Battery Pack Prices Fall As Market Ramps Up | Hacker News Reader

Battery Pack Prices Fall As Market Ramps Up

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As a rule of thumb, a 10x increase in production of something halves the price. Purely through economies of scale. Much of what's been seen in lithium-ion batteries is just that.

Has Tesla got their act together with their US "Gigafactory" in Nevada yet? They had a lot of problems, most of them in plant management related to starting up a big plant in an isolated area.[1] Plus feuding with Panasonic.[2]

Eventually somebody will get this right, and there will be automated plants with very few employees. This is the ideal situation for automation - making huge numbers of identical products. It just takes a long time to get the automation working.

A big problem in the US is that few people go into manufacturing engineering. It's a big thing in China, but not in the US. Average pay for manufacturing engineers is about $78K, according to Glassdoor. Senior level, maybe $82K. This is for a job which today requires understanding real-time computer control, electronics, mechanical engineering, and organizational behavior.

[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2019/12/04/tesla-e...

[2] https://electrek.co/2019/10/09/tesla-panasonic-relationship-...

I am always surprised to hear how much programmers get paid in the US (third world disclaimer: It's a lot!).

> Average pay for manufacturing engineers is about $78k

This is more on par with pay for (top) programmers or engineers that I know of. In South Africa, actuaries get paid much more than programmers. From what I have seen on HN, US based programmers (in top-ish companies) get paid actuarial salaries. As a mathematician, I have a lot to say about actuaries, but alas, that is for another day.

Maybe someone more knowledgeable can clarify this. Median pay at tech companies is sometimes > $100k annually. In my view as a not-a-US-citizen, that is a lot of money.

Bear in mind you might not have the same way to report salaries. In France, for instance, when employees report salary, they don't include the tax the company pays for them. AFAIK, in the US, salaries are reported including them. I still have a very hard time making apple to apple comparisons. If anyone has a good methodology, please ping

In the US, salaries are not usually described including tax, are they?

When someone in the US says they make $100,000 per year, that is usually exclusive of any tax paid by the company. It is also exclusive of other benefits paid, with health insurance commonly being $10-20k paid by the company, if provided. The employee is responsible for their own income tax.

There’s confusion because in the gig/entrepreneur/consultant world, people will say they “make” $200,000 in business income. But then they bear taxes and benefits out of that amount. So you may “make” more, but do worse than someone who is an employee of a bigger company. That is why it takes a substantial increase in income in the US to justify leaving a stable employer.

But this shouldn't make a difference relatively. In most of Europe (every country I know salary data of), manufacturing engineers tend to get paid at least the same if not more than programmers.

Yeah and there is also the ridiculous cost of living in a lot of the tech areas. A household earning $117k is on the poverty line in SF.

In SA salary before tax is used. So you lose from there between 20%–45%.

What is important is not how much you are paid. What is important is how much buying power you have with the salary you are paid (minus taxes) and how much your society gives you for free (education/health/...)

Until you go on holiday or buy online...

South African here. We tend to use products, integrate systems and do custom dev. There's really no reason to pay crazy salaries because "pretty good" is good enough.

When you're competing on the output of developers and the difference between first and second is Facebook and MySpace, get the best you can afford and pay them. You're spending VC money and need the best output as fast as you can get it. Good enough will kill you.

> We tend to use products, integrate systems and do custom dev.

As a young South African, this reality is something of a let down. In the US, it's like you have a country with (if you normalise to mean) 30 cities the size of JHB economically. The access to cutting edge tech jobs is just incomparable. The upside is that if you do break through, your relative success is greater. In the US, someone else is already trying your idea.

I am curious what you have to say about actuaries.

I think they are one trick ponies (evaluting risk in insurance, pensions and medical funds) that can't appreciate why 0^0 = 1, and if they do, would rather make money for the time it takes to explain.

But, to not sound like a completely grumpy cynic, I think they are intelligent and efficient; moreover, these days people have multiple jobs or facets and the critism is more towards the idea of an actuary than the individuals who are actuaries. I guess we are all in competition and actuaries and CAs are maybe just more honest about competing for one's income.

I am actually interested in actuarial research, FWIW.

There are a lot of engineers that work in manufacturing. Typically they'd be referred under controls and automation or maybe industrial engineering.

Controls Eng for plant level PLC/HMI, Automation Eng for interconnect with the higher layers (SCADA/MES/ERP/Cloud) is the general wording I see. But, yeah lots of mix and match with those words.

In the middle of architecting the systems for a new pack line myself.

Here in Australia "Process Engineer" is used a lot for this type of role.

Economies of scale often get mentioned as if it is some sort of magical property that makes things cheaper. Reality is often far more complicated. Amazon, for example, hasn't really had an improvement in fulfillment costs over time. They've gotten more expensive as they've pushed ideas that grow the company: faster shipping, more products, etc. Also, resource constraints tend to have overwhelming impacts: the cost of extracting oil from the earth got a lot cheaper on economies of scale right up to the point where they had to go after more expensive sources to get enough to fill demand. Economists have a name for this effect: diseconomies of scale.

It is pretty safe to say that economies of scale has gotten us to where we are now with batteries. But that does not necessarily mean the trajectory will continue.

But the postal system already had immense economy of scale. If Amazon had to bootstrap its own fulfillment from scratch, the per package cost absolutely would have been slashed as volume increased.

To put some numbers on it, imagine you start off delivering one package by hand a week, literally by hiring someone to drive across the country. This might cost $2000 a week in fuel, salary, depreciation etc.

Now say we're delivering a billion packages a week. The rule quoted would put it at $4 per package.

There's wiggle room to argue each end, but considering it's a rule of thumb operating over nine orders of magnitude, that it's not outright nonsensical is actually pretty good.

I agree it's not some iron law, and it's important to know when and where it can be applied.

There's also Jevons Paradox[1]. This is that the more efficiently a resource is used the more demand there is for it. So if you increase the efficiency of electric vehicles, there will be more demand for battery packs because the battery pack's use value for transportation increases. For example, if there were technological improvements to Tesla that made them get 50% more range off the same weight of battery packs, that would greatly increase the demand for those battery packs because the value of those battery packs would be greatly increased.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Ah, I've been looking for a name for this.

So this applies to software systems as well. We had a system where, every time we optimized the underlying database, it became slower . This puzzled us for a while. Turns out that people were used to the slowness. When they found out that the system became faster, they actually started entering more transactions. As more people noticed, the system got overwhelmed again. Until it reached a point where it could finally handle the load.

The variable we failed to see is that people were leaving work earlier now. Even though the system's metrics appeared to degrade, that was a metric that markedly improved. They used to work longer hours to get all their work done.

> We had a system where, every time we optimized the underlying database, it became slower.

One thing I've noticed is that the amount of time I have to wait when performing operations has remained more or constant through the past few decades, even as processor instruction retirement rates skyrocketed and memory/storage/network latencies plummeted. I often find myself trying to pull up a site to do something like track a project or buy a ticket, only to be waiting for 5 to 10 seconds before I am able to read the information and/or perform the operation I was there for.

I always ask myself, "Why on earth am I having to wait at all for this?" I assume it's the same concept of "induced demand" for roadways. Under that theory, in densely-populated areas, traffic will always be as bad as it is, regardless of the number of lanes. Add more lanes, and commute times drop. Then people who didn't tolerate the longer commute times before jump in and start commuting, increasing the load on the roads. This quickly raises the wait time to just below the previous wait time, with all the people in the "margin of toleration" who weren't commuting before now commuting.

In the case of the systems at my company for project tracking, I just assume that people build systems on dependencies in a way that trades latency with the convenience of using a particular API/service with an SLO. The system with the SLO costs money to maintain, and so they have a quota system in place based on priority. The project tracking software comes along and says, "Well, we could write the data into a Prostgres instance with a 10 millisecond response time, but then we've got to worry about backup/restore, availability, and all that stuff. Or we can be the lowest priority traffic for this nifty distributed storage backend that has a support team and SLO with a 7 second response time." The seven seconds of each person's life every time they use the tool is an externality, and it's something few people are ever going to complain about. So, 7 seconds it is.

I'm resigned to waiting an average of 5 or so seconds for anything I do on a computer for the rest of my life, no matter how cheap cycles, storage, or bandwidth get.

This equation has very interesting implications.

E. g. more lanes translates to higher automaker profits at expense of less overall population happiness.

Faster computers translate to higher overall rate of software use at expense of more overall time spent waiting

This is precisely what happens with Mobile Networks. The faster the mobile network gets, the more people uses it which causes things to slow down to zero return of performance.

Ultimately though both Economy of Scale and Jevons Paradox reaches Law of Diminishing returns. Adding more capacity to network or faster DB queries will no longer yield any meaningful output.

For a more direct example with future actors:

Cell phone battery life has stayed mostly stable, even as battery capacities have gone up and processor energy/instruction has gone down. This is because mobile device performance is mostly power-constrained: manufacturers have a target of about a day of battery life as the minimum consumers will put up with, and whenever more energy is available they'll turn up performance or add features until battery life goes back down to that minimum.

