The follow-up to this article would discuss the effects of falling costs on accelerating the transition.
Massive battery installations plus solar are already cheaper than operating an *existing* natural gas peaker plant in California. Batteries that are 50% cheaper will make that true across the U.S. That could happen by 2025 if Tesla's new battery process is successful.
Battery installations' faster response to grid demand also means they can quickly undercut remaining operating non-baseline usage, making the most polluting plants even less economically viable.
Excess storage in EVs and batteries will allow flattening the duck curve to rely even more on efficient baseload and shift renewable energy production to times of demand.
Things are going to go into overdrive faster than nearly all predictions... but still not fast enough for net zero :(
People talk a lot about a lot of things when it comes to energy production, but in terms of what actually happens the largest factor is $/MW in terms of new capacity in the expected timeframe. That economic force dominates all.
As a provider I (they) want x GW of new capacity, and will chose whatever costs the lowest amount to get that capacity. Solar is getting so cheap now that overbuilding is an entirely viable option. This is why renewables are getting built over new coal plants, the environmental benefits are just a marketing bonus.
As Engineers/scientists our job is to innovate and get the costs of the "correct" decision low enough that the economic forces take over and steer humanity towards the best outcome.
There was a recent paper that discussed this and said the transition is now inevitable due to economics and maybe always has been, but lots of forecasts were linear in their assumptions.
> Rapidly decarbonising the global energy system is critical for addressing climate change,
but concerns about costs have been a barrier to implementation. Most energy-economy
models have historically underestimated deployment rates for renewable energy tech-
nologies and overestimated their costs1,2,3,4,5,6. The problems with these models have
stimulated calls for better approaches7,8,9,10,11,12 and recent e↵orts have made progress in
this direction13,14,15,16. Here we take a new approach based on probabilistic cost fore-
casting methods that made reliable predictions when they were empirically tested on
more than 50 technologies17,18. We use these methods to estimate future energy system
costs and find that, compared to continuing with a fossil-fuel-based system, a rapid green
energy transition will likely result in overall net savings of many trillions of dollars -
even without accounting for climate damages or co-benefits of climate policy. We show
that if solar photovoltaics, wind, batteries and hydrogen electrolyzers continue to follow
their current exponentially increasing deployment trends for another decade, we achieve
a near-net-zero emissions energy system within twenty-five years. In contrast, a slower
transition (which involves deployment growth trends that are lower than current rates)
is more expensive and a nuclear driven transition is far more expensive. If non-energy
sources of carbon emissions such as agriculture are brought under control, our analysis
indicates that a rapid green energy transition would likely generate considerable eco-
nomic savings while also meeting the 1.5 degrees Paris Agreement target.
> Massive battery installations plus solar are already cheaper than operating an existing natural gas peaker plant in California
Aren't natural gas prices pretty high currently ? And with many countries moving away from gas in their electricity production, or at least moving it to peak-only, the price will go down.
Furthermore, batteries with what capacity? I highly doubt they're of the size required to sustain multi-week storm/bad weather events, even for the rarity they'd be in sunny California, le alone the rest of the US.
And from a globally strategic point of view, isn't it better to focus battery capacity on decarbonising sectors such as transportation ( cars, trucks, even trains apparently ( i still think electrifying the network is a better idea overall, but i can see how it'd be cheaper upfront to just add a battery car)) instead of "wasting" TWhs of battery capacity for long term storage.
I would be interested in seeing a detailed analysis that came to the same conclusion as your assertion regarding solar+storage being cheaper than gas plant in California.
Here is a pretty detailed analysis indicating that the storage costs make that combination infeasible at this point:
I know nothing, but what stops us from just using more energy overall such that we still depend on large amounts of fossil fuel? Even if we bring on more solace, how do we know it will replace fossil fuel rather than enabling more iverall consumption?
Worth noting that people misunderstand baseline (baseload) requirements too. Solar+batteries and some pump storage and wind are very nearly statistically able to meet baseload in most places.
Small gas plants might be needed to fill the gap for a period of time but there's no gap for large scale non renewable power sources (coal, oil, nuclear or large gas) that's big enough to make economic sense.
It's actually pretty amazing to watch how quickly LiFePO4 batteries are dropping in price over the last few years and how much better they are getting. You can get a 12v 100ah drop in replacement for about the same cost as a high lead acid AGM [1], and there are some really interesting rack mount 48v's at very low price per Wh [2].
