Why battery costs have plunged since 2010
fullstackeconomics.com
fullstackeconomics.com
Massive battery installations plus solar are already cheaper than operating an *existing* natural gas peaker plant in California. Batteries that are 50% cheaper will make that true across the U.S. That could happen by 2025 if Tesla's new battery process is successful.
Battery installations' faster response to grid demand also means they can quickly undercut remaining operating non-baseline usage, making the most polluting plants even less economically viable.
Excess storage in EVs and batteries will allow flattening the duck curve to rely even more on efficient baseload and shift renewable energy production to times of demand.
Things are going to go into overdrive faster than nearly all predictions... but still not fast enough for net zero :(
As a provider I (they) want x GW of new capacity, and will chose whatever costs the lowest amount to get that capacity. Solar is getting so cheap now that overbuilding is an entirely viable option. This is why renewables are getting built over new coal plants, the environmental benefits are just a marketing bonus.
As Engineers/scientists our job is to innovate and get the costs of the "correct" decision low enough that the economic forces take over and steer humanity towards the best outcome.
https://www.inet.ox.ac.uk/files/energy_transition_paper-INET...
> Rapidly decarbonising the global energy system is critical for addressing climate change, but concerns about costs have been a barrier to implementation. Most energy-economy models have historically underestimated deployment rates for renewable energy tech- nologies and overestimated their costs1,2,3,4,5,6. The problems with these models have stimulated calls for better approaches7,8,9,10,11,12 and recent e↵orts have made progress in this direction13,14,15,16. Here we take a new approach based on probabilistic cost fore- casting methods that made reliable predictions when they were empirically tested on more than 50 technologies17,18. We use these methods to estimate future energy system costs and find that, compared to continuing with a fossil-fuel-based system, a rapid green energy transition will likely result in overall net savings of many trillions of dollars - even without accounting for climate damages or co-benefits of climate policy. We show that if solar photovoltaics, wind, batteries and hydrogen electrolyzers continue to follow their current exponentially increasing deployment trends for another decade, we achieve a near-net-zero emissions energy system within twenty-five years. In contrast, a slower transition (which involves deployment growth trends that are lower than current rates) is more expensive and a nuclear driven transition is far more expensive. If non-energy sources of carbon emissions such as agriculture are brought under control, our analysis indicates that a rapid green energy transition would likely generate considerable eco- nomic savings while also meeting the 1.5 degrees Paris Agreement target.
Aren't natural gas prices pretty high currently ? And with many countries moving away from gas in their electricity production, or at least moving it to peak-only, the price will go down.
Furthermore, batteries with what capacity? I highly doubt they're of the size required to sustain multi-week storm/bad weather events, even for the rarity they'd be in sunny California, le alone the rest of the US.
And from a globally strategic point of view, isn't it better to focus battery capacity on decarbonising sectors such as transportation ( cars, trucks, even trains apparently ( i still think electrifying the network is a better idea overall, but i can see how it'd be cheaper upfront to just add a battery car)) instead of "wasting" TWhs of battery capacity for long term storage.
To survive a multi-week storm/bad weather event with a grid containing only solar and wind, you need a 3x overbuild of solar+wind in an optimal mix, along with a continental grid and 3 hours worth of batteries is all you need for 99.99% reliability: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z
Conveniently leaving out hydro and nuclear… [Edit: which only makes this easier.]
Hydropower is sustainable but has a very limited potential,and its impact on the environment is much, much higher than comparable wind/solar installations.
This is just the uranium, not even touching the thorium. And once we get to this point, there is uranium on the Moon and Mars. The waste-management problem is harder in the political sense than the engineering sense.
How does it matter if you enrich or you use a natural uranium reactor? The amount of fissile material is exactly the same.
> if used with fast breeder reactors
But that's breeding, not enrichment.
> but in addition, there's about 4.5 billion tons dissolved in seawater.
...aaaand there goes your requirement for a breeder. Breeders may very well turn out not to be worth the bother.
> Yet even in systems which meet >90% of demand, hundreds of hours of unmet demand may occur annually.
... and the low end of the range is 72%, which leaves many more hours unaccounted for. Some amount of reliable, clean power is needed on top of the renewables.
This is a proper plan: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/electrify
It has a role for existing hydro and nuclear.
If there is less consumption I would imagine the price would rather go up.
Basically what I’m saying is that the demand curve models a simple market with a fungible good, which can be bought and sold easily. We have to recognise that it’s like studying spherical, frictionless projectiles in physics. A good starting point, but not how the real world works.
Supply curve is missing in these statements.
> Building a power plant is a commitment to buying that product, which locks in that demand regardless of price.
What? Is there some sort of law that requires buyers to buy all of the electricity a power plant can produces?
