Houston — If Trump administration threats to raise to 25% US tariffs on Chinese imports of lithium-ion batteries and inverters are eventually enforced, the installed price for a four-hour duration battery would increase by about 15%, an analyst at S&P Global Platts Analytics said Thursday.
“The lithium-ion battery accounts for 40% to 60% of the total installed cost of a standalone battery storage asset in the US,” Felix Maire, clean energy and storage senior analyst at S&P Global Platts Analytics, said Thursday.
“The impact of the tariff would vary project by project, but we estimate a 25% tariff on both lithium-ion batteries and inverter could increase the installed prices for a four-hour duration battery by about 15%.”
In a series of announcements by US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer in May, the Trump administration provided a long list of items on which tariffs were planned. On May 10, Lighthizer said the US would increase the level of tariffs from 10% to 25% on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974.
Those tariffs, however, have not been put in place and there is no date certain for them to be implemented.
The Trump administration used the proposed tariffs as a threat to bring pressure on the Chinese government to conclude talks on a broad-based trade agreement. By May 21, those talks had broken down and have not been resumed.
But in recent weeks, however, several analyst groups have worked to calculate just what the proposed tariffs might mean to the growing battery electric storage system business in the US. Numerous battery installation companies have argued over the past two years that the cost of installing a battery storage system has been on the decline.
Two key items — lithium-ion batteries for use in storage systems and static converters also used in storage systems — were on the May 13 list of items the USTA said it would raise tariffs on.
Yayoi Sekine, energy storage analyst at BloombergNEF, said during an Energy Storage Association webinar Wednesday that the 2019 estimated price of a stationary storage lithium-ion battery was $185/kWh. If imported from China with a 25% tariff applied, the battery itself would cost $235/kWh. If tariffs on all the components of a 20 MW/80 MW energy storage system were included, the aggregated impact would be an 18% system cost increase to $338/KWh, Sekine said.
Recent Comments