These lithium iron batteries are more stable, have extremely long life and avoid cobalt and nickel while having only slightly less energy density. Pretty sure they poised to replace lead acid in almost all applications over the next few years.
Tesla is finally replacing the lead acid 12v battery with a lithium 12v and of course they a going LifePO4 for the main pack in some lower end models.
I just replaced my worn out high end AGM's in my RV with LiFePO4's, 3 times the price but 4 times the usable capacity in only slightly more space and much less voltage sag throughout the discharge cycle and much faster recharge acceptance and at least 6 times the cycle life, should be the last batteries I need to buy for it.
the new rack-mount LiFePO4 batteries are insane. I have multiple "server racks" with bus bars. Right now each 5KWH module is ~$1500 with fully integrated BMS and safety systems. If I need more storage I just order another one and slot it in.
I could see these modules hitting $500 within 5 years.
What’s happened with the 12V 100ah over the last year is literally unbelievable. During the pandemic supply crunch these things have gone from $1000 to $400.
>> A 600-fold increase in battery production made batteries much cheaper.
>> Economists have found that manufacturing costs often decline at a predictable rate. In a model known as an experience curve, costs fall by the same percentage (called the learning rate) each time industry-wide volume doubles...
So somewhat of a meta... Moore's law is a specific instance. The Y axis is price. The X axis is production volume, not time. Usually, rising production volume must overcompensate for falling prices to maintain a such a trend.
Lunar travel, for example, did not get much cheaper over the decades because volume didn't increase. The automobile industries' golden years of annual price improvements ended in the 1920s. The US market had peaked^, because demand for cars was finite.^ If the price of a car halves, we don't triple the number of cars we buy.
With computing, demand (or capacity to consume) has been able to "keep up" with Moore's Law. The market overcompensates for falling chip prices with increased consumption. More X for the X-axis. I think this is where we are currently for electric. Home installation, commercial and grid installations are still speculative. Vehicles are no longer speculative. The demand is there. It's not open-ended like computing, because once every vehicle has a battery... But for the next few years, demand will predictably rise to overcompensate for falling prices.
We need about 50 TWh of batteries to convert the world's cars to electric, and a similar amount to convert the world's grid to renewables. We're currently producing about 0.3 TWh annually, and have more than that coming online in each of 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025.
So we should have at least a decade of strong demand to keep driving down prices. Of course those low prices will probably stimulate more use cases, but it does seem likely that those new uses aren't as large as vehicles or grid storage.
You're forgetting about market share. If prices don't sink further because demand elasticity is maxed out it has to be the result of some form of market failure. Either on the seller side (collusion, aka refusal to use pricing for market share increase) or irrationality on the buyer side (veblen goods, clearly a factor with cars and moon travel is, in a way, off the charts in that metric).
I like to look at sinking prices of technology through the the mental model of an inherent minimum cost, where learning or scale doesn't just make it magically cheaper but reduces avoidable overhead. Plenty of product types that have started expensive and then became cheaper and cheaper have clearly seen all the economy of scale that could reasonably be expected, they wouldn't become any cheaper per unit if the market consumed 10x as much. Same for spending a few more decades making them, unlikely to learn ways to make it web cheaper.
You were already able to get LFP batteries outside of China for a bit cheaper than that for 2 years at car maker wholesale quantities.
Battery cells plummeted as a part of vehicle cost.
The cheapest cost I ever heard quoted in China was $64 per kw/h. I don't preclude that battery makers with own car factories like BYD have real costs around $30-$40.
Taking cost at $40, BYD Dolphin had $1200 in it, comparable to costs economy class IC cars have in their whole powertrain.
But EV vehicles are on overall easier to engineer. Part counts of EVs are much smaller than IC cars.
More importantly, you can deliver satisfying driving experience with much smaller car if you use electric traction, while <999cc engines will have small powerbands no matter what amount of smarts is added to their ECUs.
I always tell that 1-to-1 IC, and EV comparisons make little sense. EVs are a whole different class of vehicles.
Putting a slash in the unit there makes this read as "kilowatt per hour", which really doesn't make sense.
Think of it as the power the battery can continuously provide (in kilowatt) multiplied (not divided!) by the time it can sustain that power (in hours). Hence "kWh", "kilowatt hour".
