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Comment by newyankee | Hacker News Reader

I am personally a firm believer that a sub 100$/kwh retail price LFP battery with 10k cycle life will be a reality in < 10 years and change our relationship with energy. I wish there could be modular energy blocks that we can move around portably and charge/ discharge for different loads (not just EV)

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Ten years is long. I'm pretty sure that Tesla is already buying them below that price right now for their China operation. Retail prices are of course a different matter. This market is supply constrained so unless you are negotiating hard for large volume orders, it's pretty hard to buy battery cells directly. That indeed might take ten years to get fixed.

Anyway, you can buy some Tesla power wall for your home at quite steep prices right now. Considering the difference in price for that and their actual cost, margins on those might be very lucrative for Tesla right now. They charge as much as 8500$ for a 13.5 KW powerwall. If they source the batteries for 100$ per kwh, that's a nice markup.

At this point the cool kids on the DIY forums have worked out exactly how to build your own powerwall equivalent using LFP cells bought directly from China. It's enough of a savings to make it a worthwhile project.

do you have links for that?

My personal favorite is DIY Solar Forum. I'm more into LFP batteries and solar for my RV than for my house, but here is a direct link to their DIY Powerwall subforum: https://diysolarforum.com/forums/diy-powerwalls.25/

As cool as that sounds in a certain sense, I would be shocked (no pun intended) if doing so wouldn't void one's homeowner's insurance. There's no way in hell I would put so much concentrated energy in an amateur pack anywhere near a home.

I think a lot of people are putting them in metal sheds in their gardens, which somewhat mitigates that risk.

Moved into a metal-rental house where the a prior owner did a lot of his own custom electric and hvac installation.

About half a million in medical bills from that.

So yea, keep it in the shed please.

What does this mean? Previous owner's medical bills? yours?

The cool kids who are a lot braver about their house burning down or local grid problems being blamed on them that I am.

Price is already there. I bought ~89$/kwh LFP batteries last year (shipping brought them over ~$100/kwh though). Some LFP batteries already have a 5000+ cycle count, I'd expect way less than a 10 year outlook.

I read about such prices in articles about EVs but have never seen them in practice in a completely assembled pack.

I think so too but I also think that the groundbreaking research that will underpin that change is not going to be trumpeted in the press ahead of time but instead will quietly show up as incremental improvements to the current processes and materials. The venue for announcement will likely be the WIPO.

I think this is less about ground breaking research and more about simply ramping up volume production to the point where the market isn't supply constrained anymore. With the EV industry basically growing as fast as batteries can be produced, that might take a while. But as that happens, cost will continue to improve for manufacturers and that should start reflecting out in unit prices. The important thing to realize is that production cost and product price are two things.

In a supply constrained industry full of EV manufacturers desperate to buy any batteries at all, the profit margins are going to be insane for battery manufacturers for quite some time to come. So, we might not see lower prices until production volumes start meeting demand. That demand is for existing batteries at their existing prices. A better battery at a higher price would likely do equally well. However, new and improved batteries should drive the prices of the older ones down. So, we might end up with some commodity good enough batteries produced in very high volumes that will actually become affordable at some point.

Let's hope that there will be a major effort to make batteries not only cheaper but cheaper to recycle. Right now we are treating ground up batteries as high grade ore rather than to be able to retrieve their component parts in relatively pure state from the battery itself. There are probably very good reasons for this but it strikes me that we may be going from one environmental problem into another. A few hundred kilos of chemical waste per vehicle is not a great prospect to look forward to.

How much waste is left after the "high grade ore" is processed? I thought we were pretty good at extracting metals from stuff.

Anywhere from 5 to 75% depending on who you believe.

https://cen.acs.org/materials/energy-storage/time-serious-re...

Note that this is in flux, more recent articles may give different (hopefully higher) numbers.

There is plenty of investment going into recycling. Basically recycling lithium from spent batteries is vastly easier compared to refining it from naturally occurring deposit that only have tiny trace amounts of it when measured in parts per million. That's why lithium is so expensive. There's no shortage of it but refining it from naturally occurring deposits is a very energy intensive process due to the low concentrations of it even in some of the richer deposits. Recovering it from a batteries that actually contain many kilos of it is going to be not a hard cost equation for a wannabe recycler. In the unlikely case that somebody were to actually dump EV batteries in a landfill that would just create a nice business opportunity for other companies. Much better to sell batteries directly to such companies.

But if you are genuinely worried about environmental impact, you should of course be very angry about anything ICE vehicle related where we convert fossil fuels into planet destroying quantities of CO2 without regard to how the oil is mined, how badly it destroys the environment or how many babies the exhaust fumes kill.

Exaggerating a little here but just making the point here that there is a bit of double standards here. When it comes to ICE vehicles, nobody gives a shit where their oil comes, how many children were involved mining the Cobalt involved in removing the sulfur from their diesel/petrol (yes, that's a thing). But as soon as we talk EVs people suddenly get hyper critical about how resources are mined and used and where stuff comes from. It's more than a little hypocritical.

Yes there are some challenges (and business opportunities) but it pales in comparison to the absolute dumpster fire that is the ICE vehicle industry and its apologists.

It is perfectly possible to see another ecological catastrophe coming and to try to avoid a repeat of past mistakes.

If you want to really help the planet: don't use an ICE don't use a BEV, ride a bike.

About the double standard: I'm guessing the cobalt used for replacing the ICE will be an order of magnitude or two more than what has been + will be used for portable electronic devices. Or am I full of balonie ?