> And so continued low prices could lead to more construction of gas plants, which leads to an increase in demand.
This is backwards. An increase in demand for electricity might lead to construction of new gas plants, with a bet that even with the increased supply, electricity buyers are willing to pay at least x price for electricity for y duration sufficient to earn a z return on investment for building the new gas plant.
If that's anything resembling correct...then the change-over would be more like replacing all-diesel fuel & engine infrastructure with gasoline.
Hydrogen can be cheap (extracted from natural gas) or green (electrolysis). It can't be both.
Hydrogen is also a monumental PITA to store.
As for storage, it's true that storing hydrogen is problematic but once I calculated that even existing facilities for natural gas in, say, Germany would be sufficient for a whole month of the whole country's grid running off of hydrogen. This is less than the several months provided by using the same storage for natural gas, but since in the following decades, the demand for this gas is going to shrink severely as German buildings are going to be replaced by low-energy buildings (pursuant to the 2010/31/EU Energy Performance of Buildings Directive and the 2012/27/EU Energy Efficiency Directive, as well as presumably future regulations), this capacity might be freed up, and in any case it's a much larger capacity than is predicted to be required (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001429211...) for a 100% renewable grid in Germany.
One interesting idea I don't know the feasibility of but is tempting anyway is ultra-large-scale liquid hydrogen storage. Considering the square-cube law and low density of liquid hydrogen stressing the structure (just 70 kg per cubic metre of liquid hydrogen tank, as opposed to 1000 kg per cubic metre of a water tank, for example), ultra-large-scale storage of hydrogen could be feasible in principle -- certainly much more than for example liquid hydrogen storage for a car, and in industrial settings to boot (as opposed to cars handled by ordinary citizens).
As I understood it natgas storage facilities wouldnt keep hydrogen. It'd leak.
But green hydrogen is only useful if electricity is cheap but batteries are expensive. The original article indicates why batteries aren't expensive and are likely to get dramatically cheaper over the next decade. That's why hydrogen is likely to stay irrelevant except for niche use cases.
e.g. steel manufacturing can use Green Hydrogen for the Reduction reaction, as part of the alternate pathway without coal.
That is absolutely not true. How exactly will cheap batteries for example allow you to make ammonia for agriculture, the chemical industry, etc.? Current global ammonia production alone is worth something like two hundred gigawatts of power continuously pumped into electrolyzers. That's like ten percent of global electric generation at the moment.
Hydrogen from electrolysis is best viewed as an intermediate feedstock for further chemical synthesis, as with ammonia production, methane production, jet fuel production, etc. There is perhaps potential for dumping excess grid electricity into hydrogen storage tanks at power plants as a temporary storage system, i.e. converting the hydrogen back to electricity via fuels cells (not turbines!) to meet electrical demand later.
Hydrogen storage requires special alloys to avoid steel embrittlement however, so it's fairly expensive.
Those bad weather events come usually with lots of wind - which you can harvest, too. So the solution might just be the often propagated energy mix.
And you can build batteries without any rare elements(natrium instead of lithium), so if you build enough of them and enough solar and co. then who cares if some of that energy gets lost, as long as the grid remains stable?
As i have said a few times around here, there's a meteorological phenomenon across Europe now ( since September, and projected to go well into the winter), with bad weather ( clouds, low sunlight), low temperatures, and low wind speeds. Traditional hydro and tidal energy generation are still OK, but solar and wind are at historical lows. And again, this is ongoing for months.
Furthermore, a bad weather event like storms can have winds that are too fast for a wind generator to operate safely.
But the south(west) of europe still has lots of sun, like it almost always has. And a bit further south, there is always sun in the desert.
So yes, I would not deconstruct all the conventional power plants, just yet. And I think having some backup gas plants is not a bad idea, either.
Here is a pretty detailed analysis indicating that the storage costs make that combination infeasible at this point:
http://euanmearns.com/the-cost-of-wind-solar-power-batteries...
The California scenario in that report suggests over $5 trillion needed to switch to solar+batteries.
I get the fact that battery prices are going down. That doesn't mean that grid-scale battery systems are feasible and deployable any time soon.
Fossil fuels are on the exact opposite situation. The more we consume the more expensive they get, and quickly so. That "quickly so" part is actually bad news, but this means that we will almost certainly not increase their usage.
I do really recommend you to look into this.
In short, no, we can't scale fossil fuel production without increasing its costs.
In general, people aren't sitting around wishing they had more electricity. If they wanted to use more it's right there and available.
