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The price of lithium-ion batteries has declined by 97% in the last three decades

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Re: The price of lithium-ion batteries has declined by 97% in the last three decades

#91

Post by cogman10 »

quickthrowman wrote: post #81
cogman10 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/natural-gas-power-st... If the whole grid goes down, your gas likely won't be there. If you add solar, then you could indefinitely run in most circumstances.

I don’t live in Texas, I live somewhere that the natural gas doesn’t go out because people will die if it does, so our infrastructure is winterized and maintained. We get some -30F every winter and the natural gas service is always there. You could swap out the NG generator for a diesel one with a day tank and then you don’t have to worry about NG service :) A 30kwH battery wall is going to last 6-12 hours at most an…

60kWh for 4k then? What about 120kWh for 8k?

Point being you could target your outage range based on what you want to prep for at a fairly low cost (assuming $50/kWh).

Add on a solar system to any of these and you'd have indefinite power without a reliance on surrounding infrastructure.

For my home, 30kWh would give me ~24hr of power.

Even if you want a fossil fuel generator, you could have an auto switch to battery for the short outages so you don't have to go crank on the generator.

Re: The price of lithium-ion batteries has declined by 97% in the last three decades

#92

Post by cogman10 »

holoduke wrote: post #89
cogman10 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the current silicon manufacturing processes, I'd say the end is in sight. Every node shrink is taking longer and longer and getting more and more expensive to fabricate. We've been reliant on node shrinks to push things further. That hard limit is 0.2nm (silicon atom size) we are at ~2nm gate features. It remains to be seen if we can get to that 0.2nm size, I honestly don't think we can push much further past th…

3d chips. Imagine current size with 1 million layers. Sure it will start with just a few layers. And many obstacles to be overcome like temp and delay. But one day our cpus will look like little cubes. Moore's law can continue for at least another 30 years

Couple of problems.

First, how do you cool such a chip? Sure, you could add a bunch of transistors but the thermal costs per transistor will stay the same. Assuming similar design but adding 20 layers, how would you account for your CPU now consuming 600W?

Second, The tech doesn't exist. The problem we have is that layering chips today is basically growing crystals in a controlled fashion. Defects in lower layers spoil upper layers. Today that's already a problem (CPUs today have ~7 or 8 layers). Can you imagine the problem of 20 or 30 layers?

Who knows, maybe we'll come up with solutions to both problems, but that's a big maybe. My bet is that instead we focus on architecture designs. We revisit old but deemed too expensive concepts like an async CPU.

Re: The price of lithium-ion batteries has declined by 97% in the last three decades

#93

Post by UncleOxidant »

cm2187 wrote: post #39

That's not the price of batteries in general, that's the price of Li-Ion batteries. Were Li-Ion batteries mass produced in 1991?

We used a Lithium D cell in a prototype wireless product at a startup I worked at in 1989. The cells were pre-production samples. I forget the name of the company that was producing them now (I think it was a Japanese company - there were no logos on these batteries), but we were warned not to let them short out as they would go off like a 1/4 stick of dynamite. We were pretty careful with them, but we did have a unit come back from the field that had pretty much burned up, nothing but a charred circuit board left and most of the plastic enclosure melted away.

Re: The price of lithium-ion batteries has declined by 97% in the last three decades

#94

Post by eloff »

cogman10 wrote: post #34
eloff wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Think Moore's Law, which is dead now. Look again. Moore's law in terms of single threaded performance is dead. In literal terms of number of transistors on a wafer, it's still increasing exponentially, just slower. And in terms of what mattered when people cited Moore's law, the decrease in price/performance, it's still exponential, just slower and multi core. It will end, as all exponential trends must end lest th…

With the current silicon manufacturing processes, I'd say the end is in sight. Every node shrink is taking longer and longer and getting more and more expensive to fabricate. We've been reliant on node shrinks to push things further. That hard limit is 0.2nm (silicon atom size) we are at ~2nm gate features. It remains to be seen if we can get to that 0.2nm size, I honestly don't think we can push much further past th…

There are still many ways this may change. 3d transistors (which are currently used), different materials, and 3d chips (stacking layers of chips).

We are not yet close enough to the end to say where it is, so that's out of sight IMHO.

