The rise of batteries in six charts
rmi.org
rmi.org
Two interesting data points to that end
1) The "duck curve" for CA is almost neutral - eg the timing imbalance between peak demand and solar power generation - battery utilization is the most straightforward solution here - https://twitter.com/baker_edmund/status/1750644294673748366
2) There has been a massive decline in rooftop solar applications in CA since solar energy reimbursements dropped - https://twitter.com/thomasopeters/status/1750920941868347539 - some of that is potentially pent up demand, but I think illustrates the role state policy has to play in moving towards "renewables"
It's a bit like changing the tires on a moving bus. Somebody had to pay for the new tires and wheels, and the support truck to run along side the bus, and the extra fuel, and a discount for the new tires, etc. Once the new tires are on the bus can keep driving without support.
And as electricity prices are driven down even further, T&D will come to dominate over energy generation costs.
Few models account for this, but Christopher Clack made one, and the lowest cost energy path was a small amount of investment in distribution now, paired with massive deployment of solar on homes and industrial/commercial.
This won't happen unless utilities are forced into it or their allowed profit model is changed to deliver ratepayers the lowest cost energy, however.
https://xenetwork.org/ets/episodes/episode-146-why-local-sol...
(And of course, perhaps one modeler can get it wrong. But over here in California where the majority of our sky high electricity cost is from T&D, it definitet feels very true. And last national stats I saw had T&D as higher than generation costs)
And there is a 100% chance they will, like my home is today, because 11kW of solar is making about 800W due to cloud cover which has persisted most days of summer.
But that is a PG&E problem (well problem for the consumer and great for their bottom line).
Generation is the majority of the cost across the US: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/prices-and-f...
The people best positioned to take advantage of incentives own their own home and have the disposable cash to make the initial outlay for residential generation.
- Distribution systems today can only handle some percentage of EV penetration in a given area, not 100%. Charging an EV from the roof skips the grid entirely
- The bulk of the cost is labor and permitting, not the modules themselves. Given that, California requires solar on newly constructed homes
- California updated their net metering program so that ratepayers aren’t subsidizing rooftop solar anymore (in NEM 3.0, homeowners get paid wholesale rates)
As long as you have enough sunshine hours in your region.
Southern Spain is fine year-round, but you won't get any meaningful output out of a solar panel in Finnish winter. The rest of Europe lies between those two extremes.
Northern winter will be made more challenging by addition of EVs to the grid, because a lot of electricity is being used for heating as well.
There's also regional variability - cities absolutely require utility-scale solar, just as they require dedicated agricultural land to feed the population, because there's not enough surface area in a city. Rural/suburban areas on the other hand are ideal for integrated rooftop solar.
According to Wikipedia the LCOE on small roof top solar is about twice that of utility solar. [0] So yes, it's dramatically better. But typically the price difference between what the utility is paid and what the customer is charged is 3 times, so your average household is better off installing solar despite generating it at twice the cost of a utility.
The price difference isn't just transmission costs. It's also retail markup, regulatory charges and metering and billing.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_sourc... - there are a lot of tables in that page. Twice looks to be generous to the utilities.
People also learned that the cheap Chinese solar cells die in 5-10 years and aren't worth installing unless your electricity costs are really high.
A lot of the installers got out of the business knowing they were on the hook when the warrantees came calling.
Although, American manufacturers have been restarting since Biden adjusted some of the tariffs in 2023.
We'll see if they go back to producing a decent product or if they just try to shovel garbage like China.
Yesterday we peaked out at 3GW discharging rate, and 4GW charging rate. We are plowing ahead in the transition to utilizing all of our excess solar! We peak at 25GW expected today, so we have a little ways to go but it's incredible how far and how fast they're replacing everything. Clean air FTW! Thanks sun!
-- Temperatures are mild throughout most of TX (50s and 60s F); temps in CA are similar, perhaps a bit warmer;
-- It's roughly mid-day in both places (3PM TX, 1PM CA);
-- TX has a population of ~30M, CA has ~39M
..yet somehow right now TX is consuming ~47GW (per ercot) while CA is only consuming ~23.5GW (per caiso). What gives?
1. TX has more heavy industry than CA.
2. CA has spent decades and billions on energy efficiency improvements.
3. CA prices are higher, which encourages lower demand, and encourages investments in efficiency. TX has lower prices which encourages more demand.
(2) high energy costs lead to more investment in electrical efficiency in CA;
(3) high energy costs mean that if you're running an aluminum smelter (for example), you don't run it in CA. Or building a new mega data center. so there are fewer electricity-intensive industrial facilities in CA than there would otherwise be.
