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.
This is something a lot smart people even here on hackernews have been unable to get their head around. The speed of cost decrease in renewable based electricity and battery prices. Solar electricity is cheaper now than all fossil fuel based electricity in most of the world already. But its cost are still decreasing at about 10% a year. So electricity that costs $1 today will cost $0.25 or less in 10 years. Most of us have not seen this on our bills yet as renewable still are small percentage of the total as the percentage of renewable increases our bills should start decreasing as well.
Currently Electric cars you can drive 18 miles compared ice cars 10 miles for a $1. It could be 40 miles in 5 years and 80 miles a $1 in 10. Without even any improvements in the electric car motors and lighter batteries which could push the mileage to 100~120 miles a $1. This is the reason I feel electric vehicles will be supply constrained rather than demand constrained in the next few years. And if current manufacturers are unwilling to sacrifice their ice vehicle cash cows now they will loose the market to the new entrants very very quickly. And with electric cars being less complex to manufacture we might see manufacturers outside of Japan, Eur and USA.
> 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.
Natural gas prices in California are dominated by transport costs, not production costs.
To survive a multi-week storm/bad weather event with a grid containing only solar and wind, you need a 3x overbuild of solar+wind in an optimal mix, along with a continental grid and 3 hours worth of batteries is all you need for 99.99% reliability: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z
Nuclear isn't sustainable, extremely slow to build and astronomically expensive. It's not an option.
Hydropower is sustainable but has a very limited potential,and its impact on the environment is much, much higher than comparable wind/solar installations.
Nuclear is very sustainable. With enrichment, the world's known uranium supplies (5.5 million tons) would last about 30,000 years at present usage rates, if used with fast breeder reactors. The NEA estimates that's a sixth of what's out there. Obviously this doesn't go as far if you scale it up 10-100x, but in addition, there's about 4.5 billion tons dissolved in seawater.
This is just the uranium, not even touching the thorium. And once we get to this point, there is uranium on the Moon and Mars. The waste-management problem is harder in the political sense than the engineering sense.
The big advantage of nuclear is that it is reliable. However, the paper I linked above says wind and solar can be reliable, so nuclear no longer has any redeeming qualities.
A reliable grid of nuclear + renewables is significantly cheaper than without the nuclear, according to the EU study that has been circulated here a couple months back.
The abstract for the paper (thanks for that link!) says:
> Yet even in systems which meet >90% of demand, hundreds of hours of unmet demand may occur annually.
... and the low end of the range is 72%, which leaves many more hours unaccounted for. Some amount of reliable, clean power is needed on top of the renewables.
Yes, the abstract sucks. Those are the numbers without batteries or over-building. To get to 99.99% you have to add all the mitigations: 3x overbuild, 3 hours of batteries and a continent wide grid.
Oh sorry, I misread your original comment as saying that plan wouldn't work because it required too much overbuilding, when actually you were saying that it would work! Yes, our existing hydro and nuclear just makes it even easier to switch.
" I highly doubt they're of the size required to sustain multi-week storm/bad weather events"
Those bad weather events come usually with lots of wind - which you can harvest, too. So the solution might just be the often propagated energy mix.
And you can build batteries without any rare elements(natrium instead of lithium), so if you build enough of them and enough solar and co. then who cares if some of that energy gets lost, as long as the grid remains stable?
> Those bad weather events come usually with lots of wind - which you can harvest, too. So the solution might just be the often propagated energy mix.
As i have said a few times around here, there's a meteorological phenomenon across Europe now ( since September, and projected to go well into the winter), with bad weather ( clouds, low sunlight), low temperatures, and low wind speeds. Traditional hydro and tidal energy generation are still OK, but solar and wind are at historical lows. And again, this is ongoing for months.
Furthermore, a bad weather event like storms can have winds that are too fast for a wind generator to operate safely.
At least for Germany, that's just not the case. Wind is going quite strong this quarter, so strong that it easily offsets the lower-than-average solar generation. And that's mostly due to the weather – expansion was massively stalled by conservative administrations in the last few years.
Normally if nothing else changed you'd expect prices to go down since the most expensive providers (= those with highest costs of doing their business) pulling the price up leave the market.