I think patent licensing is a bit of a concern. As I understand it, a lot of the big battery manufacturers in China have an agreement that the don't need to pay licensing fees for batteries used domestically, but if a major car manufacturer wanted to import LFP cells to, say, the U.S. they might have to pay the licensing fees or risk getting sued. (That might not be 100% correct, I'm kind of piecing things together from random Internet sources.) That may be moot soon as the relevant patents expire, which could change the battery landscape hugely (I hope).
Another thing is that not all LFPs are necessarily ideal for automotive use. For instance, batteries that can only safely discharge at 1C might be a bad idea to use unless the vehicle has a large enough battery pack that the load is spread out over a lot of cells. So, price isn't everything. Obviously, high energy density is also much desired for use in cars.
That said, I think LFPs are probably the ideal technology right now for replacing most of the world's combustion-engine ground transportation infrastructure with battery-electric vehicles. We just need to manufacture them at the necessary scale, and right now it's only China that's doing it. (It's like if Saudi Arabia discovered oil and the rest of the world said, "Well, I guess Saudi Arabia just owns the whole oil market. No reason to invest in it ourselves, because we can just get it from KSA." In the 20th century that would have obviously been a strategic blunder, but that's what the world is basically doing now with batteries. Whoever can make batteries cheaper than everyone else can use that to dominate the energy industry going forward. Fortunately there are fewer moats; anyone can make batteries if they can get the ingredients, and LFP ingredients are mostly not that rare except maybe lithium and copper.)
Meanwhile a 1kW/h battery for an e-bike can still retail for $2000 (thinking of the Stromer BQ983).
Surprises me how long it takes for these prices to tickle down into normal consumer goods. But they will, the true revolution of electric assisted urban transport has only just begun. Really exciting to see all the wacky new transport modes that are created left and right, I wonder which ones will stick
The size of the car is in no way constrained by the engine size. People swap V8s into Miatas all the time. You can do a K24 swap into a Honda Fit without changing any bodywork. Vehicle size is entirely determined by market segment, design, and collision safety.
As for small engines, Fiat's 0.9 TwinAir is enjoyable once you get rid of the factory tune that is super-optimized for low emissions in the official tests at the expense of driveability. It even has extra-low rev limiters in the first three gears. Starting from the 105 bhp version you can get 120 bhp and 200 Nm of torque with only ECU tuning and removing baffles from the airbox, makes it a fun little thing.
If you "used up" battery that's due to be sent to the recycler, How much of that 1200 could you hope to recoup? (I assume a power train can only be sold for scrap for a tiny fraction)
Plenty of them are labelled correctly and deliver as advertised. ~3400 mAh products are readily available from Samsung, Sanyo, Sony and LG. The best way to ensure you get quality product is to buy from a reputed middle-man, unless you plan to buy 100's of thousands of cells, then it will definitely be possible to go direct.
Energy storage is following the solar curve in dropping prices from manufacturing - we've seen this for at least 5 years now...nothing new there.
The funny thing about it - it isn't clear where the value really accrues. There is continual downward pressure on prices for the full system but there hasn't been particularly good ways to recoup value from the utilities models and bidding as merchant power is super tough to make money.
If the hope that electricity prices keep going down from cheap solar (speculating future energy prices is a losers game) it only gets more difficult to install ESS systems. I.e. any system you install now will be out performed by the system in 2 years especially if you are in a bidding market.
As someone who builds projects and invests in climate tech companies I find the prices coming down great and open up more opportunity but I just don't know where the value accrues. For example Fluence going public -- they make money on the control & IT side of the system. So any price decrease in the hardware (Siemens) will likely be recouped from Fluence in service costs.
TL,DR; Glad the prices are coming down - I'm not entirely sure the narrative is right about where this goes and the gatekeepers (utilities + regulators) haven't fully bought in - ie compensation for the value proposition from ESS hasn't been proved en masse. Federal policies might be the finger on the scale that really continues to keep the growth of ESS + solar/wind going strong.
We are going into uncharted waters for grid balancing though and I suspect the utilities will recoup money through system upgrade payments defrayed across the ratebase.
The article appears to credit Tesla, but Tesla built the gigafactory with Panasonic.
And Panasonic had invested, and received massive investment from the likes of Apple for years before.