But what Texas has is much higher requirements for air conditioning, which can't be easily gas-powered at the level of individual houses. Thus the higher electrical energy requirements. Now, you can run gas turbines at the utility level to generate electricity, but that's much less common at the level of individual homes.
1GW of "power" they can supply for 4 hours if you completely discharge the battery.
But that's it. Batteries could supply 100% of the grid briefly, and you still wouldn't be anywhere near having completed a switchover.
Makes the operating economics non trivial.
You can look this up for yourself: https://www.gridstatus.io/live/caiso
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/01/ev-lfp-battery-price-w...
The recent price war in China is a testament to that.
Do they have a model using LiFePOs now?
To the main parent, the runway for further EV drivetrain cost reductions is at least a decade more. The LFP and sodium ion production roadmaps have almost 200 wh/kg sodium ion and 230 wh/kg LFP on it, so that is reasonably a five year likelihood.
10-20 year is solid state, sulfur techs, and other chemistries poised to double or triple density of the cells.
The first curve shows the really low commercial vehicle demand on batteries. This will not be the case, commercial vehicles from busses to worksite vehicles to town delivery vans are going to goddamn explode in demand, once all the business owners realize the TCO of EV drivetrains is so low.
I've been pretty disappointed in electric companies, perhaps they are pricing in grid adaptation, but wind and solar should be relentlessly driving down the cost of electricity and something is up with that.
The dual headed dragon of economies of scale/density in batteries combined with the price drop in electricity for wind/solar is something that ICEs simply cannot win against.
Which is why I chuckle at every mainstream media article about EV sales fluctuations or anti-EV stories, or the inevitable "I can't charge because Apartment/Parking Garage/City". People, this is an economic tsunami coming, and it has already started. All those infrastructure problems will be solved.
The "I rent" is the most mystifying thing, indicative of local governments not getting ahead of this. What should be cheaper to wire up, a suburban development sprawled over 10 square miles, or 100 cars in a one block radius? Governments need to be incentivizing apartment charging pronto.
If ubiquitous and cheap charging infrastructure is not being priced in, which is still a blocker for many.
For example, I cannot reasonably run lengths of 110v extension cords down the block to charge a car overnight, and acquiring my own house with a garage is dramatically more expensive than any fuel savings. :p
I used to run extension cords out of windows and across the sidewalk to charge a Fiat 500e.
It's unfortunate that EVs make the most immediate sense in high-density urban settings, but those same settings have lots of people who can't use the simple kinds of charging infrastructure (eg, Level 1/2 chargers).
Truly high-density urban settings should ideally find transportation solutions without cars.
Look at the numerous existing city public spaces built into high profile architecture, where basically no one ever hangs out in. (There's a TED talk about this.)
I was not exactly in that situation. First time, I lived in a room on the 3rd floor of a house, but I'd run the extension cord out of the house owner's workshop basement window. I could reliably park in front of the house, however.
2nd time, I ran the cord out of a 2nd story window from my room, but the parking space was behind the house's fence under my window.
3rd situation, I would run the cord from the apartment exercise room, out the window to the fenced in parking lot behind the building. However, the building management actually removed those outlets! Then, that law requiring them to let us charge passed, but by then, it was time for us to move out. Now, I have a garage of my own!
I don't have a garage attached to my house, it's a shared garage building. But once a few owners got EVs, and it became clear to others that EVs were the future, we got some minimal renovations done that allowed anyone to pay to have a slow AC charger installed.
Oslo has been rolling out street-side AC charging poles. There's never quite enough but the growth is steady.
Other countries may not have the same incentives, but that just shifts the point where the rapid transition starts by a few years I think, since cars get cheaper and better all the time. And remember that Norway is fairly cold, which is brutal on range in the winter, so it's not really a fully ideal place for EVs (though at least the car starts reliably every time unlike diesel)
You don't need a garage, just some sort of reserved parking space... There are plenty of weatherproof electrical boxes. It costs a bit of money to have a trench from your home to your car parking area, but far less than buying a house.
And that "110v extension cord" can supply 240V with just a change of connectors on either end (e.g.: 6-30p) allowing charging twice as fast.
I don't think the OP was worried about people who have the ability to dig a trench and install underground wiring to a reserved spot in a "car parking area". I suppose it's not technically having a garage but it sure feels like it in spirit.
For batteries not put in EVs a slightly lower price will get them installed in grid storage solutions.
Consumers will be the last to see lower prices while demand outpaces supply.