Re: The price of lithium-ion batteries has declined by 97% in the last three decades

#95

Post by eloff »

cogman10 wrote: post #92
holoduke wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3d chips. Imagine current size with 1 million layers. Sure it will start with just a few layers. And many obstacles to be overcome like temp and delay. But one day our cpus will look like little cubes. Moore's law can continue for at least another 30 years

Couple of problems. First, how do you cool such a chip? Sure, you could add a bunch of transistors but the thermal costs per transistor will stay the same. Assuming similar design but adding 20 layers, how would you account for your CPU now consuming 600W? Second, The tech doesn't exist. The problem we have is that layering chips today is basically growing crystals in a controlled fashion. Defects in lower layers spo…

This is real, shipping technology.

See 3d nand flash cells, see stacked cache and HBM memory. All the usual characters are working on it. Intel, AMD (TSMC), Samsung.

Cooling is an issue, but there are solutions.

Re: The price of lithium-ion batteries has declined by 97% in the last three decades

#96

Post by chrisseaton »

bluedino wrote: post #79
cm2187 wrote: post #39

That's not the price of batteries in general, that's the price of Li-Ion batteries. Were Li-Ion batteries mass produced in 1991?

Yea, AA batteries have definitely not gotten cheaper

AA is a form-factor, not a chemical technology. You can get lithium AA batteries. You probably mean alkaline cells have not gotten cheaper.

Re: The price of lithium-ion batteries has declined by 97% in the last three decades

#97

Post by eloff »

bin_bash wrote: post #17
eloff wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read the whole comment? I edited it, but that part was in there from the beginning, just in different words.

I agree with you, I just think you weren't making your case strongly enough by implying that Moore's Law referred to more than just transistor count.

Fair enough

Re: The price of lithium-ion batteries has declined by 97% in the last three decades

#98

Post by eloff »

kevml wrote: post #26
lanstin wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am sure there is some sci fi novel where species compete for neutron stars because they are a very dense compute substrate.

Not neutron stars specifically, but Accelerando by Charles Stross covers this.

That was a good book, it challenged many of my assumptions.

Re: The price of lithium-ion batteries has declined by 97% in the last three decades

#99

Post by reissbaker »

ben_w wrote: post #62
cogman10 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If musk is to believed, (and I think he's on point with this), $50/kWh will likely come within the next 5 years. So next 9 years? My expectation is beyond Tesla, the rest of the industry will have hit on that sub $50/kwh price point. That is going to make a lot of things really interesting. $2000 for a 30kWh home battery backup? Who wouldn't get one? To further this, with climate change leading to more and more extre…

> $2000 for a 30kWh home battery backup? Who wouldn't get one? Very few of the people that would currently benefit from a domestic backup battery could afford $2k, and most of the people who do have $2k to spare don’t live in places with unreliable electricity. The overlap isn’t zero, but… for example, I visited Kenya with an ex of mine, we met a local friend of hers, that friend would’ve benefited from a more reliab…

> Very few of the people that would currently benefit from a domestic backup battery could afford $2k

California, a state of 40 million people, would disagree with you ;)

Not just referencing the blackouts we had last summer: CA also is heavily invested in solar power, and as a result, power is much cheaper during the day than at night (assuming you opt into time of use pricing). A battery for $2k would pay for itself in California quickly, because you can charge it when power is cheap during the day and run off battery when power is expensive at night.

Plenty of other US states have had blackouts as well; my parents in PA now own a generator due to repeated blackouts last year. If they could have bought a battery for $2k, they probably would have: generators are loud and dirty. And Texans certainly had a bad time with blackouts recently as well.

Re: The price of lithium-ion batteries has declined by 97% in the last three decades

#100

Post by baybal2 »

cogman10 wrote: post #92
holoduke wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3d chips. Imagine current size with 1 million layers. Sure it will start with just a few layers. And many obstacles to be overcome like temp and delay. But one day our cpus will look like little cubes. Moore's law can continue for at least another 30 years

Couple of problems. First, how do you cool such a chip? Sure, you could add a bunch of transistors but the thermal costs per transistor will stay the same. Assuming similar design but adding 20 layers, how would you account for your CPU now consuming 600W? Second, The tech doesn't exist. The problem we have is that layering chips today is basically growing crystals in a controlled fashion. Defects in lower layers spo…

> Today that's already a problem (CPUs today have ~7 or 8 layers).

No, I think x86 passed 14+ layers at least half a decade ago.

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