The sci-fi dream of drawing all our electricity from powerful batteries is getting closer to becoming a reality.
What happened: The all-in cost of electricity from a battery project fell to a record-low $78 per megawatt-hour (MWh) in 2025, down 27% from the previous year and roughly half of what it was in 2020, according to a new BloombergNEF report. That cost is expected to fall by another 25% by 2035.
Batteries’ levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) — energy industry lingo for the price per unit of electricity that a project delivers over its lifetime — is now roughly on par with coal.
Why it matters: If batteries get cheap enough, powering a bigger share of the electrical grid with solar and wind will become a more realistic possibility. Even when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn't shine, batteries could supply the grid with their stored energy.
Large-scale batteries are already being used to help keep the lights on during major storms, like one that knocked out wind farms and natural gas plants in Texas earlier this year.
Yes, but: Today’s batteries typically store enough power to last, at most, around four hours, but the grid needs power around the clock. It’s common to go longer than that without much wind, and as anyone who has lived through a Canadian winter knows, we frequently experience multi-day stretches of grey, sunless weather.
Building enough batteries and renewable energy to cover all those gaps would be immensely costly and require enormous amounts of critical minerals, some of which are already in short supply.
What’s next: Cheaper batteries will make supplying more of our energy needs with renewables possible, but until we see technological leaps to produce better batteries as well, some level of gas or nuclear power is still a must.—TS