I'm hoping in about 5 years, especially with sodium ion in production, that changes.
The really cool thing about battery production is that it's not like an ICE engine where you have to design an ICE for this size application and an ICE for that size application: the batteries can be used in a leaf blower, a moped, a car, a truck, or a massive grid.
The battery supply can be routed wherever needed. That should result in a vastly cheaper overall industry than the ICE drivetrain industry. Sure you need different electric motors, but those aren't THAT different, and the industrial world has already been building all the necessary sizes and variations for a century now.
Demand just keeps increasing, too.
Companies will gladly pocket the difference between what they charge the customers and their $100/KWh bulk price.
I presume manufacturers make packs using whatever cell sizes they can source?
I had thought the trend was away from cylindrical (eg 4680) and towards prismatic or pouch cells? Whatever happened to the 1 metre long BYD cell: https://pushevs.com/2020/05/26/byd-blade-prismatic-battery-c...
[1] https://cnevpost.com/2024/01/17/battery-price-war-catl-byd-c...
1. On the chart of energy density, I'd like to see the the energy density of petrol for comparison. It's much higher, and even though extrapolation is dangerous, I'd like to see how long it could take to reach parity given some of the different forecasting models they mention. Specifically regarding their mention of air travel, I'd like to know what the minimum viable energy density would be for a vessel's fuel source, because my current understanding is that commercial air travel powered by electricity is not feasible.
2. They mention S-curve adoption, but that reaches a horizontal asymptote eventually, it doesn't go up forever. I'd like to see more analysis on where we think we're at on the S-curve, and why. I'd like to see a guess on where it levels out displayed on that chart, instead of the arrow simply pointing at the sky. If nothing else, show where the chemical limit might be based on current battery technology.
I want to displace fossil fuels and reduce pollution and slow the greenhouse effect as much as possible. I think transparency and realistic expectations need to be part of the transition. The more information available to markets, the more efficiently they can work towards the goal. I find it very difficult to get answers to these types of questions when discussing renewable energy generation and storage. I'm sure part of it is my own ignorance on where to look, which is why I ask: especially here, hopefully an expert can see this and quickly point me in the right direction.
Petrol's higher energy density doesn't matter as much as people think.
Electric vehicles are around four times as efficient as petrol. In a petrol car, only 20% of the energy is converted to motion. In electric cars, this is around 80% (with some variation dependent on regenerative braking). I wrote about this extensively in a previous article: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/electrification-en...
Really hard to beat propane or diesel for heat in the wilderness right now.
This is somewhat silly, since a gas-fired heat pump can be very efficient, but gas-fired heat pumps are quite rare.
(California has a pricing/policy problem here, IMO. Electricity is absurdly expensive, gas is somewhat reasonable, and the result is that electric heating is not nearly as economical as it should be.)
They can start to make sense from around 50 kW heating/cooling capacity and upwards, so the smallest units are suitable for 8-15 apartments depending on size.
Plus they asked about airplanes and somehow you made it about cars.
However, assuming that the renewable generation cost curve continues to improve exponentially then the most likely outcome for a carbon-neutral or carbon-negative future will be using electricity to manufacture high density combustible fuels out of atmospheric carbon, effectively using it as a high density "battery" for use cases that demand high energy density.
To the extent that your analysis is relevant to the concerns of the poster, all it means is that batterys are actually ~4x better than the raw energy density would indicate. As to the specifics, Wikipedia claims petrol is ~12,888 W*h/kg or ~24x the battery energy density in the article, so ~6x better with respect to car motion. Note that the current curve has only gone from ~100 W*h/kg to ~500 W*h/kg, so we would need to see density growth comparable to the last 30 years to happen again.
Any given energy storage technology can store a maximum amount of energy in a fixed volume or mass. Behold one of my favorite plots: [1]
From lowest to highest energy density:
- springs, which use mechanical elastic potential energy, are kinda horrible
- capacitors, which use electric permittivity, aren't great
- next are both batteries and combusted fuels, which both use chemical reactions.
- nuclear gets us another few orders of magnitude
- finally, antimatter (E=mc^2) is a ways beyond that
Both batteries and fuels rely on the energy difference between unreacted molecules, so their theoretical energy density is the same. Well, actually, fuels are burnt to create heat which is converted to energy, and this heat->energy conversion is fundamentally thermodynamically inefficient (only ~tens of percent), whereas batteries are the same sorts of reaction but much more controlled. A sufficiently clever battery, which moves atoms around to react in the right places at the right time, is thus more efficient and thus energy-dense than fuel. However, moving atoms around like this to make a more efficient battery is much more advanced nanotech than what we currently have. But it's theoretically possible.
