Decade of the Battery
noahpinion.blog
noahpinion.blog
It's rarely the case that "we all decide that we have this very important thing to do for humanity" and focus on doing just that.
More often the benefits for humanity flow down as side effects from other more basic incentives like making money selling fast sport electric vehicles used to signal that you're rich or whatever
Snark aside, e-bikes are great, I don't have one but that's because between my nice road bike that can crank out 100 miles no problem, and my battery car, I don't need one. But they do work for lots of people. I wish I could get one for my kid, but it is illegal for anyone under 14 to ride one, where I live.
Brompton bikes are one of the classic recommendations for folding bikes but there tons of other options nowadays as well.
SendMyBag do ship bikes, but I have mostly used more dedicated bike shipping services, which have been very reliable. SendBike [2] iswho I haved used in the past, but I have also had friends use ShipMyBike [3] successfully in the past. The advantage of these companies is that they will first ship you a box to use, if you dont have one already.
[1] https://www.sendmybag.com/en-gb/ [2] https://sendbike.com/ [3] https://www.shipmybike.com/
Access to an ebike will probably result in me taking significantly more trips with it, where I would otherwise have opted to either rent a car for an hour, or just not make the trip.
I don't have hard evidence to back up the claim, but I'm certain that an e-bike will rack up more than enough km's in a time period that the overall volume of ebike-exercise outweighs analogue-bike exercise, even if you subtract the "lost" exercise due to the e-bike assistance.
The amount of emotional and confidence boost you get from 250W of electricity honestly cannot be measured.
Watching closely.
Pricing for the one linked (cheapest when I sorted my search results, but magic happens when you sort by price on AE so take with a pinch of ... sodium I guess) is around $9 for a single cell (3 V, 3500 mAh) or $100 for a 20-pack. No idea if chargers are available, haven't checked.
Edit: actually include the link.
1: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005870547110.html?spm=a2...
They are similar to lithium-ion batteries in terms of working principle and cell construction, but they replace lithium with sodium as the intercalating ion1.
Sodium-ion batteries are cheaper to produce, safer to use, and operate better in extreme temperatures than lithium-ion batteries3.
However, sodium batteries of equal capacity are heavier and larger than their lithium equivalents3.
Not so much for neighbourhood battery packs that smooth local area roof solar or for industrial scale battery parks next to solar and wind farms.
Did you forget your sources? And why did you write in such a strange way?
If I had to guess it seems like they meant to cite their sources, but forgot to do so.
The solid state battery era looks like this:
- Much better safety. No thermal runaway problem. Survives nail test.
- Upwards of 5,000 charge cycles.
- Charge times around 5 minutes.
- Maybe better energy density.
- Cost not yet well understood. Manufacturing is hard.
For small devices, the battery should outlive the device.
For cars, the usage model looks more like gas cars. Drive 300-400 miles, recharge in 5-10 minutes. This has land-use implications. Gas stations can convert to charging stations in the same footprint and layout. No need for giant parking lots of chargers.
Maybe the new 'hot' sites for such will be next to grid substations.
How many MWs would a carpark roofed with solar panels generate? My calculations say you need about 4k square meters to get 1MW whilst the sun is shining bright. That's about the size of medium sized supermarket carpark. Double that if you cover the building as well. You might get a good 2MW at peak, enough to allow a few cars charging at once. Not much good at after the afternoon sun has gone down and the after work rush is happening at the supermarket.
Given most drivers will be charging at home, I wonder what percentage of cars we can expect to be wanting to charge whilst shopping?
Unless you have enormous battery banks, the first few charges will deplete them.
Lithium-iron-phosphate batteries have taken over the low end of the market. Cheaper and safer, but less energy per kilogram.
If that's true, that's miraculous. Given the order of magnitude reduction that will come with economies of scale and commercialisation (as we've experienced with Li-ion), they'll be cheaper than Li-ion in no time.
Only reason for gas stations to be a seperate type of shop is how expensive and dangeous it is to have a gasoline pipes to every parking space. This is easy and cheap to do for electricity.
To bring in more revenue many gas stations try to be a "bit of a supermarket" in addition to selling gas. With electricity it will likely go the other way around, so supermarkets will extend with selling electricity and there will less reason to have gas stations as a seperate business location.
I already see supermarkets here getting a few charging spaces, usually a bit in the back.
I'm very eager to get off the grid completely and be rid of this profit-chasing nonsense.
I know this is going to get me a bunch of responses about how much more pressure is on the grid because of EVs, solar doesn't help during off-peak hours, etc. Boo-hoo cry me a river. These energy companies have gotten billions in gov't grants and credits and they're still massively profitable and continue gouging customers.
