As a rule of thumb, a 10x increase in production of something halves the price. Purely through economies of scale. Much of what's been seen in lithium-ion batteries is just that.
Has Tesla got their act together with their US "Gigafactory" in Nevada yet? They had a lot of problems, most of them in plant management related to starting up a big plant in an isolated area.[1] Plus feuding with Panasonic.[2]
Eventually somebody will get this right, and there will be automated plants with very few employees. This is the ideal situation for automation - making huge numbers of identical products. It just takes a long time to get the automation working.
A big problem in the US is that few people go into manufacturing engineering. It's a big thing in China, but not in the US. Average pay for manufacturing engineers is about $78K, according to Glassdoor. Senior level, maybe $82K. This is for a job which today requires understanding real-time computer control, electronics, mechanical engineering, and organizational behavior.
I am always surprised to hear how much programmers get paid in the US (third world disclaimer: It's a lot!).
> Average pay for manufacturing engineers is about $78k
This is more on par with pay for (top) programmers or engineers that I know of. In South Africa, actuaries get paid much more than programmers. From what I have seen on HN, US based programmers (in top-ish companies) get paid actuarial salaries. As a mathematician, I have a lot to say about actuaries, but alas, that is for another day.
Maybe someone more knowledgeable can clarify this. Median pay at tech companies is sometimes > $100k annually. In my view as a not-a-US-citizen, that is a lot of money.
Bear in mind you might not have the same way to report salaries. In France, for instance, when employees report salary, they don't include the tax the company pays for them. AFAIK, in the US, salaries are reported including them.
I still have a very hard time making apple to apple comparisons. If anyone has a good methodology, please ping
In the US, salaries are not usually described including tax, are they?
When someone in the US says they make $100,000 per year, that is usually exclusive of any tax paid by the company. It is also exclusive of other benefits paid, with health insurance commonly being $10-20k paid by the company, if provided. The employee is responsible for their own income tax.
There’s confusion because in the gig/entrepreneur/consultant world, people will say they “make” $200,000 in business income. But then they bear taxes and benefits out of that amount. So you may “make” more, but do worse than someone who is an employee of a bigger company. That is why it takes a substantial increase in income in the US to justify leaving a stable employer.
But this shouldn't make a difference relatively. In most of Europe (every country I know salary data of), manufacturing engineers tend to get paid at least the same if not more than programmers.
What is important is not how much you are paid. What is important is how much buying power you have with the salary you are paid (minus taxes) and how much your society gives you for free (education/health/...)
South African here. We tend to use products, integrate systems and do custom dev. There's really no reason to pay crazy salaries because "pretty good" is good enough.
When you're competing on the output of developers and the difference between first and second is Facebook and MySpace, get the best you can afford and pay them. You're spending VC money and need the best output as fast as you can get it. Good enough will kill you.
> We tend to use products, integrate systems and do custom dev.
As a young South African, this reality is something of a let down. In the US, it's like you have a country with (if you normalise to mean) 30 cities the size of JHB economically. The access to cutting edge tech jobs is just incomparable. The upside is that if you do break through, your relative success is greater. In the US, someone else is already trying your idea.
I think they are one trick ponies (evaluting risk in insurance, pensions and medical funds) that can't appreciate why 0^0 = 1, and if they do, would rather make money for the time it takes to explain.
But, to not sound like a completely grumpy cynic, I think they are intelligent and efficient; moreover, these days people have multiple jobs or facets and the critism is more towards the idea of an actuary than the individuals who are actuaries. I guess we are all in competition and actuaries and CAs are maybe just more honest about competing for one's income.
I am actually interested in actuarial research, FWIW.
Controls Eng for plant level PLC/HMI, Automation Eng for interconnect with the higher layers (SCADA/MES/ERP/Cloud) is the general wording I see. But, yeah lots of mix and match with those words.
In the middle of architecting the systems for a new pack line myself.
Economies of scale often get mentioned as if it is some sort of magical property that makes things cheaper. Reality is often far more complicated. Amazon, for example, hasn't really had an improvement in fulfillment costs over time. They've gotten more expensive as they've pushed ideas that grow the company: faster shipping, more products, etc. Also, resource constraints tend to have overwhelming impacts: the cost of extracting oil from the earth got a lot cheaper on economies of scale right up to the point where they had to go after more expensive sources to get enough to fill demand. Economists have a name for this effect: diseconomies of scale.
It is pretty safe to say that economies of scale has gotten us to where we are now with batteries. But that does not necessarily mean the trajectory will continue.
But the postal system already had immense economy of scale. If Amazon had to bootstrap its own fulfillment from scratch, the per package cost absolutely would have been slashed as volume increased.
To put some numbers on it, imagine you start off delivering one package by hand a week, literally by hiring someone to drive across the country. This might cost $2000 a week in fuel, salary, depreciation etc.
Now say we're delivering a billion packages a week. The rule quoted would put it at $4 per package.
There's wiggle room to argue each end, but considering it's a rule of thumb operating over nine orders of magnitude, that it's not outright nonsensical is actually pretty good.
I agree it's not some iron law, and it's important to know when and where it can be applied.
There's also Jevons Paradox[1]. This is that the more efficiently a resource is used the more demand there is for it. So if you increase the efficiency of electric vehicles, there will be more demand for battery packs because the battery pack's use value for transportation increases. For example, if there were technological improvements to Tesla that made them get 50% more range off the same weight of battery packs, that would greatly increase the demand for those battery packs because the value of those battery packs would be greatly increased.
So this applies to software systems as well. We had a system where, every time we optimized the underlying database, it became slower . This puzzled us for a while. Turns out that people were used to the slowness. When they found out that the system became faster, they actually started entering more transactions. As more people noticed, the system got overwhelmed again. Until it reached a point where it could finally handle the load.
The variable we failed to see is that people were leaving work earlier now. Even though the system's metrics appeared to degrade, that was a metric that markedly improved. They used to work longer hours to get all their work done.
> We had a system where, every time we optimized the underlying database, it became slower.
One thing I've noticed is that the amount of time I have to wait when performing operations has remained more or constant through the past few decades, even as processor instruction retirement rates skyrocketed and memory/storage/network latencies plummeted. I often find myself trying to pull up a site to do something like track a project or buy a ticket, only to be waiting for 5 to 10 seconds before I am able to read the information and/or perform the operation I was there for.
I always ask myself, "Why on earth am I having to wait at all for this?" I assume it's the same concept of "induced demand" for roadways. Under that theory, in densely-populated areas, traffic will always be as bad as it is, regardless of the number of lanes. Add more lanes, and commute times drop. Then people who didn't tolerate the longer commute times before jump in and start commuting, increasing the load on the roads. This quickly raises the wait time to just below the previous wait time, with all the people in the "margin of toleration" who weren't commuting before now commuting.
In the case of the systems at my company for project tracking, I just assume that people build systems on dependencies in a way that trades latency with the convenience of using a particular API/service with an SLO. The system with the SLO costs money to maintain, and so they have a quota system in place based on priority. The project tracking software comes along and says, "Well, we could write the data into a Prostgres instance with a 10 millisecond response time, but then we've got to worry about backup/restore, availability, and all that stuff. Or we can be the lowest priority traffic for this nifty distributed storage backend that has a support team and SLO with a 7 second response time." The seven seconds of each person's life every time they use the tool is an externality, and it's something few people are ever going to complain about. So, 7 seconds it is.
I'm resigned to waiting an average of 5 or so seconds for anything I do on a computer for the rest of my life, no matter how cheap cycles, storage, or bandwidth get.
This is precisely what happens with Mobile Networks. The faster the mobile network gets, the more people uses it which causes things to slow down to zero return of performance.
Ultimately though both Economy of Scale and Jevons Paradox reaches Law of Diminishing returns. Adding more capacity to network or faster DB queries will no longer yield any meaningful output.