But they'd have to pay more. We're postulating a scenario in which electricity prices fall precipitously. As far as I'm aware, any time the prices fall for any resource, society consumes it with increasing inefficiency. For example, broadband Internet becomes readily available and people start streaming cat videos, CPU clock speeds skyrocket and Microsoft releases Windows Vista. If renewable energy prices decline thus driving down costs for all energy prices, I suspect we'll find something equally stupid (e.g., mining more bitcoins) to do with the extra capacity rather than decommissioning fossil fuels.
Ultimately we have to choose to decommission fossil fuel plants at the expense of our frivolities, but at least in America we seem to be disappointingly bad at this kind of impulse control (in aggregate).
Moreover, looking at overall energy isn't particularly informative without also analyzing energy costs--according to https://www.statista.com/statistics/183700/us-average-retail..., the energy costs have increased 60% in the last 20 years which would obviously suppress consumption.
We're talking about the opposite--how does our energy use change if prices fall dramatically. Are we really going to replace fossil fuels or do we just find other uses for this new electricity? For one, we're going to be electrifying other applications--all of these new electric cars are going to place new demand on the electrical grid (previously they were energized by gasoline and as such didn't burden the grid). But beyond that, are we going to actually use any excess energy capacity well, or are our applications just going to get less efficient (why should a factory invest in a more efficient machine if energy prices drop precipitously? economics favor the less efficient solution in the same way the economics of plummeting data storage and transfer prices favor bulky electron apps over streamlined native apps).
[1] Not strictly flat, but not exactly a short-term precipitous drop either:
https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/electricity-...
Small gas plants might be needed to fill the gap for a period of time but there's no gap for large scale non renewable power sources (coal, oil, nuclear or large gas) that's big enough to make economic sense.
Most places? As I've mentioned a few times here, there's an ongoing meteorological phenomenon across Europe with bad weather ( clouds and stuff), low wind speeds and cold temperatures. It started around September and is projected to continue well into the winter. Electricity produced by wind is at historical lows, and of course solar is of limited help as well. It's among the contributing factors for the high gas prices.
You'd need a whole lot of batteries and pumped up hydro ( which can't just be put anywhere) to cover for such events.
And depending on faraway places for energy is dangerous, as for instance Germany is discovering now with Russia. Do you imagine Europe depending on Algeria and Morocco solar, for instance, and France pissing them off with some (neo/ex-)colonial matters ( like for instance, France recently lowered quotas for Algerian citizens entering the country, and Algeria was (rightfully) pissed), and them cutting the cables.
Aren't the UHVDC losses just 1,5% per 1000 km? 16% for 10000 km, though, but that might still be economical in some cases.
Sure, shit does happen. Like with everything. Perhaps it could be mitigated with an insurance or multipath?
Political risk is another matter, of course. But we do have gas pipelines crossing such boundaries as well, so surely it's doable?
Would one call geothermal power non-renewable because the radioactive decay in the earth that heats the interior isn't replaceable by a human?
How about all of the hydrogen atoms that irreversibly fuse into helium in the sun, not to mention the materials to make the solar panels and wind turbines to harness that power?
But, hey, there is a glimmer of hope. It's not going to do a damn thing, but cycling instead of driving is still a bit of defiance, even if it's only symbolic.
Realistically, we do have power and control over where and how we work. There is some real muscle in smart people working on hard problems. May not a win. I'm sure you understand the consequences of that. At least, I can go down swinging. As you say, things are going into overdrive.
I'm not going to tell you how to live your life. I am going to encourage you to hold off on that heroin experiment for a while, maybe don't move to a tent in a national park just yet. Things are changing. We don't get a free pass. Some things are going to be real ugly. Maybe, MAYBE, things will be ok.
The iceberg is out there. We're probably going to hit it. We all still have some agency (I hope). If you have to rearrange deck chairs, go for it. Give it a minute. We aren't sunk yet. It doesn't have to be an apocolypse just yet.
The planet is and will be fine, it’s our way of living and society that will go, and that will not happen in your lifetime. So there’s no need for you to suffer with that gloom.
Another even more practical reason: it’s unproductive.
Most of that anxiety is offloaded from those in true power and resold by “the media”. It’s obviously a serious problem but they are feeding you mostly bullshit in order to meet their revenue targets or agendas.
Don’t be a victim of them before being a victim of climate change.
You can't know that. Rising temperatures, acidity and water levels in oceans, deforestation, overfishing, drastic temperature amplitudes and higher frequency of natural disasters can all be devastating for whole ecosystems, which could have cascading effects. Nobody can reliably predict how all of that will turn out, but it could turn out really bad. Will the planet "be fine" if a big portion of ocean life is extinct and huge swaths of land are uninhabitable? Depends on your definition of fine i guess.
My response was in order to address this generalized anxiety and guilt that's mostly unproductive and in some cases quite maquiavelic.