But I am disappointed. Economies of scale should dictate better community coverage and service - not worse than individuals can do themselves.
A single Tesla Powerwall is something like $10000 (before incentives) for 13 kWh capacity. I regularly see articles about battery costs being ~$150/kWh now. Thats about $2000 and yet the Powerwall is 5x that cost. Even if it was $200/kWh that doesn't get close to adding up.
Is it all installation costs? extra hardware costs? Or something related to trade where we just can't get cheap batteries here in the US?
Where I live in Europe I can buy a lifepo4 cell for 97€ from a trusted supplier, 300Ah x 3.2V = almost a kWh. For a full battery you need to add the cost of a BMS and a balancer.
Its high value-add, but I would have thought competition would push prices down too.
My understanding is that LFP is a fair bit safer so maybe regulators haven’t caught up?
Also, the Tesla Model 3 and Y are currently some of the most affordable EVs on the market. It's only the X, S, and Cybertruck that are the high priced ones.
Different markets - here in Oz BYD is half to two thirds the price of "equivalent" Tesla.
I put the word equivalent in quotes because everyone has an opinion on what a product is worth and what equivalency means. Honestly, when I eventually get to buy an EV I will avoid both brands like the plague so I'm not about to argue any points in this regard.
Secondly, my reasoning is in the context that I don't think the time is right to buy one now. I bought a car 3 months ago, second hand. My EV alternative was twice the already quite large price. My conclusion was that buys me 10 years of running costs and the difference after taking depreciation into account made it more.
But reasons against are as follows with some weighting.
Tesla: 100% no.
50% The technology "integration" and all that comes with it. I don't want my car connected to the internet. I don't want an app for my car. At this point I have the perception Tesla is the "Apple of Cars" - an ecosystem built around car ownership that is overpriced and restrictive. I don't need my experience being monitored or reported or collected.
25% With Apple it seems you get good customer service for your $. I haven't heard similar for Tesla.
20% Engineering. Tesla is building a car. There are many other car manufacturers that have been doing this for much longer. Yes going electric is a big change, but the many years of solid domain experience will count.
5% I don't want my $ going to Musk or anything to do with him. Seriously, at this point I would think the best thing Tesla could do would be to quietly cut any ties with him. Note this is 5% weighting because it is more a "bad taste" thing than anything.
BYD 120% no. Yup, 20% more No than Tesla.
50% Same technology integration as the Tesla. Lessened due to lesser perceived (note I have not studied every aspect) reliance on that integration but greater due to data concerns with China. I have greater concerns with China because every company is literally state apparatus when it comes to information. At least the US is slightly separate between corp and state - slowing things in an ever so minor practicable sense.
40% chinese engineering. Don't get me wrong, I see the huge strides in improvement Chinese manufacturing has made but I have seen too much stupid chinese engineering in my lifetime. That "perception debt" is costing them.
30% I don't want to support China's destruction of world capability in manufacturing. BYD is significantly subsidised by the State which goes a long way to why they are so cheap.
If I had to spend money on an EV today, I'd seriously check out Hyundai.
Example 30kw for $8k. https://signaturesolar.com/eg4-ll-s-lithium-batteries-kit-30... or https://batteryhookup.com/products/new-24-56kwh-lifepo4-batt...
That's called a UPS. You can buy them in stores. Closer fit for this purpose might be solar-charging portable power stations, which are also COTS hardware that similarly costs a few hundred dollars each.
Anything more elaborate than that needs to be wired into your breaker box, requiring licensed electricians and inspections. Not terribly expensive, though. Installing an automatic transfer switch in your home is pretty common in rural areas with frequent power outages, for generator installations.
Tesla sells megapacks, and it's much more realistic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Megapack#Specifications , a 4MWh battery is $1.4m.
https://www.currentconnected.com/product/sk48v100-48v-server...
Of course you will need a charge controller and some other components which will add to the cost.
the demand at the grid and commercial scale is so huge right now that anyone putting cells into suburban-home sized systems and dealing with that type of customer (the absolute worst kind) are practically throwing money away when they could be doing 1 - 10 big deals with competent (electrical and financial) counterparties. in a supply constrained world there's no point in serving the bottom of the market. talking to you is an opportunity cost.
it'll come soon though as production ramps. the recent inflection of EV growth below expectations has created the slack for it to be possible, but it'll still be a few years as those are all NMC lines.
if your curious to see examples of what the commercial scale looks like today victron has a great youtube channel full of them: https://www.youtube.com/@VictronEnergyBV/videos
But Sodium based batteries are coming into the market and would be even cheaper.