Also, note that the Gigafactory was built in 2014 but prices were dropping well before.
The far more likely cause for the decline of batter prices (and why I had predicted they would decline in the early 2010s) was the massive investment by consumer electronics, and particularly smartphone makers, in better and cheaper battery technology.
Elon Musk's best move was taking advantage of the investments the smartphone industry was putting into reducing battery costs.
The scale is completely different. Consumer electronics were step one, but will account for less than 1% of worldwide battery production and drop to negligible quantities.
Tesla is pushing us towards Terawatt scale of production.
Methinks we are moving to wrong direction. Instead of massive battery farms, we should focus on intelligent metering. Every consumer should have wireless metering unit, which shows the price of electricity at every moment with big red numbers. Then it is your choice, you can waste your monies or invest on 100 kwh battery, which can also can optimize the charging-recharging cycle. In Europe the price of electricity is often momentarily negative, when there is good wind blowing. That would the time to bake the pie and clean youres freezer.
Can we please borrow the improv "yes, and" for climate solutions?
Time-of-use metering is not new. The UK has had the option of cheap overnight tariff for decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_7 - although that was traditionally implemented as a separate circuit.
Meanwhile batteries are still useful at grid level for "frequency response" and stabilisation of dips (e.g. generator trip-outs). Being able to turn on a few hundred megawatts within a 50Hz cycle is a very useful feature.
I would rather enjoy constant nuclear energy rather than be a slave for some device which dictates me when to cook or wash. People where is your fundamental freedom desire?
I would much rather than a public utility look after that for me, so that I don't have to carefully time my freezer-cleaning. If it's worth buying batteries then let them do that in the most cost-efficient manner, and let me not have to micromanage that part of my life.
Yes, I think it is a missed opportunity. Hopefully, we are slowly getting there.
We have smart meters, smart thermostats, smart everything, all these devices should be able to negotiate for the best time to run. The big red display can be a thing, but I don't want to micromanage my power consumption when it can be done automatically.
We already have boilers that turn off during peak hours, but you can also have your thermostats take the cost of electricity into account, there is a video by Technology Connections on that ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0f9GpMWdvWI ). You should also have a "run when it is cheap" button on your appliances, most already have a delayed start feature, we can be a little smarter. Electric cars are even better because not only you can schedule charging but they are also batteries.
We already have the technology to do all that, at most, all we need is a standardization effort. Power line communication seems like a good fit. It is already used in smart meters to automate readings, and this way, any device that is plugged in knows how much it costs and can adjust, including the big red display if you want one.
This is a fairly key part of most actual efforts, in fact many people installing grid batteries are doing so in order to buy low and sell high. That doesnt work if a flat rate has been set.
Similarly the batteries in cars are very easy to charge according to rime of use prices or predicted marginal carbon.
I agree that increasing efficiency has enormous potential, but consumers are almost certainly responsible for only a small share of overall energy consumption compared with industry and transport. We need to target our measures there, which implies adjusting incentives. We really should build pollution charges into the cost of electricity (“carbon pricing” if you’re talking to conservatives who balk at the “carbon tax” and the inverse for progressives who balk at markets); however, corporations won’t stand for that, and they effectively govern us over here in the United States. Moreover, this would also trickle down to consumers at least until industries respond by making their processes more efficient which would presumably drive public sentiment in favor of pollution (regrettably, I suspect we are a weak-willed people these days, but I’d be happy to be disproven).
i can't seem to find any cheap battery sellers in india. $275/KWh is being sold on retail, someone even quoted me $450/KWh for 5kwh. this is absurd because the rates are nowhere near that, anyway to acquire like 20-30 or even 50kwh for my home at sane rates in india?
These averages come from much much higher quantities, and are not retail prices.
There's also such significant demand that at the retail level, it's unlikely that you'll see < $150/kWh anytime soon, I would think.
As batteries get cheaper, the potential market also gets much much much larger. At $275/kWh it is pretty attractive for a huge part of the consumer market, and almost no one knows that batteries are that cheap already.
Really looking forward to a future with cheap energy storage and super cheap energy generation from solar and wind. It will enable a huge surge of productivity in the global south, especially if people can electrify without having to use super-expensive grid transmission systems.
Good article. TLDR: Wright's Law, Jevon's Paradox, governmental policy.
As editor, I would have encouraged author to include three more facets.