It’s unclear to me if that accounts for second order effects? For example, lower demand leads to lower prices, sure. But then those lower prices lead to higher demand. This should quickly reach equilibrium if buying and selling were spur of the moment decisions with no long term consequence. But in the energy market that’s not the case. Building a power plant is a commitment to buying that product, which locks in that demand regardless of price. And so continued low prices could lead to more construction of gas plants, which leads to an increase in demand.
Basically what I’m saying is that the demand curve models a simple market with a fungible good, which can be bought and sold easily. We have to recognise that it’s like studying spherical, frictionless projectiles in physics. A good starting point, but not how the real world works.
>For example, lower demand leads to lower prices, sure. But then those lower prices lead to higher demand.
Supply curve is missing in these statements.
> Building a power plant is a commitment to buying that product, which locks in that demand regardless of price.
What? Is there some sort of law that requires buyers to buy all of the electricity a power plant can produces?
> And so continued low prices could lead to more construction of gas plants, which leads to an increase in demand.
This is backwards. An increase in demand for electricity might lead to construction of new gas plants, with a bet that even with the increased supply, electricity buyers are willing to pay at least x price for electricity for y duration sufficient to earn a z return on investment for building the new gas plant.
Any particular sources? From a quick web search, it sounds like hydrogen has a very different energy density (Joules/cu. m., or BTU/cu. ft., or whatever), very different combustion and leak safety characteristics, and can either leak through or embrittle many parts of the existing (natural gas) distribution infrastructure.
If that's anything resembling correct...then the change-over would be more like replacing all-diesel fuel & engine infrastructure with gasoline.
Electrolytic hydrogen can be cheap as long as 1) electricity for electrolysis is cheap and 2) electrolyzers are cheap. 1) is reasonably easily assured by shaving off overgeneration of electricity from renewable power plants. 2) is a matter of electrolyzer R&D, although it's true that it's slightly complicated by the former solution of 1) by decreasing their duty cycle. Nevertheless, 1) is the dominant problem.
As for storage, it's true that storing hydrogen is problematic but once I calculated that even existing facilities for natural gas in, say, Germany would be sufficient for a whole month of the whole country's grid running off of hydrogen. This is less than the several months provided by using the same storage for natural gas, but since in the following decades, the demand for this gas is going to shrink severely as German buildings are going to be replaced by low-energy buildings (pursuant to the 2010/31/EU Energy Performance of Buildings Directive and the 2012/27/EU Energy Efficiency Directive, as well as presumably future regulations), this capacity might be freed up, and in any case it's a much larger capacity than is predicted to be required (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001429211...) for a 100% renewable grid in Germany.
One interesting idea I don't know the feasibility of but is tempting anyway is ultra-large-scale liquid hydrogen storage. Considering the square-cube law and low density of liquid hydrogen stressing the structure (just 70 kg per cubic metre of liquid hydrogen tank, as opposed to 1000 kg per cubic metre of a water tank, for example), ultra-large-scale storage of hydrogen could be feasible in principle -- certainly much more than for example liquid hydrogen storage for a car, and in industrial settings to boot (as opposed to cars handled by ordinary citizens).
Gas infrastructure used to deal with coal gas which contained ~50% of hydrogen. Somehow it worked back then. Doesn't seem like an unsolvable problem to me.
Green hydrogen can be cheap if electricity is cheap. With the falling prices of renewables, that is quite likely to happen soon.
But green hydrogen is only useful if electricity is cheap but batteries are expensive. The original article indicates why batteries aren't expensive and are likely to get dramatically cheaper over the next decade. That's why hydrogen is likely to stay irrelevant except for niche use cases.
Green Hydrogen is also good if you absolutely need Hydrogen. In this case, Green Hydrogen at twice the cost of getting it from Natural Gas is still a win.
e.g. steel manufacturing can use Green Hydrogen for the Reduction reaction, as part of the alternate pathway without coal.
Oh certainly. I added the "niche use case" modifier. Compared to transportation and power generation, steel manufacturing is a "niche use case". It's a massive use case, but compared to the transportation and power generation use cases people usually hype hydrogen for...