This is what biology does: us humans are powered by chemical storage (sugar/fat/glucose), which is used more efficiently than current batteries but without combustion. (lithium-ion is ~0.8 MJ/kg, glucose is ~16 MJ/kg, gasoline ~46 MJ/kg)
One thing I wanted to add is that fat (lipids) are much more energy dense than glucose. ~38 Mj/kg, though I am not sure what fraction of that the body recovers. Which makes sense, you want to maintain your long-term storage in a denser format.
So the density of chemical reactions is by definition higher.
Side note: energy density should apply to volume, not weight, but we'll - it is too common now.
My point was the traditional fuels (incl. the edible ones) use more material/weight than their own. So it is very likely they'll be more efficient. The batteries require a reversible action by just applying current - this is quite the climb compared to most chemical reactions.
We have not done much since the li-ion inception, using FePO4 instead of cobalt is more sensible from an economic point of view but the energy density is even lower.
Doesn't matter for WHAT? You start out talking about energy density, and then cite some numbers regarding efficiency. What does one have to do with the other? You've done nothing to support your opening claim here.
OK, so we've got ~300 mile range electric cars.
Where are the 5,000 mile range gasoline cars?
I’m not accounting for a gas engine having more heavy parts, that mostly matters in city driving.
How does it settle out when you take into account the significantly higher weight of EVs?
Combined with regenerative braking, it doesn't make that big of difference in total energy usage. A massive chunk of the energy used in an EV is aero drag which makes little difference about weight. Weight makes a bigger impact with stop and go traffic on non-regen cars as slowing down that extra mass turns more energy into heat. An object in motion wants to stay in motion and all, once you're up to speed you're using about the same energy. This is why a lot of the EV trucks have close to the same range if the bed is full or not assuming it has the cover on the bed, but towing even a small trailer becomes a massive range hit.
I get on average 3.5mi/kWh in my EV, ~1MJ/mi. A gallon of gas is like 120 MJ, an average hybrid will get like 40mpg, so 3 MJ/mi being burned. You'd need to get like 120mpg to match my average efficiency of energy usage, and my EV isn't even that incredibly efficient of an EV.
When vehicles uphill, ramp, and fight with the increasing wind resistance due speed, it is needed a high torque for to motion.
The petrol's energy density is translated in high torque, that the gearbox latter transforms progressively.
In electric vehicles, generating high torque and cooling the overheated coils for to obtain such high torque drains the battery quickly, the range drops quickly.
And for to increase the range, more weight is added (more batteries), that requires higher torque for motion, that requires more energy again, and so on.
This is why the energy density it is important, in batteries are the watts hour per kilogram. As also it is important the number of cycles before such batteries start to drop energy density until to fail (to note the weight keeps being the same along all of this degradation).
With the current technology, due the magnetic fields strength generated in the coils, and the energy density of the batteries, EVs just can not compete with petrol vehicles. It is about torque, among other things.
What is needed? batteries with bigger energy density ( higher Wh/Kg with higher number of recharge cycles), and/or higher efficiency generating magnetic fields of high strength (ambient superconductivity, also stronger magnets would help some coil's topologies).
This is why electric and combustion vehicles have such different ranges at even the same weight. Nowadays.
Such high torque is needed at the same moment the vehicle doesn't circulate on a flat terrain, or when have to reach highway speeds.
For to get at least the same ranges, the electric vehicle must reduce the energy consumption for the generation of the required torque (and speed), or needs to increase the energy density of the battery in companion of increasing the recharge cycles.
will be possible to achieve this? of course.
(The losses cooling or heating the battery and avoid the self-discharge should get the same advances, as it's counted as stored energy but it's not used for motion)
Once the oil is used it's gone. Batteries can be recharged
Fuel cells could well enable 30X better power densities. That would count to me as flight powered by electricity. There's also beamed power. Perhaps this wouldn't be practical, but it's a thought experiment that shows there's nothing impossible from first principles for electrical powered flight.
Given that the status quo is "go out of business when old planes can't be maintained anymore" the possibility of some radical change like electrification or a change in the scope rules is increasingly likely.
As it is now there is fierce competition for bus service from Ithaca to NYC (budget to various grades of premium) and I find it almost unimaginable that I'd fly to NYC to get to NYC because flying to JFK or atrocious EWR (never once made a transfer at EWR that didn't involve re-entering the secure zone) wouldn't save time to get to Midtown.