A lot of discussions of the learning curves for batteries seem to bundle all of this together, but I think there are two or three different learning curves that are at different points: The most visible one is mobile batteries, where lithium-based technologies dominate and have preferred quite far down the learning curve. But then I think there is a separate curve for stationary storage, which is at a much earlier stage, with huge room for improvement, and a number of promising technologies that exist but haven't yet made it to commercial scale. And I think there's another, separate and even more nascent curve for stationary and long duration storage, where there are initial indications that some of the initial technologies might be scalable, but it's still years away, and I think it's so early that we may well see entirely different approaches come out of the labs and win this market.
Maybe it’s not so much of an issue in the US where cities are designed for a lot of cars, but here in the EU it’s actually quite dangerous. If a car catches fire it’ll have to be dumped into a specialised container of sorts, which works ok for cars. If a bus catches fire on the wrong street it’ll risk burning the entire street down.
Just imagine what power walls would do to neighbourhoods where buildings are close to each other. You’d frankly burn an entire town-part down of every home had a power wall and just one of them caught fire.
I can't speak to the EU risk profile, as the EU has far less fire deaths in home than the US, but we here in the US will tolerate home lithium batteries just fine.
Data from the National Transportation Safety Board showed that EVs were involved in approximately 25 fires for every 100,000 sold. Comparatively, approximately 1,530 gasoline-powered vehicles and 3,475 hybrid vehicles were involved in fires for every 100,000 sold: https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/environment-energy-coordinatio...
Statistics from 2015 showed that 174,000 vehicle fires were reported, and almost all of them involved gasoline vehicles. Tesla claims that gasoline cars are 11x more likely to catch fire than a Tesla, and that the best comparison of safety is fires per billion miles driven. If we compare using this method, there are approximately five EV fires for every billion miles traveled, compared to 55 fires per billion miles traveled in gasoline cars: https://driveelectriccolorado.org/myth-buster-evs-fire/
1) the fleet average is around 12 years old, when most EVs are new enough to still be covered by factory warranty.
2) incidents and risk in cars is coupled with driving patterns and trip length. There's no analysis to tell us whether or not it's the EVs themselves that are safer, or the way they're driven. This is also why the claim of incidents per billion miles needs further qualification. It assumes the driving profile matches the fleet driving profile, but that may not be the case due to charging requirements.
3) a lithium battery fire isn't the same as a gasoline car catching fire, and we shouldn't pretend that they are. Even taking it at face value that EVs catch fire less often, the metric for most people isn't "will my car catch fire?" but rather "will this kill me?". If an EV is actually five times less likely to catch fire, but you're six times more likely to die, that's a net loss in safety. And given the nature of some of the battery fire deaths that have occurred, alongside the -- until recently -- relative scarcity of EVs, I wouldn't fault someone for waiting to see how things shake out.
4) regardless of what stats collected by those in the industry say, you're still paying a higher premium to insure an EV. And I get that there are multiple factors that go into determining that, but I trust the people who's job it is to make money by evaluating risk more than I trust companies trying to sell me an EV.
The way I see it, any improvements to the safety of batteries when things go wrong is a good thing. Even if it's the case that batteries are already better, an improvement that eliminates the horror fires that stick in people's minds, even if those fires are incredibly rare, is a big gain in public perception.
Does factory warranty prevent fires?
> 2) incidents and risk in cars is coupled with driving patterns and trip length. There's no analysis to tell us whether or not it's the EVs themselves that are safer, or the way they're driven. This is also why the claim of incidents per billion miles needs further qualification. It assumes the driving profile matches the fleet driving profile, but that may not be the case due to charging requirements.
So, its the drivers fault the car catches fire? But its not the gas car drivers fault, but only EV car drivers fault?
> 3) a lithium battery fire isn't the same as a gasoline car catching fire, and we shouldn't pretend that they are. Most of the newer cars have LiFePO4 batteries, which don't have the same risks as Li-Ion cars.
From https://www.evlithium.com/Blog/advanced-safety-features-of-l...
Non-flammable electrolyte: LiFePO4 batteries use a non-flammable electrolyte that does not catch fire even if the battery is punctured or damaged. The electrolyte is a mixture of lithium salts and a solvent that is less volatile and less flammable than the organic electrolytes used in other types of lithium-ion batteries.
High safety: LiFePO4 batteries have a lower risk of overheating and catching fire due to their more stable cathode material and lower operating temperature. They also have built-in protection circuits that prevent overcharge, over-discharge, short-circuit, and physical damage.
> 4) regardless of what stats collected by those in the industry say, you're still paying a higher premium to insure an EV. And I get that there are multiple factors that go into determining that, but I trust the people who's job it is to make money by evaluating risk more than I trust companies trying to sell me an EV. All new cars have higher insurance because they cost more.