> But green hydrogen is only useful if electricity is cheap but batteries are expensive
That is absolutely not true. How exactly will cheap batteries for example allow you to make ammonia for agriculture, the chemical industry, etc.? Current global ammonia production alone is worth something like two hundred gigawatts of power continuously pumped into electrolyzers. That's like ten percent of global electric generation at the moment.
Compared to the cost of large-scale hydrogen storage batteries will always be expensive. This is why grids will use hydrogen for long-duration energy storage instead of batteries.
Which is effectively a battery! Hydrogen production is energy intensive, but if you produce it with excess energy capacity and then use it when it's needed, it's a decent energy storage method. Though mobile applications (air travel, trains, etc) are more likely to dominate in the shorter terms as it's lighter than batteries in high power applications
The only feasible way to do that is to use the hydrogen at the source of production to make methane, using direct air capture and reduction of CO2 (Sabatier process) as the carbon source. This is because existing methane pipelines would be embrittled by hydrogen and would soon fail, with disastrous consequences.
Hydrogen from electrolysis is best viewed as an intermediate feedstock for further chemical synthesis, as with ammonia production, methane production, jet fuel production, etc. There is perhaps potential for dumping excess grid electricity into hydrogen storage tanks at power plants as a temporary storage system, i.e. converting the hydrogen back to electricity via fuels cells (not turbines!) to meet electrical demand later.
Hydrogen storage requires special alloys to avoid steel embrittlement however, so it's fairly expensive.
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:
That report is already too old to be relevant. It took battery prices at $200 they are around $100-120 now it took solar cost at around $50 per MWH it is now around $35~40 in the US $20~30 in India and China etc. And prices for both are still falling approximately 10~15% annually.
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?
There is no lack of materials for creating PV and batteries. The more we consume them, the cheaper they will become for the near future.
Fossil fuels are on the exact opposite situation. The more we consume the more expensive they get, and quickly so. That "quickly so" part is actually bad news, but this means that we will almost certainly not increase their usage.
Why should this be the case? There’s a whole lot of oil in the ground, so we certainly aren’t limited there (no more so than we are for lithium, cobalt, etc anyway), and just like we can scale battery production capacity to meet demand, we could presumably also scale fossil fuel production capacity.
This is my expectation. In absolute terms, we burn more coal and biomass than ever. We’ve never reduced (in absolute terms) the amount of an energy source we consume. Replacements have served to aid an increase in over all energy consumption. Source: a podcast, so no idea if it checks out.
> If they wanted to use more it's right there and available.
But they'd have to pay more. We're postulating a scenario in which electricity prices fall precipitously. As far as I'm aware, any time the prices fall for any resource, society consumes it with increasing inefficiency. For example, broadband Internet becomes readily available and people start streaming cat videos, CPU clock speeds skyrocket and Microsoft releases Windows Vista. If renewable energy prices decline thus driving down costs for all energy prices, I suspect we'll find something equally stupid (e.g., mining more bitcoins) to do with the extra capacity rather than decommissioning fossil fuels.
Ultimately we have to choose to decommission fossil fuel plants at the expense of our frivolities, but at least in America we seem to be disappointingly bad at this kind of impulse control (in aggregate).
People don't directly consume very much energy; most of our energy footprint is derived from the processes to manufacture the things we consume. Much of that has been outsourced in the last several decades.
Moreover, looking at overall energy isn't particularly informative without also analyzing energy costs--according to https://www.statista.com/statistics/183700/us-average-retail..., the energy costs have increased 60% in the last 20 years which would obviously suppress consumption.
We're talking about the opposite--how does our energy use change if prices fall dramatically. Are we really going to replace fossil fuels or do we just find other uses for this new electricity? For one, we're going to be electrifying other applications--all of these new electric cars are going to place new demand on the electrical grid (previously they were energized by gasoline and as such didn't burden the grid). But beyond that, are we going to actually use any excess energy capacity well, or are our applications just going to get less efficient (why should a factory invest in a more efficient machine if energy prices drop precipitously? economics favor the less efficient solution in the same way the economics of plummeting data storage and transfer prices favor bulky electron apps over streamlined native apps).