If you try to take the bus in the other direction you find you can't get from here to there. A friend of mine who used to ride the bus through Canada to get to the Detroit suburbs now takes the bus up to Syracuse, then takes Amtrak and gets out at 4am. On the way back one time there was no room on the bus although he paid for a ticket ahead of time.
The real significance of the regional airport is that it connects to a hub that goes everywhere. As it is if I have to fly somewhere I'll probably have to go up to SYR where at least I can fly on Jetblue and know I'm flying on an Airbus.
ITH used to get
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Canada_Dash_8
which I really enjoyed flying in, but they got replaced with 50-seat regional jets because regional jets are less likely to break down at a small airport requiring a crew to travel two hours to repair them.
As it is, academics at Cornell and Ithaca College will struggle to bring in speakers and it's just one more bit of "stave the countryside" that will drive knowledge workers to go to blue cities where their votes don't count -- it's how you hand the next election to a Demagogue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer_ERJ_family
both of which stopped manufacturing circa 2020. We used to get the DASH-8 which I liked to fly more but they stopped using it because it breaks down more often which is no problem if it happens at PHL but takes hours to get a crew to fix if it breaks down at ITH.
You don't know what the future holds and neither do I.
S-curves are hard to predict. Basically every time someone attempts to do it, they are way off. This [0] is a neat paper that addresses the question. We've blown past every single prediction.
[0] https://www.inet.ox.ac.uk/files/energy_transition_paper-INET...
Batteries will get more energy dense, the range will increase a bit. But yeah, it's hard to see it getting to a few 100 miles.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/eviation-announces-...
In terms of battery density, the fact that they have an operational, flyable aircraft, just stuffing batteries and an electric motor into a 60 year old air frame... pretty good and only going to get better!
When I've actually tried it with tools like
https://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/generated/scipy.o...
it's frequently been terribly, terribly wrong.
I know almost nothing about this space. I would appreciate a comment on why this is feasible or not...
There are also research programs about making fuel from other sources, like https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016523702...
Companies like terraform industries are doing something similar, but creating natural gas. With enough cheap solar, all hydrocarbons are pretty much on the table as well.
It'll be a decade or more until this is scaled up and not dependent on subsidies.
It does say batteries will start to take market share in 2030. That's almost certainly true. It's a high priority for the Norwegian company to electrify the short distance airplane network in the next coming years. There are already battery electric planes coming out. And battery chemistries suitable for short range planes are starting early production.
I suspect battery electric plane will get a surprisingly good range once we start to get highly optimized battery chemistries and optimized airplane designs for that market. The hardest part is to get the first few products to mass market.
They might creep into the medium range market by 2050.
But long range? It might never happen. Unless we get something like aluminum-air batteries that can exploit oxygen in the air somehow. But it doesn't matter. Long range flights are not the majority of flights. It's a small enough market that e-fuels could cover it.
Since flying battery electric will be so much cheaper it's also possible people will have to switch planes multiple times on a journey. Maybe there will be some innovations/optimizations that make that faster and easier.
But you're right that starting somewhere is better than not doing that.
Diesel 12.7 kWh/kg
Electricity is already low-entropy, whereas energy from burning petrol is high entropy and thus contains less useful work.
Tangent but: I've always wondered why home cogeneration never took off. Too bad we don't have gas water heaters and gas furnaces that generate electricity and dump the excess onto the grid and heat with the waste heat.
Even a low-efficiency thermoelectric generator would recover some useful energy that is otherwise kind of wasted.
- Diesel has a peak efficiency of 40% but an average efficiency of 20-25% (depending on the type of driving)
- Gasoline has a peak of 35% and an average of 16%–20%
- Battery has a peak of 85% and an average of 80%
That doesn't discredit the predictions, but I don't think that the connection they're trying to draw between energy density and market demand really holds water. The development of higher density batteries is good for certain applications like that ground-effect electric seaplane, but it isn't necessary for cars or grid storage, where the first case is mostly viable already and the second is concerned with the cost outlook and the self-discharge rate.
There are a few go-kart places here, I hadn't been there for a few years, and now I learned that they all switched to electrical. Much quieter, no fumes, works great indoors
But as of Jan 1 2024, they also had to introduce a financial incentive just to keep coal plants online, because otherwise the coal plants can't compete on price, just like you said! Some weird economics going on here, but it seems like China is still adding coal just to maximize total power deployed, even if it's uneconomic at the margins.
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-guarantee-payments...
Batteries with renewables are already cheaper than nuclear and it will only get cheaper while nuclear costs are ballooning.
