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Lithium battery costs have fallen by 98% in three decades

economist.com

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

#331

Post by adrianN »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #326
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…

> Furthermore, nuclear plants take 5 to 10 years to even build. But that's the problem. The cost of solar and batteries is declining rapidly. For how long? We don't know. Exponential curves eventually flatten out. We had Dennard scaling until we didn't. So the question is, do they get cheap enough before they hit the wall? We have two choices. Choice one, build new nuclear plants, and then if alternatives are even ch…

They are already cheap enough. Renewables are much cheaper than nuclear and competitive with fossil fuels. We don't need another factor 10 cost improvement. All we need is political will to implement the change. We could be running 70% renewable in a couple of years if we wanted to. To get to 100% we might need to improve the cost effectiveness of power-to-gas facilities, but there is zero reason today not to replace the majority of our energy consumption with renewables.

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

#332

Post by richardw »

cookiengineer wrote: post #328
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…

In general I agree with the renewable energy movement, and also with the ideas that come with modern approaches to electric mobility (like car sharing etc). The only point I have left that I have to agree with, and that's a huge one, is recycling. Our governments across the planet have failed to enforce sustainable recycling pipelines in the plastics industry, how would this be any different? Why is my laptop battery…

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

#334

Post by AnthonyMouse »

adrianN wrote: post #331
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Furthermore, nuclear plants take 5 to 10 years to even build. But that's the problem. The cost of solar and batteries is declining rapidly. For how long? We don't know. Exponential curves eventually flatten out. We had Dennard scaling until we didn't. So the question is, do they get cheap enough before they hit the wall? We have two choices. Choice one, build new nuclear plants, and then if alternatives are even ch…

They are already cheap enough. Renewables are much cheaper than nuclear and competitive with fossil fuels. We don't need another factor 10 cost improvement. All we need is political will to implement the change. We could be running 70% renewable in a couple of years if we wanted to. To get to 100% we might need to improve the cost effectiveness of power-to-gas facilities, but there is zero reason today not to replace…

They're cheap enough when they're not being used as baseload. To get to 100% renewable you would need to pay for storage and then have enough over-supply to deal with extended periods of overcast. That's a lot more expensive.

This is another reason to do both. Use nuclear for baseload and you remove all the storage you would need for solar to work overnight. Meanwhile demand is higher during the day when solar is generating, so still use that there. It reduces the amount of storage you need from the entire night to just the high demand period between sunset and when people go to bed.

> All we need is political will to implement the change.

You only need political will for subsidies.[1] You only need subsidies if it's not actually cheaper.

[1] Or regulatory approval, but let's not bind everything in red tape all around, shall we?

If it is cheaper then people just do it on their own without any government involvement.

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

#335

Post by elihu »

minitoar wrote: post #80
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…

Are there many gains to be had on electric motors? I guess I sort of assumed those had seen quite a bit of optimization already.

There's some gain to be had in terms of efficiency, but not much. Induction motors are I think generally approaching 90%, and SRIPM-type motors are in the mid 90's.

Probably the biggest gains going forward will be around improving the ratio of power output to weight, and reducing manufacturing costs (of both the motor and the controller). Maybe also increasing maximum RPM and improving durability, for whatever application where current motors aren't good enough.

It might also be nice to have more standardization and modularity. In the EV conversion world, there's kind of a defacto standard of motors made specifically for conversion mostly using a B-face with a 1 1/8th inch shaft with a quarter inch key slot. That helps a lot, as you can buy a motor from one company and a transmission adapter plate and coupler from another company and have pretty good odds it'll work. There are apparently ways to get almost any motor to work with almost any transmission, but that usually requires custom fabrication. (Obviously you can also ditch the transmission and just connect the motor directly to the drive shaft or transaxle or whatever. I don't know much about that route.)

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

#336

Post by simpleguitar »

RhodoGSA wrote: post #314
simpleguitar wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Toyota, it wasn't the engineering, design, nor the manufacturing that was the bottleneck. It was sourcing of the batteries. Toyota sold 100k Priuses it's first year (2005), and peaked at 237k Priuses in 2012. At that time, nobody had the capacity (nor the materials), to produce that many battery packs for full EV use. In hind sight, they could have committed fully to LiIon batteries for the future, but in early 2…

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

#337

Post by elihu »

aaronblohowiak wrote: post #118
fulafel wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are so close to 100% efficiency that the possible gains are modest.

what is the cost of the motor vs the cost of the input materials? what % of the cost of a vehicle is the cost of the electric motor? My understanding (however limited here) is that car-worthy motors are still priced at a bit of a premium to their input materials, but it doesnt really matter because overall they are still not that expensive compared to batteries.

