The emergence of big automotive OEMS into the energy storage market will drive prices down in the next couple of years, delegates at Intersolar Europe heard last week.
Kai-Philips Kaires from RWRH Aachen University said the emergence of Tesla, Daimler and EON into the ESS market would drive down prices within the next two years.
Kaires said there were currently around 60,000 funded PV and battery systems currently installed in Germany.
Of those, 60% use energy storage systems from ‘small’ companies Sonnen, Senec, SMA and E3/DC, with 90% of those using lithium-ion.
“The big players are thinking about going into the market and the price decreases,” he said. “Up to today there were only mid-sized companies, so big firms are using economy of scale.
“We can expect prices to decrease for a couple of years.”
He added that the shrinking of the price gap between lead-acid and lithium-ion had raised the profile of lithium-ion systems.
This has led to lithium-ion going from having a 50/50 share of the market in 2014 to today, when the technology now dominates, with 90% of current sales in Germany.
