Battery prices fell fast enough in 2024 to change what a solar project is
A 20 percent single year drop in lithium ion pack prices was the fastest since 2017. It is also close to the point where dispatchable solar stops being a premium product.
December 2024 · Global
Retrospective analysis of December 2024. Published August 2026.
BloombergNEF's 2024 Lithium-Ion Battery Price Survey, published 10 December 2024, put the volume weighted average battery pack price at $115 per kilowatt hour, a 20 percent drop from 2023 and the steepest single year decline since 2017. The survey drew on 343 data points across electric cars, buses, and commercial vehicles, and found meaningful regional spread beneath the average: pack prices in China averaged $94 per kilowatt hour, while the US and Europe ran 31 and 48 percent higher respectively. Cell manufacturing overcapacity, falling metal and component costs, and continued adoption of lower cost lithium iron phosphate chemistry were the drivers BNEF identified.
The Signal
BNEF's 2024 survey recorded lithium-ion battery pack prices falling 20 percent year over year to $115 per kilowatt hour, the largest annual drop since 2017, with China at $94 per kilowatt hour against materially higher US and European averages.
Why It Matters
Storage economics, not panel or turbine cost, are now the more active variable in whether a generation asset can be sold as dispatchable rather than intermittent power. A 20 percent single year price move changes the co-location math for a project that was marginal on storage economics twelve months earlier.
The System Connection
The regional price spread matters as much as the global average for our origination work, since a project's storage economics depend on where its equipment is actually sourced and financed, not on the headline global figure.
Development Implication
Projects we are advising on with wind or solar generation now model storage co-location as a base case rather than an optional upgrade, given how much the marginal economics have moved in a single reporting cycle.
What We Are Watching
- Whether the following year's survey shows the decline continuing or stabilizing after 2024's outsized move.
- Tariff and trade policy effects on the US-China-Europe price spread specifically.
- LFP chemistry adoption rates outside China.