I think you have to choose a limited perspective to make a diseconomy of scale for batteries.

CPUs, RAM, Energy and Energy storage have each reached the economy of scale point where innovation is heavily rewarded.

Single core, static dram, Oil, and lithium batteries should each fail at some point soon.

Your examples are services, but the argument is about economies of scale for manufacturing.

As for resource constraints, don't forget substitution.

Yep, there are very often "learning curves" that can be used to accurately predict price trends as manufacturing volume increase. The same thing has played out with solar cells and led to big price drops.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swanson%27s_law

The PLC/DCS/SCADA world hasn't really caught up to modern open-source software in a lot of cultural ways. Lots of proprietary components and "pay-to-learn" practices. I expect there's software-engineer types who would venture into the hard-real-time control systems world if it were as open-source and tinker-friendly as something like Rails. Nowadays someone like Microsoft has to go open source to have any hope of capturing developer mind share for something like .NET.

The PLC/DCS/SCADA world hasn't really caught up to modern open-source software in a lot of cultural ways.

That may be a feature. Otherwise you get a Raspberry Pi, with enough attack surface to drive a semi through, to control a pressure regulator.

I wish I went into manufacturing engineering. I wanted to work on robot AI and am there now but studying software is the easy part, you can easily get access to all the software and documentation online for free. Learning automation and manufacturing is more costly in terms of time and money.

More expensive to learn and unfortunately pays much less.

Not lost on me that jobs working on systems to spy on and gas light people pay about three times what manufacturing engineering jobs pay.

One of my mechanical engineering suitemates in college cooped/worked at a Frito Lay chip plant for three semesters and got a job there in manufacturing after graduating, I remember because when he got back he always had boxes of product they gave him after each work period.

I wish every government that invested in renewables would invest at least as much in batteries R&D.

I don't think government funding battery research makes as much sense now as it used to. Absolutely everything runs on batteries nowadays, to the point where they are the main source of expense and weight for a large swathe of consumer goods. The commercial incentive to build a better battery is just huge. I remember reading some years ago that the prospectus of a large oil company, ExxonMobil maybe, explicitly singled out a sudden leap in battery energy density as something that could torpedo their $250b/yr business. It's hard to see how the government finds a way to build something that the private sector can't, when there's a trillion dollars at stake.

Interesting that you mention ExxonMobil. ExxonMobil does, in fact, cite "technological advances in energy storage that make wind and solar more competitive for power generation or increased consumer demand for alternative fueled or electric vehicles" [1] as a risk factor on their annual form 10-K.

In a bit of a twist, worth noting that Exxon Research & Engineering was involved in the invention of the rechargeable lithium ion battery [2]. Quoting from [3], "Thus Stanley Whittingham invented the first rechargeable LIB, patented in 1977 and assigned to Exxon."

[1] https://ir.exxonmobil.com/static-files/37b7e1b7-620b-4248-a3...

[2] https://patents.justia.com/patent/4009052

[3] https://www.currentscience.ac.in/Volumes/117/09/1416.pdf

Disclosure: I worked for ExxonMobil from 2012-2017 but don't have any remaining ties.

I don't know how much funding does in batteries that are designed to be stationery. I.e. where weight does not matter, where they can be bulky and potentially run hot.

There are technologies that are irrelevant for cars or phone (which I do think attract most of the battery R&D) that would be a good fit for a battery the size of a building, designed to store the electricity for a whole city during the night/low wind period.

Government can fund the private R&D easily by, for instance, mandate that renewable sources installed on the grid must provide a baseline 24/24.

But public research is nothing to sneeze at. It brought us the lithium-ion battery (Goodenough was working at the U of Texas when inventing it). Private R&D is good at incremental improvements and solving deployment problems. Public research at funding radically new tech. They work well together.

Economics doesn’t matter. So long as CO2 emissions continue to rise, subsidies are not only desirable they are absolutely mandatory in any rational sense of the word. The cost doesn’t matter.

Batteries are getting literally hundreds of millions of dollars a year in R&D investments and have been for decades. We could increase that by a few Billion per year, but it’s not obvious what would make a good investment over just buying more batteries and letting the market develop.

I would be interested in a study on how many years it takes the average "battery breakthrough" that never goes anywhere because the lab technique is completely unscalable to be revisited with more advanced technology and declared impractical a second or third time.

Why don't govs give tax breaks for everything that's battery related? Extraction, shipping, manufacture, sales...? I feel the price would halve instantly.

A carbon tax would help a great deal here as well.

On manufacturing engineering...

Tesla is likely just an example of a general trend. Whether it's big leaps towards "fully automated" manufacturing or gradual, cheap labour is not as important. It's increasingly a "talent" paced industry.

Manufacturing is becoming less la

Doesn't halve the price of raw materials though which is a big part of Lithium Ion battery pricing.

I'd love to see a cost summary of a typical lithium ion battery if you have it. How much is labor, energy, materials?

Depends entirely on the chemistry, but it's mainly Cobalt that is killing the price. Everyone tries to cut it out as much as possible. Tesla is trying to cut costs with less Cobalt but in general it means worse performance and a lot of safety issues with overheating or exploding. Huge amount of savings from the last years comes from cutting Cobalt by making better chemistries, trying to keep the safety record at the same time.

And we are not even close to the scale of an industry with world-wide relevance. Semiconductors is a nearly 500billion$ industry for example. If batteries reach 100billion$ we could probably expect prices well below 50$/kwh. That means you can put a sufficiently large powerwall into your home for around the price of a new laptop. That in turn enables homeowners to generate most of their energy needs themselves via (also cheap) pv arrays. This technology has the chance to completely turn around the home energy market.

I think this is an important point. The lithium-ion battery market is _still_ smaller than the lead-acid battery market. This business is still ramping up.

Wow, really?

I've got dozens of Li-ion batteries in my house and only two lead-acid. One in my truck and one I use as a backup power supply for my radio equipment.

Well, estimates I can google up at the moment put the Pb-acid worldwide market at ~$42bn/year and the Li-ion market at ~$40bn/year. The latter is growing much faster but the former is also growing.

Lead acid batteries are used in pretty much everything ICE vehicle and are used in large quantities as uninterruptible power supplies (data centers use a ton). It's a huge industry.

They're cheap, simple (don't require a complex BMS), predictable/safe, have a long-enough lifetime and are easy to recycle. The biggest drawback really is weight - and thereby shipping cost - but for long term stationary applications that doesn't matter.

Lithium Ion attached to a supercapacitor with a sophisticated BMS is a much more complex setup-- yet even so, it will probably end up being the gold standard in the long run at this point, I would say even in most places lead-acid is still being used. I would not have predicted anything like that even five years ago, but barring some unlikely breakthrough it seems like where we're headed.

Honestly it’s just market inefficiencies at this point. I build battery packs for drones and RC planes and the lead acid stuff is just garbage. They can’t perform to more than 60% of their rated capacity and then start voltage sagging. The energy density is pitiful. A small UPS under your desk with LiFePo4 cells would outperform the lead acid 3-4x for the same space and last longer for the same or less money.

The majority of the are designed for massive amounts of current for short period of time?

Considering we ship 1.2B Smartphone, 300M Tablet, 150M Laptop, 100sM of IOT Gadget, along with Electric Cars and Buses. I am very much surprised Lead Acid Battery has a higher market revenue. Apart from ICE vehicle ( Which I dont buy every year ) I dont have any Lead Acid Battery around me.

UPS and battery backup for things like Alarms and Phone Systems use Gel Cells or AGM batteries which are in the sealed lead-acid family. You probably have more "lead acid" batteries than you think.

Well I think part of that is attributed to lead acid being better at certain things then lithium, no?

Cheaper yes, better not really. IIRC li ion is better in every way except low temperature performance.

> low temperature performance

Doesn't that make li-ion unsuitable for, e.g., ICE vehicles that need to start at low temperatures?

The batteries in EVs are definitely not as "forget about it" as the lead acid's in gas cars!

In some ways they are more "forget about it" than lead acid -- lithium battery life is measured in cycles, rather than time. Your lead acid battery will be dead in 5 years, but your lithium batteries can last for 5,000+ cycles, even more if the cells are intelligently discharged.

As for cold temperatures -- less current can be drawn from each cell. In those cases, you can add more cells to still perform adequately in the cold. And this may even fit in the same form factor as the existing lead acid battery, because lithium batteries are physically smaller.

An li ion battery of the same capacity will supply less cranking current, but you can make it slightly larger (still much lighter and smaller than SLA) and make up for that difference. It's only below -30 Celsius (-20 to -40 depending on the chemistry) that lead acid retains better capacity, and they freeze completely at -80.

Li-ion will last far, far longer than any lead acid under any conditions.

Yeah I have an EV that gets 240 miles on a warm summers day but it drops down to like 160 on a day where it’s below freezing climbing a mountain. I’m OK with that. It’s still an absurd amount of range for a technology that would have been unthinkable a decade or two ago. I think once EVs start surpassing ICE cars in range it will be a non issue for most people.