Cell phone battery life has stayed mostly stable, even as battery capacities have gone up and processor energy/instruction has gone down. This is because mobile device performance is mostly power-constrained: manufacturers have a target of about a day of battery life as the minimum consumers will put up with, and whenever more energy is available they'll turn up performance or add features until battery life goes back down to that minimum.
Yep, there are very often "learning curves" that can be used to accurately predict price trends as manufacturing volume increase. The same thing has played out with solar cells and led to big price drops.
The PLC/DCS/SCADA world hasn't really caught up to modern open-source software in a lot of cultural ways. Lots of proprietary components and "pay-to-learn" practices. I expect there's software-engineer types who would venture into the hard-real-time control systems world if it were as open-source and tinker-friendly as something like Rails. Nowadays someone like Microsoft has to go open source to have any hope of capturing developer mind share for something like .NET.
I wish I went into manufacturing engineering. I wanted to work on robot AI and am there now but studying software is the easy part, you can easily get access to all the software and documentation online for free. Learning automation and manufacturing is more costly in terms of time and money.
One of my mechanical engineering suitemates in college cooped/worked at a Frito Lay chip plant for three semesters and got a job there in manufacturing after graduating, I remember because when he got back he always had boxes of product they gave him after each work period.
I don't think government funding battery research makes as much sense now as it used to. Absolutely everything runs on batteries nowadays, to the point where they are the main source of expense and weight for a large swathe of consumer goods. The commercial incentive to build a better battery is just huge. I remember reading some years ago that the prospectus of a large oil company, ExxonMobil maybe, explicitly singled out a sudden leap in battery energy density as something that could torpedo their $250b/yr business. It's hard to see how the government finds a way to build something that the private sector can't, when there's a trillion dollars at stake.
Interesting that you mention ExxonMobil. ExxonMobil does, in fact, cite "technological advances
in energy storage that make wind and solar more competitive for power generation or increased consumer demand for alternative fueled or electric vehicles" [1] as a risk factor on their annual form 10-K.
In a bit of a twist, worth noting that Exxon Research & Engineering was involved in the invention of the rechargeable lithium ion battery [2]. Quoting from [3], "Thus Stanley Whittingham invented the first rechargeable LIB, patented in 1977 and assigned to Exxon."
I don't know how much funding does in batteries that are designed to be stationery. I.e. where weight does not matter, where they can be bulky and potentially run hot.
There are technologies that are irrelevant for cars or phone (which I do think attract most of the battery R&D) that would be a good fit for a battery the size of a building, designed to store the electricity for a whole city during the night/low wind period.
Government can fund the private R&D easily by, for instance, mandate that renewable sources installed on the grid must provide a baseline 24/24.
But public research is nothing to sneeze at. It brought us the lithium-ion battery (Goodenough was working at the U of Texas when inventing it). Private R&D is good at incremental improvements and solving deployment problems. Public research at funding radically new tech. They work well together.
Economics doesn’t matter. So long as CO2 emissions continue to rise, subsidies are not only desirable they are absolutely mandatory in any rational sense of the word. The cost doesn’t matter.
Batteries are getting literally hundreds of millions of dollars a year in R&D investments and have been for decades. We could increase that by a few Billion per year, but it’s not obvious what would make a good investment over just buying more batteries and letting the market develop.
I would be interested in a study on how many years it takes the average "battery breakthrough" that never goes anywhere because the lab technique is completely unscalable to be revisited with more advanced technology and declared impractical a second or third time.
Why don't govs give tax breaks for everything that's battery related? Extraction, shipping, manufacture, sales...? I feel the price would halve instantly.
Tesla is likely just an example of a general trend. Whether it's big leaps towards "fully automated" manufacturing or gradual, cheap labour is not as important. It's increasingly a "talent" paced industry.
Depends entirely on the chemistry, but it's mainly Cobalt that is killing the price. Everyone tries to cut it out as much as possible. Tesla is trying to cut costs with less Cobalt but in general it means worse performance and a lot of safety issues with overheating or exploding. Huge amount of savings from the last years comes from cutting Cobalt by making better chemistries, trying to keep the safety record at the same time.
And we are not even close to the scale of an industry with world-wide relevance. Semiconductors is a nearly 500billion$ industry for example. If batteries reach 100billion$ we could probably expect prices well below 50$/kwh. That means you can put a sufficiently large powerwall into your home for around the price of a new laptop. That in turn enables homeowners to generate most of their energy needs themselves via (also cheap) pv arrays. This technology has the chance to completely turn around the home energy market.
I think this is an important point. The lithium-ion battery market is _still_ smaller than the lead-acid battery market. This business is still ramping up.
Well, estimates I can google up at the moment put the Pb-acid worldwide market at ~$42bn/year and the Li-ion market at ~$40bn/year. The latter is growing much faster but the former is also growing.
Lead acid batteries are used in pretty much everything ICE vehicle and are used in large quantities as uninterruptible power supplies (data centers use a ton). It's a huge industry.
They're cheap, simple (don't require a complex BMS), predictable/safe, have a long-enough lifetime and are easy to recycle. The biggest drawback really is weight - and thereby shipping cost - but for long term stationary applications that doesn't matter.
Lithium Ion attached to a supercapacitor with a sophisticated BMS is a much more complex setup-- yet even so, it will probably end up being the gold standard in the long run at this point, I would say even in most places lead-acid is still being used. I would not have predicted anything like that even five years ago, but barring some unlikely breakthrough it seems like where we're headed.
Honestly it’s just market inefficiencies at this point. I build battery packs for drones and RC planes and the lead acid stuff is just garbage. They can’t perform to more than 60% of their rated capacity and then start voltage sagging. The energy density is pitiful. A small UPS under your desk with LiFePo4 cells would outperform the lead acid 3-4x for the same space and last longer for the same or less money.
Considering we ship 1.2B Smartphone, 300M Tablet, 150M Laptop, 100sM of IOT Gadget, along with Electric Cars and Buses. I am very much surprised Lead Acid Battery has a higher market revenue. Apart from ICE vehicle ( Which I dont buy every year ) I dont have any Lead Acid Battery around me.
UPS and battery backup for things like Alarms and Phone Systems use Gel Cells or AGM batteries which are in the sealed lead-acid family. You probably have more "lead acid" batteries than you think.
In some ways they are more "forget about it" than lead acid -- lithium battery life is measured in cycles, rather than time. Your lead acid battery will be dead in 5 years, but your lithium batteries can last for 5,000+ cycles, even more if the cells are intelligently discharged.
As for cold temperatures -- less current can be drawn from each cell. In those cases, you can add more cells to still perform adequately in the cold. And this may even fit in the same form factor as the existing lead acid battery, because lithium batteries are physically smaller.
An li ion battery of the same capacity will supply less cranking current, but you can make it slightly larger (still much lighter and smaller than SLA) and make up for that difference. It's only below -30 Celsius (-20 to -40 depending on the chemistry) that lead acid retains better capacity, and they freeze completely at -80.
Li-ion will last far, far longer than any lead acid under any conditions.
Yeah I have an EV that gets 240 miles on a warm summers day but it drops down to like 160 on a day where it’s below freezing climbing a mountain. I’m OK with that. It’s still an absurd amount of range for a technology that would have been unthinkable a decade or two ago. I think once EVs start surpassing ICE cars in range it will be a non issue for most people.
A 33% drop in efficiency sounds reasonable for climbing a mountain vs driving on flat land. Do you know how much your range drops when you're driving in the cold but not climbing a mountain?
Mine drops that much when below freezing on a FLAT surface. On one hand, it's better than prior systems. On the other hand, it's still abysmally worse than conventional systems.
This is just one of the many risks of being an early adopter, I suppose.
I agree that once this major bottleneck is removed, the vehicle will be much more competitive - assuming the fix doesn't increase the cost too much.
Some EVs just heat their battery, which limits the loss of range. The power for heating can be automatically drawn from the charging station in the early morning. Some EVs also start heating the cabin when you schedule it and they are plugged in (eg Ioniq).