Cobalt free batteries are already being produced and the cobalt used in the remaining batteries can be recycled.

If LFP does get to 10_000 cycles usable, that's 50 years at 200 cycles per year.

Cars are going to get much more durable, or it's going to have to be easy to move a pack to a new chassis three or four times. Car manufacturers would probably prefer the latter.

Either that, or we get my imagined rustpunk future, with multi-acre demolition yards full of rusting car bodies piled five high, all wired up and acting as grid storage.

The recycling problem is there, definitely; but it's not overwhelming. And it's much less of a problem than methane emissions and toxic chemical emissions from fracking for oil.

This would be ideal. But car manufacturers would hate to no longer sell fashion and status items but just transportation.

“I think this is less about ground breaking research and more about simply ramping up volume production to the point where the market isn't supply constrained anymore.“

These happen hand in hand. It’s analogous to semiconductor improvements that take 1-10 thousand minor improvements (R&D) over the global supply chain during a given year to result in real gains.

I too believe that modular energy blocks are key to price and technology competition. But tech vendors really don't like competition, so I doubt that this will be a reality unless forced by regulators.

Regular batteries began to be standardized in 1928 by American Standards Association (predecessor to ANSI) - according to Wikipedia. We can buy standard batteries in a variety of sizes. I envision a "modular energy block" as something much bigger than these "C" and "D" batteries. But small enough to still be picked up. Perhaps 40 lbs.

So... normal car battery size?

Using Lithium-Ion and adding electronics to make it "modular" - I think it would closer to a cubic foot.

It may be a while until the KWH/kg are high enough to make a removable auxiliary battery that is light enough for the average person to pick up. Right now it looks like Teslas are going about a 4.5 lbs per mile, which is quite heavy. A 30lb battery would barely be worth pulling off the highway to swap. A pair of them wouldn’t get you 15 miles and add a bunch of complexity to your design. In ten years when density has doubled we might be in a very different place.

As the batteries get lighter the cars go farther on the same charge, so maybe we will hit an inflection point sooner than that.

For cars, you would want to automate the swap anyway, so you'd presumably have handling equipment to swap and move batteries between the remove-recharge-store-install steps. I don't think you'd want to use humans in that application.

Until the value of the battery is a tiny fraction of the vehicle, battery swapping will always be a risky proposition.

I as the battery swap station will try to keep the good batteries and swap into someone else's vehicle the terrible batteries. Even if most stations are good actors, it won't take many to destroy the ecosystem by pushing marginal (or worse) batteries into customer vehicles.

Nobody's going to blindly trust a swapping system where the swapped commodity is anywhere between very valuable and toxic waste.

I didn't spell it out in my top post but this is part of my concern as well. My primary battery is going to have to stay mine due to the market for lemons.

A swappable spare battery feels like something I don't need to own. And my hunch is it should be more tactile versus automated, for that reason and because humans are good at manipulating non-standard objects, machines are not. Probably require less weather proofing too.

But now you're limited by how much an average human can carry for fifteen, thirty feet. Propane tanks are 37 lbs new, and those are hard for many people to wrangle until they've burned off a few pounds of propane. 30 lbs, or maybe 15kg feels like a more workable number. But that's < 9 miles per 'cylinder'. I don't know what the threshold is for 'compelling' but I'm pretty damned sure it's a lot more than 8 miles. 25 miles for a pair might get someone's attention, but that's a few years out.

Or an automated replacement process, which still has other issues we haven't addressed in this thread.

You rent the batteries as a service.

https://insideevs.com/news/537644/nio-4-million-battery-swap...

Good points. But, there must be a way to test batteries in an automated way at the replacement station and presumably take them out of service. And, like gasoline distribution, a way to inspect and certify the workings of a replacement station so that the user has good confidence that they are getting a serviceable battery to carry along to the next replacement.

sub 100$/kwh retail price LFP battery with 10k cycle life will be a reality in < 10 years

Look on Alibaba. You can buy that right now.

I would note that they were specifically talking about "retail price". Alibaba, where (based on experience) you have little recourse with refunds and accountability if the product isn't as described, is not a retail outlet.

You might already know this but anything labelled as grade A cells on Alibaba is a scam pure and simple (especially at 100$/kwh). You will get a grade B (used) cell with a somewhat diminished capacity that won't hold for 10k cycles.

To be clear those are usually still great value, but it's worth nothing because people are generally unaware and don't understand that discrepancy between Alibaba prices and what you'd get from a supplier in the US.

Interesting metric. I recently came across this team [1] in Seattle that is building what you mention. Disclaimer: after coming across the team I decided to invest in their equity crowdfunding effort.

[1] https://joulecase.com/

I can see the charm, but they are more expensive per kwh than a powerwall.

However the form factor is a definite winner, along with the stacking. I;m not sure about the integration into solar. But for what it is, a portable power block, its very nice.

On a side note, I would love to see some weather proof alternative to a tesla powerwall. I dislike Tesla as a company, and it pains me to see that they only decent product out there being owned by them

Fascinating company. Not sure I see value proposition though for festival rentals replacing generating power as they aren't completely interchangeable products. Wish them luck though greening up the festival space.

Anker's isn't modular but they do have power devices that overlap with the lower end of their product line.

Allegedly Tesla is already at $130/kwh which part of the reason their margin is so high.

> LFP

I'm so thankful to see that acronym supplanting LifePO4.

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