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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

#121

Post by ClumsyPilot »

alvah wrote: post #114
ben_w wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> $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…

"most of the people who do have $2k to spare don’t live in places with unreliable electricity" Increasing the mix of renewables in the electricity networks will mean most people live in places with unreliable electricity going forward. The proposed $2k 30kWh home battery backup could well be the adaptation many of us have to make.

um, no, we are not going to have unreliable electricity because people's lives depends on it. We will have grid scale batteries, and the grid will charge you more or less depending on when you are using energy. it does not make sence to have such essential equipment randomly distributed through the population where I have to fight my landlord to repair the damn thing or have it not cause a house fire, while the guy is out of the country on holiday and couldn't give a rat's ass

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

#122

Post by 14 »

quickthrowman wrote: post #84
colechristensen wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has the capacity gone up?

No, I’ve been buying 2500 mAH batteries rated for 20A draw for 5.50 a piece, mostly Sony and Panasonic from illumn

I am curious, what kind of projects do you do with those batteries, what is their use for? Thank you

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

#123

Post by cogman10 »

eloff wrote: post #95
cogman10 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

3d cells for nand aren't the same as 3d CPU cores. Nand is incredibly simple which makes it possible to do things like 3d cells which would otherwise be more complicated.

There's a reason memory can generally beat computational cores to smaller node sizes. It's because highly uniform circuits are much easier to manufacture. A lot of problems present in CPU logic cores (such as cross talk) just aren't present to the same extent in NAND cells.

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

#124

Post by usrusr »

chrisseaton wrote: post #96
bluedino wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And it's an excellent example. Technology gets better until efficiencies are maxed out and battery cell production can't be an exception. The only big outlier has been computer chips, where slowly shrinking cost per square mm (if it even sank?) was an insignificant footnote compared to the ever increasing ability to pack in more per unit of surface area. Lithium batteries have far more in common with alkaline batteries than with transistors for logical operations.

Power transistors for example I would also consider closer to alkaline cells than to logic, there has surely been a lot of progress in that field which eventually brought us the miracles of HVDC, but on a far more conventional scale.

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

#125

Post by cogman10 »

eloff wrote: post #94
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…

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.

Like I said, cooling is going to be a major issue that doesn't currently have a solution (as far as I know) Even if it does, you are going to run into the real problem that even if you can cool a 600W CPU, would the average customer WANT to have such power hungry parts? Now imagine the problem in server space where the CPUs are already constrained by power consumption.

The entire reason cloud service providers are looking at and advertising ARM racks is the power savings from operating them.

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

#127

Post by drzaiusapelord »

cbmuser wrote: post #110

Yes, but their energy density has hardly changed and every gasoline tank beats your average LiIon battery by a factor of 10: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#In_chemical_rea...

Lithium-ion is something of an everyday miracle. I'm older and I remember previous rechargeable battery technologies and they were just terrible. Also, Gas and tiny portable batteries have nearly nothing in common. You're not going to be able to fit an ICE into my iphone. What's with the weird comparisons? I don't see how they are helpful. Its like when we talk about hate crimes or civilians killed in war, and other people bring out unrelated stats about car accidents or cancer. This is a common thing on the internet that almost no one questions. Its weird and frankly a dishonest rhetorical trick.

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

#128

Post by pryelluw »

dceddia wrote: post #126

Funny, it seems like batteries for my car are like 2-3x what they used to be.

Well, the technology on 12v car batteries has continued to advance. /s

It’s ridiculous how expensive they’ve become. More so when there is no R&D costs associated. Manufacturers simply slap on a different name and sell it at a premium.

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

#129

Post by gerdesj »

colechristensen wrote: post #71
xkjkls wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a graph there on market size, which shows the market size has grown 50,000x since 91.

This is a sort of meaningless metric, you can adjust your time frame to make the market size arbitrarily small because it was 0 before 1991.

Your parent specifically stated 1991 not "before 1991".

I think I understand what you mean but there was also a unfulfilled requirement before 1991. Back then (I'm 50.5 years old) cells didn't explode but then they also didn't set the world alight in terms of longevity either.

We had Walkmans and crappy clones that drained the shitty rechargeable cells we had at the time in a few hours. OK those things drove mechanical beasties - cassettes but cells/batteries were not particularly good before Li-Ion turned up.

Do you have any idea how something as simple as an iPod becomes exciting because no mechanical spinny things means power draw is much, much lower? It also helps if the thing isn't beige or grey. Apple are no more exciting to me than any other mob: design-wise, but they did get a few things right early on: "don't look shit". As it turns out, that simple mantra means that you get to >$1T t/o.

Now I own a phone that runs for around two days before charging. That doesn't sound too grand until you recall that just the GPS thing in it would have required 2U+ in a comms rack back in the day. The camera? If I kept an equivalent camera from the 1990s in my pocket then I'd be making silly jokes about it. The phone: I can stand on the top of Hay Torr and make a call.

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

#130

Post by alvah »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #121
alvah wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"most of the people who do have $2k to spare don’t live in places with unreliable electricity" Increasing the mix of renewables in the electricity networks will mean most people live in places with unreliable electricity going forward. The proposed $2k 30kWh home battery backup could well be the adaptation many of us have to make.

um, no, we are not going to have unreliable electricity because people's lives depends on it. We will have grid scale batteries, and the grid will charge you more or less depending on when you are using energy. it does not make sence to have such essential equipment randomly distributed through the population where I have to fight my landlord to repair the damn thing or have it not cause a house fire, while the guy i…

um, yes, it's happening already in areas where intermittent supplies make up a sufficient percentage of the energy mix (e.g. South Australia). In an ideal world we'd keep the rollout of intermittent sources below the level at which they cause instability until grid scale batteries are invented, however that's not the world we live in.
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