A 33% drop in efficiency sounds reasonable for climbing a mountain vs driving on flat land. Do you know how much your range drops when you're driving in the cold but not climbing a mountain?

Mine drops that much when below freezing on a FLAT surface. On one hand, it's better than prior systems. On the other hand, it's still abysmally worse than conventional systems.

This is just one of the many risks of being an early adopter, I suppose.

I agree that once this major bottleneck is removed, the vehicle will be much more competitive - assuming the fix doesn't increase the cost too much.

Some EVs just heat their battery, which limits the loss of range. The power for heating can be automatically drawn from the charging station in the early morning. Some EVs also start heating the cabin when you schedule it and they are plugged in (eg Ioniq). EVs can also start and go without any problems in conditions where gas cars give up (-20 celcius).

Lots of motorcyclists replace their lead-acid batteries with lithium-ion batteries that are much lighter. They’re very unreliable but some people will deal with that to save a few pounds.

I imagine you mean ice cars with much more demanding starters, but worldwide motorcycle market is pretty big.

You still get about half range in -20C with cabin heating.

Lead acid batteries are able to survive a complete discharge, which would destroy a lithium ion battery.

This doesn’t sound entirely right to me. lead acid batteries do get damaged by deep discharges

even “deep cycle” lead acid batteries aren’t supposed to go to full discharge. from https://www.solar-electric.com/learning-center/deep-cycle-ba...

> Deep cycle batteries are designed to be discharged down as much as 80% time after time and have much thicker plates. The major difference between a true deep cycle battery and others is that the plates are SOLID Lead plates - not sponge. This gives less surface area, thus less "instant" power like starting batteries need. Although these can be cycled down to 20% charge, the best lifespan vs cost method is to keep the average cycle at about 50% discharge.

It's not. Even a single complete discharge event is often if not usually enough to kill the performance of a lead-acid battery not intended for deep cycle.

Deep cycling performance depends on the battery chemistry. Most cars in the US use a type of lead-acid battery that can't be deep cycled even a single time without serious risk of damage to the cell. I would assume this is true of any lead-acid battery not intended for deep cycling everywhere else in the world too as it adds significant cost to battery.

Lol you are absolutely wrong. Li-ion cycle life is typically rated at 99% depth of discharge, rarely at 98%. That means .5 to 1% of maximum capacity without damage.

Deep cycle lead acid is damaged permanently at less than 20% capacity. Manufacturer recommendation is to avoid going below 50%. "Deep cycle" means going below 50% won't immediately destroy your battery... Like most car batteries.

Desulfation can help but will never fully recover a lead acid battery. If you discharge a lead acid battery -any kind- to 1%, it is fucked.

Wouldnt prices of the grid go down as well? The grid could switch to a storage model too. Making it not that attractive to deal with all the maintenance.

Maybe not. I’ve heard that the fixed costs of a traditional grid are substantial enough that if large numbers of homeowners moved to PV generation the grid costs could become unsustainable and ultimately unmaintainable/collapse.

This a largely an accounting problem. Most consumers pay by kWh, with no separation between generation and transmission cost components. If more people generated their own power, they’d have to seperate out the generation and transmission costs.

I would bet there are also a bunch of fixed costs (per unit area of land that is served by the grid, let's say) that don't drop if you lose customers.

You've got to have utility poles, trim trees away from power lines, etc. regardless of whether you serve 100% or 25% of the customers in that area.

If you lose a lot of customers, you will have to raise prices on the ones that remain. If you're competing against something that already took away some of your customers, then raising prices could have a snowball effect and cause you to lose more.

PGE & Peninsula Clean Energy already breaks out transmission and generation costs. Most the costs are for transmission.

https://www.peninsulacleanenergy.com/for-residents/

https://www.peninsulacleanenergy.com/wp-content/uploads/2017...

I know that they separate the generation and transmission costs in southern california and I'd imagine there are others that do that. I wonder what kind of pivot we will see from the utilities.

Minimum connection fees, legislated enforced grid connect.

Or just let it go.

It'll still be a thing in cities because you don't have enough area to collect sunlight for tall buildings on the buildings themselves, but that's also where the costs are lowest because the density is highest. If technology makes it so you no longer need a power grid in rural or suburban areas, and the economics are no longer viable there, why should we pay a lot of money to continue to have one there?

Or the company maintaining the grid will raise prices.

If you had to make the choice between "no electricity to power my fridge, my lights, my laptop" vs "pay double for the electricity", you'll pay double.

If people respond rationally, this would lead to re-designing the grid to be more decentralized and maintain the lower cost of energy we get from solar.

The grid would not collapse but instead would evolve (maybe wiping out whole swatches of companies and utilities in the process but so what).

Many people won't (or can't) install their own PV/storage, but everyone needs electricity.

Those without PV and/or storage will need to purchase their electricity from others.

The mechanism for getting the electricity from seller to purchaser will be a grid of some sort.

La plus ca change and all that.

My understanding from PUCT dockets is that fixed costs account for 90% of transmission firm costs.

Let it crumble over time... Lax the regulation how reliable it has to be - that will drive the cost of maintenance down.

Upgrade it in a way that failures can be isolated (my house supplies couple of houses around me, etc).

Co-ops don’t need to be profitable, just one more reason to use them.

With renewables knocking on 1 cent/kwh at utility scale, retail prices will go down, and the majority of the cost will be storage and transmission. You might expect prices to be higher at night (the reverse of now), as more of the light vehicle fleet moves to EVs and everyone charges their cars at night (unless you can incentivize workplace charging, when the sun is shining).

> You might expect prices to be higher at night

For people with rooftop solar and no batteries, that's already the case (depending on the feed-in tariff of course).

Saw an article about this today: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-12-05/solar-panels-rebates-...

Yeah, definitely going to see tariffs disfavor rooftop solar (utilities don't want to be the "battery" if they can avoid it), which is going to increase battery uptake rate (to consume your own generation first instead of export it for no value to the grid), which will drive battery prices down faster.

If there's that much storage in cars if a large % of transport switches over, especially consumer commuters with long-range batteries, perhaps a service can allow EV owners to get paid to allow their daily commute cars to store excess solar in the day and stream it back at night.

You can skip the "stream it back at night" part. If you have a big battery, you don't need to charge it to full every day. So you plug in day and night, and have an algorithm pick when it actually charges... based on the wind/sun forecast and your calendar entries.

Then there is no extra battery wear.

There are quite a few people here in Palo Alto who can plug in at work. Facebook has more than 100 chargers at their HQ, and half of the EVs at my apartment complex never use our free charger.

A company I worked with looked into this model. The problem is that most cars are not in garages near PV during the day, they're in parking lots at work or in shopping/errand locations. They return to garages and plug in just before sunset, so the load on the grid from EVs actually goes up right as the input from PV is going down.

The model does work great with powerwall-type devices, though.

But if you offer to pay people who keep their cars plugged in during the day, probably more people would do it. Also, while car batteries are likely to be lower in the evenings, they're probably not completely dead. They could feed the remaining energy back to the grid at that time, then charge up later at night when the load is lower.

1) The percentage of people with EVs who leave them plugged in at home during the day is very small. This is unlikely to change for several years.

2) It's a bad proposition to people because you're basically telling them they won't be able to take long trips in the morning and you're going to decrease the life of their battery (people are rightfully really concerned about this).

3) The big concern with utilities right now is how to handle home renewable excess power during the day. All the rooftop PV is feeding a bunch of power back into the grid when it's sunny, then all those homes are sucking down power from dusk to dawn. The utilities need daytime power storage or non-daylight generation to offset this. Storing power at night doesn't do much to actually solve the problem, so there's not much of a business model in it. Grid-scale battery installations are quickly becoming the solution here.

If you're looking for a car-based model that could potentially work for this, it has to involve solar parking lots and also be car-specific. Charge your car at a parking lot during the day, drive it home and plug it in to power your house in the evening. Get a discount from your electric company as a result.

I sorta get the idea but who wants to burn cycles on your EV to save a couple of bucks a month? It makes no sense to me.

You can just buy batteries for your house. We’re down to what? $200/kWh? Less? If there wasn’t so much mark up in the industry, you could buy a whole house battery for 2-3k that would be good enough to shift most of your energy usage. Utilities just need to incentivize it, which presumably would happen naturally due to market forces as solar adoption goes up.

What stops the cars being charged at the parking lot at work or shopping/errand locations? One could imagine a distributed model where you have a small battery home and you not only shop your groceries but also the electricity and bring that home with your car. (Likely not relevant model in densely populated areas)

In that scenario, the parking lots need to be on the grid. Even if you cover a car in solar panels, for almost everyone they’d be a range booster rather than turn the car into a net producer.

> In that scenario, the parking lots need to be on the grid.

Not necessarily. You can imagine a grocery store covering the roof of their building in solar panels to run chargers in the parking lot. If solar gets cheap enough they might even do it for free (or below market rates) to drive business to the store. Then you charge up your car while shopping, use the power at night.

