At least 10 new plans for building gigafactories were revealed over the past six month. Tesla’s Elon Musk, the most aggressive green energy investor, announced plans for “probably four” new gigafactories: one near the German capital Berlin, a second is already in the works in Shanghai, China, and some others ones are in planning in Sweden, Hungary and Poland.
Some smaller-scale investors have teamed up on the East Coast. a consortium including Boston Energy and Innovation (BEI), Charge CCCV, C&D Assembly, Primet Precision Materials and Magnis Resources confirmed it will build a 15 GWh a year plant on IBM’s former Huron Campus manufacturing site in New York.
In Thailand, Energy Absolute aims to invest $2.9 million in a battery manufacturing site with a production capacity of 1 GWh per year, and potential to be expanded to 50 GWh by 2020.
Germany’s carmaker Daimler has dedicated $500 to its subsidiary Accumotive to expand its lithium-ion battery production from currently 80,000 units up to around 320,000.
In Australia, Energy Renaissance is advancing plans for a battery factory in Darwin, with production capacity of 1 GWh of batteries a year.
Growing investment appetite amid falling costs
Cost for battery production is falling rapidly as manufacturers bring large gigafactories on-line, although the price for raw material is going up. Lithium now makes up more than 10 percent of the cost of making a battery cell, and pricing for lithium has doubled from $5,000 per ton to $10,000 per ton.
By 2030, Bloomberg New Energy Finance anticipates battery pack prices to drop to $73 per kilowatt-hour, down from a volume-weighted average of $273/kWh in 2016.“This is an average, though,” said Logan Goldie-Scot, head of BNEF's storage practice. “We're already seeing pack prices below $200 per kilowatt-hour.”
“Institutional investors are waking up and ready to invest in storage,” commented Randolph Mann, President of esVolta.
The California-based energy storage project developer recently secured a $140 million loan from CIT, Siemens Financial Services, CoBank, ACB and Key Banc to fund construction and operations of the “esFaraday” potfolio. These eight energy storage units, with 480 MWh combined capacity, will deliver reliable back-up power and ancillary services to the Californian grid, backed up by long-term contracts with electric utilities and load serving entities.