So yes, "the planet" will be fine. Our coddled asses attached to our infantilized minds probably not, so instead of this schizophrenic attitude ranging from "We're doomed!" to "I want to talk to the manager", maybe we should be more productive and do our best while understanding we might not get what we want and that's "fine".
Not saying there won’t be life left on the planet even if it looks like Venus. Life is adaptable. But it wouldn’t flourish like it does today.
I've never heard this scenario from anyone who has spent any time reading the science. Unless you can give some details of why this is something that's worth having on the radar, I'm going to dismiss that scenario as a fear-mongering doomsday prediction.
The ecosphere, yes, but I'm concerned about humanity specifically.
Also, it might be possible the same argument could hold for Venus. It probably thrived (at reasonable temperatures) for billions of years before it didn't.
Any way, it won't happen in a day, and as with any pandemic humans are great at finding solutions, (see covid). Sure some people will die along the way as they don't get with the program, but that's expected.
Unless our energy sources become useless (ie. sun blackout AND depleted oil AND no wind) we will have a way to keep warm, produce oxygen and grow food.
The worst case would be we'd have to move into underground bunkers.
My takeaway is the opposite: COVID is a lot simpler on a problem solving scale than climate change and we're not exactly doing well with COVID.
Conversations about what we should and should not do cannot be held on a basis of nihilism. I respectfully suggest that people with the view of "fuck the planet, I'll be dead anyway" should not be permitted a voice at the public policy table.
Yes, because it's out of our control.
> Conversations about what we should and should not do cannot be held on a basis of nihilism.
100% agree, just as they shouldn't be held on the basis of fear, panic and self-righteous superficial knowledge based on the arrogance that "we" are so precious and "can do anything", a kind of celestial exceptionalism "we" use to point out the flaws in others but not in ourselves.
> I respectfully suggest that people with the view of "fuck the planet, I'll be dead anyway" should not be permitted a voice at the public policy table.
I 100% respectfully disagree, mostly because it's not practical and will backfire. Also the assumption that others are dumb and shouldn't be listened can only come from people who are very narrow minded to the point they themselves are "dumb".
Personally, I think that any action we can take towards making things better will pay off. Action is better than inaction. There will be negative consequences to climate change, but acting sooner could save millions, even hundreds of millions of lives, so don't give up now. We're just finally starting to see real adoption of electric cars and grid-scale batteries, those industries are set to boom. The solution is at our doorstep, now is not the time to just go "ah, fuck it, why bother?".
We've already warmed up the planet by about 1C from pre-industrial times, and...well, pretty much nothing consequential happened
Based on the most likely temperature impacts of the most realistic emission scenarios, we're looking at an additional 0.8C (optimistic) to 1.5C (pessimistic) on top of that by the end of the century, with the temperatures plateauing shortly afterwards. No, Earth will not become the next Venus, nor will Greenland and Antarctic melt (it's -30C there right now)
...is "Greenland and the Antarctic are still cold" really your hot take on climate change?
These lithium iron batteries are more stable, have extremely long life and avoid cobalt and nickel while having only slightly less energy density. Pretty sure they poised to replace lead acid in almost all applications over the next few years.
Tesla is finally replacing the lead acid 12v battery with a lithium 12v and of course they a going LifePO4 for the main pack in some lower end models.
I just replaced my worn out high end AGM's in my RV with LiFePO4's, 3 times the price but 4 times the usable capacity in only slightly more space and much less voltage sag throughout the discharge cycle and much faster recharge acceptance and at least 6 times the cycle life, should be the last batteries I need to buy for it.
1. https://www.amazon.com/LiFePO4-Battery-2000-5000-battery-Off...
I could see these modules hitting $500 within 5 years.
https://shop.signaturesolar.us/products/24v-200ah-lifepower4...
>> Economists have found that manufacturing costs often decline at a predictable rate. In a model known as an experience curve, costs fall by the same percentage (called the learning rate) each time industry-wide volume doubles...
So somewhat of a meta... Moore's law is a specific instance. The Y axis is price. The X axis is production volume, not time. Usually, rising production volume must overcompensate for falling prices to maintain a such a trend.
Lunar travel, for example, did not get much cheaper over the decades because volume didn't increase. The automobile industries' golden years of annual price improvements ended in the 1920s. The US market had peaked^, because demand for cars was finite.^ If the price of a car halves, we don't triple the number of cars we buy.
With computing, demand (or capacity to consume) has been able to "keep up" with Moore's Law. The market overcompensates for falling chip prices with increased consumption. More X for the X-axis. I think this is where we are currently for electric. Home installation, commercial and grid installations are still speculative. Vehicles are no longer speculative. The demand is there. It's not open-ended like computing, because once every vehicle has a battery... But for the next few years, demand will predictably rise to overcompensate for falling prices.
