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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

#191

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.

A battery with only 50% capacity is pretty useless for a car but if you get it for cheap, its a great deal for a home battery.

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

#192
post #59

Earlier 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.

Likewise, and I was quite perplexed as a kid why The Secret of Nimh had no mention of batteries.

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

#193
post #162

Earlier 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.

I was never rich enough to own a laptop in that era, but I remember weight being the commonly espoused difference, or at least how it was marketed.

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

#194

The 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.

From what I understood,you can't store a lot more energy without unwanted side effects using the current technology.

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

#195
post #122

Earlier 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

I use 18650 cells over pocket cells in my hobby projects if possible: partly because I find it easier to get consistent quality 18650's in my local market (shipping lithium ion batteries is a hassle), partly because it allows me to use the same pool of batteries across many things (power banks, torches, different DIY-projects).

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

#196
post #130

Earlier 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.

My understanding is that neither of the major outages in SA in recent times have been related to intermittent supply issues (i.e. the first major incident was related to trips caused by weather, the second was related to a gas using supplier failing to increase supply due to some market regulation minutiae that was subsequently changed).

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

#197
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?

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 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
Pretty misleading title. In 1990 you could buy a AA duracel for 30 cents[0] update: older model. Alkaline may have been higher (see comments). Presently at Walmart you can get them for about 68 cents (24 pack for 16.24[1]). That's a nominal price increase of roughly 100%, although of course in real terms, it is flat (30 cents in 1990 were about 63 cents today). But those are alkaline batteries. This article is comparing the costs of prototypes of Lithium ion batteries in 1991 to mass production unit costs today. That unit costs fell massive from prototype to mass production stage is neither newsworthy nor interesting.

[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

#199
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?

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…

'Overestimates' because at the start of the time series people were using cheaper alternatives to the very-expensive li-ion batteries.

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

#200

Earlier 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…

In theory yes. In practice, the mach e handles very nicely compared to the mach 1. You'd not buy the latter in favor of the former for it's raw performance as the mach e is simply faster. Brake pads last longer because of regenerative breaking (i.e. you hardly use your brakes at all). Tire wear on a mustang is something to be mindful of. But then doing donuts seems to be a thing with these cars. Ridiculous torque has a price. You see the same pattern with other EVs and increasingly high performance electrical sports cars breaking all sorts of records.

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.

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