That seems like an odd comparison to me. Is it normal to compare the Top Tier Anything to the Average of another thing?
Top Tier Car 0-60 Times vs Average Car Costs? IDK, it doesn't seem to contain any REAL information. Shouldn't the comparison be the costs of the SAME cars and not include cars that aren't top tier?
What am I not getting?
Cost is $139/kWh, which on a scale of 0-9000, is pretty close to zero historically. https://about.bnef.com/blog/lithium-ion-battery-pack-prices-...
Actually, if you know the details of the development of consumer cars, you'll find that advances and levels of performance in top tier cars tends to trickle down into average cars. Not without some dilution, but that's a definite trend! So things like disc brakes, fuel injection, microprocessor control.
This sort of thing definitely happens with batteries over time. It's a way of peeking into the future. Just fudge factor for a little dilution.
https://www.mountsinai.org/health-library/poison/dry-cell-ba... https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/002805.htm https://batteryuniversity.com/article/bu-703-health-concerns...
And cannot always be easily recycled:
https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2023-09/Lithium-I...
In addition to general concerns about chemical availability, and processing issues.
E.g. Demand expected to outstrip supply as soon as next year:
https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insight...
Only some are toxic. But can you name the poison or danger with saltwater batteries?
"Chinese automaker Yiwei debuted the first sodium-ion battery-powered car in 2023. It uses JAC Group’s UE module technology, which is similar to CATL's cell-to-pack design.[82] The car has a 23.2 kWh battery pack with a CLTC range of 230 kilometres (140 mi)."
And for grid storage, "slightly bigger size" really doesn't matter.
Why would want to build an enery system on low-energy-density technology?
That would be equivalent to using relays for building computers in 2024.
We have nuclear energy, we don’t need to use technology from the medieval ages.
But there are many battery companies for gird batteries. Flow is just one type and one that seems far less poplar now-days. They were all the hype like 10-15 years ago.
The problem is the Li-commodity race has already beaten most of those designs. You need to use very, very cheap materials. Form Energy considered some flow designs but rejected them.
That's why Form Energy are going to things like Iron batteries, because Li batteries will never reach those numbers.
But very few of those alternative have had any real commercial success yet.
Peaker plants are power plants sitting there ready to turn on during peak power usage. I think they used to be often coal, which took a while to start up and produced lots of pollution, but then more recently natural gas plants start up faster and have much lower emissions. So during an evening power usage peak, or during really cold or hot times when power demand is high, the grid can tap that power source. Now you can replace those plants with a bunch of batteries that are ready in milliseconds to provide additional power, and then you can charge them if they get used up at night when electric usage is low.
The major problem with hydrogen is the fuel cell efficiency. Electrolysis is above 80%, but fuel cells are barely at 60% and it gets lower when you try to make the design more practical (lower temperature, less platinum). So batteries just have to hit 50% to compete. But that 50% includes both inherent cycle efficiency and self-discharge and Form Energy isn't putting their numbers up front, as far as I can see.
More importantly, seasonal storage is heavily concerned with heating, and the conversion of hydrogen to heat is a different matter. The batteries have heat pumps going for them, but you can make a gas-powered heat pump too. So rather than the fuel cell efficiency you look at the CoP difference between electric and gas heat pumps. The latter have received little attention, but could see a surge of interest if green hydrogen becomes more popular (and easier to transport). But here we exhaust my understanding of the situation.
I don't think seasonal storage will ever be thing. Having storage for a few days or weeks is practical.
Non of the technologies we are talking about will work for seasonal.
Most of the non Li-Battery grid cell systems have not yet proven much. Many of the first generation of such system went bust. And many of the others have taken a long time and are still not deployed.
So far the successful grid battery companies are mostly repackaging other cells.
In other words, (Honda civic IC + home solar/batteries) saves more carbon than a Tesla with no actual power generation capacity. But that just isn't fashionable.
I'm sitting in a house right now, streaming top gear on a 50-inch tv, completely off-grid.
Further, V2G/H is more than likely to be a thing in the near future further putting the EV batteries to work stabilizing the grid.
Yes. Even before we get to full V2G, managed charging provides a helpful degree of flexibility.
An EV is a giant battery (several times the size of a Tesla PowerWall, for example) that happens to move sometimes. The battery can be used for other things when the car isn't moving - and it will be.
Electric vehicle battery prices are falling faster than expected: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38304405
So far the best I found are around 250 Wh/kg (for the whole powerbank).
It's still a terrifying amount of energy, but I'd feel much much different about someone with a 300WH LFP pack sitting next to me than I would a lipo pack.
