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Grid storage costs to decrease

Lux Research has released a forecast that expects lithium-ion and molten-salt battery costs to fall to US$500/kWh by 2022. This is predicted to bring down the high capital cost of emerging grid storage technologies. However, it is still double the target of US$250/kWh.

Cost reductions in battery technologies are expected, but not as low as the target of US$250/kWh by 2022.

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Even with the predicted cost of US$500/kWh, expectations of another 50 percent of that level remain unrealistic, at least for a decade according to Lux Research.

Lux Research developed the following scenarios and concluded with these findings for grid-tied systems:

• Li-ion batteries: Costs will fall by 45 percent by 2022 to US$506/kWh. They may lose market share to cheaper molten-salt batteries for larger projects but will remain the choice for projects with space constraint thanks to their high density.
• Sodium nickel chloride (ZEBRA) batteries: Costs will fall to US$473/kWh by 2022 as a result of improved manufacturing productivity and better capacity utilization that will account for 95 percent of the reduction. The processing of the key raw materials bear a large portion of the manufacturing costs.
• Vanadium redox flow batteries (VRFBs): Costs will fall to US$783/kWh. Vertical integration and exclusive supply agreements will be key to managing the cost of vanadium pentoxide, a metal with a widely variable historical market price and uncertain future. Future cost estimates for vanadium pentoxide range from US$15/kg to US$30/kg, from the current US$13.20/kg. At the upper end of the range, VRFB cost will actually increase to $1,205/kWh.

Brian Warshay from Lux Research who is the lead author of the report 'Grid storage battery cost breakdown: exploring paths to accelerate adoption' said that molten-salt batteries hold the highest potential as the cheapest source for large-scale systems. He added that manufacturing improvements will play the biggest role in cost reductions, to as much as 95 percent."Li-ion batteries are dependent on cost reductions from mass production while molten-salt batteries and VRFBs rely on long discharge durations to reduce costs," he said.