EVs can also start and go without any problems in conditions where gas cars give up (-20 celcius).
Lots of motorcyclists replace their lead-acid batteries with lithium-ion batteries that are much lighter. They’re very unreliable but some people will deal with that to save a few pounds.
I imagine you mean ice cars with much more demanding starters, but worldwide motorcycle market is pretty big.
> Deep cycle batteries are designed to be discharged down as much as 80% time after time and have much thicker plates. The major difference between a true deep cycle battery and others is that the plates are SOLID Lead plates - not sponge. This gives less surface area, thus less "instant" power like starting batteries need. Although these can be cycled down to 20% charge, the best lifespan vs cost method is to keep the average cycle at about 50% discharge.
It's not. Even a single complete discharge event is often if not usually enough to kill the performance of a lead-acid battery not intended for deep cycle.
I'd say dozens of times in my adult life I've dealt with and recovered lead acid batteries that were completely discharged due to the headlights left on or similar.
Deep cycling performance depends on the battery chemistry. Most cars in the US use a type of lead-acid battery that can't be deep cycled even a single time without serious risk of damage to the cell. I would assume this is true of any lead-acid battery not intended for deep cycling everywhere else in the world too as it adds significant cost to battery.
Lol you are absolutely wrong. Li-ion cycle life is typically rated at 99% depth of discharge, rarely at 98%. That means .5 to 1% of maximum capacity without damage.
Deep cycle lead acid is damaged permanently at less than 20% capacity. Manufacturer recommendation is to avoid going below 50%. "Deep cycle" means going below 50% won't immediately destroy your battery... Like most car batteries.
Desulfation can help but will never fully recover a lead acid battery. If you discharge a lead acid battery -any kind- to 1%, it is fucked.
Wouldnt prices of the grid go down as well? The grid could switch to a storage model too. Making it not that attractive to deal with all the maintenance.
Maybe not. I’ve heard that the fixed costs of a traditional grid are substantial enough that if large numbers of homeowners moved to PV generation the grid costs could become unsustainable and ultimately unmaintainable/collapse.
This a largely an accounting problem. Most consumers pay by kWh, with no separation between generation and transmission cost components. If more people generated their own power, they’d have to seperate out the generation and transmission costs.
I would bet there are also a bunch of fixed costs (per unit area of land that is served by the grid, let's say) that don't drop if you lose customers.
You've got to have utility poles, trim trees away from power lines, etc. regardless of whether you serve 100% or 25% of the customers in that area.
If you lose a lot of customers, you will have to raise prices on the ones that remain. If you're competing against something that already took away some of your customers, then raising prices could have a snowball effect and cause you to lose more.
I know that they separate the generation and transmission costs in southern california and I'd imagine there are others that do that. I wonder what kind of pivot we will see from the utilities.
It'll still be a thing in cities because you don't have enough area to collect sunlight for tall buildings on the buildings themselves, but that's also where the costs are lowest because the density is highest. If technology makes it so you no longer need a power grid in rural or suburban areas, and the economics are no longer viable there, why should we pay a lot of money to continue to have one there?
The question is how long-term transmission costs will look. If cities won't be able to self-generate their own electricity, then the electricity has to come from somewhere. Currently we assume that it'll have to come from a centralized generation plant, but why?
Hypothetically, if the capex to install PV is low enough, and the transmission costs are low enough, then you could build a type of decentralized generator where suburban and rural generation feeds urban demand. There's early work being done on "smart grids" which enable this pattern, but I could imagine a future company that markets to a private homeowner, one who already had sufficient generation for their own needs, with the offer of upgrading their private PV in exchange for most of the generation profits.
That would require you to continue to maintain the grid in suburban and rural areas. And then install more panels there, so they can generate for the city as well as themselves. It seems like it would be a lot more cost effective to just put the additional panels (or whatever other generation method) in a few centralized locations outside the city and then only have to wire those specific locations up to the grid.
Or the company maintaining the grid will raise prices.
If you had to make the choice between "no electricity to power my fridge, my lights, my laptop" vs "pay double for the electricity", you'll pay double.
If people respond rationally, this would lead to re-designing the grid to be more decentralized and maintain the lower cost of energy we get from solar.
With renewables knocking on 1 cent/kwh at utility scale, retail prices will go down, and the majority of the cost will be storage and transmission. You might expect prices to be higher at night (the reverse of now), as more of the light vehicle fleet moves to EVs and everyone charges their cars at night (unless you can incentivize workplace charging, when the sun is shining).
Yeah, definitely going to see tariffs disfavor rooftop solar (utilities don't want to be the "battery" if they can avoid it), which is going to increase battery uptake rate (to consume your own generation first instead of export it for no value to the grid), which will drive battery prices down faster.
If there's that much storage in cars if a large % of transport switches over, especially consumer commuters with long-range batteries, perhaps a service can allow EV owners to get paid to allow their daily commute cars to store excess solar in the day and stream it back at night.
You can skip the "stream it back at night" part. If you have a big battery, you don't need to charge it to full every day. So you plug in day and night, and have an algorithm pick when it actually charges... based on the wind/sun forecast and your calendar entries.
Then there is no extra battery wear.
There are quite a few people here in Palo Alto who can plug in at work. Facebook has more than 100 chargers at their HQ, and half of the EVs at my apartment complex never use our free charger.
A company I worked with looked into this model. The problem is that most cars are not in garages near PV during the day, they're in parking lots at work or in shopping/errand locations. They return to garages and plug in just before sunset, so the load on the grid from EVs actually goes up right as the input from PV is going down.
The model does work great with powerwall-type devices, though.
But if you offer to pay people who keep their cars plugged in during the day, probably more people would do it. Also, while car batteries are likely to be lower in the evenings, they're probably not completely dead. They could feed the remaining energy back to the grid at that time, then charge up later at night when the load is lower.
1) The percentage of people with EVs who leave them plugged in at home during the day is very small. This is unlikely to change for several years.
2) It's a bad proposition to people because you're basically telling them they won't be able to take long trips in the morning and you're going to decrease the life of their battery (people are rightfully really concerned about this).
3) The big concern with utilities right now is how to handle home renewable excess power during the day. All the rooftop PV is feeding a bunch of power back into the grid when it's sunny, then all those homes are sucking down power from dusk to dawn. The utilities need daytime power storage or non-daylight generation to offset this. Storing power at night doesn't do much to actually solve the problem, so there's not much of a business model in it. Grid-scale battery installations are quickly becoming the solution here.
If you're looking for a car-based model that could potentially work for this, it has to involve solar parking lots and also be car-specific. Charge your car at a parking lot during the day, drive it home and plug it in to power your house in the evening. Get a discount from your electric company as a result.
I sorta get the idea but who wants to burn cycles on your EV to save a couple of bucks a month? It makes no sense to me.
You can just buy batteries for your house. We’re down to what? $200/kWh? Less? If there wasn’t so much mark up in the industry, you could buy a whole house battery for 2-3k that would be good enough to shift most of your energy usage. Utilities just need to incentivize it, which presumably would happen naturally due to market forces as solar adoption goes up.
What stops the cars being charged at the parking lot at work or shopping/errand locations? One could imagine a distributed model where you have a small battery home and you not only shop your groceries but also the electricity and bring that home with your car. (Likely not relevant model in densely populated areas)
In that scenario, the parking lots need to be on the grid. Even if you cover a car in solar panels, for almost everyone they’d be a range booster rather than turn the car into a net producer.
> In that scenario, the parking lots need to be on the grid.
Not necessarily. You can imagine a grocery store covering the roof of their building in solar panels to run chargers in the parking lot. If solar gets cheap enough they might even do it for free (or below market rates) to drive business to the store. Then you charge up your car while shopping, use the power at night.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m optimistic about replacing fossil fuels and think things are already better than McKay dared to hope for, but I think a grid has to be part of the solution.