At what point does switching to something more trolleybus like, where your car charges while driving down the road, maybe in contact with a rail, make more sense than all this self driving and battery capacity? Even if it was just interstates.

Likely never (if you look at Tesla's luxury vehicles almost at 400 miles of range [S and X with Raven drivetrains] and their Supercharger charge rates [0-80% SOC in ~15-20 minutes]). Battery capacity per kg and charge rates are likely to improve faster than coordinating the deployment of nationwide rail or overhead wire electrical infrastructure on interstates (a Supercharger station only takes about two weeks to install, and costs ~$150k-200k).

https://supercharge.info/map

I'm still hoping that Teslas on AP will eventually begin to coordinate and drive very close together or even attach bumper-to-bumper in order to save energy on highways due to lower air resistance. Ad hoc highway trains more or less...

For all practical purposes they have that now. The CD on tesla cars is very low, and even AP1 cars will follow other vehicles on the highway for hundreds of miles without a hitch.

The AP follow distance setting can be set from 1 to 7, and setting it to 1 just ends up with more abrupt braking when traffic encounters a slowdown. A spaced out setting of 4 is a much more comfortable setting.

Yes, but energy density is terrible. You are having to move 3x the weight not to mention the huge effincicy hit . You arent taking reality into account.

The Model 3 weighs hundreds of lb more than its equivalent in an ICE car, not 3x as much. These numbers are still improving as well.

The economics do not make sense. There are massive capital and operational expenditures to build power rails/overhead wires everywhere.

If you want to longbets.org this I will have someone put down $1000 this will not happen in any city of over 10k people in the United States in the next 20 years.

BMW 3 series: 3,582 to 3,764 lbs

Model 3: 3,627 to 4,072 lbs

At best the Tesla is 8% heavier (total weight).

Even buses are using batteries to move away from the trolley bus model. Maintaining those overhead lines is a pain, and they go offline all the time. I expect these will just go away outside of true rail usage.

EV car batteries are too expensive and overdesigned to be used for grid power (imho)

How so? We have two long range Model 3s which have 140+ kWh capacity in total (70kWh/car, conservatively). Even if you'd only allow 50% of that to be used for powering one's house (you don't want to run large batteries all the way down, or charge them to 100%, often, if you care about long-term capacity), each car could provide 35 kWh, or the equivalent capacity of ~3 PowerWalls. The proper electrical interfaces and monitoring needs to be engineered, but there isn't any good reason not to do this. Seems like such a waste. Even if you could only use 20kWh, that's still be a huge win. In states such as Florida (and, now, California) where power outages are frequent, this would be a godsend.

Of course. Drain your car during the outage, get stuck with dead car when it turns out this outage is caused by the fire nearby.

Grid prices will go down as demand goes down when people start producing and storing energy themselves. With the cost of solar panels and batteries dropping and production capacity growing exponentially while prices continue to drop, the grid will be less important but still essential to many.

It will also accelerate the demise of coal, gas, and nuclear as they are already too expensive and will have no chance whatsoever in an open market where prices are trending down massively over the next decades. The status quo of course is that they are effectively state protected monopolies currently in many places, which will slow things down in some places and is also the reason you get to pay many times the actual market price per kwh.

If people still need the grid but don't oat for anymore, then the prices go up since the powerline companies are usually required to maintain them. It doesn't matter than you need power only 8 days a year few kw.

I imagine cities will stay centralized. There is some money selling electricity from large plots to small ones (and apartment), a nice amount of it on selling from houses to industry, and a huge amount of it on intermediating the PV and storage transactions.

But cheap batteries will probably means a large downsizing on the large distance distribution grid.

I've thought it could not only change the home energy market, but housing.

Housing could become much more distributed, as people could live independently where they chose.

(not that socially they would do that)

I'd guess electricity is only 1 of ~20 things I need civilization for.

This still relies on bureaucratic changes - in many jurisdictions, connecting to the grid is mandatory.

That's the current situation in Australia, for example: https://reneweconomy.com.au/the-40-australian-towns-that-cou...

In the US these restrictions are usually tied to nearby cities. The larger but sparsely populated unincorporated areas don't require (or have) utilities.

> (not that socially they would do that)

Factor in that once VR headsets hit MVP status, you won’t need to commute for basic “we need you to be in a room with these people to talk to them” tasks, it becomes even more plausible.

What happens to the property market if “you don’t need to commute to be in meetings” comes true?

What makes you think that VR will deliver on the remote work dream where videoconferencing failed? I don’t think the 2D nature of videoconferencing is the problem here.

How do you think energy determines this at the moment? The grid is, to a first approximation, the same price everywhere people live.

Oil is a $70 trillion industry and yet a barrel of crude is currently $60.

What does that mean? Nothing. You are just creating a faux correlation between two prices with no justification.

World gdp is 80 trillion. So the 70 trillion estimate you throw out for oil is clearly hyperbole... in case anyone is taking that literally.

Yeah, $2 trillion is the ballpark. Link for those curious: https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/030915/what-percent...

Well, perhaps GP was arguing that battery prices were functions of an economy of scale. No such property applies to petroleum, since growth in petroleum means going after more difficult reserves, which means higher prices.

You still have to get lithium?

Lithium is reasonably cheap already, and is in that stage where a marginal increase on scale brings the price lower, instead of higher.

I’m not a chemist — would it be harder to get it from recycling old batteries than getting it from rocks?

Because even the battery market is saturated, recycling is the only source you’ll need.

There is a lot of lithium about, just not a lot of stuff that is easy to get at. The cost of lithium isn't a huge part of battery cost at the moment anyway (10s of dollars per kilo with about 50kg in an ev battery).

About 1kg/kWh?

more succinctly: petroleum is a consumable needed for operation, lithium is a manufacturing input

It wouldn't make sense though, because economies of scale are enterprise-wide not industry-wide.

I don't know that I'd agree with that. Look at the computer industry, for a example, and how many small, medium, and large agents all benefit from what amounts to a distributed economy of scale. Apple, Microsoft, Dell and the like all produce better products with less investment when their suppliers can spend fewer dollars per widget throughout the supply chain.

They happen on both spheres.

But yes, I would really like to know the rationale behind the GP's opinion.

It currently costs about $10-12 million to drill and produce a well in West Texas. The fact that a barrel of crude is only ~$60 is absolutely mind-boggling.

The current crude price is due to a worldwide glut in the oil market along with weakening demand growth, OPEC facing forces that are causing it to make production missteps it has no choice but to make, and US shale having to pump to service debt they've overextended themselves with.

Chesapeake Energy, previously an O&G industry darling, is struggling under $9 billion in crushing debt, and has made statements they may not be able to continue as a going concern. At the same time, investors are not so interested in overly optimistic and aggressive well depletion projections.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-oil-opec/opec-extends-oil... (OPEC extends oil cut to prop up prices as economy weakens)

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-09-08/the-wo... (The World’s Oil Glut Is Much Worse Than It Looks)

It's not just the debt.

Climate concern means that instead of the choice being between selling your oil for $1 today or hoping to get $2 tomorrow, now it's $1 today or get lynched for pumping oil out of the ground tomorrow.

Worse, the producers don't know when exactly tomorrow is. Probably it's before 2050, but maybe it's before 2040. If enough people get scared it could be sooner. This is one reason many in that industry actually supported global carbon taxes. Having your entire industry phased out smoothly is a nice predictable future. Sure, you'd rather continue to make money forever, but a smooth exit is the next best thing.

Some readers have probably had garden leave, an employer terminates you but pays you salary for a few months to stay home and not work - as an employee you can't tell any secrets or work for someone else. It's unsatisfying, but it's predictable, the mortgage gets paid. Much scarier to show up one morning and find oh, the company went bankrupt, you won't get this month's pay and the tax man hasn't received their cut for the last six months either. Same thing with a gradually increasing system-side carbon tax. Using oil becomes uneconomic, but gradually and predictably. The industry dies but the people running it come out OK. We've opted for a world where it may all go very wrong for them very quickly.

Chesapeake suffers from decades of mismanagement. Granted there are other oil companies that are also suffering (Lynn, Continental, Williams, Devon, OXY, etc.) But there are a few that are doing well (Total SA, NYSE:MCP, PRNG, EGY, etc)

Disclaimer: several family members are current and previous Chesapeake employees. I no longer own any of the stocks listed above.

A dentist in west Texas charges $150 for a regular tooth filling. A dentist in the middle east charges $15 for the same job.

Offshore deep water wells the world over regularly cost $100MM-$200MM+ just to drill.

Yeah, and a barrel of oil is about 1.7 MWh, so the proportion seems to be about right.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrel_of_oil_equivalent

OP gave an implicit justifications, bigger industry can mean that the goal to more efficient produce gets backed by more $€£, and thus gets reached more faster - at least if no monopoly will be created (as then the consumer is screwed 100%).

What? Projected world GDP for 2019 is $88 trillion.

