Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and most of the people who do have $2k to spare don’t live in places with unreliable electricity. A home battery in many places is basically free money. Renewables mean there is an extreme oversupply at some times and an undersupply at others. Owning a battery hooked up to the grid means you buy power at oversupply times where the power goes in to negative pricing and then sell it back at other times in the same da…
Old car batteries are at the end of their life because they have low capacity or have shorted cells.
The price of lithium-ion batteries has declined by 97% in the last three decades
191–200 of 330 posts
Re: The price of lithium-ion batteries has declined by 97% in the last three decades
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
The other commenter says that they were first introduced as a commercial product in 1991. According to Wikipedia, they were preceded by two years by the first commercially-available nickel-metal hydride cells in 1989, so that would be an interesting point of comparison. Also nickel-cadmium and lead-acid have been around for a very long time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel%E2%80%93metal_hydride_b...
I remember a lot of stuff having NiMH for a long time throughout the 90s, seemed like it took LiIon a lot longer to catch on.
Re: The price of lithium-ion batteries has declined by 97% in the last three decades
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
How much better than the competition were they then? Did you understand why you were using such a dangerous alternative?
Weight, I suppose. And silver+zinc was likely still more expensive.
Re: The price of lithium-ion batteries has declined by 97% in the last three decades
#194The flip side is that we got almost no improvements in energy density for 3 decades. Thank you for the cost reduction, but it is not enough.
Re: The price of lithium-ion batteries has declined by 97% in the last three decades
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: The price of lithium-ion batteries has declined by 97% in the last three decades
#197That's not the price of batteries in general, that's the price of Li-Ion batteries. Were Li-Ion batteries mass produced in 1991?
The classic example is light bulbs [1]. If you use naive comparisons of like goods across years, with weighting by percentage of expenditures, to measure consumer/producer price changes from e.g. 1890-1930, you'll see:
1. decreasing weight in the basket and increasing price of whale-oil lamps over time 2. increasing weight in the basket and decreasing cost of light bulbs over time
But what you won't capture is that these two goods are both providing lighting, and that the switch from one to another provides a sharp drop in the price of light that is not captured by the change in prices of either in isolation.
Here it's the opposite effect, in that looking at Li-Ion battery prices in isolation overestimates the deflationary effect on energy storage prices.
This problem has also popped up in the context of measuring US manufacturing output over time. Specifically, the correction factors used to deal with this are called "price deflators", and their inability to deal with the pricing and business model of computer hardware may have produced an incorrect impression that US manufacturing output is holding steady or increasing, when it's actually decreasing [2]
[1] "Classic" as in used to draw the attention of the field in this important 1998 paper: https://lucept.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/william-nordhaus-...
[2] https://research.upjohn.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&htt...
Re: The price of lithium-ion batteries has declined by 97% in the last three decades
#198[0] https://www.nytimes.com/1990/01/20/style/consumer-s-world-co...
[1] https://www.walmart.com/browse/household-essentials/aa-batte...
Re: The price of lithium-ion batteries has declined by 97% in the last three decades
#199That's not the price of batteries in general, that's the price of Li-Ion batteries. Were Li-Ion batteries mass produced in 1991?
This illustrates a big problem in econometrics, specifically inflation measurement ("price indexes"): when comparing the prices of equivalent (baskets of) goods and services, "equivalent" gets harder and harder to define over longer time and space intervals. The classic example is light bulbs [1]. If you use naive comparisons of like goods across years, with weighting by percentage of expenditures, to measure consume…
Re: The price of lithium-ion batteries has declined by 97% in the last three decades
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
Energy density is a meaningless measure for cars. $ per mile isn't. If you have a heavier battery, you just need a bit more of it to drive the same amount of miles. It just boils down to cost in the end. You can also trade weight for mileage and have less battery. That lowers the cost and improves the mileage. Apparently Tesla has pushed internal cost per kwh of storage below 100$ now. That price is going to drop fur…
Energy density on mass is not entirely meaningless . A heavier car requires larger tires. That makes the tires a more expensive continuing cost, and creates more particulate pollution. A heavier car also requires larger brakes and pads (though electric cars can offset this with regen). A heavier car also puts more wear onto the roads. A heavier car also makes the car slower at a given horsepower, and have worse handl…
Energy per kg is relevant when weight matters. For example in electrical planes. In cars, $ per mile is the one to focus on. Of course that continues to improve as energy density improves so they are somewhat linked.