^https://hbr.org/resources/images/article_assets/hbr/7409/745...
We need about 50 TWh of batteries to convert the world's cars to electric, and a similar amount to convert the world's grid to renewables. We're currently producing about 0.3 TWh annually, and have more than that coming online in each of 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025.
So we should have at least a decade of strong demand to keep driving down prices. Of course those low prices will probably stimulate more use cases, but it does seem likely that those new uses aren't as large as vehicles or grid storage.
I like to look at sinking prices of technology through the the mental model of an inherent minimum cost, where learning or scale doesn't just make it magically cheaper but reduces avoidable overhead. Plenty of product types that have started expensive and then became cheaper and cheaper have clearly seen all the economy of scale that could reasonably be expected, they wouldn't become any cheaper per unit if the market consumed 10x as much. Same for spending a few more decades making them, unlikely to learn ways to make it web cheaper.
>>If prices don't sink further because demand elasticity is maxed out it has to be the result of some form of market failure
The "normal/natural" state is that prices do not simply continue dropping always.
US automobile prices were at their best in the late 20s, with a model-T-costing <$10k adjusted. By that point annual sales were maxed, competition had taken most profits out of the game... Not incidentally, the depression was starting to happen.
In the industry, cars-as-fashion became a thing.
When an industry hits peak demand, prices don't just continue to fall until the industry becomes tiny. At least, that's not a very common pattern and the trend certainly doesn't just continue to here as a continuation of an expansionary learning curve.
Welfarist/marginalist economic models don't take into account that time/history/economics is directional. Expanding markets don't follow the same rules as contracting ones.
Yes, expanding markets work different than stable or contacting markets. But that difference is that the expansion can gloss over certain failure modes. Yes, Intel might have occasionally pushed out a new Pentium generation if x86 had been the only CPU architecture in the world and AMD (and Cyrix) had not existed, because the demand for instructions per second rises with availability (this abstraction conveniently groups demand from replacement upgrades and demand from new use cases into a single bin). But that would have still been a broken market, even while the brokenness was temporarily hidden by demand elasticity/expansion.
Model T wasn't the most efficient moment of car manufacturing, not if you include features in the equation. A car with the performance of the model T wouldn't sell today for a dollar beyond scrap value, and even Tatas and Dacias can e.g. be started without cranking and so on. The closest equivalent to a Model T would be a Tuktuk and those are cheaper today even before adjusting for a full century of inflation.
You were already able to get LFP batteries outside of China for a bit cheaper than that for 2 years at car maker wholesale quantities.
Battery cells plummeted as a part of vehicle cost.
The cheapest cost I ever heard quoted in China was $64 per kw/h. I don't preclude that battery makers with own car factories like BYD have real costs around $30-$40.
Taking cost at $40, BYD Dolphin had $1200 in it, comparable to costs economy class IC cars have in their whole powertrain.
But EV vehicles are on overall easier to engineer. Part counts of EVs are much smaller than IC cars.
More importantly, you can deliver satisfying driving experience with much smaller car if you use electric traction, while <999cc engines will have small powerbands no matter what amount of smarts is added to their ECUs.
I always tell that 1-to-1 IC, and EV comparisons make little sense. EVs are a whole different class of vehicles.
Putting a slash in the unit there makes this read as "kilowatt per hour", which really doesn't make sense.
Think of it as the power the battery can continuously provide (in kilowatt) multiplied (not divided!) by the time it can sustain that power (in hours). Hence "kWh", "kilowatt hour".
Another thing is that not all LFPs are necessarily ideal for automotive use. For instance, batteries that can only safely discharge at 1C might be a bad idea to use unless the vehicle has a large enough battery pack that the load is spread out over a lot of cells. So, price isn't everything. Obviously, high energy density is also much desired for use in cars.
That said, I think LFPs are probably the ideal technology right now for replacing most of the world's combustion-engine ground transportation infrastructure with battery-electric vehicles. We just need to manufacture them at the necessary scale, and right now it's only China that's doing it. (It's like if Saudi Arabia discovered oil and the rest of the world said, "Well, I guess Saudi Arabia just owns the whole oil market. No reason to invest in it ourselves, because we can just get it from KSA." In the 20th century that would have obviously been a strategic blunder, but that's what the world is basically doing now with batteries. Whoever can make batteries cheaper than everyone else can use that to dominate the energy industry going forward. Fortunately there are fewer moats; anyone can make batteries if they can get the ingredients, and LFP ingredients are mostly not that rare except maybe lithium and copper.)