It is called the learning curve. It applies to prettyucj every industry. Especially if said industry mass produces a standardized product.

It boggles my mind that I pay only $3 per gallon of gas in Nevada (and $5 in Communist Republic of California) despite the fact that it is obtained by drilling into oceans, in extreme cold weather of alaska or the super hot regions of texas, refined at some place and then transported 1000 miles in ships, trucks, trains.

That price is an example of extreme economic efficiency. Battery prices will go down over time as the industry grows.

How are you comparing the cost to fill a powerwall with consumable energy, to a durable good like a laptop?

By overallocating. In Europe, most homes can do well with 10kwh daily electric energy. Make that 20 to be on the safe side. To fill that reliably you might need something between 10 and 50kwp solar energy. Everything can be bought once.

In 2012 it was expected we'd be at $160/kWh by 2025[1]. Instead we're below that by 2019. I wouldn't be surprised if that $100/kWh by 2023 prediction from the source isn't too conservative.

[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/sustainability/o...

And once that happens, it is going to turn the auto industry upside down. Some ice companies like VW realize this and are rushing like crazy to be ready when it happens. The companies that aren't doing this today are likely going to go bankrupt.

I don't think so. Things just don't move that fast in the auto industry. Each car generation lasts 4-8 years. The average age of cars on the road right now is 12 years old. It's taken 10 years to get to 2% EV market share in new vehicle sales even with enormous subsidies. At $100/kWh, a car with 300 miles of range will still have a $7500+ battery, which is too much for sub-$20K cars to still be sub-$20K cars: unless every single auto maker abandons the low-end of the market, someone's going to still be making gas cars for those buyers. There won't be an electric car charger on every street and every parking spot at every apartment building for decades at best, which means people without their own garage to charge in will not be clamoring to switch to much less convenient (for them) electric cars. People will still be buying and driving gas cars and non-plugin hybrids for a very long time, no matter how fast battery prices fall.

> There won't be an electric car charger on every street and every parking spot at every apartment building for decades at best

You don't need them at every parking space, you just need enough density so owners can charge regularly. Maybe in Nimbyism America that's going to take a while (I recently took a trip to San Francisco and didn't even see one electric car charger), but elsewhere it's already possible. In my Eastern European country most supermarkets and shopping malls have electric car chargers, and in the city center there is nearly one fast charger per square km. You can already own an EV here, if you live in an apartment but have to park it on the street.

The average American drives 16 miles each way to work, so that's 160 miles a week comuting. If they had a Model 3, even charging once a week would be more than enough.

I strongly disagree. One problem with your sub-20k market argument is that battery prices are going to keep falling, so in a few more years ev sticker prices are going to be equivalent. Another is that most sub-$20k manufacturers make a large part of their income from more expensive cars, and so for that reason will be in grave danger of bankruptcy.

As for chargers, the number is expanding rapidly, for a variety of reasons. That means every year that goes buy there are more people who are in a position to buy an ev.

Yes, ice's will keep selling, but the numbers will be going down which means that the economies of scale that present manufacturers depend for profits will no longer be there. They will also be stuck with fixed expenses. That means to make a profit they will have to raise prices, which will just drive sales down faster.

Also resale prices will plummet, which will give drivers more of a motivation to buy an ev. Also governments concerned with climate change, which is basically every large developed country besides Russia and the present US federal administration, will be pushing ev's and punishing ice's (like is already going on in China).

As for your point the auto industry moves slowly, that is why many companies will go bankrupt.

Once self driving hits, the cost of shared cars per mile will drop below the cost of gas, so the entire bottom of the market (that <$20k segment) will just disappear.

The sub-$20k new car segment is tiny and shrinking.

I predict 10$ is going to happen fairly soon after that. That would be massively disruptive to anything involving the consumption of energy; which is basically most of the world's economy.

It will ignite the next economic boom just like oil and coal did once.

I have bought a few used electric car batteries for diy solar projects on ebay recently. I have paid $200-$250/kwh.

For example a Tesla Model S battery module, 24V, 250Ah,5.2kWh, Panasonic 18650 3200mAh cell is going for $1,045.00 + 150 shipping.

That is $229/kwh shipped. For most of these batteries you will also have to buy a BMS and/or cell balancer.

That’s pricey per kWh - lithium tech generally is. I’ve just installed an off-grid solar system, and ended up putting together a spreadsheet of a whole bunch of battery options, got prices per kWh, and then built in a factor for lifetime/max cycles.

Ignoring max cycles, the cheapest lead acid I found was £87/kWh. Lifetime was poor, however.

The best bang for buck was OPzS lead acid cells - £115 per kWh, and a long, long lifetime and high cycle count. They’re the most commonly used cell in new grid-scale solar installs, and it turns out there’s a reason for that - over 15 years, they cost less than 20% of lithium over the same period.

That's true but those lead acid cells are only practical for stationary installations. They are far too heavy to use in vehicles.

Where are you finding these OPzS cells?

In Europe - I bought 24 BAE Secura 6 (900Ah at C100) cells from an outfit called merkasol - they’re pretty commoditised and the prices are similar from different distributors. Went for those as they were the biggest OPzS cells I could safely carry by myself, at 60kg, and 42kwh of storage is plenty.

Would you be able to share your research?

Sure. It’s scratty as sin as it was purely intended for my consumption - you can safely ignore the sheets other than batteries - panels are a pretty simple equation - more power is better, and usually cheaper per surface area, and the other gumph was specific to my requirements.

You’ll note the total absence of lithium cells - I took them out as they skewed the scale so badly that it was hard to differentiate between the others.

Also, all the prices are EUR, and I should have said €, not £, in my previous comment. Living between U.K./EU and being paid in USD sees me forgetting what currency I did something in quite frequently.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1w8vPBHkMyY5jvkxtK1Qh...

That seems kind of expensive still. Grid power is around 7 cents / kwh for comparison so you need over 3,000 hours of usage to break even on a depreciating battery. Or for comparison, new 18650 cells are around $2 each in bulk, so you could get almost the same kwh storage (probably 5% less) for the same price, with a lot more cycles left.

I don't know how much it adds, but the Tesla model S module has to have rigidity for the car and some puncture resistance etc. that might not be needed in a power application right? It also may need to have a much higher peak discharge and charging rate and cooling to accommodate that.

That's true. A vehicle-grade battery pack should also already come with the wiring built in so you can charge and discharge all the cells from a single point without having to make your own harness. Still, though, I'm not convinced buying a used Model S battery pack is a good deal unless you have an application that specifically needs it.

grid power where?

For PG&E in california, grid power is .23/.29/.51 per kwh (tiers depending on usage)

Here in Portland [1].

[1] https://www.portlandgeneral.com/residential/power-choices/ba...

You are forgetting delivery charges. It's between 0.11 and 0.12, with appropriate charges.

I would love to get that from PG&E in California. As it is, and with the high cost of energy in datacenters (because it's triply redundant, etc.) I've been researching natural gas power generation at home to power my render farm, instead of putting it in a datacenter.

I can do it for about $0.17/kWh, which is cheaper that the energy I get from PG&E. Fixed cost for the generator is about $7K to power the farm.

i'd factor in wear and tear on the generator there too they aren't meant for 24/7 use.

That's fair, but it doesn't really change the main point that you're looking at a stupid amount of hours equivalent to get to break-even while adding hundreds of charge cycles to an already-degraded battery. I can't really see this being a positive ROI purchase unless you want to use it for a vehicle. Used battery prices need to come down another 20-30% before it will make sense.

I'm surprised seeing that power-source chart for OR. In particular 60% NatGas+Coal, 30% hydro, 6% wind. Any idea why so little wind-power development yet?

It's not 3000 hours of usage, it's 3000 cycles.

Where are you seeing them for this price? That's significantly lower than I've seen.

https://www.ebay.com/b/Electric-Vehicle-Batteries/177703/

I have bought a few different kinds, The honda cells are currently my favorite for their build quality but they are not the cheapest.

Let’s hope at the same time we are building up a corresponding recycling infrastructure and products to be recycled easily. Otherwise I am afraid we are building up another trash problem.

Most batteries beyond laptop size have significant value once they are 'used'. Most retain 20-90% of their original capacity, meaning they can live on in grid storage which has relatively insignificant size limitations.

Most of the new capacity is for large applications (cars) which means low battery type diversity, and this high reusablity due to consistency and of course high market-value. Quite a few businesses will pop up to create this solutions as the increase of batteries make it through their first life.

This logic is flawed because not all environmental issues are the same priority.

If you believe climate change is the biggest environmental issue, batteries could be significantly "dirtier" overall than alternatives as long as they contribute less to C02.

The parent whose logic you criticised neither said nor implied that batteries are not worth pursuing.

I read it as batteries may be worth pursuing, and if so let's make them clean. That's a proposition which seems difficult to dispute.

Maybe you are right but I think it’s worth thinking about these issues before jumping to a solution that may turn out to cause other problems. For example it may make sense to have some kinds of standards for recyclability.

