Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Lithium battery costs have fallen by 98% in three decades

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 424 posts

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

#171

Post by iagovar »

the8472 wrote: post #155
iagovar wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An expensive phone is about 500-1000€. A cheap EV is in the 20K neighborhood, and the functionality is pretty bad compared to a cheap second-hand utility car (pretty hard to travel outside your city). Even when regulations push prices up, it's still far more economical to buy a cheap gas car than a cheap EV. Even in Europe there are plenty of countries where many people can't afford an EV. They can afford second-hand…

Nissan leafs are get into the price range and they're basically first-generation mass-market EVs. Yes people do buy these. And in some european cities street-side/lamppost chargers already are a thing. Multiple conditions are only going to get better, not worse.

Nissan Leafs are ~20k for Km0 offers in Spain. They are very limited cars in range, functionality is behind than a 10K Km0 Fiat Panda. Street chargers are scarce, and usually expensive, and I have a hard time picturing a charger in every parking space in my city.

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

#172

Post by dehrmann »

turtlebits wrote: post #153
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…

The 2015 Leaf has the worst battery degradation of any EV. That's Nissan's fault. However, battery prices are going drop further. Your Leaf has a 24kWh pack. At the current $100/kwh price, thats $2400 for a completely new battery. In the future I'm sure you could get an even higher capacity replacement.

That might have been an intentional choice if they knew either they'd sell to suckers and leave them on the hook for the new battery, or have to subsidize a new battery in 5 years, knowing it would be cheaper, like writing a call on batteries.

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

#173

Post by vmception »

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…

Is there a good way to quickly understand this for any topic?

Like, take something you might not be interested in and just "don't get". Your conclusions will be very quick but based on the current state of things.

The people that "do get it" might be crazy, or they might be seeing a longer trend that they've been following so long that they never articulated it, and aren't even capable of articulating it.

How is one supposed to form opinions on new topics where the state rapidly changes?

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

#174

Post by usrusr »

ben_w wrote: post #148
dmoy wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And yet we do it every ~18 months with semiconductors. So, this is about to stop. Very soon. Quantum tunneling, yield rates, etc are all starting to be cost prohibitive. Even if hypothetically it does, there's a very real limit - an atom is only 10x smaller than 2nm.

On the one hand, I remember people saying the same about nodes much larger than those we currently use. On the other, yes: continue current trends and single atom transistors become standard in 10-32 years.

I think it boils down to we will hit a wall, but we don't know exactly when we'll hit it. (and how hard, chances are that higher-hanging-fruit refinements will make the transition to stagnancy so gradual that we may not notice at all)

A jump from "all past predictions failed" to "and so will all future predictions" seems rather bold to me. In the end it's like a somewhat upended variation of the "x decades to practical fusion" thing where we all hope that the old joke that x might be a natural constant is eventually proven wrong.

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

#175

Post by wazoox »

sokoloff wrote: post #105
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…

> 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…

The new Dacia Spring has a 27kWh battery and costs only 12k€. In the electric car market, the situation is evolving extremely rapidly.

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

#176

Post by waiseristy »

chrisseaton wrote: post #166
r00fus wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Collision avoidance, speed limiting, adaptive speed limiting, adaptive headlights, lane keeping, blind-spot warning, ISO-FIX anchors, far stronger pillars, reversing cameras, lane exit monitors, SOS buttons and GPS reporting, far more air bags, door-cyclist collision warnings, seat-belt pre-tensioning, some have pre-collision suspension raising, etc, etc, etc. I just went from a 2009 Land Rover to a 2020 Land Rover,…

Don't forget TPMS! Probably one of the best safety-to-dollar-spent advancements in the last *13 years

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

#177

Post by shoo »

dragosmocrii wrote: post #2

The article says that today a battery pack the size of a backpack and that weighs about 40kg, can power a house for a day. Is that really so? Would that be a normal house, being powered for an entire day? I find it hard to believe that battery would pack that much energy

Another anecdote: I rent a 50m^2 apartment. Electricity consumption for the apartment, averaged over trailing 12 months, is 4.5 kWh / day. This excludes: energy for stove top/oven (natural gas) and energy for hot water (paid for as part of rent, cannot see the details). Consumption for two people, including one person working from home full time. Relatively modern apartment that is warm enough in winter without active heating.

This will not be representative of energy usage in houses, larger apartments with many exterior sides & lots of exposed glass.

edit: house prior to that was an older 100 m^2 semi-detached house with much worse insulation. Similar setup with natural gas for cooking & hot water. Annual electricity consumption was 1750 kWh / year so about 4.8 kWh / day on average, for two people. Not so different to the current situation. Curious. From memory we ran the air conditioner on a few days in summer and electric heating in the depths of winter. From memory the house was somewhat unpleasantly cold some of the time so perhaps we tended to put on warm clothing rather than try to heat the whole place.

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

#178

Post by bdcravens »

markdown wrote: post #167
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…

> a car lasts only 10-15 years Is this normal where you live (presumably the US)? I find that really wasteful. Cars last twice that in my country, and we have tropical, seaside (salt = rust) weather to deal with.

25% of cars are 16+ years, and the longevity of cars is increasing

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/28/25percent-of-cars-in-us-are-...

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

#179

Post by ghaff »

usrusr wrote: post #174
ben_w wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the one hand, I remember people saying the same about nodes much larger than those we currently use. On the other, yes: continue current trends and single atom transistors become standard in 10-32 years.

I think it boils down to we will hit a wall, but we don't know exactly when we'll hit it. (and how hard, chances are that higher-hanging-fruit refinements will make the transition to stagnancy so gradual that we may not notice at all) A jump from "all past predictions failed" to "and so will all future predictions" seems rather bold to me. In the end it's like a somewhat upended variation of the "x decades to practic…

Well, the main direction of refinements at this point seem to be around composable/heterogeneous computing where we basically have a lot of hardware optimized for specific workloads and throw the complexity at the software people. i.e. now deal with GPUs, DPUs, FPGAs, xCPUs, etc. instead of (largely) just a standardized set of CPU instructions.
Post reply on HN