LFP is great for cheaper vehicles and awesome for grid storage (which is not weight sensitive). The vast majority of batteries in the near-term transition will be LFP due to their common materials and super cheap cost.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_GtSA4Ig9s
"A Brief History of LFP, Patents, Licencing Costs, Pricing // and Tesla" by The Limiting Factor
Surprises me how long it takes for these prices to tickle down into normal consumer goods. But they will, the true revolution of electric assisted urban transport has only just begun. Really exciting to see all the wacky new transport modes that are created left and right, I wonder which ones will stick
It’s a combination of having relatively well-off consumers, who lack the time/knowledge to start messing with their expensive machines and lack of generic spare parts due to the likes of Bosch locking down their components, and creating specialised computers (similar to how modern cars work) so that only authorised repair shops can work on them.
[1] https://ampedcycling.com/e-bike-battery-prices-what-can-i-ex...
A better example would be Lunacycle, which sells components for DIYing e-bikes. A 704Wh battery from them costs $550. $781/kWhr. Bafang is another well-known component supplier and sells a 754 Wh battery pack for $600. $795/kWhr.
Those are both 52v packs which are the most 'exotic' on the market at the moment, so there is a bit of a price premium.
In all cases, we're talking retail pricing for complete battery packs, with integrated battery management systems and packaging.
The article is talking about wholesale prices paid by companies buying these cells by the million unit quantity.
It is already happening for normal e-bikes, where 3000+ used to be the starting range for a somewhat decent e-bike. This is currently about 2000+ but in a few years it will hopefully be possible to get a somewhat decent e-bike for 1000 - 1500.
As for small engines, Fiat's 0.9 TwinAir is enjoyable once you get rid of the factory tune that is super-optimized for low emissions in the official tests at the expense of driveability. It even has extra-low rev limiters in the first three gears. Starting from the 105 bhp version you can get 120 bhp and 200 Nm of torque with only ECU tuning and removing baffles from the airbox, makes it a fun little thing.
It is. Nobody will buy a full-sized sedan with 800cc engine, unless you are in China.
There are a minimal size powertrains a car body need to be able to house for its size to be sellable.
The matter is you can put much smaller, and cheaper EV powertrains relative to the body size/weight for a much better driving experience.
You can use freed space to pile in extra niceties, which would've required bigger body size for an IC powered car, thus necessitating bigger, more expensive powertrain.
The attraction of hybrids was exactly that you can get a crap engine to provide driving quality of a much more expensive setup, like a good V6, or entry level V8 at lower cost, in a smaller car.
But "just better" is the worst enemy of good enough. You can throw away the whole IC altogether, and provide a 3L+ I6 experience in a micro car.
And there is no way EVs need less space for battery + motors in total. Have you seen the size of a Model X battery pack? Only difference is they typically use space below the floor of the car, rather than in front. They are typically a bit wider than ICE cars to compensate and give sufficient interior space.
You will have to, and you say "The size of the car is in no way constrained by the engine size," which is a complete nonsense. On the lower end, it's constrained by sellability of a car, and on the upper end it's physically constrained by the size of car frame.
> Only difference is they typically use space below the floor of the car, rather than in front.
Yes, and that's a very big advantage. Even very tiny EVs can have batteries with hundreds of kilowatts of power output.
Yes, as already said, I completely agree.
> and on the upper end it's physically constrained by the size of car frame
In theory yes, but in practice you don't really feel this limitation, that's my point. As I said, you can fit a K24 engine into a Honda Fit (B-segment supermini car) without modifying the frame or bodywork. A turbocharged K24 can put out 300 kilowatts without breaking a sweat.
Using bigger engines, for bigger cars really makes sense.
If you "used up" battery that's due to be sent to the recycler, How much of that 1200 could you hope to recoup? (I assume a power train can only be sold for scrap for a tiny fraction)
Lithium is cheap, currently lithium hydroxide is at ~30$/kg. Of the total cost of a typical LFP battery, the lithium is ~2%. The rest of the materials round up to ~10%, the bulk of the cost is capital and labor.
I often see second hand cells from electric busses on 1688.
Can u give more details? Where is a good place to buy some 2nd hand LFPs for trial projects, ~50-500kwh quantities
This seems to be wrong by an order of magnitude. $500/kWh is more plausible at that time.
Otherwise you are claiming that you paid $7.5 for a 15 kWh worth of cells, including the shipping, in ~2010.
Hmm, so $100/kWh is really good!
He's a good one to follow. I look forward to reading more of his FullStackEconomics posts.
"experience curve" - the more you do something, the easier it gets. Hence, ship daily
The world is flooded with 18650 size cells that are marketed at 2500+ mAh but measure 500 mAh.
Certainly the higher profit margin on the consumer side must help the other less corrupt sectors.
The funny thing about it - it isn't clear where the value really accrues. There is continual downward pressure on prices for the full system but there hasn't been particularly good ways to recoup value from the utilities models and bidding as merchant power is super tough to make money.