Grid is also useful for time shifting power demand/production to smooth out the morning/evening dips, for space-shifting production to deal with clouds etc., and (assuming wind is part of the solution) the best wind resources aren’t where you actually want to build houses.
It looks like you're right that just covering the store and parking lot in panels wouldn't be enough. But then you've got two possibilities. One is the store is in the city, and then it can be on the grid, because there is always going to be a grid in the city. The other is the store isn't in the city and then you've got cheap land next to the store to fill with panels and turbines.
> Grid is also useful for time shifting power demand/production to smooth out the morning/evening dips, for space-shifting production to deal with clouds etc., and (assuming wind is part of the solution) the best wind resources aren’t where you actually want to build houses.
But batteries (especially when they're in cars) do the same thing. Your house may not be on the grid, but it's got panels on it that power it during the day, meanwhile your car is out getting charged up somewhere else, and you use that power at night.
Electric car typically has a >50kWh battery, which will power a typical household for about two days on its own, call it twice that if the house runs on its own panels during the day. So as long as you get the equivalent of a full charge twice a week, that's all you need, right?
I’m not saying what you propose can’t be done — and perhaps American cities are different enough from Europeans cities that it makes sense to treat each one as an island grid in a way you wouldn’t want to around here — just that the grid still looks useful to me.
Actually, thinking about what I saw in California and Nevada when I visited, I can easily believe American cities “should” be independent electrical islands once we get enough worldwide battery production.
> Your home can run for two days from an EV battery, but the problem isn’t the home, it’s the car itself.
Those numbers seem high for electric vehicles. You've got a Model 3 doing something like 26kWh per 100 miles and an average commute of 16 miles each way. That's less than 10kWh per day but they're showing 40.
At what point does switching to something more trolleybus like, where your car charges while driving down the road, maybe in contact with a rail, make more sense than all this self driving and battery capacity? Even if it was just interstates.
Likely never (if you look at Tesla's luxury vehicles almost at 400 miles of range [S and X with Raven drivetrains] and their Supercharger charge rates [0-80% SOC in ~15-20 minutes]). Battery capacity per kg and charge rates are likely to improve faster than coordinating the deployment of nationwide rail or overhead wire electrical infrastructure on interstates (a Supercharger station only takes about two weeks to install, and costs ~$150k-200k).
I'm still hoping that Teslas on AP will eventually begin to coordinate and drive very close together or even attach bumper-to-bumper in order to save energy on highways due to lower air resistance. Ad hoc highway trains more or less...
For all practical purposes they have that now. The CD on tesla cars is very low, and even AP1 cars will follow other vehicles on the highway for hundreds of miles without a hitch.
The AP follow distance setting can be set from 1 to 7, and setting it to 1 just ends up with more abrupt braking when traffic encounters a slowdown. A spaced out setting of 4 is a much more comfortable setting.
If the cars were able to push and pull each other, engines/batteries could be used optimally. Cars with nearly empty batteries would recuperate and recharge if absolutely needed, cars with full batteries would pull the rest. AP would put the most suitable car in front to minimize the total air resistance... Lots of possibilities.
Might be worth designing a new type of car for this kind of use though.
Yes, but energy density is terrible. You are having to move 3x the weight not to mention the huge effincicy hit . You arent taking reality into account.
I dont think the comparison is to ICE but to a car on a rail/line that doesnt need to carry its energy at all (or only a small battery for the last 30 miles.)
The economics do not make sense. There are massive capital and operational expenditures to build power rails/overhead wires everywhere.
If you want to longbets.org this I will have someone put down $1000 this will not happen in any city of over 10k people in the United States in the next 20 years.
Even buses are using batteries to move away from the trolley bus model. Maintaining those overhead lines is a pain, and they go offline all the time. I expect these will just go away outside of true rail usage.
How so? We have two long range Model 3s which have 140+ kWh capacity in total (70kWh/car, conservatively). Even if you'd only allow 50% of that to be used for powering one's house (you don't want to run large batteries all the way down, or charge them to 100%, often, if you care about long-term capacity), each car could provide 35 kWh, or the equivalent capacity of ~3 PowerWalls. The proper electrical interfaces and monitoring needs to be engineered, but there isn't any good reason not to do this. Seems like such a waste. Even if you could only use 20kWh, that's still be a huge win. In states such as Florida (and, now, California) where power outages are frequent, this would be a godsend.
Grid prices will go down as demand goes down when people start producing and storing energy themselves. With the cost of solar panels and batteries dropping and production capacity growing exponentially while prices continue to drop, the grid will be less important but still essential to many.
It will also accelerate the demise of coal, gas, and nuclear as they are already too expensive and will have no chance whatsoever in an open market where prices are trending down massively over the next decades. The status quo of course is that they are effectively state protected monopolies currently in many places, which will slow things down in some places and is also the reason you get to pay many times the actual market price per kwh.
If people still need the grid but don't oat for anymore, then the prices go up since the powerline companies are usually required to maintain them. It doesn't matter than you need power only 8 days a year few kw.
I imagine cities will stay centralized. There is some money selling electricity from large plots to small ones (and apartment), a nice amount of it on selling from houses to industry, and a huge amount of it on intermediating the PV and storage transactions.
But cheap batteries will probably means a large downsizing on the large distance distribution grid.
In the US these restrictions are usually tied to nearby cities. The larger but sparsely populated unincorporated areas don't require (or have) utilities.
Factor in that once VR headsets hit MVP status, you won’t need to commute for basic “we need you to be in a room with these people to talk to them” tasks, it becomes even more plausible.
What happens to the property market if “you don’t need to commute to be in meetings” comes true?
What makes you think that VR will deliver on the remote work dream where videoconferencing failed? I don’t think the 2D nature of videoconferencing is the problem here.
Well, perhaps GP was arguing that battery prices were functions of an economy of scale. No such property applies to petroleum, since growth in petroleum means going after more difficult reserves, which means higher prices.
There is a lot of lithium about, just not a lot of stuff that is easy to get at. The cost of lithium isn't a huge part of battery cost at the moment anyway (10s of dollars per kilo with about 50kg in an ev battery).
I don't know that I'd agree with that. Look at the computer industry, for a example, and how many small, medium, and large agents all benefit from what amounts to a distributed economy of scale. Apple, Microsoft, Dell and the like all produce better products with less investment when their suppliers can spend fewer dollars per widget throughout the supply chain.
It currently costs about $10-12 million to drill and produce a well in West Texas. The fact that a barrel of crude is only ~$60 is absolutely mind-boggling.
The current crude price is due to a worldwide glut in the oil market along with weakening demand growth, OPEC facing forces that are causing it to make production missteps it has no choice but to make, and US shale having to pump to service debt they've overextended themselves with.
Chesapeake Energy, previously an O&G industry darling, is struggling under $9 billion in crushing debt, and has made statements they may not be able to continue as a going concern. At the same time, investors are not so interested in overly optimistic and aggressive well depletion projections.
Climate concern means that instead of the choice being between selling your oil for $1 today or hoping to get $2 tomorrow, now it's $1 today or get lynched for pumping oil out of the ground tomorrow.
Worse, the producers don't know when exactly tomorrow is. Probably it's before 2050, but maybe it's before 2040. If enough people get scared it could be sooner. This is one reason many in that industry actually supported global carbon taxes. Having your entire industry phased out smoothly is a nice predictable future. Sure, you'd rather continue to make money forever, but a smooth exit is the next best thing.
Some readers have probably had garden leave, an employer terminates you but pays you salary for a few months to stay home and not work - as an employee you can't tell any secrets or work for someone else. It's unsatisfying, but it's predictable, the mortgage gets paid. Much scarier to show up one morning and find oh, the company went bankrupt, you won't get this month's pay and the tax man hasn't received their cut for the last six months either. Same thing with a gradually increasing system-side carbon tax. Using oil becomes uneconomic, but gradually and predictably. The industry dies but the people running it come out OK. We've opted for a world where it may all go very wrong for them very quickly.