Yeah, some motors have rare-earth permanent magnets which are expensive. Induction motors don't, they just have a weird squirrel-cage structure made of (I guess) copper. Probably the manufacturing inputs for an induction motor are cheap, but the motors are a bit inefficient.

I'm currently doing a conversion that uses a Netgain Hyper9 [1]. They cost about four and a half thousand dollars (including controller) and they're pretty bulky and heavy. They're really efficient though. An OEM manufacturer I'm sure could have a motor made much more cheaply and design it to run at a much higher voltage and produce correspondingly more power. I think the Hyper9 just uses magnetized iron or something like that for the permanent magnets. No rare-earths, so it might be pretty cheap to make something like that in volume. They serve the conversion market though, so it's kind of niche product. I have no idea what Nissan spends to make something like a Leaf motor.

[1] https://www.go-ev.com/motors-warp.html#HyPer_9HV

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

#338

Post by adrianN »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #334
adrianN wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are already cheap enough. Renewables are much cheaper than nuclear and competitive with fossil fuels. We don't need another factor 10 cost improvement. All we need is political will to implement the change. We could be running 70% renewable in a couple of years if we wanted to. To get to 100% we might need to improve the cost effectiveness of power-to-gas facilities, but there is zero reason today not to replace…

They're cheap enough when they're not being used as baseload. To get to 100% renewable you would need to pay for storage and then have enough over-supply to deal with extended periods of overcast. That's a lot more expensive. This is another reason to do both. Use nuclear for baseload and you remove all the storage you would need for solar to work overnight. Meanwhile demand is higher during the day when solar is gen…

Using nuclear for baseload doesn't work economically. Nuclear plant economics are such that you want to run them 100% all the time. Renewables sometimes produce pretty close to 0 energy. If you don't want to invest into storage you need nuclear capacity to cover close to all demand. If you have that capacity you don't need renewables. I don't think we can build nuclear plants quickly enough to prevent catastrophic warming.

If you instead use renewables, batteries, and power-to-gas you can also reach net-zero emissions without waiting twenty years until you have enough nuclear plants. Renewables and batteries are already cheap enough to compete with fossil fuels, and provide enough stability to reach a high percentage of the energy demand. 50% renewables is doable with hardly any storage at all. Power-to-gas can provide the storage needed for seasonal variations, but there are still cost problems with that.

Imo the lack of political will for the energy transformation mostly takes the form of unpriced externalities for fossil fuels. There still is no carbon price that is even close to the actual damages. Damages from the extraction of fossil fuels are not paid for by the companies either. Coal plants still emit tons of Mercury without paying for it. Aviation fuel is essentially untaxed. The list goes on and on.

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

#339

Post by bratcomplex »

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.

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

#340

Post by benzor »

JeffL wrote: post #318
an_opabinia wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it a misconception? If the credit didn’t exist they would not be profitable. They lose money on the cars. They sell more cars, they lose more money. I like the company and I like electric cars, but I’m not stupid, I’m not misconceiving anything.

Yes it's a misconception. Their profit margin on cars is consistently over 20%. They have large overhead costs that are more or less fixed like R&D that get amortized more and more as sales go up. They have massive net free cash flow every quarter even while building out new factories that will increase production capacity by 50% every year for the next several years, further increasing economies of scale and operati…

You and GP are arguing two different things and are both right.

GP's claim is that Tesla would not be profitable without regulatory credit sales: this is true. Tesla's profit for 2020 is $721M and its credit sales for 2020 are $1.58B, just over double. It's fair to say that, were those credit sales to fall to zero, Tesla risks losing its profitable status. Here we're effectively discussing net profit margin for the company as a whole.

Your claim is that Tesla's automotive gross margin on car sales is 20%. This is also true, but only includes COGS (Cost of Goods Sold), so car parts and assembly costs. It does not include other expenditures such as CapEx or R&D. 20% sounds great (and it is), but when we look at the net profit margin, $721M of profit on $31.54B of revenue gives only a 2.2% net profit margin which is not as impressive.

It's therefore rather unfair to say that GP's claim is a misconception, it's actually perfectly true.

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