Where are they getting batteries that are 500Wh/kg for commercial applications? Even state of the art NMC cells in the 21700 and 46800 form factors barely scrape at 300Wh/kg, and everything else (LFP) is significantly below that number.
The 500wh/kg figures come from at least two companies nine months ago - one might be a US arm of the other:
https://www.catl.com/en/news/6015.html
https://amprius.com/the-all-new-amprius-500-wh-kg-battery-pl...
Both have asserted idependant verification.
High energy density isn't the only desirable goal of course. Really cheap, bulk storage, hard to damage, with long lifetime and many recharge cycle batteries are good for grids even if they're too heavy for the mobile | car market.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium_redox_battery
,for example, have a promising future in not { car | phone } applications.
Also, battery-powered >=737-size passenger airplanes (also not so sure about trains and cargo ships) will need at least a revolution in battery technology - batteries won't do, they're just too heavy for the little energy they output:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#In_energy_stora...
Planes have neither of those properties which is what makes them hard to run off batteries.
Cargo ships also wouldn’t seem to have a problem. My understanding is that the drag on a hull increases sub-linearly relative to displacement. So a 10% increase in displacement might only increase drag by 1%. So it’s unlikely the weight penalty of batteries would be prohibitive.
You would need a whole other ship full of lithium batteries in tow so a useful size cargo ship would have the enormous energy required for a regular cargo trip.
Trains work better, but charge time would impact operation feasibility, and just electrifying the railway with overhead cables is currently cheaper than lithium battery solutions.
Hence the case for hydrogen fuel cells for train applications.
Follow-up: At what point is continued operation of existing coal become uneconomical (to simplify the question assume decent solar generation locations are available/ grid connected nearby).
I guess I want to hear predictions of when fossil fuel usage will peak, and over what time period will it be reduced by 20, 30, 50%.
https://www.iea.org/news/the-energy-world-is-set-to-change-s...
And they think there'll be 800Wh/kg in 2030? Wasn't that well beyond what's needed for medium-range electric flight?
Is that even possible, chemically speaking?
Where can I learn more? Can I buy these 500Wh/kg batteries today?
How fast will batteries continue to grow and improve? The answer is a lot faster than today’s consensus view.
What's behind the drastic downturn in nickel and lithium prices, and what does it mean?
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-01-26/examining-the-drastic...
TLDR: Despite high expectation demand didn't meet ramped up supply at the raw material end.
Diesel 12.7 kWh/kg
Again, diesel still wins, but man is that gap closing.
[0] https://www.mprnews.org/story/2023/02/10/rusty-batteries-cou... [1]https://cleantechnica.com/2023/12/29/electric-cars-powered-b... [2]https://samcotech.com/is-it-possible-to-extract-lithium-from...
I also think that biotech has picked up some new tricks lately (alphafold, etc) that might let it branch out from academia, medicine, and agriculture and affect things like mining re: bioleeching fungi to move minerals through mycelial networks to the surface.
Lithium is more abundant than lead, tin, or tungsten. We're not going to run out any time soon.
Sigmoids (the most well know being the logistic curve) begin to tapper off overtime approaching no growth and reaching an upper bound.
First, battery technology has changed to require only one rare ore: lithium. Older battery chemistries required nickel and cobalt, but the most popular chemistry in electric vehicles today is lithium iron phosphate.[1] It has lower energy density than nickel manganese cobalt (NMC) or nickel cobalt aluminum (NCA), but lasts longer and is safer.
Second, lithium is everywhere. The reason why most lithium comes from salt flats in Australia, Chile, and China is because that's the cheapest way to get it. But there are plenty of other salt flats around the world, and the oceans themselves contain over 100 billion tons of lithium (1,000x more than known land resources). If today's biggest producers form a cartel and try to control prices, other sources will become economically viable.
Third, lithium is a tiny fraction of the cost of an electric vehicle. LFP batteries have around 160 grams of lithium per kWh, so a typical car battery (60-90kWh) has 10-15kg of lithium. The spot price for lithium is $15/kg, so the materials cost per car is around $150-250. If lithium prices went up by a factor of 10, the cost of the car would only go up by 5%. In contrast, doubling the price of petroleum almost doubles the cost of driving.
Fourth, demand for lithium extraction will go down in the long run. This is because unlike petroleum, lithium stays in the car. Older EVs contain lots of lithium (and other raw materials) that can be recycled into new batteries. Old batteries are basically very high quality ore. Lithium recycling may sound unlikely to some, but we already have existence proofs of recycling happening with other cheaper elements. 80% of all copper ever mined is still in use. The number for aluminum is almost as high. Remember that the cost per kg of copper is half that of lithium, and aluminum is 1% the cost of lithium.