Chesapeake suffers from decades of mismanagement. Granted there are other oil companies that are also suffering (Lynn, Continental, Williams, Devon, OXY, etc.)
But there are a few that are doing well (Total SA, NYSE:MCP, PRNG, EGY, etc)
Disclaimer: several family members are current and previous Chesapeake employees. I no longer own any of the stocks listed above.
OP gave an implicit justifications, bigger industry can mean that the goal to more efficient produce gets backed by more $€£, and thus gets reached more faster - at least if no monopoly will be created (as then the consumer is screwed 100%).
It boggles my mind that I pay only $3 per gallon of gas in Nevada (and $5 in Communist Republic of California) despite the fact that it is obtained by drilling into oceans, in extreme cold weather of alaska or the super hot regions of texas, refined at some place and then transported 1000 miles in ships, trucks, trains.
That price is an example of extreme economic efficiency. Battery prices will go down over time as the industry grows.
By overallocating. In Europe, most homes can do well with 10kwh daily electric energy. Make that 20 to be on the safe side. To fill that reliably you might need something between 10 and 50kwp solar energy. Everything can be bought once.
In 2012 it was expected we'd be at $160/kWh by 2025[1]. Instead we're below that by 2019. I wouldn't be surprised if that $100/kWh by 2023 prediction from the source isn't too conservative.
And once that happens, it is going to turn the auto industry upside down. Some ice companies like VW realize this and are rushing like crazy to be ready when it happens. The companies that aren't doing this today are likely going to go bankrupt.
I don't think so. Things just don't move that fast in the auto industry. Each car generation lasts 4-8 years. The average age of cars on the road right now is 12 years old. It's taken 10 years to get to 2% EV market share in new vehicle sales even with enormous subsidies. At $100/kWh, a car with 300 miles of range will still have a $7500+ battery, which is too much for sub-$20K cars to still be sub-$20K cars: unless every single auto maker abandons the low-end of the market, someone's going to still be making gas cars for those buyers. There won't be an electric car charger on every street and every parking spot at every apartment building for decades at best, which means people without their own garage to charge in will not be clamoring to switch to much less convenient (for them) electric cars. People will still be buying and driving gas cars and non-plugin hybrids for a very long time, no matter how fast battery prices fall.
> There won't be an electric car charger on every street and every parking spot at every apartment building for decades at best
You don't need them at every parking space, you just need enough density so owners can charge regularly. Maybe in Nimbyism America that's going to take a while (I recently took a trip to San Francisco and didn't even see one electric car charger), but elsewhere it's already possible. In my Eastern European country most supermarkets and shopping malls have electric car chargers, and in the city center there is nearly one fast charger per square km. You can already own an EV here, if you live in an apartment but have to park it on the street.
The average American drives 16 miles each way to work, so that's 160 miles a week comuting. If they had a Model 3, even charging once a week would be more than enough.
I strongly disagree. One problem with your sub-20k market argument is that battery prices are going to keep falling, so in a few more years ev sticker prices are going to be equivalent. Another is that most sub-$20k manufacturers make a large part of their income from more expensive cars, and so for that reason will be in grave danger of bankruptcy.
As for chargers, the number is expanding rapidly, for a variety of reasons. That means every year that goes buy there are more people who are in a position to buy an ev.
Yes, ice's will keep selling, but the numbers will be going down which means that the economies of scale that present manufacturers depend for profits will no longer be there. They will also be stuck with fixed expenses. That means to make a profit they will have to raise prices, which will just drive sales down faster.
Also resale prices will plummet, which will give drivers more of a motivation to buy an ev. Also governments concerned with climate change, which is basically every large developed country besides Russia and the present US federal administration, will be pushing ev's and punishing ice's (like is already going on in China).
As for your point the auto industry moves slowly, that is why many companies will go bankrupt.
Once self driving hits, the cost of shared cars per mile will drop below the cost of gas, so the entire bottom of the market (that <$20k segment) will just disappear.
I predict 10$ is going to happen fairly soon after that. That would be massively disruptive to anything involving the consumption of energy; which is basically most of the world's economy.
It will ignite the next economic boom just like oil and coal did once.
That’s pricey per kWh - lithium tech generally is. I’ve just installed an off-grid solar system, and ended up putting together a spreadsheet of a whole bunch of battery options, got prices per kWh, and then built in a factor for lifetime/max cycles.
Ignoring max cycles, the cheapest lead acid I found was £87/kWh. Lifetime was poor, however.
The best bang for buck was OPzS lead acid cells - £115 per kWh, and a long, long lifetime and high cycle count. They’re the most commonly used cell in new grid-scale solar installs, and it turns out there’s a reason for that - over 15 years, they cost less than 20% of lithium over the same period.
In Europe - I bought 24 BAE Secura 6 (900Ah at C100) cells from an outfit called merkasol - they’re pretty commoditised and the prices are similar from different distributors. Went for those as they were the biggest OPzS cells I could safely carry by myself, at 60kg, and 42kwh of storage is plenty.
Sure. It’s scratty as sin as it was purely intended for my consumption - you can safely ignore the sheets other than batteries - panels are a pretty simple equation - more power is better, and usually cheaper per surface area, and the other gumph was specific to my requirements.
You’ll note the total absence of lithium cells - I took them out as they skewed the scale so badly that it was hard to differentiate between the others.
Also, all the prices are EUR, and I should have said €, not £, in my previous comment. Living between U.K./EU and being paid in USD sees me forgetting what currency I did something in quite frequently.
That seems kind of expensive still. Grid power is around 7 cents / kwh for comparison so you need over 3,000 hours of usage to break even on a depreciating battery. Or for comparison, new 18650 cells are around $2 each in bulk, so you could get almost the same kwh storage (probably 5% less) for the same price, with a lot more cycles left.
I don't know how much it adds, but the Tesla model S module has to have rigidity for the car and some puncture resistance etc. that might not be needed in a power application right? It also may need to have a much higher peak discharge and charging rate and cooling to accommodate that.
That's true. A vehicle-grade battery pack should also already come with the wiring built in so you can charge and discharge all the cells from a single point without having to make your own harness. Still, though, I'm not convinced buying a used Model S battery pack is a good deal unless you have an application that specifically needs it.
I would love to get that from PG&E in California. As it is, and with the high cost of energy in datacenters (because it's triply redundant, etc.) I've been researching natural gas power generation at home to power my render farm, instead of putting it in a datacenter.
I can do it for about $0.17/kWh, which is cheaper that the energy I get from PG&E. Fixed cost for the generator is about $7K to power the farm.
That's fair, but it doesn't really change the main point that you're looking at a stupid amount of hours equivalent to get to break-even while adding hundreds of charge cycles to an already-degraded battery. I can't really see this being a positive ROI purchase unless you want to use it for a vehicle. Used battery prices need to come down another 20-30% before it will make sense.
I'm surprised seeing that power-source chart for OR. In particular 60% NatGas+Coal, 30% hydro, 6% wind. Any idea why so little wind-power development yet?
Let’s hope at the same time we are building up a corresponding recycling infrastructure and products to be recycled easily. Otherwise I am afraid we are building up another trash problem.
Most batteries beyond laptop size have significant value once they are 'used'. Most retain 20-90% of their original capacity, meaning they can live on in grid storage which has relatively insignificant size limitations.
Most of the new capacity is for large applications (cars) which means low battery type diversity, and this high reusablity due to consistency and of course high market-value. Quite a few businesses will pop up to create this solutions as the increase of batteries make it through their first life.
This logic is flawed because not all environmental issues are the same priority.
If you believe climate change is the biggest environmental issue, batteries could be significantly "dirtier" overall than alternatives as long as they contribute less to C02.
Maybe you are right but I think it’s worth thinking about these issues before jumping to a solution that may turn out to cause other problems. For example it may make sense to have some kinds of standards for recyclability.
We have along history of doing one thing to fix another thing and causing lot of other problems.