If the hope that electricity prices keep going down from cheap solar (speculating future energy prices is a losers game) it only gets more difficult to install ESS systems. I.e. any system you install now will be out performed by the system in 2 years especially if you are in a bidding market.
As someone who builds projects and invests in climate tech companies I find the prices coming down great and open up more opportunity but I just don't know where the value accrues. For example Fluence going public -- they make money on the control & IT side of the system. So any price decrease in the hardware (Siemens) will likely be recouped from Fluence in service costs.
TL,DR; Glad the prices are coming down - I'm not entirely sure the narrative is right about where this goes and the gatekeepers (utilities + regulators) haven't fully bought in - ie compensation for the value proposition from ESS hasn't been proved en masse. Federal policies might be the finger on the scale that really continues to keep the growth of ESS + solar/wind going strong.
We are going into uncharted waters for grid balancing though and I suspect the utilities will recoup money through system upgrade payments defrayed across the ratebase.
And Panasonic had invested, and received massive investment from the likes of Apple for years before.
Also, note that the Gigafactory was built in 2014 but prices were dropping well before.
The far more likely cause for the decline of batter prices (and why I had predicted they would decline in the early 2010s) was the massive investment by consumer electronics, and particularly smartphone makers, in better and cheaper battery technology.
Elon Musk's best move was taking advantage of the investments the smartphone industry was putting into reducing battery costs.
Tesla is pushing us towards Terawatt scale of production.
Time-of-use metering is not new. The UK has had the option of cheap overnight tariff for decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_7 - although that was traditionally implemented as a separate circuit.
Meanwhile batteries are still useful at grid level for "frequency response" and stabilisation of dips (e.g. generator trip-outs). Being able to turn on a few hundred megawatts within a 50Hz cycle is a very useful feature.
Knowing the price of something you consume is taking away your fundamental freedom? If that's the case, you should probably stop looking at prices when making any purchases - all things from groceries, electronics, cars ... wouldn't want to lose more of it.
It goes to show how meaninglessly people now use that word - it's essential become a flag for "anything I like (or dislike)" with no bearing on reality.
So I guess that's one more flaw in the extreme anarchist case for more nuclear power.
An electric car driven 30 miles per day is going to use 3000-9000 Wh, a 10 W LED left on overnight is going to use ~120 Wh.
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-coal-tops-wind-as-primary-elec...
This trait has been slowly but surely bred out of the modern population I think.
We already have boilers that turn off during peak hours, but you can also have your thermostats take the cost of electricity into account, there is a video by Technology Connections on that ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0f9GpMWdvWI ). You should also have a "run when it is cheap" button on your appliances, most already have a delayed start feature, we can be a little smarter. Electric cars are even better because not only you can schedule charging but they are also batteries.
We already have the technology to do all that, at most, all we need is a standardization effort. Power line communication seems like a good fit. It is already used in smart meters to automate readings, and this way, any device that is plugged in knows how much it costs and can adjust, including the big red display if you want one.
Similarly the batteries in cars are very easy to charge according to rime of use prices or predicted marginal carbon.
It feels like a step backwards to force this kind of gamification onto people.
I realized that me myself could suffice with quite tiny 10kwh battery for a week. I do not eat stuff that requires refrigerator running all the time and I bake my humble pies with Russian Gas.
A large bank can take advantage that typical is far less than worst case, and not everyone will hit the worst case at the same time. Thus a large bank to supply the same number of users can be far smaller than every user having their own small bank. (though it is possible for all the small banks to supply to each other)
My company has a foundry where we melt iron. Our production schedule is planed with the power company months in advance so we can get the lowest possible rates. The factory only works the night shift. The factory shuts down for maintenance in December (the power we don't use goes to Christmas lights). We are not the only company doing that.
Not all industry can respond those. Restaurants use a lot of energy (I'm guessing less than cooking at home though - anyone know how to check this), but they have to cook when people want food not when energy is abundant.
What is your foundry yearly "capacity" factor? Below 30% if only night shifts and some monthes off?
I'm curious wether foundry like yours could run only on PV produced electricity and some wind.
We have one factory that does 5 months of production, then 7 of maintenance. Everything is replaced in those 7 months, thus ensuring there are no breakdowns (just in time doesn't work if the conveyor breaks). The workers mostly go to a different factory in the area on the opposite schedule, we plan labor that way so they have a job year round just a different destination.
How does this square with this?
> Moreover, this would also trickle down to consumers at least until industries respond by making their processes more efficient which would presumably drive public sentiment in favor of pollution (regrettably, I suspect we are a weak-willed people these days, but I’d be happy to be disproven).
People have the power to vote in the US. They have had many decades to vote for politicians that will increase taxes on fossil fuel. European countries have voted to do that many, many years ago.
