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Lithium battery costs have fallen by 98% in three decades

economist.com

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Re: Lithium battery costs have fallen by 98% in three decades

#381

Post by cwhiz »

umvi wrote: post #56
Someone wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or houses not in the USA. http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/average-household-electricity... : “The average American or Canadian household in 2010 used about twenty times more than the typical Nigerian household, and two to three times more than a typical European home”

Why is that? Is it because North Americans use electricity for cooking and heating whereas other countries use gas for that?

Same reason most Americans are poor. Inability to prioritize long term goals over immediate gains. Save $50 today, but spend $500 more over the next decade.

Re: Lithium battery costs have fallen by 98% in three decades

#382

Post by wpietri »

rtpg wrote: post #309
wpietri wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are exactly the same kind of error in that both assume stability over time. One assume prices are stable; the other assumes the rate of change is stable.

To be honest this whole debate is a bit academic. In one situation someone is saying "this thing costs a lot of money and so is a toy for the rich". At the time of the statement it's probably true! You might get into an error by saying "it will always be like that because it's expensive now". But the issue is that, _even at the time of the statement_, the price has been decreasing over time! It's falsifiable at the t…

Both are assumptions about the future. Neither is falsifiable at the moment of speaking. What would be falsifiable is a statement about the historic rate of change.

I agree that it's generally more likely that a 15-year trend will continue than change. If we're talking about a year, that is. But 5 years? 15 years? 100 years? 1000 years? At some point, the general assumption changes.

But without trend data, I also agree that assuming price stability a better general assumption than assuming a major price drop. Historically, very few things keep getting cheaper. It requires a) large society willing to keep making R&D investments, and b) a technological domain with a lot of possible ways to keep lowering costs.

And what I mostly agree with is the proverb, "It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future."

Re: Lithium battery costs have fallen by 98% in three decades

#383

Post by mrfusion »

_0w8t wrote: post #361
zdragnar wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They'll never be free. They'll never be cheaper than the raw materials that go into them, or the copper to wire them together and into the car. At some point, there's going to be a price floor that the research, materials supply and competition simply won't break through. Guessing when that is going to happen is more luck than anything. I do not see it continuing to get exponentially cheaper for long, though. LiFePho…

Well, the theoretical floor is much further if one goes beyond Lithium. There are various prototypes that oxides aluminum potentially reaching energy densities greater than gasoline. Now, those are currently only reversible in the sense of using aluminum smelter to restore aluminum from the oxidized form. Still we do not know if reversible process is not possible at all in a compact device and the supply of aluminum…

Even as a single use battery it would be amazing. Carry around a 20 lb battery in your EV as a backup to get you to a charger.

Electric airplanes could carry these for takeoff and maybe jettison at a preplanned location for recycling.

Re: Lithium battery costs have fallen by 98% in three decades

#384

Post by nswest23 »

wpietri wrote: post #224
nardi wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are not the same kind of stupid. One makes the assumption that costs will always be the same, and the other makes the assumption that cost decreases are linear, or predictable. The former is much stupider.

They are exactly the same kind of error in that both assume stability over time. One assume prices are stable; the other assumes the rate of change is stable.

No, the first error is that costs are fixed (stupidest), the second is that they are easily forecast (just kinda stupid).

Re: Lithium battery costs have fallen by 98% in three decades

#385

Post by imtringued »

dmoy wrote: post #132
ip26 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

drawing a line on a graph and saying "look how X Y is gonna be in Z years" is the same exact type of stupid And yet we do it every ~18 months with semiconductors. Imperfect to be sure, but if you don’t skate to where the puck is headed, you will miss opportunity.

> And yet we do it every ~18 months with semiconductors. So, this is about to stop. Very soon. Quantum tunneling, yield rates, etc are all starting to be cost prohibitive. Even if hypothetically it does, there's a very real limit - an atom is only 10x smaller than 2nm.

We'll get to 256 core server chips and that will be the end of the line. You are forgetting that the advertised version number denoted by nm is about what size a theoretical planar transistor would need to have to be equivalent to the advertised process.

Since that number is purely theoretical, we can construct a theoretical scenario in which its theoretical nature would become absolutely obvious. Take a 7nm process node transistor and stack it 100 times. Such a process would be called a 0.07nm process.