We have along history of doing one thing to fix another thing and causing lot of other problems.

Lithium will be very valuable and motivate recycling for quite a wile. I don't think this will be a problem, certainly not more than the current disposal pipeline for ICE cars.

There was no such problem with lead-acid batteries, so I don't there will ever be with li-ion.

The difference is that a bunch of trinkets have lithium batteries in them and are very difficult to remove, whereas it's mostly vehicles that use lead acid batteries and they're designed to be easily removed. Also you tend to replace lead acid batteries and continue to use the product while with lithium you tend to throw out the product when the battery is dead. This combination makes recycling much more difficult, although I'm sure you'll be able to catch most of this with general electronics recycling.

Well nobody tried to use lead-acid batteries for storage of anything on the significance of grid base-load and replacing a huge chunk of transportation energy capacity.

For decades we have used lead-acid batteries in close to every backup power solution of any size, plus at least one lead-acid battery per vehicle. Of course we expect lithium-ion to surpass lead-acid in market size and number of deployed batteries, but the amount of lead-acid batteries in the world is nothing to sneeze at either.

Lead is stupidly easy to recycle. There are videos of people doing it on streetcorners in india. Lithium, not so much.

Already solved, no worries needed. https://www.duesenfeld.com/index.html

This makes me wonder how falling battery prices will affect the cost of used electric vehicles. On one hand, the replacement battery costs will go down, and in turn should make for better resale value (since the replacement cost of a wearable part is factored into the resale value.) But on the other hand, auto companies (especially Tesla) have been passing that savings down to the customer, leading to cheaper brand new prices of vehicles.

While it may appear on the surface that Tesla has not reduced their prices all that much, keep in mind that the only current offering for the Model S is the 100KWh battery. The Model 3 prices have been incrementally decreasing, while simultaneously standardizing features like autopilot, which used to be a $2K upgrade.

Another problem is the fast pace of innovation.

Tesla aside, most electric vehicles will be outdated in 3-5 years (I say that as an e-Golf owner/lessee) because the next generation of vehicles will be much better. I think we're in the iPhone 3G phase and have a couple iterations/generations of fast evolution ahead until the market stabilizes.

We own one of the first Nissan Leafs off the line. When we're done with it, I will happily give it to someone (because resale on these is already next to nothing) if it replaces their ICE car. And an old electric is something that I theorize would be perfect for the less wealthy. An old beater ICE has to be more trouble and expense than on old EV with a usable battery. Even if it only goes 40 miles in its old age, at least it will do those 40 miles reliably.

You may want to install a second-hand II gen battery instead, because apparently it snaps right in place with only minor modifications:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h47rnjsD0Ys

Thanks for the info. We’re going to have to be deciding what to do with it in the next few years, and that’s an appealing option.

Used EVs will be ideal cars for teens learning to drive - they don't need huge range, and they don't need much maintaining.

The ideal car for a teen learning to drive is the car that their family already owns.

Depends how you look at it. You could make an argument that the ideal is a brand new car with the best crash test scores of anything on the market and state-of-the-art safety features.

Car crashes are the leading cause of death for teenagers: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db37.htm#leadin...

I know someone who learned to drive in an older leaf.

In some ways a better experience. The accelerator is drive-by-wire for instance, so acceleration is smooth. The regenerative braking means just lifting your foot slows you down.

One wierd part was the driving test asks about putting the car in "accessory" (which the leaf technically has, but is hard to achieve without studying the manual). Other evs don't even have it.

"accessory" (which the leaf technically has, but is hard to achieve without studying the manual).

I’ll remind our listeners at home that I’m the one with the eight year old Leaf. To this day, with a gun to my head, I couldn’t get it into “accessory” in under five minutes, if at all. From memory, it’s some combination of “this sequence” coupled with “but only if..., otherwise...”. If you master that, try and turn the heat on with it still plugged in, without using the app. It can be done, but...

I'm curious, why are do used Leafs have such low resale value?

The impression I have: The first couple generations of Leafs don't have active battery temperature management and so far most Leafs that have entered the secondary market have done so in part because of large battery capacity reductions (necessitating in some of those cases battery replacements, which so far used dealers haven't been willing to finance at scale, so instead pass the "savings" to the next buyer).

As more Leafs show up with better managed battery lifetimes and/or as more used dealers get comfortable with battery replacements (and that gets subsequently cheaper as an industry), it may be likely that the Leaf loses its reputation as a "loss" on the secondary markets and maybe regains some of its resale value. (Especially now that current generations have more active battery management.)

But the entire secondary market for EVs is overall confused, because there are fewer EVs in the secondary market than should be. (The average first lifetime of an EV is way ahead of ICE "norms" right now, with average EV first owners keeping cars 7-10 years.) It may take used EV sales a while to better readjust prices to the actual marginal utility of a used EV (in light of overall reduced maintenance costs of a secondary EV lifetime versus ICE averages that used dealers have had decades of information about).

After comparing leaf vs tesla I've come to a different opinion. It's not really battery temperature management, I think it's the small battery.

An older tesla with 250 miles range * 2000 cycles would have 500k mile lifetime.

An older leaf, 75 miles range * 2000 cycles = 150k miles lifetime.

Also, charge percentage vs battery health. Telsa recommends keeping the battery between 20 and 80% charge, and charging defaults to 80% (adjustable)

Leafs usually charge to 100% unless you poke around and find the 80% setting.

Note that keeping the leaf between 20 and 80% will give you about 45 miles range (and you need to be a careful driver to get the EPA range).

So - The range will decrease on both cars, but for the leaf, the range will decrease and cycling will increase in an accelerating fashion.

Because after eight years, driving from Redmond->Seattle->Redmond with the heat on becomes a dicey proposition. Best keep a list of charging stations handy, that's all I'm sayin'. Used to be that trip was no problem if I kept it under 70mph on the freeway. Now I better keep it closer to 60mph, and leave the heat off if I don't really need it. The next gen used a heat pump and electric seats to keep you warm rather than an inefficient strip heater. (Digressive pet peeve: that heater draws 3K watts while it's warming up. Why the fsck does it take five minutes to produce heat? Where is that 3K watts going other than to warm my legs fifteen seconds after I hit the switch?)

And compared to what you can buy today, even if it's a used-but-later-model Leaf, they're weren't great when they were new. We bought ours because we have an ICE in reserve. Go buy a Chevy Bolt for the same money we spent and most folks can just forgo the ICE with the range the Bolt has. We keep the Leaf around because it suits most of our needs, and I usually get to work on a scooter or bicycle, so the wife can commute in it and the ICE sits. But as the battery degrades, he becomes more of a "running around town" car.

That's crazy, w/r/t the heater. Our 3 starts firing heat immediately. I thought that was a major EV advantage.

It's an awful, ugly car with an extremely small range. Drives like a golf cart.

Guessing because when they were new, the range was marginal for a lot of uses (80ish miles), and uses drop off rapidly with even minor battery losses (when 40 miles each way drops to 25), your circle gets a lot smaller.

I've heard this echoed by Matt Farah on his One Take review of the Model 3 Performance. He recommended leasing the car as it doesn't seem like a "collectors" item. Essentially saying it was built to be used for a few years, and then recycled. Much like old iPhones are these days.

Link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrGgIDqgUj4

I'm not sure how much I agree as the Tesla resale market is very strong (even for old Model S cars). But, definitely curious to see how it shakes out.

We are very much at the tip of the ice berg in terms of EV sales. The car market will look insanely different in 10 years. As a consumer, I'm stoked to see how it plays out.

This is good though. The faster the values of EVs decline, while still having hundreds of thousands of miles of service life ahead of them, the faster they're affordable on the used car market (choking out ICE vehicles) to those of less means.

That doesn't really make sense. It really is a mostly mature product as the components like doors, windows, steering are mostly mature. Cars have been produced for a long time and this is just another marginal improvement on the same concept. Its a car and it gets you to your destination relatively comfortably. Not that much different than other cars.

Short term demand for EVs will grow faster than old ones can hit the second hand market. They are already super scarce, which means that EVs have awesome second hand market value until the market saturates, which will take decades.

Laptop batteries can still be premium item. Especially Dell. If you don't buy a business class laptop, it's very likely you cannot order the battery online. You have to call dell support. Dell support is an India call center that will ask for $70 for a shipping label so you can send the machine in to get diagnosed, even if the bios is saying battery health is poor and you don't need a diagnosis. They refuse to just sell you a new battery from the phone or online. They refuse to give you a cost estimate because they want you to have sunk cost before they give an expensive quote. You send in the machine and it's $60 for battery and $80 for servicing. Aliexpress has the batteries for $20 but there's horror stories about exploding batteries. You can easily pay $200/yr if you want to keep your machines at 50% charge or better. Be sure to see how easy it is to switch a battery before buying a new laptop.

How about third party repair people like louis rossman? They will probably do it for the proper price and not give you bullshit.

