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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

#321

Post by bagacrap »

oblio wrote: post #233
FabHK wrote: post #224

Nice that the cost has come down. Unfortunately, that which makes electric cars and planes feasible, namely energy density (Wh/litre) and specific energy (Wh/kg), has not improved that rapidly. The article mentions a factor of 3.4 over 30 years for energy density, ie 4% p.a., or doubling every 17 years. I think electric aircraft need another doubling or two in specific energy to become feasible, so another few decade…

If we fix everything except for aircraft, we will have done enough. At that point aircraft can keep using fossil fuels for a while longer. Cars, trucks, buses, trains, HVAC, factories are what needs to be electrified ASAP.

are ACs not already electric?

I guess furnaces are still largely gas, oil or wood burning... that doesn't seem like a technological problem though.

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

#322

Post by dublin »

bagacrap wrote: post #321
oblio wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we fix everything except for aircraft, we will have done enough. At that point aircraft can keep using fossil fuels for a while longer. Cars, trucks, buses, trains, HVAC, factories are what needs to be electrified ASAP.

are ACs not already electric? I guess furnaces are still largely gas, oil or wood burning... that doesn't seem like a technological problem though.

Gas furnaces are FAR more efficient than their electric resistance heating or even heat pump counterparts. Not to mention that a simple gas burner works with no moving parts (other than the solenoid valve) for decades with no maintenance, while heat pumps, in my experience, are far more troublesome than regular HVAC units, and still have to fall back to grossly inefficient resistance heating (even in a normal central Texas winter!) when temps dip below freezing. (One great thing about my parents moving several years back was leaving their $400-1000 annual heat pump repair bills behind. It wasn't just a bad unit - it was the third heat pump they'd had, and all (even from different mfrs!) were similarly troublesome, esp. for heating.)

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

#323

Post by dublin »

jiofih wrote: post #320
ncmncm wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intercontinental shipping is more likely to move to electrically-synthesized ammonia than to batteries. Big aircraft are more likely to move to liquified hydrogen, synthesized on demand at major airports; initially burning it in turbines, eventually using fuel cells and electric drive. Ammonia will be pretty easy to switch to; the main impediment today is just raw production capacity, which needs to be scaled up by t…

First and foremost, hydrogen production needs to be moved to renewable power. At current production levels it generates almost a billion tones of CO2 annually already. And then, total efficiency for hydrogen fuel is much lower than batteries. In vehicles for example, while 70-80% of grid energy reaches a cars’ wheels, the figure for LH2 is about 25%, a lot more of it goes to production and transport than its actual p…

Hydrogen is an energy STORAGE medium, NOT an energy SOURCE.

The ONLY economically viable source of H2 today is cracking Natural Gas (and to your point, nearly always producing CO2 in the process).

From both a lifecycle efficiency and pollution perspective (if you accept the ridiculous idea that CO2 is a pollutant), we're way better off just burning the NG, which is already the cleanest carbon-based fuel there is.

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

#324

Post by dublin »

oblio wrote: post #259
amelius wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If every industry thinks like that ...

I can drive a car that's 20% heavier due to batteries. Nobody's going to fly a commercial plane that's 40% heavier due to batteries. Some places, current batteries just don't cut it.

The requirements for fairly large power margins for safe operation at takeoff and landing generally prevent electric airplanes from making sense and achieving FAA approval, especially for commercial applications. We are decades away from viable electric commercial aviation. Even turbine-electric series hybrids weigh and pollute more than their native kerosene-burning equivalents.

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

#325

Post by ncmncm »

dublin wrote: post #323
jiofih wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First and foremost, hydrogen production needs to be moved to renewable power. At current production levels it generates almost a billion tones of CO2 annually already. And then, total efficiency for hydrogen fuel is much lower than batteries. In vehicles for example, while 70-80% of grid energy reaches a cars’ wheels, the figure for LH2 is about 25%, a lot more of it goes to production and transport than its actual p…

Hydrogen is an energy STORAGE medium, NOT an energy SOURCE. The ONLY economically viable source of H2 today is cracking Natural Gas (and to your point, nearly always producing CO2 in the process). From both a lifecycle efficiency and pollution perspective (if you accept the ridiculous idea that CO2 is a pollutant), we're way better off just burning the NG, which is already the cleanest carbon-based fuel there is.

NG is not a viable aircraft fuel. It is possible that cryogenic LCH4 could be, as SpaceX uses it, but its energy mass density is not enough to drive a wholesale conversion, as LH2's is. Batteries are also far from viable as energy storage for transport aircraft.

Obviously, the LH2 fuel must be produced electrolytically, from electricity generated from renewable sources like solar, wind, or geothermal, not from NG as it all is today; I specifically called that out in the text that the above pretends to reply to, so it is hard to see why NG-generated H2 is mentioned here at all. LH2 generated on demand at airports does not incur transport losses.

Identically, NH3 is today produced by consuming NG and exhausting CO2, which process also must be replaced with catalytic means powered from renewable sources, and H2 generated electrolytically.