You used to need a decent budget for D batteries if you were going to do this with an 80's boom box, but now you can run a full-sized PA speaker for hours on the built-in Li-ion batteries, so it's way more common.
> Practical class-D amplifiers were enabled by the development of silicon-based MOSFET (metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor) technology.
> The first class-D amplifier based integrated circuit was released by Tripath in 1996, and it saw widespread use.
say thanks :) i started going down the analog electronics route with audio amplifier projects
These speakers can get so loud. There's a lake here and you can hear them loud and clear across the whole lake, at least a half mile away.
And yes, being able to block people's headphones and other stuff would be bad, but I'm moving towards that being acceptable collateral damage.
Fed up of rude idiots playing really bad music at massive volume (and why is it that only people with appalling musical taste enjoy blasting it?).
Just the cells are <1400 Euros, this is crazy. Because the battery is now far from the most expensive item for a solar-battery setup.
The battery revolution cannot be overstated, especially now with Sodium batteries entering the market, which don't use lithium.
https://www.youtube.com/@forestyforest
He's found that solar is not useful where he lives (Canada) so he replaced the alternator in his van with one that generates more power, and uses that to keep his big battery charged.
Electric cars (credits to Tesla), especially the first generation basically used a ton of the same cells found in (some) laptops.
The demand for electric cars, thus batteries fuelled a huge increase in manufacturing capacity, which dropped prices. And maybe I'm wrong but the cheaper batteries made drones more affordable, so that industry got a boost with investment.
A lot of things aren't limited by technology, but by capital and market incentives.
Which to me actually shows the limitations of this system as we could have had electric cars decades ago. We could have had this revolution decades ago. What a different world we would have had.
In 2004, I think it would have been reasonable to think that EVs would always be a niche for small short range "commuting cars". I remember thinking this, and being excited about even that possibility! But now I frequently see these big Rivian trucks and SUVs driving around, and I know their range is similar to a tank of gas. That seems pretty crazy to me!
And it wasn't just the economics of scale that has made that work.
In the case of stationary batteries, I think just the economics driving the price down has indeed been the most important factor, but something else I haven't seen anybody mention yet is that it also has a lot to do with solar barreling down its cost curve, kicking off massive deployment, to the point that it is a fairly common occurrence now for some locations on some grids at some times of some days to have negative power prices due to solar over-production. Batteries are excellent at sopping up extra power that would have otherwise gone nowhere (or to crypto mining perhaps, but maybe I'm repeating myself).
https://about.bnef.com/blog/china-already-makes-as-many-batt...
I like their reports because it injects facts into what is otherwise a very opinion driven public debate. And the facts are quite impressive.
Some key points:
- they are tracking about 6 twh of new battery production related investment for 2025 world wide
- that's about 4x the projected demand of 1.5 twh for 2025; which is up from slightly under 1 twh last year (2023). So, they are signalling massive over production of batteries is about to happen. That's quite a change from the shortages companies were dealing with in the last few years.
- they expect that to have some obvious effects on prices and some of those investments: not all these projects will make it and battery over supply will drop prices and endanger producers that can't do that.
I would add to that that it is likely that wider availability of cheaper batteries is going to create new use cases as well. So their demand projection might be off. If prices drop low enough, a lot of household equipment might start coming with batteries, for example. Things like fridges and ovens for example. That's a market that barely exists now. But if prices drop enough, why not?
Another thing I find interesting is the average charge state and longevity of batteries. We're accumulating many twh of batteries on a year to year basis and they might have a life measured in decades. That's just how long it takes to get through the many thousands of charging cycles these things support even when you use them very intensively.
But mostly these batteries are at pretty high charge states because they actually aren't used that intensively. You don't drain your EV's battery every day. And your powerwall that can run your house hours is only used very lightly on a day to day basis because power outages don't happen that often.
So, that's a lot of potential energy that is pre-distributed and ready for use that the grid doesn't have to supply on demand. Tens to hundreds of twh pretty soon. Some virtual power plants are starting to rival nuclear power plants in the amount of power they can make available. And that's while these virtual power plants are still operating at relatively small scales. They can only do so in short bursts of course but it starting to affect how grid investments are being allocated.
The cure for high prices is high prices!
Also I love your thought on how much energy we're distributing around in all these mostly-charged batteries. It would have been unthinkable not all that long ago to have this much energy stored at "the edges" in an extremely accessible form.
“…more electric bicycles are now sold than electric cars in the U.S.”
Maybe because of high tariffs which as far as I know don’t exist for e-bikes.