I'm really not worried about rare ores being the bottleneck for electric vehicle adoption. In 2022, world lithium production was around 130,000 metric tons. That's enough to produce 9 million cars. In that same year, 85 million motor vehicles were built. Assuming we wanted all vehicle production to be EVs, and assuming an average battery capacity of 90kWh, that would require 1,224,000 tons of lithium. If lithium production increases at the same rate it did from 2016-2022 (3.5x)[2], it will take another 12 years before there is enough capacity to make every vehicle electric. I doubt things will take off that quickly, but you never know. EV designs are simpler than combustion vehicles, and the raw materials costs are similar. As EV production volumes increase and manufacturers design for farther down-market, we should see prices continue to drop.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery
2. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/lithium-production?tab=ch...
From what I've read this causes the lithium market to be very chaotic.
Supply is complicated and capital intensive to bring online while the demand is essentially inelastic.
Time it right and you make a fortunes.
One of the most common objections to a wholesale switch to renewables is "what if it's cloudy / not windy" sort of thing. Cheap, widely deployed energy storage is key to answering that objection.
They go hand in hand. More batteries, more renewables, more batteries, more renewables, etc. etc. etc.
Eventually, the obvious goal is to charge everything via renewable power.
If we're talking about powering cars, then even if your power comes from 100% coal, it's still cleaner to drive the EV than gasoline, simply because the coal power plant benefits from the economy of scale. It merely takes longer for the trade-off of the higher carbon footprint of manufacturing an EV to happen. But it does eventually happen.
If we're talking about powering an energy grid, nobody expects them to be charged via consumables. That's just silly. But battery storage is how you make wind/solar energy work without requiring burning consumables as a backup.
How much hydrocarbon fuel is needed to produce these batteries each year?
How much fuel is needed to charge them?
The eventual goal would be zero.
Required? None. There's nothing in EV battery production or charging or usage that requires burning fossil fuels. That fossil fuels are a major source of our current energy is part of the problem that we are also working to solve. And mass production of economical batteries is part of how we do that with renewable energy.
Building grids and vehicles that burn fossil fuels means you need to keep drilling, refining, and transporting that fossil fuel for every future kWH generated or mile driven. Forever.
A battery is made once and used for its lifetime, and most of its critical materials can be recycled at end of life into new batteries.
If you want current stats on total lifetime emissions of manufacturing and using batteries vs fossil fuels, search for "EV cradle to grave emissions" and there are a few studies. My recollection is that the results show that an EV will have lower lifetime emissions than a fossil fuel vehicle even with today's mostly dirty grids in most cases, and break-even in the worst grid mixes. As grids shift to renewables and recycling increases those numbers should only improve.
so 273 billion kWh of hydrocarbon fuel burned to make batteries that can hold only 51.5 million kWh of energy.
And then roughly a few billion or more to fill them up each year.
What year will we make enough solar & wind power to compensate for the 21 billion gallons of fuel?
https://www.verifythis.com/article/news/verify/environment-v...
> David Checkel, a professor at the University of Alberta and an electric car expert, did some back-of-the-napkin math to dispute the claim. Checkel calculated that if each gallon of fuel costs $3, then 21 billion gallons would cost $63 billion annually. If $63 billion was the price tag for 250,000 batteries, then the cost of raw materials for each battery would be more than $250,000.
You seem confused by the concept of a reusable battery. It's not a AA battery; you don't throw it away every 300 miles and get a new one.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403212...
Plenty of other papers with similar results. Current total lifecycle emissions are already net negative for EV vs ICE including production of the battery and vehicle, and production of the electricity using the current grid. That margin improves as the grid gets cleaner.
Your responses to answers make this painfully obvious.
If you want to make a point, then just make it. Don't hide behind a bullshit claim that you're just asking questions and then cry about downvotes.
Cost and environmental impact has been accounted for. And it turns out, using solar/wind energy for production and storing the excess in batteries for when the sun goes down or the wind gets lighter is better for the environment than constantly burning natural gas and coal. Yes, building batteries has a carbon footprint, but that footprint only needs to be done ONCE, whereas burning fuel for electrical generation requires constant burning.
For some reason, this fact upsets you, and rather than accept it, you try to act like nobody has done the studies.
I don't know how else to explain this to you. The studies have been done. This is settled science.
So again. Your questions are bad faith. You have no interest in learning.