They don't want to use more at current prices[1], but if a MWh costs an average of $5 instead of $50, I would expect behaviour to start to change significantly. For example, at some point I would expect (perhaps naively) that things like desalination and long-distance water redistribution become a lot more viable.
[1] Not strictly flat, but not exactly a short-term precipitous drop either:
There are quite a few billion people around the world who are wishing they had more electricity aspiring to USA living standards who will pick up the slack in demand.
Ideally, but even in the US, I feel like any reduction in fossil fuel prices will be offset by increased usage such as purchase of bigger cars or flying more as history has shown.
I would like to research this, I imagine the death of American heavy industry must be a significant reason for the stability despite population growth.
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.
> Solar+batteries and some pump storage and wind are very nearly statistically able to meet baseload in most places
Most places? As I've mentioned a few times here, there's an ongoing meteorological phenomenon across Europe with bad weather ( clouds and stuff), low wind speeds and cold temperatures. It started around September and is projected to continue well into the winter. Electricity produced by wind is at historical lows, and of course solar is of limited help as well. It's among the contributing factors for the high gas prices.
You'd need a whole lot of batteries and pumped up hydro ( which can't just be put anywhere) to cover for such events.
Because shit happens and there's resistance ( electrical). There are cables between the UK and France, and UK and Norway, and there was a fire at one of the UK-France cables, rendering it inoperable for months.
And depending on faraway places for energy is dangerous, as for instance Germany is discovering now with Russia. Do you imagine Europe depending on Algeria and Morocco solar, for instance, and France pissing them off with some (neo/ex-)colonial matters ( like for instance, France recently lowered quotas for Algerian citizens entering the country, and Algeria was (rightfully) pissed), and them cutting the cables.
It does, but that consumable releases no CO2 or other greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. That seems to be the clear and present danger that "renewables" are trying to limit. Nuclear accomplishes this, and has the possibility that we could use it to sequester carbon if enough capacity was built.
Would one call geothermal power non-renewable because the radioactive decay in the earth that heats the interior isn't replaceable by a human?
How about all of the hydrogen atoms that irreversibly fuse into helium in the sun, not to mention the materials to make the solar panels and wind turbines to harness that power?
Green/renewable/sustainable aren't complete synonyms. As a shorthand people consider huge natural sources like the Sun that is already outputting whether we tap into it or not (same with geothermal) differently than more limited ones like oil or uranium deposits. We'll probably change the language if we ever get into megastructure or solar-system scale engineering that blurs that distinction.
Deep down, I think we're pretty much all fucked. We've gone too far and there's no way back. And I think you agree.
But, hey, there is a glimmer of hope. It's not going to do a damn thing, but cycling instead of driving is still a bit of defiance, even if it's only symbolic.
Realistically, we do have power and control over where and how we work. There is some real muscle in smart people working on hard problems. May not a win. I'm sure you understand the consequences of that. At least, I can go down swinging. As you say, things are going into overdrive.
I'm not going to tell you how to live your life. I am going to encourage you to hold off on that heroin experiment for a while, maybe don't move to a tent in a national park just yet. Things are changing. We don't get a free pass. Some things are going to be real ugly. Maybe, MAYBE, things will be ok.
The iceberg is out there. We're probably going to hit it. We all still have some agency (I hope). If you have to rearrange deck chairs, go for it. Give it a minute. We aren't sunk yet. It doesn't have to be an apocolypse just yet.
Since you’re unsurprisingly taking a beating here in HN, let me reframe your general mood.
The planet is and will be fine, it’s our way of living and society that will go, and that will not happen in your lifetime. So there’s no need for you to suffer with that gloom.
Another even more practical reason: it’s unproductive.
Most of that anxiety is offloaded from those in true power and resold by “the media”. It’s obviously a serious problem but they are feeding you mostly bullshit in order to meet their revenue targets or agendas.
Don’t be a victim of them before being a victim of climate change.
You can't know that. Rising temperatures, acidity and water levels in oceans, deforestation, overfishing, drastic temperature amplitudes and higher frequency of natural disasters can all be devastating for whole ecosystems, which could have cascading effects. Nobody can reliably predict how all of that will turn out, but it could turn out really bad. Will the planet "be fine" if a big portion of ocean life is extinct and huge swaths of land are uninhabitable? Depends on your definition of fine i guess.
