The price of BESS has fallen steadily in the past few years, but recent events look set to slow or event reverse that trend at least in the short term. Video interviewees at last month’s Energy Storage Summit 2026 shared their views on the topic.
Turnkey lithium-ion battery energy storage system (BESS) prices fell significantly year-on-year in both 2025 and 2024, driven primarily by fierce competition among Chinese suppliers as well as the maturation and development of the technology.
However, the US-Iran war’s effect disruption of global supply chains and spike in energy prices, the tripling of the price of lithium carbonate and China’s removal of its VAT export rebate for batteries by year-end have led many to talk about a reversal of that trend. Prices have started to creep up in Chinese BESS tenders. Lithium carbonate is used in lithium-ion batteries, and represents roughly 5% of BESS costs.
We asked industry sources at our publisher Solar Media’s Energy Storage Summit 2026 in London last month for their views.
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Note that the event and interviews, which we video recorded (see below, timestamped to the relevant comments), took place before the US and Israel attacked Iran. The war has already pushed up energy prices significantly and disrupted supply chains which will likely fuel general inflation.
Prices to go up but batteries ‘will continue to move goal posts’ for technology choice
“It’s always very difficult to predict where the market is going to but there are a couple of factors that right now play into that direction (of increasing prices),” said independent power producer (IPP) R.Power’s head of BESS Laurens Vanochten.
“The removal of the VAT export rebate of course is something that drives the prices for battery storage is up simply because the majority of batteries are coming from China.”
“And there are a lot of factors that are very hard for us to influence and very hard to predict like
transport costs. We saw it a couple of years ago with the Suez canal blockage. Nobody could predict that but it did disrupt the entire logistics chain.”
Vanochten said it is also worth noting the moves in some European countries and at the EU-level to use more domestically manufactured technology in clean energy projects: “It’s an interesting market dynamic. I don’t foresee that we’re shifting completely away from China, but you do notice now that simple regulatory change in China will drive up the prices for our battery projects here.”
See our full interview article with R.Power from the event here.
Andy Tang, overseas business CEO for Chinese lithium-ion OEM Rept Battero said that although the recent lithium carbonate price spike from RMB65,000 to RMB150-160,000 (c.US$22,000) was significant, it is nowhere near the price spikes of 2022.
“We’ve been here before as an industry, right? We were here in 2022 when the prices skyrocketed, back then it peaked at RMB600,000 per metric ton. We’re a long way from that peak. But, we’re triple the price, so it’s definitely having an impact,” he said.
In comments we already published in our full interview piece, Erik Stromso, CEO of BESS platform BW ESS said that the price falls of recent years “would not be a straight line” in the long-term, but that batteries would continue to “move the goal posts on pricing” relative to other technologies on the grid.
Joshua Murphy, head of storage for IPP Econergy, meanwhile said that it is still unclear what the impact will be. Short-term fluctuations in lithium carbonate don’t generally translate into higher costs, particularly if you are ordering large quantities of equipment, and the extent to which suppliers will pass on or absorb the VAT rebate cost is also not known. See our full chat here.