If there is anyone on here who works in the battery production, EV, or utility industries, can you comment on exactly what is driving the dramatic cost/kWh declines? Every article I've read seems to imply that the cost declines are just being driven by economies of scale (massive fixed costs of plant construction being averaged out over large production runs) and learning economies (https://rameznaam.com/2014/09/30/the-learning-curve-for-ener...). Apart from these two forces, are there any innovations in manufacturing processes or product components+architecture that are partly responsible for the decline?

Edit: grammar.

There was a paper that analysed the source of PV cost declines. Would be interesting to see the same for batteries:

Evaluating the causes of cost reduction in photovoltaic modules

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2891516

I don't work in the industry and am not an expert, but I think a part of it in recent years is that lithium ion manufacturers have been figuring out how to get by with less cobalt in nickel-manganese-cobalt batteries.

If you read about 622 or 811 chemistries, those are the proportion of nickel, manganese, and cobalt. So, the older 622 batteries are 20% cobalt, and the newer 811 batteries are 10% cobalt. Manufacturers are trying to move to 5%, iirc.

(This doesn't apply to lithium iron phosphate, which doesn't use cobalt at all as far as I know.)

Raw material prices have declined pretty dramatically in the last 18-24 months (cobalt, lithium,etc).

the OP references the bloomberg article which does say economies of scale, but also "thanks to improvements in manufacturing equipment and increased energy density at the cathode and cell level" https://about.bnef.com/blog/battery-pack-prices-fall-as-mark...

It certainly helps when there is a small number of suppliers, one giant manufacturing center, and one nearby consumer. Removing all of the supply chain middlemen in search of buyers, repeatedly producing the same manufacturing machinery, and reducing shipping costs are each chipping away part of the cost.

Has cost-effective density improvements stalled?

The last really significant announcement out of the main Tesla university research group was in cycles lifetime.

The suggested range of many Tesla forthcoming models (truck, roadster2) seem to assume a chemistry improvement, as well as other future announcements by less experienced (in EV) manufacturers.

I personally speculate that the Nurburgring Model S prototype beat the Porsche using a substantially lighter battery to get its 20 second advantage, but I have no confirmation on that.

Its all relative... the Model 3 battery is significantly more energy dense than the Model S battery and appears to be lighter weight. How much of this is packaging (2170 vs 18650 form factors) vs chemistry improvements is really hard to know. It is widely believed that the Model S prototype was using a much larger battery with 2170 cells and likely at either the same or a somewhat lower weight than the previous Model S.

The truck has the benefit of being tall, so the pack is multilevel. The roadster will use at least two levels as well as it has a very thick pack, and obviously at its price point they can afford to use the absolute highest density cells on the market.

Tesla managed to halven the relative cobalt content in each iteration (Roadster -> Model S -> Model 3), and Elon hinted that Tesla wants to go Cobalt free, as it’s an expensive conflict mineral.

This is great news. Still, we must end support for the coup in Bolivia that is in part driven by international hunger for lithium.

That is stupid conspiracy theory, lithium is cheap. Cobalt is what makes the price, so keep an eye on Congo. But done if the social problems thanks to Cobalt are already welly known there.

Whatever major commodity you look at there are going to be some bad guys involved in its production somewhere.

Yeah few here seems consider the social and environmental costs of batteries. Disappointing.

Awesome news, storage is so crucial to decarbonization. Some really interesting emerging energy storage tech has been presented and discussed over at https://collective.energy if this kind of stuff interests you

https://investors-corner.bnpparibas-am.com/investment-themes...

That aligns with my theory that since all the easily extracted oil has been exploited, the oil industry is saddled with a price floor, and once alternatives beat that, the oil industry will rapidly collapse as supply is more expensive than alternatives, and oil won't have any way to profitably compete.

If you look at the energy return on investment over time, it's something like 125:1 in 1920. Dropped into 25:1 in 1970. Now at less than 15:1 maybe lower.

Would love to have your voice on the platform

This has not been my experience as a consumer trying to buy 18650 batteries for my 3.3V ESP-8266 projects. Is there a good place to buy these? Searching Amazon for them shows me tons of AA and AAA batteries but no actual 18650's. In the past couple years, the price has gone up for me and the availability down.

Are there better options? I've read about 26650's but I have never tried them. Do they last longer? Are they safer? Can I charge them in my NiteCore charger that works great for 18650's?

How can a consumer/tinkerer wanting to scale up production take advantage of these options? The prices may have gone down at Tesla scale, but not at consumer scale.

What are you typing into amazon to only find AA? If I type "18650" into amazon I get multiple options for manufacturer, chemistry, and capacity.

As well, there are a handful of websites that specialize in selling battery cells, do a web search for "18650 for sale"

26650 cells have higher capacity and max current numbers than 18650s on average but your 18650 charger likely won't have prongs long enough to reach the pads.

If they were long enough, it would charge just fine.

Jehu Garcia is a good reference for batter deals ( note discount code "JEHU" )https://kit.co/jehu/black-friday-deals-2019 found via his channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cD7tYQd4XE4

Wild guess here but maybe those specific types of batteries went up due to popularity of vaping as they're standard in most mods.

I mean, people at first scoffed at the idea of GPU prices rising in 2013 and 2017/18 due to crypto mining (both times!)

These are bulk B2B prices, not consumer prices.

Do not buy 18650 or other lithium batteries on Amazon. There are many poorly made and outright counterfeit batteries. Amazon banned their sale but 3rd parties selling them keep popping up.

In the past I've had success using Parametrek to find good deals (and then doing my homework on the seller to make sure they're legit): http://batteries.parametrek.com/index.html?size=18650

Right now you can authentic 18650 Samsung cells for around $260/kWh, or 21700 Samsung cells for $165/kWh. Those are sale prices, but if you're careful and watch for deals, you can find them.

Yet somehow AA and AAA battery prices remain constant through generations.

Anyone still using non-rechargeable AA's and AAA's deserves it.

Sorry I have tried to get off them but for infrequently used devices they are much better, they can be stored for long periods and are still good, rechargeable will self discharge and be dead when you go to use and probably wont recharge anymore. Rechargeables require a float charge if being stored.

I just replaced a 9v in my infrared thermometer that finally died after 4 years...

That's not true anymore, the new nimh cells like Panasonic eneloops can sit on a shelf for 10+ years and have most of their charge left (70% after 10 years according to their packaging).

Not really. Discount chains sell them for $1 for a 4 pack.

I just paid $13 for 60x Rayovaks AA at Walmart.com... but it's still too much

The price for these batteries are what the market allows, not correlated with the production cost. At cost, I bought Duracell from the plant with a few dollars a pound (a decade ago I worked for them).

Better personal transportation devices, warm coats, extra-long battery life on all electronics. I sense a nomadic lifestyle for everyone.

excellent point! and falling real estate prices - people will distribute out of the cities in search of lower land prices and "cleaner" life style.

Semi-relevant question: there are many battery-based "generators" up to 500Wh on Amazon. Are there any in the 1.5-2KWh range? We often get outages during winter and it'd be good to have something that could drive a furnace for a day or so.

The situation in Bolivia probably had a significant effect.

There's lots of lithium mines there. The new (read: coup) government knows this I'm sure and is looking to get rich off of it at the expense of the indigenous population.

Bolívia produces ~0.2% of lithium today. It’s not even in the top 10 for reserves (US, Mexico, Australia). There is no way it can have an impact on global prices unless they ramp up production by > 100x.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_lithium_p...

Right now Bolivia only has huge reserves. You also have to be able to extract it efficiently.

Look at Venezuela, their reserves are huge but their oil is much more difficult to extract.

Also the lithium market is complex, there are many different grades. The impact of raw lithium price on battery prices are just ~30%.

So the current political situation has probably no effect at all.

Ah, I was mistaken. I thought they were extracting it.

Besides more electric cars, what else could we expect from “electrification”?

Potentially more decentralized or at least time-smoothed electric grids. More batteries can mean greater independence between production means and consumption time. (The obvious case is better time shifting of things like wind or solar power.)

"time-smoothed electric grids". Exactly, this is actually where Lithium batteries make the most sense, especially with solar. It isn't to provide 100% backup output at a grid/utility scale but to make output more consistent when it comes to voltage variance and output. Time shifting power output even by minutes via storage combined with solar forecasting (disclaimer: I work for a solar forecasting company), from what I can tell, can remove a large chunk of uncertainty. The better the forecasting, the smaller the battery can be whilst maintaining low levels of uncertainty.

Grid scale "backup" via Lithium batteries IMO, doesn't make any sense. Generating hydrogen from excess power for grid scale generation actually does make sense. As power generation gets cheaper still and the "now" value of it also becomes less, I think it will make financial sense to locally "bank" energy in the form of hydrogen for versatile use during peak times where grids are overloaded with renewable energy (and wholesale price is 0 or negative which is common quite often in some networks).

The second and third order effects are a bit hard to predict. Electric fork lifts ?! Cheaper Plastics .. Oil moving from transportation to Chemical sector .. collapse of petro-states .. its going to be interesting.