Huge amounts of life and species have died out in the past and will continue to happen. This time we have an hand in it, but you don't see any other species aware or preoccupied by it, so it's also morality issue.
My response was in order to address this generalized anxiety and guilt that's mostly unproductive and in some cases quite maquiavelic.
So yes, "the planet" will be fine. Our coddled asses attached to our infantilized minds probably not, so instead of this schizophrenic attitude ranging from "We're doomed!" to "I want to talk to the manager", maybe we should be more productive and do our best while understanding we might not get what we want and that's "fine".
The ecosphere has been around for billions of years. It's been through much much, MUCH worse. It'll be fine. Maybe some hairless apes might suffer a bit, and a few thousand species might be replaced by something else, but in the long run the planet is going to thrive.
This is normalcy bias. Since it’s worked out well so far, it’ll work out well in future. But there is a point of no return - if the concentration of atmospheric carbon exceeds a certain level, it will melt the ice caps, which will increase the temperature further, which will cause dissolved CO2 in the oceans to enter the atmosphere, which will … you get the idea. There’s a potential feedback loop at the end of which the planet becomes like Venus.
Not saying there won’t be life left on the planet even if it looks like Venus. Life is adaptable. But it wouldn’t flourish like it does today.
Is there any credible science indicating that "Earth turns into Venus" is even remotely possible if we were to deliberately put all our efforts into triggering it?
I've never heard this scenario from anyone who has spent any time reading the science. Unless you can give some details of why this is something that's worth having on the radar, I'm going to dismiss that scenario as a fear-mongering doomsday prediction.
I mean, I’m pretty concerned about the magnitude of suffering of those hairless apes. That seems like a sufficiently bad outcome to warrant a change in behavior and even doomsday rhetoric.
The ecosphere, yes, but I'm concerned about humanity specifically.
Also, it might be possible the same argument could hold for Venus. It probably thrived (at reasonable temperatures) for billions of years before it didn't.
As Carlin so eloquently put it, "The planet is fine. The people are fucked".
Any way, it won't happen in a day, and as with any pandemic humans are great at finding solutions, (see covid). Sure some people will die along the way as they don't get with the program, but that's expected.
Unless our energy sources become useless (ie. sun blackout AND depleted oil AND no wind) we will have a way to keep warm, produce oxygen and grow food.
The worst case would be we'd have to move into underground bunkers.
Do you have any criterion by which you would accept the planet as "not fine"? If the entire biosphere were eliminated by supernova, would that be "fine"?
Conversations about what we should and should not do cannot be held on a basis of nihilism. I respectfully suggest that people with the view of "fuck the planet, I'll be dead anyway" should not be permitted a voice at the public policy table.
> If the entire biosphere were eliminated by supernova, would that be "fine"?
Yes, because it's out of our control.
> Conversations about what we should and should not do cannot be held on a basis of nihilism.
100% agree, just as they shouldn't be held on the basis of fear, panic and self-righteous superficial knowledge based on the arrogance that "we" are so precious and "can do anything", a kind of celestial exceptionalism "we" use to point out the flaws in others but not in ourselves.
> I respectfully suggest that people with the view of "fuck the planet, I'll be dead anyway" should not be permitted a voice at the public policy table.
I 100% respectfully disagree, mostly because it's not practical and will backfire. Also the assumption that others are dumb and shouldn't be listened can only come from people who are very narrow minded to the point they themselves are "dumb".
You know whats worse than people who say climate change doesnt exist? People like you who spout off unsubstantiated defeatist nonsense about "why it's too late" and "it doesn't matter". Because people like you trick others into thinking the same, and not giving a damn.
There's a lot of pessimism and cynicism in the world these days. I think movies make that clear. There are so many movies about dystopian futures where everything is hopeless and everything is inevitably going to shit. The general mood is very different from what you saw in movies from the 1980s.
Personally, I think that any action we can take towards making things better will pay off. Action is better than inaction. There will be negative consequences to climate change, but acting sooner could save millions, even hundreds of millions of lives, so don't give up now. We're just finally starting to see real adoption of electric cars and grid-scale batteries, those industries are set to boom. The solution is at our doorstep, now is not the time to just go "ah, fuck it, why bother?".
