Lithium battery costs have fallen by 98% in three decades • Hacker News Board

Re: Lithium battery costs have fallen by 98% in three decades

#121

Post by natch » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 7:29 PM UTC

tyingq wrote: post #82

kragen wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, no, the world is 25 times bigger than the US, by population. So it's ridiculous to equate houses with US houses, especially when reading a British publication.

The article uses US dollars quite a lot. That's why I posted US stats, marked as such. I did update it with a UK average as well. Also, FWIW, the North American edition of the Economist accounts for more than half the readers. UK readers are less than 20% of the total.

Kragen was right, I was talking about the size of the world. The US is not representative of average or normal. Nor is the UK. And UK publications, due perhaps to colonial history, tend to take a more global view so I would not assume their notion of an average house is centered on the UK either.

Re: Lithium battery costs have fallen by 98% in three decades

#122

Post by thesteamboat » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 7:30 PM UTC

ajuc wrote: post #72

umvi wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that? Is it because North Americans use electricity for cooking and heating whereas other countries use gas for that?

Air conditioning isn't needed in many EU countries except for a few days a year (so it's not worth to even install it in private homes, modern offices mostly have them though for some reason). Also depending on the country few people use cloth driers - you just hang your clothes on a cable and let them dry by themselves. Houses in colder parts of EU are also usually better isolated than in US ([1] that's a typical Po…

Sorry to nitpick, but I assume you mean EU houses are better insulated than those in the US, rather than isolated.

Re: Lithium battery costs have fallen by 98% in three decades

#123

Post by ip26 » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 7:30 PM UTC

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #78

hristov wrote: post #71

This is important to keep in mind when you read articles and/or studies about how electric cars or wind or solar power is impractical. A lot of the data these studies use is just obsolete. Say you have an opinion piece in a news paper that says that electric cars will always be expensive toys for the rich. It relies on a scientific paper published in a technical journal 2 years ago. The scientific paper does not perf…

Yes, using obsolete data from when tech was bleeding edge in 1999 to imply things about cost going forward is misleading. On the other hand using improvement over the same timeline, drawing a line on a graph and saying "look how X Y is gonna be in Z years" is the same exact type of stupid but pointed in a different direction. In 1991 lithium was highly immature technology and would take about a decade to make it into…

drawing a line on a graph and saying "look how X Y is gonna be in Z years" is the same exact type of stupid

And yet we do it every ~18 months with semiconductors.

Imperfect to be sure, but if you don’t skate to where the puck is headed, you will miss opportunity.

Re: Lithium battery costs have fallen by 98% in three decades

#124

Post by ghaff » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 7:30 PM UTC

supernova87a wrote: post #87

I'm pretty interested to know what parts of this cost have hit their practical limit, and which still have cost to be squeezed out? -- Mineral scarcity/cost of mining -- Cost of processing, refining lithium -- Cost of making battery chemical contents -- Cost of assembling rest of complete battery Any info on how much more advance there is to go on these aspects? And, after all that is squeezed out, is lithium still g…

>is lithium still going to be the thing for 30 years

The biggest thing I'm aware of that seems to be going on right now is trying to make Lithium metal batteries work at scale

https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/the-smarter-grid/the-return...

Re: Lithium battery costs have fallen by 98% in three decades

#125

Post by ExcavateGrandMa » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 7:31 PM UTC

I swear I've sold my drones and can't buy new one :/

Re: Lithium battery costs have fallen by 98% in three decades

#126

Post by r00fus » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 7:33 PM UTC

chrisseaton wrote: post #108

sokoloff wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> while a car lasts only 10-15 years While it might be the case that today’s EVs will not be economically longer-lived than 15 years, the overall average age of a car in the US is 12 years, and most of my cars have been bought with 10 or more years on them as it makes for very inexpensive motoring (no need for collision or comprehensive insurance, no financing interest, and nearly no depreciation). I bought my 2015 L…

> no need for collision or comprehensive insurance, no financing interest, and nearly no depreciation But you need to maintain it and have it inspected instead! And you're also paying with your safety - ten years is a very long time in safety technology these days!

Surely you jest. What safety features on standard vehicles became indispensable in the past 10 years?

