Costs associated with grid-scale energy storage systems are on track to fall 41% between 2015 and 2020, Greentech Research concludes in a study released earlier this week.
The category of balance-of-system (BOS) costs, currently priced at US$670.00 per kilowatt of storage, includes hardware elements like inverters and containers, as well as “soft costs” like acquisition, interconnection, and charges associated with engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC).
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“While batteries remain the most expensive component of an energy storage system and have the most room for price declines, savings will be found across projects’ entire value chain,” said lead author Luis Ortiz, former executive vice president and CTO at Solar Grid Storage.
“GTM Research forecasts average grid-scale energy storage BOS costs to dip below $400 per kilowatt by 2020,” Munsell writes. The GTM report “provides a component-level breakdown of storage BOS costs, and identifies factors for large variances in BOS costs observed across storage projects.”