I don't feel tricked into not caring when threatened with living on a barely livable planet. I don't know if he or she is right but if anything, when I read it, it rather made me think about what would ecological armed struggle against the biggest polluters would look like.
We've already warmed up the planet by about 1C from pre-industrial times, and...well, pretty much nothing consequential happened
Based on the most likely temperature impacts of the most realistic emission scenarios, we're looking at an additional 0.8C (optimistic) to 1.5C (pessimistic) on top of that by the end of the century, with the temperatures plateauing shortly afterwards. No, Earth will not become the next Venus, nor will Greenland and Antarctic melt (it's -30C there right now)
looks around Yep, yeah, nothing consequential happening around the world. No widespread unprecedented flash floods in multiple areas of the globe simultaneously. No megafires burning on multiple continents. No temperature records being broken and re-broken by wide margins multiple times a year every single year. Nothing really at all. I don't know what they're talking about.
...is "Greenland and the Antarctic are still cold" really your hot take on climate change?
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.
>>If prices don't sink further because demand elasticity is maxed out it has to be the result of some form of market failure
The "normal/natural" state is that prices do not simply continue dropping always.
US automobile prices were at their best in the late 20s, with a model-T-costing <$10k adjusted. By that point annual sales were maxed, competition had taken most profits out of the game... Not incidentally, the depression was starting to happen.
In the industry, cars-as-fashion became a thing.
When an industry hits peak demand, prices don't just continue to fall until the industry becomes tiny. At least, that's not a very common pattern and the trend certainly doesn't just continue to here as a continuation of an expansionary learning curve.
Welfarist/marginalist economic models don't take into account that time/history/economics is directional. Expanding markets don't follow the same rules as contracting ones.
Replace "normal/natural" with "idealized": yes, free market theory promises quite strongly that if there is a more efficient way to produce something, eventually some contender will discover that way and begin pushing out competition until that competition adapts. That mechanism does not require demand elasticity at all, it can work just fine in a perfectly inelastic market. Food is the closest thing we have to an inelastic market and it's certainly not a market characterized by lack of price competition caused by that absence of demand elasticity.
Yes, expanding markets work different than stable or contacting markets. But that difference is that the expansion can gloss over certain failure modes. Yes, Intel might have occasionally pushed out a new Pentium generation if x86 had been the only CPU architecture in the world and AMD (and Cyrix) had not existed, because the demand for instructions per second rises with availability (this abstraction conveniently groups demand from replacement upgrades and demand from new use cases into a single bin). But that would have still been a broken market, even while the brokenness was temporarily hidden by demand elasticity/expansion.
Model T wasn't the most efficient moment of car manufacturing, not if you include features in the equation. A car with the performance of the model T wouldn't sell today for a dollar beyond scrap value, and even Tatas and Dacias can e.g. be started without cranking and so on. The closest equivalent to a Model T would be a Tuktuk and those are cheaper today even before adjusting for a full century of inflation.
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.)
IIRC, global LFP patents are due to expire in the next year or two, allowing production everywhere.
LFP is great for cheaper vehicles and awesome for grid storage (which is not weight sensitive). The vast majority of batteries in the near-term transition will be LFP due to their common materials and super cheap cost.
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
Almost all e-bike batteries sold to consumers are ridiculously overpriced[1] relative to their components. Especially those from reputable brands like Bosch and Shimano which supplies most of the better e-bike brands on the street.
It’s a combination of having relatively well-off consumers, who lack the time/knowledge to start messing with their expensive machines and lack of generic spare parts due to the likes of Bosch locking down their components, and creating specialised computers (similar to how modern cars work) so that only authorised repair shops can work on them.
But for anyone that can break the protection and manufacture a somewhat descent generic replacement battery the potential profit is enormous. I am sure some Chinese are well aware and hard at work on circumventing the DRM
It is unfortunately not that simple. The likes of Bosch have had a decade or two to learn how to lock up their automotive systems and they're using every trick in the book to do the same to e-bikes.