And, obviously there are conversion losses from solar/wind to electric to separated H2 and to chilled LH2, and then to accelerated air, just as there are losses extracting crude oil, transporting, refining, transporting again, burning, and exhausting it. End-to-end cost, including externalized environmental cost, is what matters. We need a carbon tax to help drive conversion. But the favorable energy mass density of LH2 overrides enormous conversion losses, which is the whole point.

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

#326

Post by ben_w »

mac01021 wrote: post #318
ben_w wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Value for money is not my argument. I’m just saying loads of people for whom it would provide benefit don’t have $2k spare money to invest. To put a different spin on it: the price point for the cheapest consumer unit should be way lower than that… unless you force landlords to install it at their own cost (as a landlord myself: a $2k legally mandated expense would not be happy fun times, but I could and would suck i…

I understand your point. I don't think of the infrastructure here as _bad_, though. We do have the occasional outage after a storm, as I described. But, even if the uptime were as low as 99%, which it is not, I would not want to pay the cost of making the grid significantly more resilient than it is.

My electricity uptime has never been as low as 99%. South coast UK for the first 18 years of my life, total downtime would’ve been at most half a day, in 30-60 minute fragments, ~99.992% uptime. Never once failed when I was back there for 7 months to help provide care for my mum. Likewise Sheffield for about a year, and that place had an annoying prepay electricity meter.

Rural Wales for 3.5 years? 30 minutes of downtime total, ~99.998% uptime. Similar total downtime in Cambridge, but I was there 8.5 years, so 99.9993% uptime. I don’t think it’s ever failed me here in Berlin.

That in particular is why I’m saying here that American infrastructure looks bad. It’s not the only way, TBH, but it is so in a new and relevant way I wasn’t previously expecting.

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

#327

Post by mac01021 »

ben_w wrote: post #326
mac01021 wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand your point. I don't think of the infrastructure here as _bad_, though. We do have the occasional outage after a storm, as I described. But, even if the uptime were as low as 99%, which it is not, I would not want to pay the cost of making the grid significantly more resilient than it is.

My electricity uptime has never been as low as 99%. South coast UK for the first 18 years of my life, total downtime would’ve been at most half a day, in 30-60 minute fragments, ~99.992% uptime. Never once failed when I was back there for 7 months to help provide care for my mum. Likewise Sheffield for about a year, and that place had an annoying prepay electricity meter. Rural Wales for 3.5 years? 30 minutes of down…

I don't doubt that electrical service in nearly all the UK has _much_ higher uptime than the service here in Connecticut.

I could be wrong, but I suspect that the infrastructure in the two places is built essentially the same way. I think the crucial difference is that Connecticut has so many more trees. Downed trees break the lines all over the state whenever a windstorm or a snowstorm comes through. (Come to think of it, most of the UK doesn't get snowstorms, either).

I'm just saying that never for a second would I consider trading any of those trees for additional uptime. Nor do I want to pay the utility providers whatever it would cost to bury all those lines in the ground where they'd be safer from storm damage. I'd rather have a week without power every couple of years.

I'd be curious to know if the story is different in rural or semirural Scandinavia.

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

#328

Post by jiofih »

dublin wrote: post #323
jiofih wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First and foremost, hydrogen production needs to be moved to renewable power. At current production levels it generates almost a billion tones of CO2 annually already. And then, total efficiency for hydrogen fuel is much lower than batteries. In vehicles for example, while 70-80% of grid energy reaches a cars’ wheels, the figure for LH2 is about 25%, a lot more of it goes to production and transport than its actual p…

Hydrogen is an energy STORAGE medium, NOT an energy SOURCE. The ONLY economically viable source of H2 today is cracking Natural Gas (and to your point, nearly always producing CO2 in the process). From both a lifecycle efficiency and pollution perspective (if you accept the ridiculous idea that CO2 is a pollutant), we're way better off just burning the NG, which is already the cleanest carbon-based fuel there is.

Oil is also an energy storage medium, but I don’t think that distinction matters at all here.

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

#329

Post by Syonyk »

lovemenot wrote: post #288
Syonyk wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does this come with a “know what you are doing” caveat? Yes, and I'll suggest that a disturbingly large fraction of the people doing this on YouTube don't know what they're doing, and are being brutally unsafe with the batteries, even if it works. I've done battery pack rebuilding semi-professionally for a few years (I was rebuilding ebike packs for most of North America from about 2015 to 2018), and the people scr…

Thank you so much for sharing your experience. It's valuable. Do you know any best practices about who does this right, and how it can be done both safely and economically? If necessary with automation and large scale.

Following up a few days later, someone did send a video my way that I agree with every aspect of - the guy does a very safe, competent build, with correct techniques, and builds a far better and safer pack than most of the commercial packs I've seen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adY-S8AH_Jc

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

#330

Post by leucineleprec0n »

Marazan wrote: post #227
leucineleprec0n wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It didn't really take off until flash and the colored assortment anyways tho

They started taking off when you could load them from a windows machine.

Ah yeah, correct. Weren't the first ones using Firewire IO? Just classic levels of insular on Jobs' part

edit: maybe not, plausibly just charging

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