It befuddles me when blame is placed on corporations in a country whose population explicitly prioritizes driving pickup trucks and SUVs for grocery and school runs. Any upwards movement in fossil fuel prices, which are already among the lowest for large democratic countries, results in the general public to be furious at politicians.
The facts illustrate a simple truth: Voters in America only want a reduction in usage of fossil fuels as long as it does not affect their expected future lifestyle.
> It befuddles me when blame is placed on corporations in a country whose population explicitly prioritizes driving pickup trucks and SUVs for grocery and school runs. Any upwards movement in fossil fuel prices, which are already among the lowest for large democratic countries, results in the general public to be furious at politicians.
Everyone is just responding to market incentives at the end of the day, which is the point behind carbon pricing: align our environmental and financial incentives. So I prefer to focus on systemic solutions rather than placing blame, although I certainly think it’s good and useful to blame/shame corporations and politicians who actively oppose the public good (even though this kind of corruption is another form of responding to incentives).
> Voters in America only want a reduction in usage of fossil fuels as long as it does not affect their expected future lifestyle
Perhaps, but that’s irrelevant because we don’t actually need to change our lifestyles very much. Implement a carbon tax and gradually raise the price over time so it gives corporations some time to optimize their processes for efficiency thereby keeping consumer costs low. That corporations can and do respond to legislated incentives is one of the takeaways of TFA, after all.
There's also such significant demand that at the retail level, it's unlikely that you'll see < $150/kWh anytime soon, I would think.
As batteries get cheaper, the potential market also gets much much much larger. At $275/kWh it is pretty attractive for a huge part of the consumer market, and almost no one knows that batteries are that cheap already.
Really looking forward to a future with cheap energy storage and super cheap energy generation from solar and wind. It will enable a huge surge of productivity in the global south, especially if people can electrify without having to use super-expensive grid transmission systems.
Even $250 per kWh of LFP storage with 5000 cycles means 5 cents per kWh out of the battery.
And in reality the cost is even less since after 5000 cycles the battery will still have 70-80% of original capacity and can keep going for more cycles.
these are amazon prices on https://www.amazon.in/Luminous-12150H-Solar-Battery-Multicol...
i can get 200ah for this price for same 5 years warranty included and no shipping. its sold at the shop on the other block so shipping and warranty is included.
oh, btw you cant really buy stuff from china to india. the borders are either closed or you have to pay 40% customs so that is out of question. the reason why i think LFP at 275 is expensive , again because the replacement before 5 years gives me another 5 years without paying again so essentially i would be getting for $1500, 12 * 200 * 16 and sure its bulky AF but i do not have to drive more than a mile for getting it to home so yeah
uh, this one says Long cycles (1500 @80% DOD, 5000 @ 20% DOD); AH efficiency > 90%; WH efficiency > 80%
sure 1500 is not 5000 but its also not 500. second, it says 60 months warranty which they mean "replacement" so if i exhaust the 1500 in 5 years,they would replace it at no extra charge, suppose it happens after 4 years. the new batteries would give me another 4 ~ years so in total i would get around 5+4~5 years life out of paying just once. i'm not saying LFP is bad, just expensive.
I paid $100/kWh for LFP 3.2V 280Ah cells delivered from China to my country in Europe.
As editor, I would have encouraged author to include three more facets.
What is the market size for batteries? Give me a range. From incremental replacement of existing tech to total switchover.
Projections into the future. Per Wright's Law, driving down production costs, the marginal costs (?) of batteries will approach material costs. So what is that point and when will it happen?
The driver for Wright's Law is investment. What is that shape? Spending $X billions will reduce the price of 1kwh of batteries by $Y dollars. Mostly to train us noob observers and misc other policy makers to think in these terms. So during the food fights over our futureperfect carbon negative economy, tax payers and lobbyists for the captains of industry can say stuff like
"Ahem. Yes madam Senator, excellent question. Per our analysis, if the USA govt invests and underwrites 100 megabucks for the next decade, we'll bring to market 100 megawhats (sic), at below current prices and decreasing into the future, employing 100 kilopeeps (sic), resulting in 400 megabucks of tax and licensing revenue back to the USA govt over the next 40 years. Doing so will guarantee our grandchildren's economic security and prosperity. We ask for your support. Thank you."
Batteries are price takers for materials such as iron, but for materials such as lithium, they are price setters. The price of lithium follows the same Wright's law curve as batteries do. Lithium is quite common, so its price decreases as quantities increase due to Wright's law. And batteries consume most of the world's lithium, so the lithium demand follow battery demand.
I wonder where all of the battery waste goes and if we are truly better off with piles of lithium batteries but reduced carbon footprint. Did I miss some recycling innovation for said batteries?