Perhaps, and then I hope they will be made obsolete as all the essential parts for making e-bikes are becoming commodities. 250W electric motors (max allowed in EU dor normal e-bikes) are not exactly rocket science. My jigsaw even has a 300W motor (though probably not rated for hours of continuous use)
Stromer is a Swiss e-bike company and one of the most expensive e-bike brands on the market.
A better example would be Lunacycle, which sells components for DIYing e-bikes. A 704Wh battery from them costs $550. $781/kWhr. Bafang is another well-known component supplier and sells a 754 Wh battery pack for $600. $795/kWhr.
Those are both 52v packs which are the most 'exotic' on the market at the moment, so there is a bit of a price premium.
In all cases, we're talking retail pricing for complete battery packs, with integrated battery management systems and packaging.
The article is talking about wholesale prices paid by companies buying these cells by the million unit quantity.
Until very recently Stromer was just about the only available e-Bike in the Netherlands that could reliably do to 45km/h,and thus quite popular. The retail prices for the 618/814/987 kWhr batteries are 1190/1650/1990, which to me indicates that the retail price is not at all related to any costs they make but that they are doing pure value pricing (whatever consumers are willing to pay). Their monopoly on proper speed pedelecs is rapidly coming to an end, so hopefully prices will soon get down to something more directly related to manufacturing costs.
It is already happening for normal e-bikes, where 3000+ used to be the starting range for a somewhat decent e-bike. This is currently about 2000+ but in a few years it will hopefully be possible to get a somewhat decent e-bike for 1000 - 1500.
Making batteries is like printing money right now. Everybody needs them and there is nowhere near the supply to meet the demand. Long term batteries will become a commodity and that's when purchase cost will drop dramatically.
Consumer goods have all sorts of regulatory barriers to get through and you’re paying for it. If you get a spot welder and buy cylindrical cells wholesale, you can build dirt cheap li-ion packs. LFP really doesn’t buy you any safety for such a tiny (1kWh) pack.
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.
> The size of the car is in no way constrained by the engine size.
It is. Nobody will buy a full-sized sedan with 800cc engine, unless you are in China.
There are a minimal size powertrains a car body need to be able to house for its size to be sellable.
The matter is you can put much smaller, and cheaper EV powertrains relative to the body size/weight for a much better driving experience.
You can use freed space to pile in extra niceties, which would've required bigger body size for an IC powered car, thus necessitating bigger, more expensive powertrain.
The attraction of hybrids was exactly that you can get a crap engine to provide driving quality of a much more expensive setup, like a good V6, or entry level V8 at lower cost, in a smaller car.
But "just better" is the worst enemy of good enough. You can throw away the whole IC altogether, and provide a 3L+ I6 experience in a micro car.
But why would you put an 800cc engine in a full-sized sedan? You have plenty of room to fit a decent turbocharged two-liter four-cylinder.
And there is no way EVs need less space for battery + motors in total. Have you seen the size of a Model X battery pack? Only difference is they typically use space below the floor of the car, rather than in front. They are typically a bit wider than ICE cars to compensate and give sufficient interior space.
> But why would you put an 800cc engine in a full-sized sedan? You have plenty of room to fit a decent turbocharged two-liter four-cylinder.
You will have to, and you say "The size of the car is in no way constrained by the engine size," which is a complete nonsense. On the lower end, it's constrained by sellability of a car, and on the upper end it's physically constrained by the size of car frame.
> Only difference is they typically use space below the floor of the car, rather than in front.
Yes, and that's a very big advantage. Even very tiny EVs can have batteries with hundreds of kilowatts of power output.
> On the lower end, it's constrained by sellability of a car
Yes, as already said, I completely agree.
> and on the upper end it's physically constrained by the size of car frame
In theory yes, but in practice you don't really feel this limitation, that's my point. As I said, you can fit a K24 engine into a Honda Fit (B-segment supermini car) without modifying the frame or bodywork. A turbocharged K24 can put out 300 kilowatts without breaking a sweat.
location and structure matter in system design. even if the battery takes up more total space than an ICE no one is going to notice the car being 1 inch taller overall for consumer vehicles.
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)
If it's an LFP battery, I think those are pretty easy to recycle but the materials weren't worth much to begin with. It's mostly just lithium, plastic, aluminum, fertilizer, iron, probably graphite, and copper.