Lithium will be very valuable and motivate recycling for quite a wile. I don't think this will be a problem, certainly not more than the current disposal pipeline for ICE cars.
The difference is that a bunch of trinkets have lithium batteries in them and are very difficult to remove, whereas it's mostly vehicles that use lead acid batteries and they're designed to be easily removed. Also you tend to replace lead acid batteries and continue to use the product while with lithium you tend to throw out the product when the battery is dead. This combination makes recycling much more difficult, although I'm sure you'll be able to catch most of this with general electronics recycling.
Well nobody tried to use lead-acid batteries for storage of anything on the significance of grid base-load and replacing a huge chunk of transportation energy capacity.
For decades we have used lead-acid batteries in close to every backup power solution of any size, plus at least one lead-acid battery per vehicle. Of course we expect lithium-ion to surpass lead-acid in market size and number of deployed batteries, but the amount of lead-acid batteries in the world is nothing to sneeze at either.
This makes me wonder how falling battery prices will affect the cost of used electric vehicles. On one hand, the replacement battery costs will go down, and in turn should make for better resale value (since the replacement cost of a wearable part is factored into the resale value.) But on the other hand, auto companies (especially Tesla) have been passing that savings down to the customer, leading to cheaper brand new prices of vehicles.
While it may appear on the surface that Tesla has not reduced their prices all that much, keep in mind that the only current offering for the Model S is the 100KWh battery. The Model 3 prices have been incrementally decreasing, while simultaneously standardizing features like autopilot, which used to be a $2K upgrade.
Tesla aside, most electric vehicles will be outdated in 3-5 years (I say that as an e-Golf owner/lessee) because the next generation of vehicles will be much better. I think we're in the iPhone 3G phase and have a couple iterations/generations of fast evolution ahead until the market stabilizes.
We own one of the first Nissan Leafs off the line. When we're done with it, I will happily give it to someone (because resale on these is already next to nothing) if it replaces their ICE car. And an old electric is something that I theorize would be perfect for the less wealthy. An old beater ICE has to be more trouble and expense than on old EV with a usable battery. Even if it only goes 40 miles in its old age, at least it will do those 40 miles reliably.
Depends how you look at it. You could make an argument that the ideal is a brand new car with the best crash test scores of anything on the market and state-of-the-art safety features.
I know someone who learned to drive in an older leaf.
In some ways a better experience. The accelerator is drive-by-wire for instance, so acceleration is smooth. The regenerative braking means just lifting your foot slows you down.
One wierd part was the driving test asks about putting the car in "accessory" (which the leaf technically has, but is hard to achieve without studying the manual). Other evs don't even have it.
"accessory" (which the leaf technically has, but is hard to achieve without studying the manual).
I’ll remind our listeners at home that I’m the one with the eight year old Leaf. To this day, with a gun to my head, I couldn’t get it into “accessory” in under five minutes, if at all. From memory, it’s some combination of “this sequence” coupled with “but only if..., otherwise...”. If you master that, try and turn the heat on with it still plugged in, without using the app. It can be done, but...
press the start button without stepping on the brake
Unfortunately it is difficult to KNOW you are in accessory.
There is a tiny battery symbol on the dash and/or the traction motor indicator is off (car symbol with arrows underneath). This is non-obvious and lost in the other indicator lights.
You will eventually find out (like a regular car) because climate control will not change the temperature, but the fans will blow and the 12v battery will drain.
The impression I have: The first couple generations of Leafs don't have active battery temperature management and so far most Leafs that have entered the secondary market have done so in part because of large battery capacity reductions (necessitating in some of those cases battery replacements, which so far used dealers haven't been willing to finance at scale, so instead pass the "savings" to the next buyer).
As more Leafs show up with better managed battery lifetimes and/or as more used dealers get comfortable with battery replacements (and that gets subsequently cheaper as an industry), it may be likely that the Leaf loses its reputation as a "loss" on the secondary markets and maybe regains some of its resale value. (Especially now that current generations have more active battery management.)
But the entire secondary market for EVs is overall confused, because there are fewer EVs in the secondary market than should be. (The average first lifetime of an EV is way ahead of ICE "norms" right now, with average EV first owners keeping cars 7-10 years.) It may take used EV sales a while to better readjust prices to the actual marginal utility of a used EV (in light of overall reduced maintenance costs of a secondary EV lifetime versus ICE averages that used dealers have had decades of information about).
I definitely understand there is a snowball effect in place, but battery research (and as one example, GM's field testing) makes it pretty clear that degeneration occurs much faster when the Lithium-based batteries are used out of operating temperatures, and that appears to be reflected in Leaf used sales (areas prone to more extreme temperature ranges have worse used Leafs).
It's not entirely a fair apples-to-apples comparison, but GM's Volt has generally worse range as comparable Leafs at each early generation, and Volts are showing much less battery degradation when compared. (Certainly you may argue that the range extender of the Volt will bring down cycle counts, but even just comparing electric miles to electric miles the Volt is still outperforming the Leaf on battery degradation.)
As for the 20%/80& thing, that is something that for instance GM's tech actively manages and just bases its outputs as if the ~80% was "full" to avoid consumer confusion. The issue there is not that charge percentage matters, according to battery industry standards, but that individual cells have a "directionality" that should be respected and a discharging cell never used to charge until it has 100% discharged and vice versa. With regenerative breaking it is useful to have cells always available "in the charging direction". It is interesting that GM and Tesla took different approaches in marketing that to car users.
Looking at the volt, it seems to battery thermal management plus it only uses 65% of the battery capacity (similar to the 20%..80% tesla recommendation). I guess they can manage the battery capacity conservatively when there's a gas motor available.
Because after eight years, driving from Redmond->Seattle->Redmond with the heat on becomes a dicey proposition. Best keep a list of charging stations handy, that's all I'm sayin'. Used to be that trip was no problem if I kept it under 70mph on the freeway. Now I better keep it closer to 60mph, and leave the heat off if I don't really need it. The next gen used a heat pump and electric seats to keep you warm rather than an inefficient strip heater. (Digressive pet peeve: that heater draws 3K watts while it's warming up. Why the fsck does it take five minutes to produce heat? Where is that 3K watts going other than to warm my legs fifteen seconds after I hit the switch?)
And compared to what you can buy today, even if it's a used-but-later-model Leaf, they're weren't great when they were new. We bought ours because we have an ICE in reserve. Go buy a Chevy Bolt for the same money we spent and most folks can just forgo the ICE with the range the Bolt has. We keep the Leaf around because it suits most of our needs, and I usually get to work on a scooter or bicycle, so the wife can commute in it and the ICE sits. But as the battery degrades, he becomes more of a "running around town" car.
Guessing because when they were new, the range was marginal for a lot of uses (80ish miles), and uses drop off rapidly with even minor battery losses (when 40 miles each way drops to 25), your circle gets a lot smaller.
I've heard this echoed by Matt Farah on his One Take review of the Model 3 Performance. He recommended leasing the car as it doesn't seem like a "collectors" item. Essentially saying it was built to be used for a few years, and then recycled. Much like old iPhones are these days.
I'm not sure how much I agree as the Tesla resale market is very strong (even for old Model S cars). But, definitely curious to see how it shakes out.
We are very much at the tip of the ice berg in terms of EV sales. The car market will look insanely different in 10 years. As a consumer, I'm stoked to see how it plays out.
This is good though. The faster the values of EVs decline, while still having hundreds of thousands of miles of service life ahead of them, the faster they're affordable on the used car market (choking out ICE vehicles) to those of less means.
That doesn't really make sense. It really is a mostly mature product as the components like doors, windows, steering are mostly mature. Cars have been produced for a long time and this is just another marginal improvement on the same concept. Its a car and it gets you to your destination relatively comfortably. Not that much different than other cars.
Short term demand for EVs will grow faster than old ones can hit the second hand market. They are already super scarce, which means that EVs have awesome second hand market value until the market saturates, which will take decades.