What is the market size for batteries? Give me a range. From incremental replacement of existing tech to total switchover.
Projections into the future. Per Wright's Law, driving down production costs, the marginal costs (?) of batteries will approach material costs. So what is that point and when will it happen?
The driver for Wright's Law is investment. What is that shape? Spending $X billions will reduce the price of 1kwh of batteries by $Y dollars. Mostly to train us noob observers and misc other policy makers to think in these terms. So during the food fights over our futureperfect carbon negative economy, tax payers and lobbyists for the captains of industry can say stuff like
"Ahem. Yes madam Senator, excellent question. Per our analysis, if the USA govt invests and underwrites 100 megabucks for the next decade, we'll bring to market 100 megawhats (sic), at below current prices and decreasing into the future, employing 100 kilopeeps (sic), resulting in 400 megabucks of tax and licensing revenue back to the USA govt over the next 40 years. Doing so will guarantee our grandchildren's economic security and prosperity. We ask for your support. Thank you."
> Projections into the future. Per Wright's Law, driving down production costs, the marginal costs (?) of batteries will approach material costs. So what is that point and when will it happen?
Batteries are price takers for materials such as iron, but for materials such as lithium, they are price setters. The price of lithium follows the same Wright's law curve as batteries do. Lithium is quite common, so its price decreases as quantities increase due to Wright's law. And batteries consume most of the world's lithium, so the lithium demand follow battery demand.
> Cheap and reliable batteries will be essential for decarbonizing multiple industries.
I wonder where all of the battery waste goes and if we are truly better off with piles of lithium batteries but reduced carbon footprint. Did I miss some recycling innovation for said batteries?
[+] [-] gibolt|4 years ago|reply
Massive battery installations plus solar are already cheaper than operating an *existing* natural gas peaker plant in California. Batteries that are 50% cheaper will make that true across the U.S. That could happen by 2025 if Tesla's new battery process is successful.
Battery installations' faster response to grid demand also means they can quickly undercut remaining operating non-baseline usage, making the most polluting plants even less economically viable.
Excess storage in EVs and batteries will allow flattening the duck curve to rely even more on efficient baseload and shift renewable energy production to times of demand.
Things are going to go into overdrive faster than nearly all predictions... but still not fast enough for net zero :(
[+] [-] zionic|4 years ago|reply
As a provider I (they) want x GW of new capacity, and will chose whatever costs the lowest amount to get that capacity. Solar is getting so cheap now that overbuilding is an entirely viable option. This is why renewables are getting built over new coal plants, the environmental benefits are just a marketing bonus.
As Engineers/scientists our job is to innovate and get the costs of the "correct" decision low enough that the economic forces take over and steer humanity towards the best outcome.
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|4 years ago|reply
https://www.inet.ox.ac.uk/files/energy_transition_paper-INET...
> Rapidly decarbonising the global energy system is critical for addressing climate change, but concerns about costs have been a barrier to implementation. Most energy-economy models have historically underestimated deployment rates for renewable energy tech- nologies and overestimated their costs1,2,3,4,5,6. The problems with these models have stimulated calls for better approaches7,8,9,10,11,12 and recent e↵orts have made progress in this direction13,14,15,16. Here we take a new approach based on probabilistic cost fore- casting methods that made reliable predictions when they were empirically tested on more than 50 technologies17,18. We use these methods to estimate future energy system costs and find that, compared to continuing with a fossil-fuel-based system, a rapid green energy transition will likely result in overall net savings of many trillions of dollars - even without accounting for climate damages or co-benefits of climate policy. We show that if solar photovoltaics, wind, batteries and hydrogen electrolyzers continue to follow their current exponentially increasing deployment trends for another decade, we achieve a near-net-zero emissions energy system within twenty-five years. In contrast, a slower transition (which involves deployment growth trends that are lower than current rates) is more expensive and a nuclear driven transition is far more expensive. If non-energy sources of carbon emissions such as agriculture are brought under control, our analysis indicates that a rapid green energy transition would likely generate considerable eco- nomic savings while also meeting the 1.5 degrees Paris Agreement target.
[+] [-] sofixa|4 years ago|reply
Aren't natural gas prices pretty high currently ? And with many countries moving away from gas in their electricity production, or at least moving it to peak-only, the price will go down.