Natural gas appliances replaced by electric ones, usually in some form of a heat pump.

This is interesting times we live in.

True Energy independence could turn world politics upside down.

The only solution for big oil to survive is to take over big battery business. Interesting what they will come up with!

>True Energy independence could turn world politics upside down.

We have true energy independence in the US. And it has turned world politics upside down. Fracking and LNG has made the US a net energy exporter over the last 10 years.

US is not whole world. It will be interesting to see when smaller nations (outside of G8) become truly energy independent. THAT will turn everything upside down once more.

No mention of Lithium and Cobalt rare earth mining. Are these resources abundant enough to support this ramp up without counter balancing economics of scale savings?

If this scales down to under a kilowatt-hour it means even a large ebike/scooter/etc. pack could move to double-digit US dollars in the next few years.

Most eBike batteries are half to 3/4ths a kilowatt hour, though if prices were lower you'd almost certainly see 1kwh & 2kwh batteries becoming standard.

The market is already headed this way, EM3ev keeps putting out larger and larger packs at the same price points year after year.

Consider that I paid $US 7500 for a 48KWh lead-acid battery pack not that long ago, this is a very impressive development.

Url changed from https://www.utilitydive.com/news/battery-prices-fall-nearly-..., which points to this.

Tangential but I hope some standards body would at least standardize phone batteries. Maybe 10 different sizes going by lbh? Right now every single phone has it's own specific battery.

To what benefit? Companies make their own batteries so they can fit exactly how much they want/need. The real estate in a phone is very valuable and even a few percent difference in the battery size can be enough to impact what other components they put in.

By 2030, dollar inflation can easily make $100 battery to cost $60 alone.

Deflation would result in lower nominal prices, not inflation.

My mistake, thank you.

What happens when that much energy is so cheap and every home has what amounts to a sizable bomb inside?

There will sure be plenty of them which aren't actually certified and the failure rate of any consumer product is never zero.

How are the positives of a distributed storage grid offset by the negatives of the technologies?

You can disconnect the other sizeable bomb - gas

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/bristol-hous...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-suffolk-48190598

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/dec/27/man-killed-e...

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/apr/06/birmingham-h...

https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/house-de...

I mean a town in Massachusetts pretty much blew up because of natural gas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrimack_Valley_gas_explosion...

Our neighbor once had a LNG powered trash truck explode in front of their drive way. It burned the entire front of the house off. Now he's got a major remodel and an antique Porsche!

Unfortunately I can't find any links on local news now. It is available here with some photos of my neighborhood.

https://statter2017.wpengine.com/2015/07/03/take-a-look-at-h...

That's one very lucky driver.

You probably couldn't though.

Gas is fairly clean energy, and many of the inefficiencies of electricity distribution don't apply.

It will be quite a long while before people in cold climates who need to heat their homes would switch to all electric or have anything close to local generation capable of heating their homes.

> You probably couldn't though.

Well, you clearly can. Norway hasn't used gas. At home people have used mostly electric heaters and wood. They're now switching out oil burning furnaces and wood burning furnaces in many areas with heat pumps.

Sweden is burning trash for electricity and piping heat from those powerplants to nearby areas.

In most areas you'd need cheaper electricity, and heat pumps should be cheaper as well. But it's definitely possible.

I think this calculation is better than you'd expect using air to air heat pumps. Their coefficient of performance can be between 2-5, meaning for each 1W of electricity, 2-5W heating is produced.

??? Any northern countries like Scandinavia for example? Gas isn't a thing here.

> What happens when that much energy is so cheap and every home has what amounts to a sizable bomb inside?

There is very little correlation between the amount of energy contained in a device, and its likelihood of exploding. A container of helium does - after all - contain an enormous amount of potential energy (if fused), but that's not gonna happen all on its own.

Your worry about batteries exploding, is because of your experience seeing Li-ion batteries exploding (or at least burning very quickly) in videos. But this is something specific to the Li-ion battery chemistries. It has very little to do with the energy stored in the battery. It's the flammable liquid electrolyte catching fire that's the primary cause.

Solid state chemistries contain even more energy, and do not explode at all. You can cut them in two and nothing happens. Their problem is cycle life though, but that might be solved.

A home battery pack will be built in a much more safe manner than a cell phone battery, they have more space to go on and they're experience less physical stress than a cell phone or even a car. One of these spontaneously catching fire is likely to be a freak accident, possible but extremely rare. And it's likely to be a fire, not an explosion, as the cells will be more contained than in a cell phone. Check out the video of Tesla setting one of their grid storage battery packs on fire. It's not very spectacular.

Are you comfortable parking your car inside of your garage? Even with a full tank of gas? Safety issues are real, but they have been solved before and are being solved now

I've seen cars burn, they don't explode like the movies, they burn. Like a couch.

Lithium batteries are much more energetic about their failures, "explode", and they can do so with only minor electrical or mechanical mistreatment.

A car in my garage is cold, outside of very odd situations it is not going to spontaneously ignite. Cars burn in accidents or when you are running them, not randomly in the middle of the night.

The "proper" safety for a large lithium battery pack is in a concrete sarcophagus or similar vessel capable of shielding and containing a catastrophic failure.

> Cars burn in accidents or when you are running them, not randomly in the middle of the night.

My co-worker's nanny's car, a new Subaru, burst into flames in her driveway while it was just sitting without the engine running. Non-crash fires occur so frequently that the Highway Loss Data Institute (HLDI) produces a Noncrash Fire Losses Report, and insurance companies calculate premiums based on that data.

https://www.iihs.org/media/c93b98d8-6a7d-44a1-810e-4468ec539...

This is really wrong. Cars have been recalled as recently as this year due to fire risk when not running.

Not only that, but they are actually no more energetic than gasoline. This is an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdaFk3w6rUY

Gasoline actually has a higher risk of becoming "explosive", though as you pointed out that is not the most common outcome.

Have you seen batteries explode? They make an audible bang, and can even push things around if they are touching those, and that's all. This is because the explosion is contained in a steel sarcophagus (much more efficient than concrete) that detracts a little from portability, but is already included on the costs people are bringing to this thread.

These technologies typically went through a period of development where safety was not a paramount concern. Once electric cars become mass market we'll probably hit that point.

Have you ever calculated how much energy a gas powered car or truck stores?

Yet we even let everyone pour that stuff into their tanks, without any supervision whatsoever ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Gasoline just burns. It takes a very specific state to get it to explode.

Not that I'm recommending it, but you could fill a coffee can with gasoline and light it on fire and with only minimum care, be completely safe.

Do the same with an equivalent-energy amount of lithium batteries and you better have a good pair of running shoes.

Go watch some youtube videos of exploding laptops.

The latest big MacBook battery has 100 watt hours of energy fully charged.

A gallon of gasoline has 33,000 watt hours of energy.

So that macbook's battery has 2.3 teaspoons, about 1 centimeter cubed, or 11 mL equivalent energy of gasoline. I have spilled that much gas on my shoe and not given it a second thought. Another way to put it is a laptop battery has about as much energy in it as a shot of vodka.

I'll happily store many bottles of liquor in the cupboard without a thought of the fire risk.

An equivalent battery carelessly stored is scary.

I get where you are coming from here, but this comparison is deeply flawed. It is possible for some lipos to burn explosively, but this isn't the common scenario for the designs and containment used in vehicles. The car fires that we've seen with lithium ion fires have not presented as massive explosions, though the fires themselves can be very difficult to extinguish.

You know that millions of homes have natural gas installation, capable of emitting essentially unlimited amounts of explosive gas with only a single leak required, right?

And you keep the macbook on your lap for how long without a worry?

The failure mode of a modern lithium battery is much more benign that the quarter-stick of TNT you're making it out to be.

> Do the same with an equivalent-energy amount of lithium batteries and you better have a good pair of running shoes.

You're just fear-mongering, and that's an absurd level of hyperbole.

Thank goodness New Jersey and Oregon have the sense to restrict untrained operators from handling that dangerous substance!

While there are certainly DIYers and the like, gas, plumbing and electricity in the US at least are all to be installed by professionals who have a license on the line, so this will be greatly mitigated. Moreover, energy density of gasoline and natural gas is significantly greater, although more meaningfully, the total energy of an EV battery is equivalent or less than a full tank of gas.

Hmm, why wouldn't they be certified? I suppose you will get a small number of people rolling their own (which is going on right now, with people reusing 18650s), but I assume it shouldn't be hard to require all commercially available units to be certified, we do that for furnaces, water heaters, etc.

It wouldn't be hard to require, it would be very hard to enforce with high coverage.

One these things become popular, just go on eBay or Amazon and buy a cheap one. There are loads and loads of electrical devices which are required to be certified which you can buy which are clearly not.

That's certainly possible, anyone can walk into a Home Depot and buy a breaker box (which is certified) and install it themselves (well or badly), but realistically that doesn't seem to happen so often it's a serious problem, partly because we have home inspections to catch the unsafe botched attempts (when they try to sell their death-trap homes).

Natural gas leaks are worse.

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