Laptop batteries can still be premium item. Especially Dell. If you don't buy a business class laptop, it's very likely you cannot order the battery online. You have to call dell support. Dell support is an India call center that will ask for $70 for a shipping label so you can send the machine in to get diagnosed, even if the bios is saying battery health is poor and you don't need a diagnosis. They refuse to just sell you a new battery from the phone or online. They refuse to give you a cost estimate because they want you to have sunk cost before they give an expensive quote. You send in the machine and it's $60 for battery and $80 for servicing. Aliexpress has the batteries for $20 but there's horror stories about exploding batteries. You can easily pay $200/yr if you want to keep your machines at 50% charge or better. Be sure to see how easy it is to switch a battery before buying a new laptop.
If there is anyone on here who works in the battery production, EV, or utility industries, can you comment on exactly what is driving the dramatic cost/kWh declines? Every article I've read seems to imply that the cost declines are just being driven by economies of scale (massive fixed costs of plant construction being averaged out over large production runs) and learning economies (https://rameznaam.com/2014/09/30/the-learning-curve-for-ener...).
Apart from these two forces, are there any innovations in manufacturing processes or product components+architecture that are partly responsible for the decline?
I don't work in the industry and am not an expert, but I think a part of it in recent years is that lithium ion manufacturers have been figuring out how to get by with less cobalt in nickel-manganese-cobalt batteries.
If you read about 622 or 811 chemistries, those are the proportion of nickel, manganese, and cobalt. So, the older 622 batteries are 20% cobalt, and the newer 811 batteries are 10% cobalt. Manufacturers are trying to move to 5%, iirc.
(This doesn't apply to lithium iron phosphate, which doesn't use cobalt at all as far as I know.)
the OP references the bloomberg article which does say economies of scale, but also "thanks to improvements in manufacturing equipment and increased energy density at the cathode and cell level"
https://about.bnef.com/blog/battery-pack-prices-fall-as-mark...
It certainly helps when there is a small number of suppliers, one giant manufacturing center, and one nearby consumer. Removing all of the supply chain middlemen in search of buyers, repeatedly producing the same manufacturing machinery, and reducing shipping costs are each chipping away part of the cost.
The last really significant announcement out of the main Tesla university research group was in cycles lifetime.
The suggested range of many Tesla forthcoming models (truck, roadster2) seem to assume a chemistry improvement, as well as other future announcements by less experienced (in EV) manufacturers.
I personally speculate that the Nurburgring Model S prototype beat the Porsche using a substantially lighter battery to get its 20 second advantage, but I have no confirmation on that.
Its all relative... the Model 3 battery is significantly more energy dense than the Model S battery and appears to be lighter weight. How much of this is packaging (2170 vs 18650 form factors) vs chemistry improvements is really hard to know. It is widely believed that the Model S prototype was using a much larger battery with 2170 cells and likely at either the same or a somewhat lower weight than the previous Model S.
The truck has the benefit of being tall, so the pack is multilevel. The roadster will use at least two levels as well as it has a very thick pack, and obviously at its price point they can afford to use the absolute highest density cells on the market.
Tesla managed to halven the relative cobalt content in each iteration (Roadster -> Model S -> Model 3), and Elon hinted that Tesla wants to go Cobalt free, as it’s an expensive conflict mineral.
That is stupid conspiracy theory, lithium is cheap. Cobalt is what makes the price, so keep an eye on Congo. But done if the social problems thanks to Cobalt are already welly known there.
Awesome news, storage is so crucial to decarbonization. Some really interesting emerging energy storage tech has been presented and discussed over at https://collective.energy if this kind of stuff interests you
That aligns with my theory that since all the easily extracted oil has been exploited, the oil industry is saddled with a price floor, and once alternatives beat that, the oil industry will rapidly collapse as supply is more expensive than alternatives, and oil won't have any way to profitably compete.
If you look at the energy return on investment over time, it's something like 125:1 in 1920. Dropped into 25:1 in 1970. Now at less than 15:1 maybe lower.
This has not been my experience as a consumer trying to buy 18650 batteries for my 3.3V ESP-8266 projects. Is there a good place to buy these? Searching Amazon for them shows me tons of AA and AAA batteries but no actual 18650's. In the past couple years, the price has gone up for me and the availability down.
Are there better options? I've read about 26650's but I have never tried them. Do they last longer? Are they safer? Can I charge them in my NiteCore charger that works great for 18650's?
How can a consumer/tinkerer wanting to scale up production take advantage of these options? The prices may have gone down at Tesla scale, but not at consumer scale.
What are you typing into amazon to only find AA? If I type "18650" into amazon I get multiple options for manufacturer, chemistry, and capacity.
As well, there are a handful of websites that specialize in selling battery cells, do a web search for "18650 for sale"
26650 cells have higher capacity and max current numbers than 18650s on average but your 18650 charger likely won't have prongs long enough to reach the pads.
If they were long enough, it would charge just fine.
Do not buy 18650 or other lithium batteries on Amazon. There are many poorly made and outright counterfeit batteries. Amazon banned their sale but 3rd parties selling them keep popping up.
Right now you can authentic 18650 Samsung cells for around $260/kWh, or 21700 Samsung cells for $165/kWh. Those are sale prices, but if you're careful and watch for deals, you can find them.
Sorry I have tried to get off them but for infrequently used devices they are much better, they can be stored for long periods and are still good, rechargeable will self discharge and be dead when you go to use and probably wont recharge anymore. Rechargeables require a float charge if being stored.
I just replaced a 9v in my infrared thermometer that finally died after 4 years...
That's not true anymore, the new nimh cells like Panasonic eneloops can sit on a shelf for 10+ years and have most of their charge left (70% after 10 years according to their packaging).
The price for these batteries are what the market allows, not correlated with the production cost. At cost, I bought Duracell from the plant with a few dollars a pound (a decade ago I worked for them).
Semi-relevant question: there are many battery-based "generators" up to 500Wh on Amazon. Are there any in the 1.5-2KWh range? We often get outages during winter and it'd be good to have something that could drive a furnace for a day or so.
The situation in Bolivia probably had a significant effect.
There's lots of lithium mines there. The new (read: coup) government knows this I'm sure and is looking to get rich off of it at the expense of the indigenous population.
Bolívia produces ~0.2% of lithium today. It’s not even in the top 10 for reserves (US, Mexico, Australia). There is no way it can have an impact on global prices unless they ramp up production by > 100x.
Potentially more decentralized or at least time-smoothed electric grids. More batteries can mean greater independence between production means and consumption time. (The obvious case is better time shifting of things like wind or solar power.)
"time-smoothed electric grids".
Exactly, this is actually where Lithium batteries make the most sense, especially with solar. It isn't to provide 100% backup output at a grid/utility scale but to make output more consistent when it comes to voltage variance and output. Time shifting power output even by minutes via storage combined with solar forecasting (disclaimer: I work for a solar forecasting company), from what I can tell, can remove a large chunk of uncertainty. The better the forecasting, the smaller the battery can be whilst maintaining low levels of uncertainty.
Grid scale "backup" via Lithium batteries IMO, doesn't make any sense. Generating hydrogen from excess power for grid scale generation actually does make sense. As power generation gets cheaper still and the "now" value of it also becomes less, I think it will make financial sense to locally "bank" energy in the form of hydrogen for versatile use during peak times where grids are overloaded with renewable energy (and wholesale price is 0 or negative which is common quite often in some networks).
The second and third order effects are a bit hard to predict. Electric fork lifts ?! Cheaper Plastics .. Oil moving from transportation to Chemical sector .. collapse of petro-states .. its going to be interesting.
>True Energy independence could turn world politics upside down.
We have true energy independence in the US. And it has turned world politics upside down. Fracking and LNG has made the US a net energy exporter over the last 10 years.
US is not whole world. It will be interesting to see when smaller nations (outside of G8) become truly energy independent. THAT will turn everything upside down once more.