Furthermore, batteries with what capacity? I highly doubt they're of the size required to sustain multi-week storm/bad weather events, even for the rarity they'd be in sunny California, le alone the rest of the US.
And from a globally strategic point of view, isn't it better to focus battery capacity on decarbonising sectors such as transportation ( cars, trucks, even trains apparently ( i still think electrifying the network is a better idea overall, but i can see how it'd be cheaper upfront to just add a battery car)) instead of "wasting" TWhs of battery capacity for long term storage.
[+] [-] gwright|4 years ago|reply
Here is a pretty detailed analysis indicating that the storage costs make that combination infeasible at this point:
http://euanmearns.com/the-cost-of-wind-solar-power-batteries...
The California scenario in that report suggests over $5 trillion needed to switch to solar+batteries.
[+] [-] throwaway894345|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nl|4 years ago|reply
Small gas plants might be needed to fill the gap for a period of time but there's no gap for large scale non renewable power sources (coal, oil, nuclear or large gas) that's big enough to make economic sense.
[+] [-] SigmundA|4 years ago|reply
These lithium iron batteries are more stable, have extremely long life and avoid cobalt and nickel while having only slightly less energy density. Pretty sure they poised to replace lead acid in almost all applications over the next few years.
Tesla is finally replacing the lead acid 12v battery with a lithium 12v and of course they a going LifePO4 for the main pack in some lower end models.
I just replaced my worn out high end AGM's in my RV with LiFePO4's, 3 times the price but 4 times the usable capacity in only slightly more space and much less voltage sag throughout the discharge cycle and much faster recharge acceptance and at least 6 times the cycle life, should be the last batteries I need to buy for it.
1. https://www.amazon.com/LiFePO4-Battery-2000-5000-battery-Off...
2. https://jakiperbattery.com/product/jk48v100/
[+] [-] zionic|4 years ago|reply
I could see these modules hitting $500 within 5 years.
[+] [-] tiahura|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] netcan|4 years ago|reply
>> Economists have found that manufacturing costs often decline at a predictable rate. In a model known as an experience curve, costs fall by the same percentage (called the learning rate) each time industry-wide volume doubles...
So somewhat of a meta... Moore's law is a specific instance. The Y axis is price. The X axis is production volume, not time. Usually, rising production volume must overcompensate for falling prices to maintain a such a trend.
Lunar travel, for example, did not get much cheaper over the decades because volume didn't increase. The automobile industries' golden years of annual price improvements ended in the 1920s. The US market had peaked^, because demand for cars was finite.^ If the price of a car halves, we don't triple the number of cars we buy.
With computing, demand (or capacity to consume) has been able to "keep up" with Moore's Law. The market overcompensates for falling chip prices with increased consumption. More X for the X-axis. I think this is where we are currently for electric. Home installation, commercial and grid installations are still speculative. Vehicles are no longer speculative. The demand is there. It's not open-ended like computing, because once every vehicle has a battery... But for the next few years, demand will predictably rise to overcompensate for falling prices.
^https://hbr.org/resources/images/article_assets/hbr/7409/745...
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|4 years ago|reply
We need about 50 TWh of batteries to convert the world's cars to electric, and a similar amount to convert the world's grid to renewables. We're currently producing about 0.3 TWh annually, and have more than that coming online in each of 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025.
So we should have at least a decade of strong demand to keep driving down prices. Of course those low prices will probably stimulate more use cases, but it does seem likely that those new uses aren't as large as vehicles or grid storage.
[+] [-] usrusr|4 years ago|reply
I like to look at sinking prices of technology through the the mental model of an inherent minimum cost, where learning or scale doesn't just make it magically cheaper but reduces avoidable overhead. Plenty of product types that have started expensive and then became cheaper and cheaper have clearly seen all the economy of scale that could reasonably be expected, they wouldn't become any cheaper per unit if the market consumed 10x as much. Same for spending a few more decades making them, unlikely to learn ways to make it web cheaper.
[+] [-] baybal2|4 years ago|reply
You were already able to get LFP batteries outside of China for a bit cheaper than that for 2 years at car maker wholesale quantities.
Battery cells plummeted as a part of vehicle cost.
The cheapest cost I ever heard quoted in China was $64 per kw/h. I don't preclude that battery makers with own car factories like BYD have real costs around $30-$40.
