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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

#361

Post by _0w8t »

zdragnar wrote: post #280
Brakenshire wrote: post #262

Earlier 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…

Well, the theoretical floor is much further if one goes beyond Lithium. There are various prototypes that oxides aluminum potentially reaching energy densities greater than gasoline. Now, those are currently only reversible in the sense of using aluminum smelter to restore aluminum from the oxidized form. Still we do not know if reversible process is not possible at all in a compact device and the supply of aluminum is vast.

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

#362

Post by _0w8t »

dmoy wrote: post #132
ip26 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

2nm is just a commercial name. The real features are much bigger, see, for example, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/10_nm_process. So we are quite far from 10 atoms per transistor.

The biggest problem is lithography. ASML managed unexpectedly for many in the industry including Intel to solve technological problems with extreme ultraviolet sources, but shrinking transistors significantly further requires soft x-rays and the perspectives of that now for mass lithography are much more uncertain than for EUV ten years ago.

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

#363

Post by oort-cloud9 »

Hmm.. The price I pay for my laptops never goes down. It was 2000 ten years ago, it's still 2000. Of course if I buy a laptop with approximately the same specs, I'll pay less. But then I'd be severely behind in my computing power. Same with the batteries as they get better. Also take into account the economic situation we are in now. What we have is not a free market economy. The government messing with the economy creates huge distortions. Under these circumstances you can't guarantee that the prices will keep falling. The prices of the Commodities are going up. One of these days, the inflation or even hyperinflation is going to hit us. Then what? Also, have you ever heard of the Great Reset? The plan is to slow the economies down inthe nameof Climate Change fight. As Klaus Schwab said you will own nothing and be happy.

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

#364

Post by yellowapple »

simpleguitar wrote: post #267
Robotbeat wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm as big of a Tesla fan as any, but I'm both continuously impressed with how ahead-of-its-time the Prius was and continuously disappointed how lack-luster Toyota has been in pure electric cars. Toyota had like a decade lead on everyone else and just.... sat on it. Only invested in hybrids and hydrogen (which was and is a dead end). Toyota could've gone all-in on pure electric cars (and better plug-in hybrids than t…

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…

> All of his 'crazy ventures' lead to colonizing Mars

Counterpoint: that flamethrower, which probably won't be of much use in a thin atmosphere lacking oxygen.

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

#365

Post by yellowapple »

elihu wrote: post #342
audunw wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

There's also a bit of an annoyance w/ EV conversions, at least here in the US: automatic transmissions being pretty much ubiquitous. They're basically dead weight for an EV (which doesn't need to switch gears), and they further tend to have a lot of mechanical and electrical complexity.

I suspect that if I ever convert my Highlander to an EV (which is something I'd like to investigate should its current drivetrain eventually give up the ghost), it'll likely entail needing to remove the transmission entirely (and maybe replace it with a fixed gearbox of some sort?). And given that it's AWD, that complicates things further, since there are very few AWD/4WD EV conversions.

That said, if there are solutions to this problem, and said solutions prove viable, then this makes EV conversion a lucrative business, and opens it up to most cars on American roads.

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

#366

Post by MomoXenosaga »

aidenn0 wrote: post #112
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…

There were similar things at the dawn of the jet age. Someone wrote a paper demonstrating that jet power could not improve over propeller power because radial-flow compressors generated too much drag and axial-flow compressors were too inefficient. What the author of the paper didn't know is that, contemporary to him, it was discovered that shaping each blade of an axial-flow compressor like an airfoil significantly…

You can't predict a breakthrough but they tend to change everything.

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

#367

Post by yellowapple »

Robotbeat wrote: post #216
baybal2 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

In part because the MiniEV has really low range (think first generation Leaf) whereas any IC car is gonna be like a Model 3 at least. 200 miles (on the EPA cycle) really is the minimum for a pure electric car IMHO. 250 miles, really. Otherwise it looks like less of a value than an IC car.

It seems like there should be a removable gasoline or diesel generator purely for range extension. For day-to-day commutes and errands near home, leave the generator at home and save on weight. For long-distance trips, bring the generator with you.

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

#368

Post by yellowapple »

mlindner wrote: post #195
markdown wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There's a lot of variation in the US depending on where you live. In California the car can be so old the paint has all come off but there's hardly any rust on the car because the air is very dry, it doesn't rain much, temperature variation is low and salt isn't used on roads. On the other hand you can be places like Canada or the northern midwest where Temperature swings by 100F between summer and winter, salt is us…

And meanwhile, my Highlander will be old enough to drink in a couple years, has lived everywhere from the East Coast to the Bay Area to (currently) the Great Basin, has been taken offroad on multiple occasions, has handled dozens of blizzards like a champ, and (knock on wood) is still hanging in there, even with my rather inconsistent maintenance.

So I'd say a lot of this depends on the model, and possibly the make.

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

#369

Post by Qwertious »

ekianjo wrote: post #220
nardi wrote: post #203

Earlier 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.

Nope, it's the same thing: excess of confidence in predicting the future.

Investing in government bonds vs investing in penny stocks: both are the same thing, as they are both an excess of confidence in predicting the future.

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

#370

Post by jononor »

vkou wrote: post #353
mlindner wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So, this is about to stop. Very soon. Quantum tunneling, yield rates, etc are all starting to be cost prohibitive. People have been saying that for over 10 years though. "Very soon" keeps being punted off by another 5 years every 5 years.

It has stopped, though. Single-threaded performance, either in absolute value, or per dollar has not been following Moore's law for more than a decade. And outside of data centers, single-thread performance is still king. Performance per watt has improved, but that's not a metric the typical end user cares much about.

Performance per watt is key for all portable devices, ie the laptops and phones that many do almost all of their end-user computing on.
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