Note: things like collision avoidance and adaptive cruise are still luxury features and the OG poster wouldn’t have bought those anyway.

Re: Lithium battery costs have fallen by 98% in three decades

#127

Post by PeterisP » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 7:34 PM UTC

CyberDildonics wrote: post #76

andi999 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your neighbour is stealing power. 15kwh/day means you are permanently using 600 Watts. Do you have a stationary (desktop) computer? Or do you underestimate heating. You can burn through your whole years budget easily in less than two month. What about the oven, I mean do you bake?

Ever heard of a refrigerators and freezers?

A decent refrigerator should consume less than a kWh per day, perhaps 1.5 kWh/day for refrigerator + standalone freezer - this is something that has changed over the last couple decades, at least in the EU there has been a strong push towards more efficient appliances and refrigerators consume much less power than older models.

Re: Lithium battery costs have fallen by 98% in three decades

#128

Post by baybal2 » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 7:36 PM UTC

audunw wrote: post #119

baybal2 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Say you have an opinion piece in a news paper that says that electric cars will always be expensive toys for the rich. Well, you don't see poor people buying EVs that much. That's car manufacturer statistics, which I believe deserves a good degree of trust. In the market for new cars, poor people buy cheapest IC cars, but not cheapest EVs. I will take the point that middle class is now buying budget EVs, but you do…

> Well, you don't see poor people buying EVs that much. You don't see poor people buying new cars that much. Which for now is pretty much the same thing as not buying EVs, since almost all EVs on the road are relatively new. That's starting to change here in Norway. There's a decent amount of used EVs entering the second-hand market. And if you can deal with the short range it's definitely preferable to buy one, sinc…

> And I think cheap BEVs will be a HUGE benefit to poor people in the future, since it saves on gas and maintenance costs in the long term.

I believe the same, if you race for the lowest cost possible, eventually an EV will be cheaper than the cheapest IC powered car for those exact reasons.

... But as I said above. Wuling MiniEV costs like $5500, which is cheaper than low-end Chinese petrol, or diesel engined sedans priced at $7000-$8000, but is still massively, massively outsold by IC cars in its price bracket despite China's massive subsidies for EVs, and quite draconian curbs on IC powered cars.

Re: Lithium battery costs have fallen by 98% in three decades

#129

Post by sokoloff » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 7:36 PM UTC

chrisseaton wrote: post #108

sokoloff wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> while a car lasts only 10-15 years While it might be the case that today’s EVs will not be economically longer-lived than 15 years, the overall average age of a car in the US is 12 years, and most of my cars have been bought with 10 or more years on them as it makes for very inexpensive motoring (no need for collision or comprehensive insurance, no financing interest, and nearly no depreciation). I bought my 2015 L…

> no need for collision or comprehensive insurance, no financing interest, and nearly no depreciation But you need to maintain it and have it inspected instead! And you're also paying with your safety - ten years is a very long time in safety technology these days!

Maintenance beyond consumables (brakes, wipers, and tires) costs less than the difference in excise tax ($25 tax per $1000 of imputed value every year). All cars are inspected annually here.

At 4K miles per year (my average pre-COVID), if my risk is average, I’d expect to be in a fatal accident slightly less than once every 22K years. I’m OK without the latest driver aids at that low level of risk.

Re: Lithium battery costs have fallen by 98% in three decades

#130

Post by natch » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 7:37 PM UTC

spockz wrote: post #41

natch wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting you through the day is not really the point though. The point is 1) shifting some consumption during peak hours off of peak rates and 2) having backup to get you through a limited outage, not necessarily at your full normal consumption level but without having to be in the dark / without internet / without phone and possibly car charging. Nobody should evaluate this by whether one battery pack by itself provi…

I’m not sure about regulations in the US but in The Netherlands you cannot just attach a battery and think you are independent of the grid. To protect the net and people working on the net, power sources behind the meter must disengage when the net/mains power drops. This effectively disables your independence plan. If you want to be independent you have to get some expensive mechanism installed that will decouple yo…

I agree with what you said but it seems you may have meant to reply to a different comment. Independence is another topic, certainly related somewhat, although it didn’t come up in my comment... interesting nonetheless.