Taking cost at $40, BYD Dolphin had $1200 in it, comparable to costs economy class IC cars have in their whole powertrain.
But EV vehicles are on overall easier to engineer. Part counts of EVs are much smaller than IC cars.
More importantly, you can deliver satisfying driving experience with much smaller car if you use electric traction, while <999cc engines will have small powerbands no matter what amount of smarts is added to their ECUs.
I always tell that 1-to-1 IC, and EV comparisons make little sense. EVs are a whole different class of vehicles.
[+] [-] wcoenen|4 years ago|reply
Putting a slash in the unit there makes this read as "kilowatt per hour", which really doesn't make sense.
Think of it as the power the battery can continuously provide (in kilowatt) multiplied (not divided!) by the time it can sustain that power (in hours). Hence "kWh", "kilowatt hour".
[+] [-] elihu|4 years ago|reply
Another thing is that not all LFPs are necessarily ideal for automotive use. For instance, batteries that can only safely discharge at 1C might be a bad idea to use unless the vehicle has a large enough battery pack that the load is spread out over a lot of cells. So, price isn't everything. Obviously, high energy density is also much desired for use in cars.
That said, I think LFPs are probably the ideal technology right now for replacing most of the world's combustion-engine ground transportation infrastructure with battery-electric vehicles. We just need to manufacture them at the necessary scale, and right now it's only China that's doing it. (It's like if Saudi Arabia discovered oil and the rest of the world said, "Well, I guess Saudi Arabia just owns the whole oil market. No reason to invest in it ourselves, because we can just get it from KSA." In the 20th century that would have obviously been a strategic blunder, but that's what the world is basically doing now with batteries. Whoever can make batteries cheaper than everyone else can use that to dominate the energy industry going forward. Fortunately there are fewer moats; anyone can make batteries if they can get the ingredients, and LFP ingredients are mostly not that rare except maybe lithium and copper.)
[+] [-] tda|4 years ago|reply
Surprises me how long it takes for these prices to tickle down into normal consumer goods. But they will, the true revolution of electric assisted urban transport has only just begun. Really exciting to see all the wacky new transport modes that are created left and right, I wonder which ones will stick
[+] [-] semi-extrinsic|4 years ago|reply
As for small engines, Fiat's 0.9 TwinAir is enjoyable once you get rid of the factory tune that is super-optimized for low emissions in the official tests at the expense of driveability. It even has extra-low rev limiters in the first three gears. Starting from the 105 bhp version you can get 120 bhp and 200 Nm of torque with only ECU tuning and removing baffles from the airbox, makes it a fun little thing.
[+] [-] geokon|4 years ago|reply
If you "used up" battery that's due to be sent to the recycler, How much of that 1200 could you hope to recoup? (I assume a power train can only be sold for scrap for a tiny fraction)
[+] [-] coryrc|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomrod|4 years ago|reply
He's a good one to follow. I look forward to reading more of his FullStackEconomics posts.
[+] [-] aitchnyu|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hunglee2|4 years ago|reply
"experience curve" - the more you do something, the easier it gets. Hence, ship daily
[+] [-] VLM|4 years ago|reply
The world is flooded with 18650 size cells that are marketed at 2500+ mAh but measure 500 mAh.
Certainly the higher profit margin on the consumer side must help the other less corrupt sectors.
[+] [-] jacquesm|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zionic|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boringg|4 years ago|reply
The funny thing about it - it isn't clear where the value really accrues. There is continual downward pressure on prices for the full system but there hasn't been particularly good ways to recoup value from the utilities models and bidding as merchant power is super tough to make money.
If the hope that electricity prices keep going down from cheap solar (speculating future energy prices is a losers game) it only gets more difficult to install ESS systems. I.e. any system you install now will be out performed by the system in 2 years especially if you are in a bidding market.
As someone who builds projects and invests in climate tech companies I find the prices coming down great and open up more opportunity but I just don't know where the value accrues. For example Fluence going public -- they make money on the control & IT side of the system. So any price decrease in the hardware (Siemens) will likely be recouped from Fluence in service costs.
TL,DR; Glad the prices are coming down - I'm not entirely sure the narrative is right about where this goes and the gatekeepers (utilities + regulators) haven't fully bought in - ie compensation for the value proposition from ESS hasn't been proved en masse. Federal policies might be the finger on the scale that really continues to keep the growth of ESS + solar/wind going strong.
