drop 99%: three decades of progress

Story: 2026 C.E. | Last updated: August 16, 2026

In 1991 C.E., a lithium-ion battery cost around $9,200 per kilowatt-hour. Today, that same unit of storage costs $78. That 99% price collapse — confirmed by data compiled by Our World in Data — is one of the most consequential cost curves in modern industrial history, and its effects are only now becoming fully visible.

At a glance

Lithium-ion battery price: The cost per kilowatt-hour has fallen from roughly $9,200 in 1991 C.E. to $78 today, a drop of more than 99% in just over three decades.
Electric vehicle affordability: The battery cells in a standard EV with 220–250 miles of range cost around $5,000 today — a pack that would have cost over $20,000 a decade ago, and nearly $600,000 in 1991 C.E.
Energy density: Beyond price, the amount of energy a battery can store per unit of volume has more than tripled since the 1990s, making EVs practical as well as affordable.

How prices fell so far, so fast

The decline was not the result of a single invention. It came from thousands of small improvements in chemistry, manufacturing, and supply chains — a process economists call a learning curve.

In 1991 C.E., the entire global market for lithium-ion batteries amounted to just 130 kilowatt-hours of cumulative production. That is roughly enough to power two of today’s electric cars. The market was dominated by Sony, which held an early monopoly and had little incentive to compete on price. Cost reductions took a back seat to safety, scaling, and battery life.

The pace of change accelerated sharply in the late 1990s, when South Korean manufacturers — including Samsung and LG — entered the market, followed by Chinese producers. Competition arrived, automation scaled up, and prices began to fall in earnest. From 1998 C.E. onward, every time global cumulative battery production doubled, prices dropped by roughly 19%. That rate closely mirrors the learning curve of solar panels, where every doubling of production brought prices down by around 20%.

By the end of 2023 C.E., global cumulative battery production had grown by a factor of 27 million compared to 1991 C.E. levels. The feedback loop is self-reinforcing: lower prices create more demand, more demand drives more production, and more production drives prices lower still.

The consumer electronics bridge

Not all of this progress came from the push for electric vehicles. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the primary market for lithium-ion batteries was consumer electronics — phones, laptops, and portable devices. Engineers working to pack more energy into smaller, lighter form factors for handheld gadgets laid the technical groundwork that later made batteries viable for cars, buses, and grid-scale storage.

It is one of history’s more useful accidents: the drive to make a phone battery last longer through a workday ended up helping make a truck battery powerful enough to haul freight. This story is part of a broader wave of clean energy milestones reshaping how the world generates, stores, and uses power.

Storage: the missing piece arrives

The dramatic fall in solar power costs during the 2010s transformed photovoltaics from one of the most expensive electricity sources to the cheapest. But cheap generation without cheap storage creates a bottleneck — energy produced when the sun shines cannot easily be saved for when it does not.

That bottleneck is now easing. Lithium-ion batteries are moving from niche electronics into homes, power grids, and vehicles at scale. Over 20 million electric cars were sold globally in 2025 C.E., with some models now priced as low as $10,000. The $5,000 battery pack that gives a car 220–250 miles of range was simply not achievable at any reasonable vehicle price point a decade ago.

Lighter, denser batteries are also opening doors beyond passenger cars. Weight constraints that once made electrification impractical for trucks, small aircraft, and short-haul shipping are loosening as energy density improves. Bloomberg’s energy transition research and analyses from the International Energy Agency both point to battery storage as a central pillar of the energy transition over the coming decade.

What the numbers mean going forward

Prices have continued to fall even recently — dropping by roughly a third in just the last few years. The data, compiled by researcher Rupert Way and drawing on work by Ziegler and Trancik, BloombergNEF, and Avicenne Energy, tracks battery cell costs only. Full battery packs — which include cooling systems, casing, and control electronics — cost somewhat more, and that gap remains a real consideration for manufacturers trying to hit consumer price targets.

It is also worth noting that the learning curve is not guaranteed to continue at the same rate forever. As the technology matures, the remaining gains may be harder to find, and the pace of improvement could slow. Supply chain constraints, geopolitical pressures on raw materials like lithium and cobalt, and the sheer complexity of scaling grid storage all represent genuine uncertainties ahead.

Still, the trajectory of the past three decades is striking. A technology that cost half a million dollars to equip a single car in 1991 C.E. now costs $5,000 to do the same job — and the price is still falling. The research underpinning this analysis, published in peer-reviewed form, suggests the curve is not a fluke. It is a pattern, and it has reshaped what is possible.

For more on this story, see: Our World in Data — Battery price decline

For more from Good News for Humankind, see:

About this article

🤖 This article is AI-generated, based on a framework created by Peter Schulte.
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