The cost of Li-ion batteries has plunged some 97% since their introduction three decades ago—a rate similar to the drop in solar panel prices. A team at MIT has analyzed what has accounted for the extraordinary savings and found that by far the biggest single factor was work on research and development, particularly in chemistry and materials science. This outweighed the gains achieved through economies of scale, although that turned out to be the second-largest category of reductions. Contributions of public and private research and development to cell-level cost decline between the late 1990s and early 2010s. The top bar depicts the contribution of multiple types of R&D while the bottom bar depicts the contribution of R&D factors that were heavily influenced by chemistry and materials science research, including both materials synthesis and processing. Ziegler et al. Their findings are published in an open-access paper in the RSC journal […]