We are going into uncharted waters for grid balancing though and I suspect the utilities will recoup money through system upgrade payments defrayed across the ratebase.
[+] [-] addicted|4 years ago|reply
And Panasonic had invested, and received massive investment from the likes of Apple for years before.
Also, note that the Gigafactory was built in 2014 but prices were dropping well before.
The far more likely cause for the decline of batter prices (and why I had predicted they would decline in the early 2010s) was the massive investment by consumer electronics, and particularly smartphone makers, in better and cheaper battery technology.
Elon Musk's best move was taking advantage of the investments the smartphone industry was putting into reducing battery costs.
[+] [-] gibolt|4 years ago|reply
Tesla is pushing us towards Terawatt scale of production.
[+] [-] timonoko|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjc50|4 years ago|reply
Time-of-use metering is not new. The UK has had the option of cheap overnight tariff for decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_7 - although that was traditionally implemented as a separate circuit.
Meanwhile batteries are still useful at grid level for "frequency response" and stabilisation of dips (e.g. generator trip-outs). Being able to turn on a few hundred megawatts within a 50Hz cycle is a very useful feature.
[+] [-] batushka3|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AndrewDucker|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GuB-42|4 years ago|reply
We already have boilers that turn off during peak hours, but you can also have your thermostats take the cost of electricity into account, there is a video by Technology Connections on that ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0f9GpMWdvWI ). You should also have a "run when it is cheap" button on your appliances, most already have a delayed start feature, we can be a little smarter. Electric cars are even better because not only you can schedule charging but they are also batteries.
We already have the technology to do all that, at most, all we need is a standardization effort. Power line communication seems like a good fit. It is already used in smart meters to automate readings, and this way, any device that is plugged in knows how much it costs and can adjust, including the big red display if you want one.
[+] [-] 35mm|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|4 years ago|reply
Similarly the batteries in cars are very easy to charge according to rime of use prices or predicted marginal carbon.
[+] [-] tpmx|4 years ago|reply
It feels like a step backwards to force this kind of gamification onto people.
[+] [-] anovikov|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway894345|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 2Gkashmiri|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] epistasis|4 years ago|reply
There's also such significant demand that at the retail level, it's unlikely that you'll see < $150/kWh anytime soon, I would think.
As batteries get cheaper, the potential market also gets much much much larger. At $275/kWh it is pretty attractive for a huge part of the consumer market, and almost no one knows that batteries are that cheap already.
Really looking forward to a future with cheap energy storage and super cheap energy generation from solar and wind. It will enable a huge surge of productivity in the global south, especially if people can electrify without having to use super-expensive grid transmission systems.
[+] [-] specialist|4 years ago|reply
As editor, I would have encouraged author to include three more facets.
What is the market size for batteries? Give me a range. From incremental replacement of existing tech to total switchover.
Projections into the future. Per Wright's Law, driving down production costs, the marginal costs (?) of batteries will approach material costs. So what is that point and when will it happen?
The driver for Wright's Law is investment. What is that shape? Spending $X billions will reduce the price of 1kwh of batteries by $Y dollars. Mostly to train us noob observers and misc other policy makers to think in these terms. So during the food fights over our futureperfect carbon negative economy, tax payers and lobbyists for the captains of industry can say stuff like
"Ahem. Yes madam Senator, excellent question. Per our analysis, if the USA govt invests and underwrites 100 megabucks for the next decade, we'll bring to market 100 megawhats (sic), at below current prices and decreasing into the future, employing 100 kilopeeps (sic), resulting in 400 megabucks of tax and licensing revenue back to the USA govt over the next 40 years. Doing so will guarantee our grandchildren's economic security and prosperity. We ask for your support. Thank you."
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|4 years ago|reply
Batteries are price takers for materials such as iron, but for materials such as lithium, they are price setters. The price of lithium follows the same Wright's law curve as batteries do. Lithium is quite common, so its price decreases as quantities increase due to Wright's law. And batteries consume most of the world's lithium, so the lithium demand follow battery demand.
[+] [-] Jabed30|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] echopurity|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] DmitryOlshansky|4 years ago|reply
I wonder where all of the battery waste goes and if we are truly better off with piles of lithium batteries but reduced carbon footprint. Did I miss some recycling innovation for said batteries?