Re: Lithium battery costs have fallen by 98% in three decades

#386

Post by jerven »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #349
adrianN wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using nuclear for baseload doesn't work economically. Nuclear plant economics are such that you want to run them 100% all the time. Renewables sometimes produce pretty close to 0 energy. If you don't want to invest into storage you need nuclear capacity to cover close to all demand. If you have that capacity you don't need renewables. I don't think we can build nuclear plants quickly enough to prevent catastrophic wa…

> Using nuclear for baseload doesn't work economically. Nuclear plant economics are such that you want to run them 100% all the time. That's what baseload is . > Renewables sometimes produce pretty close to 0 energy. Which is why they need storage, and storage is expensive. If you do half nuclear and half renewables, you only need half as much storage. Less than half, because you can use pricing to shift demand. Supp…

Baseload tends to be about 40% of max load in most grids. i.e. having base production doesn't really change the economics of storage or over-provisioning etc. On the other hand because there is always, in this theoretical grid 60% overproduction potential your base load has real difficulty making money about 1/3rd of the time.

Baseload, is really minimal load in the grid. There are many ways to produce the minimal amount. Real difficult part is to provide the max load demand on the grid.

Basically current nuclear technology is inflexible in economic terms (also quite a bit in practical terms), shown historically by most grid storage being deployed when nuclear was being built out.

Re: Lithium battery costs have fallen by 98% in three decades

#387

Post by _ea1k »

manmal wrote: post #259
theshrike79 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The battery had literally zero temperature management, no heating or cooling. They literally could've added a 12 volt chassis fan to make it not suck so bad. Rapidgate was a thing, the battery heated up when driving, you stop to recharge -> battery heats up even more -> overheat -> limiters engage and you're charging at hand crank levels of power.

The Leaf was built with Japanese climate in mind, where peak temperatures are usually not as high. I always found that strange, given that automotive components are usually tested for outlier conditions.

AFAIK, it also overheats under CHAdeMO charging in very cold temperatures. I don't think it was the climate, just saving $$.

Re: Lithium battery costs have fallen by 98% in three decades

#388

Post by theshrike79 »

sokoloff wrote: post #380
Reason077 wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A $5k, 75-mile used EV still offers a lot of utility and value because it will cost almost nothing to run and maintain. No doubt you’ll be able to buy great $5k combustion cars in 2030, but ongoing fuel and maintenance means their true cost is a lot more than that! And in some parts of the world, increasingly stringent emissions controls mean that combustion cars become more expensive, or even illegal, to drive in ci…

A 2018 model 3 or X might be a sub-$5K (in 2021 dollars) car by 2030. If they are, very few batteries will be replaced in old LEAFs. The faster that new EVs mature/evolve, the less comparative value older ones have meaning they will be getting scrapped when the next battery replacement is needed. I do all the maintenance on our cars (ex- tires, body, and warranty/recalls). The LEAF has already had one battery repair…

I think there will be a secondhand market offering battery upgrades for older EVs. So they just won't install the exact same battery, but a bigger one or a smaller one (lighter, but same capacity).

10 years of R&D on batteries by some of the biggest corporations in the world should provide some new innovations.

Re: Lithium battery costs have fallen by 98% in three decades

#389

Post by will4274 »

sandworm101 wrote: post #344
will4274 wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's about mature and immature technologies. 20 years ago, photovoltaic cells had efficiency ranges in the single digits, but rising. When efficiency rises from 5% to 10%, it makes sense to assume that it keeps rising. But electric heaters had efficiency ranges around 95%, even when my parents were kids. Now they have even better efficiency - 99.8% in my newest apartment - which is only 5% better than 50 years ago -…

Any electric heater, even those decades ago, was 100% efficient. They turn electricity watts into heat watts. Where is the energy loss? Light? That also becomes heat. Air movement? Also heat. Loss due to heat allong the cord to the heater? Thats heat too. Unless they are emitting large numbers of neutrinos, all electric heaters are simply resistors that perfectly turn electricity into heat. Put nearly any electrical…

I was actually referring to electric water heaters, so the loss is to the air.

Re: Lithium battery costs have fallen by 98% in three decades

#390

Post by minitoar »

RhodoGSA wrote: post #314
simpleguitar wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Toyota, it wasn't the engineering, design, nor the manufacturing that was the bottleneck. It was sourcing of the batteries. Toyota sold 100k Priuses it's first year (2005), and peaked at 237k Priuses in 2012. At that time, nobody had the capacity (nor the materials), to produce that many battery packs for full EV use. In hind sight, they could have committed fully to LiIon batteries for the future, but in early 2…

best currency for mars? Crypto.

Haha, I wonder if there is some sort of coin protocol that could be compatible with the deep space network. That latency seems like it could really mess things up.
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