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

371–380 of 424 posts

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

#371

Post by ksec »

rini17 wrote: post #154
clomond wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except when you consider where each technology fits within its own S-curve of adoption (X axis over time, Y axis is % of the technology adopted by the market). When factoring in the shape of the exponential decreases in costs, and that penetration of most of these technologies is at or before the inflection point (between 5%-15% market penetration), it is more likely that the cost declines will ACCELERATE moving forw…

For example there isn't agreement where on the S-curve fits hydrogen as automotive fuel. Or if it has a future at all. Same with other alternative technologies. The S-curve is only a hindsight device.

S curve only starts to plot itself once it hits an inflation or deflation point. For hydrogen it is so far from that.

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

#372

Post by ksec »

cbozeman wrote: post #231
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.

Not according to Jim Keller. He believes we still have plenty of room, and no offense to you, but I'll take his word before yours.

And Jim Keller is not a Fab / Processing guy. And if you actually listen to what he said, he is predicting plenty of room to improve, not it will improve every 24 months, which arguably has already stopped happening since ~2017

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

#373

Post by max_ »

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…

It doesn't matter how much the price falls.

The real question to answer is the efficiency compared to existing energy sources.

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

#374

Post by amelius »

HeadsUpHigh wrote: post #356
amelius wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> FYI, the cost of individual cells has long, long gone below $100 per kWh in wholesale volumes. Electric bicycle batteries are still $500 for 500Wh (consumer price, but 10x as expensive).

And phone batteries are even more expensive. This is about grid tier batteries or cars where the volume constraints are less tight.

Your sibling commenter jeffbee says they have replaced the cells in an existing battery, so I'm not convinced volume constraints are the problem here.

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

#375

Post by ben_w »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #256
ben_w wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Except when you consider where each technology fits within its own S-curve of adoption (X axis over time, Y axis is % of the technology adopted by the market). Unfortunately, even a very small amount of noise in the data makes is basically impossible to know where you are in an S-curve. Much safer to make predictions based on the far more limited good news that PV+battery is already cheaper than coal for electricit…

> how much would it cost to develop significant PV-powered electrolysis-and-Sabatier-process plant in any of the big coastal deserts, for exporting methane? What are you thinking about as the carbon source? If coal, then this has been commercially viable for decades. In North Dakota there is a 1.5 gigawatt installation running since 1984. That one uses electricity from coal power IIUC, but today PV is cheaper than co…

Thanks! While this does not fully change your conclusion for air-capture CO₂, I am confused by this:

> 1 tonne of CO2 gives ~137 kg of methane at 100% reaction yield, due to the molar weight ratio of CO2 to CH4.

I think it’s more like 363 kg given the ratio of molar weights: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=co2%20molar%20weight%2F...

(Looks like an extra factor of two, but I can’t figure out why, everything I play with in WolframAlpha is a factor of two in the wrong direction)

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

#376

Post by tim333 »

oort-cloud9 wrote: post #363

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 c…

The battery isn't a big percentage of laptop cost.

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

#377

Post by ben_w »

Qwertious wrote: post #290
taneq wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At that point, just use battery storage and bypass the reactor entirely.

For domestic day-to-day consumption, absolutely. The main argument for hydrogen AFAICT is that it can be exported overseas or stored for inter-seasonal use. Batteries can't do that, as 1) when compared to literal rocket fuel, they're impractically heavy to put on a cargo ship for bulk transport, and 2) batteries trickle-discharge so after a month or two the battery will be flat.

In fairness, pure hydrogen is also leaky and hard to work with. That’s why I was asking about the economics of turning it into methane… and yet, one of the other replies I got pointed out that methane is also a bit leaky, so we might want to reform it (or whatever the word for “opposite of cracking” is) all the way up to a room temperature liquid.

I barely remember the process from school, something like this rings a bell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalytic_reforming

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

#378

Post by azeirah »

thesteamboat wrote: post #122
ajuc wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Whaha, the Dutch word for insulation is "isolatie". The word "isolatie" also translates directly to the English word "isolation" as in being away from everyone.

I think the poster might be Dutch or similar :p

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

#379

Post by gpm »

spookthesunset wrote: post #302
urthor wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, people were doing a LOT with model airplanes ~60 years ago with kerosene engines.

I don’t think modern quads would be possible with combustion engines. They aren’t precise and responsive enough. Modern brushless motors paired with some pretty kickass electronic speed controllers and flight controllers create a pretty amazing thing. I mean modern quads can fly in “3D” mode and almost instantly reverse the direction of all the motors so the quad can fly in all orientations, right side up and upside…

Have the combustion engine drive a generator not the props, it's still more energy dense (but only scales so small).

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

#380

Post by sokoloff »

Reason077 wrote: post #325
sokoloff wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it will cost around $2-3K for the battery replacement on a car chassis that’ll be worth around $2K to get back to a range and set of features that won’t be competitive with the then-current (no pun intended) EVs or other $5K cars. If you want to spend $5K on a car in 2030, you’ll have way better options than a 75 mile range, 6kW charging (20-24 miles per hour) 2015 LEAF (CHAdeMO will be fully dead by then and…

A $5k, 75-mile used EV still offers a lot of utility and value because it will cost almost nothing to run and maintain. No doubt you’ll be able to buy great $5k combustion cars in 2030, but ongoing fuel and maintenance means their true cost is a lot more than that! And in some parts of the world, increasingly stringent emissions controls mean that combustion cars become more expensive, or even illegal, to drive in ci…

A 2018 model 3 or X might be a sub-$5K (in 2021 dollars) car by 2030. If they are, very few batteries will be replaced in old LEAFs. The faster that new EVs mature/evolve, the less comparative value older ones have meaning they will be getting scrapped when the next battery replacement is needed.

I do all the maintenance on our cars (ex- tires, body, and warranty/recalls). The LEAF has already had one battery repair under warranty (at around 17K miles, out of service for several weeks and likely a $2K+ repair at future independent rates-was 2 techs for most of a day plus pages of special sealants and consumables)

Other than that it has needed wipers and windshield fluid and that’s it. If that pattern keeps up, they’re still headed to the scrapyard en masse, I think.

Post reply on HN