No mention of Lithium and Cobalt rare earth mining. Are these resources abundant enough to support this ramp up without counter balancing economics of scale savings?
If this scales down to under a kilowatt-hour it means even a large ebike/scooter/etc. pack could move to double-digit US dollars in the next few years.
Most eBike batteries are half to 3/4ths a kilowatt hour, though if prices were lower you'd almost certainly see 1kwh & 2kwh batteries becoming standard.
The market is already headed this way, EM3ev keeps putting out larger and larger packs at the same price points year after year.
Tangential but I hope some standards body would at least standardize phone batteries. Maybe 10 different sizes going by lbh? Right now every single phone has it's own specific battery.
To what benefit? Companies make their own batteries so they can fit exactly how much they want/need. The real estate in a phone is very valuable and even a few percent difference in the battery size can be enough to impact what other components they put in.
Our neighbor once had a LNG powered trash truck explode in front of their drive way. It burned the entire front of the house off. Now he's got a major remodel and an antique Porsche!
Unfortunately I can't find any links on local news now. It is available here with some photos of my neighborhood.
Gas is fairly clean energy, and many of the inefficiencies of electricity distribution don't apply.
It will be quite a long while before people in cold climates who need to heat their homes would switch to all electric or have anything close to local generation capable of heating their homes.
Well, you clearly can. Norway hasn't used gas. At home people have used mostly electric heaters and wood. They're now switching out oil burning furnaces and wood burning furnaces in many areas with heat pumps.
Sweden is burning trash for electricity and piping heat from those powerplants to nearby areas.
In most areas you'd need cheaper electricity, and heat pumps should be cheaper as well. But it's definitely possible.
Norway is 99% hydroelectric because of geography and low population. Sweden is 40% hydro, 40% nuclear.
In neither are renewables used in significantly large ways (maybe excepting the few percent of Swedish trash burning) that are applicable to the rest of the world.
I think this calculation is better than you'd expect using air to air heat pumps. Their coefficient of performance can be between 2-5, meaning for each 1W of electricity, 2-5W heating is produced.
> What happens when that much energy is so cheap and every home has what amounts to a sizable bomb inside?
There is very little correlation between the amount of energy contained in a device, and its likelihood of exploding. A container of helium does - after all - contain an enormous amount of potential energy (if fused), but that's not gonna happen all on its own.
Your worry about batteries exploding, is because of your experience seeing Li-ion batteries exploding (or at least burning very quickly) in videos. But this is something specific to the Li-ion battery chemistries. It has very little to do with the energy stored in the battery. It's the flammable liquid electrolyte catching fire that's the primary cause.
Solid state chemistries contain even more energy, and do not explode at all. You can cut them in two and nothing happens. Their problem is cycle life though, but that might be solved.
A home battery pack will be built in a much more safe manner than a cell phone battery, they have more space to go on and they're experience less physical stress than a cell phone or even a car. One of these spontaneously catching fire is likely to be a freak accident, possible but extremely rare. And it's likely to be a fire, not an explosion, as the cells will be more contained than in a cell phone. Check out the video of Tesla setting one of their grid storage battery packs on fire. It's not very spectacular.
Are you comfortable parking your car inside of your garage? Even with a full tank of gas? Safety issues are real, but they have been solved before and are being solved now
I've seen cars burn, they don't explode like the movies, they burn. Like a couch.
Lithium batteries are much more energetic about their failures, "explode", and they can do so with only minor electrical or mechanical mistreatment.
A car in my garage is cold, outside of very odd situations it is not going to spontaneously ignite. Cars burn in accidents or when you are running them, not randomly in the middle of the night.
The "proper" safety for a large lithium battery pack is in a concrete sarcophagus or similar vessel capable of shielding and containing a catastrophic failure.
> Cars burn in accidents or when you are running them, not randomly in the middle of the night.
My co-worker's nanny's car, a new Subaru, burst into flames in her driveway while it was just sitting without the engine running. Non-crash fires occur so frequently that the Highway Loss Data Institute (HLDI) produces a Noncrash Fire Losses Report, and insurance companies calculate premiums based on that data.
We get one car fire every other year in the neighborhood thanks to the combination of teenagers with fireworks. There are always a few dozen a year in the town (110k people).
I'd have a power wall either in my garage or in a box outside the house if it would mean that we could go off-grid. Sadly that's not possible here (we've got more wind power than sun power and residential wind isn't feasible).
Have you seen batteries explode? They make an audible bang, and can even push things around if they are touching those, and that's all. This is because the explosion is contained in a steel sarcophagus (much more efficient than concrete) that detracts a little from portability, but is already included on the costs people are bringing to this thread.
These technologies typically went through a period of development where safety was not a paramount concern. Once electric cars become mass market we'll probably hit that point.
Gasoline just burns. It takes a very specific state to get it to explode.
Not that I'm recommending it, but you could fill a coffee can with gasoline and light it on fire and with only minimum care, be completely safe.
Do the same with an equivalent-energy amount of lithium batteries and you better have a good pair of running shoes.
Go watch some youtube videos of exploding laptops.
The latest big MacBook battery has 100 watt hours of energy fully charged.
A gallon of gasoline has 33,000 watt hours of energy.
So that macbook's battery has 2.3 teaspoons, about 1 centimeter cubed, or 11 mL equivalent energy of gasoline. I have spilled that much gas on my shoe and not given it a second thought. Another way to put it is a laptop battery has about as much energy in it as a shot of vodka.
I'll happily store many bottles of liquor in the cupboard without a thought of the fire risk.
I get where you are coming from here, but this comparison is deeply flawed. It is possible for some lipos to burn explosively, but this isn't the common scenario for the designs and containment used in vehicles. The car fires that we've seen with lithium ion fires have not presented as massive explosions, though the fires themselves can be very difficult to extinguish.
You know that millions of homes have natural gas installation, capable of emitting essentially unlimited amounts of explosive gas with only a single leak required, right?
Gas hobs are kinda nice. Direct induction is good enough, but I will miss gas burners for some cooking.
On the other hand Gas ovens are crazy nonsense. The electric oven was already the obviously superior choice last century and they've only continued to get better.
While there are certainly DIYers and the like, gas, plumbing and electricity in the US at least are all to be installed by professionals who have a license on the line, so this will be greatly mitigated. Moreover, energy density of gasoline and natural gas is significantly greater, although more meaningfully, the total energy of an EV battery is equivalent or less than a full tank of gas.
Hmm, why wouldn't they be certified? I suppose you will get a small number of people rolling their own (which is going on right now, with people reusing 18650s), but I assume it shouldn't be hard to require all commercially available units to be certified, we do that for furnaces, water heaters, etc.
It wouldn't be hard to require, it would be very hard to enforce with high coverage.
One these things become popular, just go on eBay or Amazon and buy a cheap one. There are loads and loads of electrical devices which are required to be certified which you can buy which are clearly not.
That's certainly possible, anyone can walk into a Home Depot and buy a breaker box (which is certified) and install it themselves (well or badly), but realistically that doesn't seem to happen so often it's a serious problem, partly because we have home inspections to catch the unsafe botched attempts (when they try to sell their death-trap homes).
Has Tesla got their act together with their US "Gigafactory" in Nevada yet? They had a lot of problems, most of them in plant management related to starting up a big plant in an isolated area.[1] Plus feuding with Panasonic.[2]
Eventually somebody will get this right, and there will be automated plants with very few employees. This is the ideal situation for automation - making huge numbers of identical products. It just takes a long time to get the automation working.
A big problem in the US is that few people go into manufacturing engineering. It's a big thing in China, but not in the US. Average pay for manufacturing engineers is about $78K, according to Glassdoor. Senior level, maybe $82K. This is for a job which today requires understanding real-time computer control, electronics, mechanical engineering, and organizational behavior.
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2019/12/04/tesla-e...
[2] https://electrek.co/2019/10/09/tesla-panasonic-relationship-...