A study with newer data discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26686969
Lithium battery costs have fallen by 98% in three decades
341–350 of 424 posts
Re: Lithium battery costs have fallen by 98% in three decades
#342Earlier 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…
The other way that EVs enter the market is that someone takes a gas-powered car and converts it to electric. It's not a particularly common thing to do, for multiple reasons. It's time consuming, expensive, and requires tools and space, and a certain amount of expertise or willingness to learn.
The may be a lot of people who have the time, inclination, space, and access to tools to do a conversion but are blocked by the cost barrier. That probably includes at least some poor people. Mostly I'm thinking of young college-age people who might not necessarily be experiencing poverty but also don't have any significant wealth either. Maybe they live with their parents and are having trouble finding work.
I'd like to see EV conversions have the same level of subsidy as OEM cars; that could make it a worthwhile and cost-effective endeavor for a lot of people. It could also provide jobs for local mechanics, for customers who don't want to do the work of converting the vehicle themselves. There are a lot of gas-powered cars on the road. They aren't all worth converting, but some of them are. It seems a waste to replace them all rather than convert the ones worth converting.
Re: Lithium battery costs have fallen by 98% in three decades
#343This 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…
> 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.
Solar power and electric cars aren’t impractical because of the price tag of the technology but because of their fundamental properties.
Solar power cannot produce electricity on demand which is why solar (and wind parks) can never compete in a free electricity market where prices are formed based on supply and demand.
A product such as electricity is worthless if it’s all produced during peak hours even if demand is low to moderate at the time or extremely expensive when it’s hardly produced while demand is high. Even if solar and wind parks would cost nothing to build, this problem wouldn’t go away simply because prices are formed by supply and demand which have to be in balance for prices no to fall or jump extremely.
This is the reason why Germany’s electricity costs twice as much to the end user as compared to France and still causes up to ten times as much of greenhouse gas emissions per kWh as compared to France.
As for electric cars: The fundamental problem is refueling time and its geographical flexibility. A car with a combustion engine can be refueled within minutes anywhere on the planet. An electric car has to be refueled for at least an hour and needs to be recharged at a station while an ICE car can be refueled on the right-most lane of a highway if you run out of fuel and someone with a jerry can comes to your rescue.
The fundamental problem with battery electric cars is that energy is changing its form during refueling (electricity => chemical form) which is why there is an upper limit to how fast such a car can be refueled.
For ICE cars, the energy is put into your tank without changing its form which is why ICE cars can be refueled within seconds if necessary (see Formula 1 cars).
This limitation is the main problem with battery electric cars and the reason why you won’t see any large numbers of police or emergency vehicles which are battery powered in the foreseeable future.
There is a reason why solar/wind and electric cars remain highly subsidized in many countries despite of the fact that the technology is becoming cheaper. Both products wouldn’t be able to compete in a free market due to their fundamental shortcomings.
Re: Lithium battery costs have fallen by 98% in three decades
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
These are not the same kind of stupid. One makes the assumption that costs will always be the same, and the other makes the assumption that cost decreases are linear, or predictable. The former is much stupider.
It's about mature and immature technologies. 20 years ago, photovoltaic cells had efficiency ranges in the single digits, but rising. When efficiency rises from 5% to 10%, it makes sense to assume that it keeps rising. But electric heaters had efficiency ranges around 95%, even when my parents were kids. Now they have even better efficiency - 99.8% in my newest apartment - which is only 5% better than 50 years ago -…
Any electric heater, even those decades ago, was 100% efficient. They turn electricity watts into heat watts. Where is the energy loss? Light? That also becomes heat. Air movement? Also heat. Loss due to heat allong the cord to the heater? Thats heat too. Unless they are emitting large numbers of neutrinos, all electric heaters are simply resistors that perfectly turn electricity into heat.
Put nearly any electrical device in a box, anything from a television to a cement mixer, and it will raise the temperature of the air in that box by exactly the same amount as the watts it draws from the power source. A 500w television puts out exactly as much heat as a 500w heater.
Re: Lithium battery costs have fallen by 98% in three decades
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
Time will tell but I've got my fingers crossed that in 15 years time any backstreet garage will exchange your battery on a car of that age for a cost proportionate to the fact that you could reasonably expect another 10 years of trouble free motoring. With luck with a 50% increase on its original capacity.
They already do. A battery swap/refresh/replacement for a Leaf is 5-10k€ over here, depending on how bad shape the original is and whether you want a larger battery in there. It's kinda sorta doable by yourself, but it's a HVDC circuit so you _really_ need to know what you're doing. Actual brand-name shops are slowly able to replace individual failed cell packs instead of just swapping the whole battery. The big prob…
> Leaf is 5-10k€
Those are pretty wide error bars, last time I looked at used Leaf's they were selling for somewhere in that range. Admittedly first gen leafs with the 24KWh battery.
Re: Lithium battery costs have fallen by 98% in three decades
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> Km0 offers That hardly qualifies as a second-hand market car. > Street chargers are scarce, and usually expensive In the past they didn't exist. Today they're scarce. In the future it'll look different. This thread is about trends after all. > And I have a hard time picturing a charger in every parking space in my city. We can start smaller of course, it only needs to be scaled up with EV adaoption, not reach 100%…
I used Km0 for giving the electric a chance.
Re: Lithium battery costs have fallen by 98% in three decades
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
The rate of change has been stable over the last 15 years, do you bet it continues for a 16th year or that it stops this year?
They'll never be free. They'll never be cheaper than the raw materials that go into them, or the copper to wire them together and into the car. At some point, there's going to be a price floor that the research, materials supply and competition simply won't break through. Guessing when that is going to happen is more luck than anything. I do not see it continuing to get exponentially cheaper for long, though. LiFePho…
There's a floor but it's not just price of raw materials. It includes performance of same raw materials just used better. So a battery today with X amount of raw materials puts out Y power. A battery in 10 years with the same amount of X raw materials puts out Y^4 power. At least according to E=MC^2 it's a long way before we reach the floor.
Re: Lithium battery costs have fallen by 98% in three decades
#348s
Re: Lithium battery costs have fallen by 98% in three decades
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wa…
> Using nuclear for baseload doesn't work economically. Nuclear plant economics are such that you want to run them 100% all the time.
That's what baseload is.
> Renewables sometimes produce pretty close to 0 energy.
Which is why they need storage, and storage is expensive. If you do half nuclear and half renewables, you only need half as much storage.
Less than half, because you can use pricing to shift demand.
Suppose you have 50 GW of nominal demand, but solar generation is at 10% of normal because it's overcast. You can get demand down to 40GW through price incentives. If you had 50 GW of solar which is down to 5 GW, you would need to cover 35 GW from storage. If you had 25 GW of solar which is down to 2.5 GW, and 25 GW of nuclear, you only have to cover 12.5 GW from storage. Less than half as much.
Re: Lithium battery costs have fallen by 98% in three decades
#350This 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…
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