I have been on the lookout for 150-200 ah LIFEPO4 batteries for about 3 months. Normally I expect technology prices to drop gradually. Maybe not noticeable over 3 months but if anything I see prices in the US to be stuck or rising slightly. The same for drop-in batteries and for LIFEPO4 cells. Am I observing the effect of tariffs, corona related shipping issues, and increased demand from the prepper community or are things normal?
Is this a bad time to buy and prices will drift down once corona is (hopefully) done with in 3-4 months or is the price stability normal and may continue for potentially much longer? I'd love to hear from people who have observed battery and cell prices in the US over several years and hear what they think is going on.
As a Victron LFP and Battle Born distributor, I can certainly attest that the tariffs caused multiple price increases last year - Battle Born raised our prices twice in the last quarter of '19, though they encouraged us and all their distributors to hold our retail pricing steady regardless, under the assumption that we'd see the tariffs ease up at the end of this year (though that bit remains to be seen). We've certainly held our retail pricing at the same level for now, but one more increase and we'll have to respond in kind just because they're expensive batteries even at our cost, there's simply not a lot of margin in them.
Victron has held pretty steady on their LFP pricing because, even though (like 73% of the world's LFP cells) their Winston cells
are manufactured in China, the rest of the assembly is in India/Malaysia and so I believe they're able to skate around the tariffs a bit. Of course, that being said, Victron LFP prices have
always been super high, so maybe they're just absorbing some of the cost for now.
I can't speak to any other manufacturers but again, literally 73% of all the world's LFP cell manufacturing is in China, so the tariffs and the virus have both taken a toll on basically every LFP battery company; hopefully as China ramps production back up in the coming months we'll see prices drop a little, and of course once the tariffs get dropped (hopefully) around November, pricing may come down a little more.
Then again, lithium is in relatively short supply around the world, so at the end of the day there's only so much pricing can possibly drop. If anything, we're more likely to see an entirely different chemistry take off in the meantime... hopefully one with more readily-available components.