Absolutely not, and I have no idea why people think it does. It's like there's lithium in the name, so people instantly assume that it makes up a substantial portion of the cost. It does not.
Lithium is cheap, currently lithium hydroxide is at ~30$/kg. Of the total cost of a typical LFP battery, the lithium is ~2%. The rest of the materials round up to ~10%, the bulk of the cost is capital and labor.
I don't think so, but I don't have specifics. There's some sources that a typical Tesla battery pack might have about 10-12 or so kg of lithium. LFP is a different chemistry, so it might have a different proportion of lithium but it's probably not hugely different. Lithium isn't particularly expensive (though it might become expensive in the future if demand goes up and production does not).
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.
Yes, that was exactly my point, that selling "2500" cells using "500" parts must be extremely profitable in the consumer sector, possibly in some sense funding the home energy storage sector.
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?
> People where is your fundamental freedom desire?
Knowing the price of something you consume is taking away your fundamental freedom? If that's the case, you should probably stop looking at prices when making any purchases - all things from groceries, electronics, cars ... wouldn't want to lose more of it.
It goes to show how meaninglessly people now use that word - it's essential become a flag for "anything I like (or dislike)" with no bearing on reality.
In reality/history nuclear has often been the reason to introduce time of use pricing, to encourage people to move loads to the overnight demand lulls to better match nuclear's flat output.
So I guess that's one more flaw in the extreme anarchist case for more nuclear power.
The same argument can certainly be made for solar. To encourage you to use power while it's available, so for example only use your lights during the daytime hours.
Certain countries in the EU view that nuclear energy is not "green", not the whole EU. The European Commission will make a call very soon for the upcoming funding period and frankly it looks like they will support nuclear energy.
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.
There are some massive electricity consumers like air conditioners, air heating, water heating, refrigerators. Those have some freedom when they're working in a continuous mode. Basically you can heat air when it's cheap and stop heating when it's expensive as long as temperature is good enough. You don't have to micromanage it yourself, with proper software and protocols it could be done automatically.
My parents installed that in 1988. The technology has existed for years. The power company charged half price for electric and gave them a second water heater so that they could heat the water at night (electric company controlled), and when power demand was high the air conditioner ran for 15 minutes, off for 10. (this mostly meant we kept the AC on all day, it wouldn't cool the house off when we got home but would keep it cool all day and cost less than setback thermostats). Refrigerators were not on the plan, but they don't draw near as much power.
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.
The game would invisible and automatic once you have your own battery.
I realized that me myself could suffice with quite tiny 10kwh battery for a week. I do not eat stuff that requires refrigerator running all the time and I bake my humble pies with Russian Gas.
Howcome? Same banks of 18650-batteries and inverters are cheap. Only problem are maybe the safety issues. But in multistory houses the batteries would be in the basement and only those display units are in the homes.
Because large banks can amortize usage over many homes. A battery bank for your house needs to be large enough for your worst case usage even though you rarely get there. If you add up all the breakers in my box it is far more power than the power company can supply to my house - but I never use them all at once. My house has a backup generator that can supply far less than the power company: it is enough for typical use but I have to be careful when I'm using it.
A large bank can take advantage that typical is far less than worst case, and not everyone will hit the worst case at the same time. Thus a large bank to supply the same number of users can be far smaller than every user having their own small bank. (though it is possible for all the small banks to supply to each other)
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).
Industry has already responded and will continue to do so.
My company has a foundry where we melt iron. Our production schedule is planed with the power company months in advance so we can get the lowest possible rates. The factory only works the night shift. The factory shuts down for maintenance in December (the power we don't use goes to Christmas lights). We are not the only company doing that.
Not all industry can respond those. Restaurants use a lot of energy (I'm guessing less than cooking at home though - anyone know how to check this), but they have to cook when people want food not when energy is abundant.
I have no idea and probably wouldn't be allowed to talk if I did.
We have one factory that does 5 months of production, then 7 of maintenance. Everything is replaced in those 7 months, thus ensuring there are no breakdowns (just in time doesn't work if the conveyor breaks). The workers mostly go to a different factory in the area on the opposite schedule, we plan labor that way so they have a job year round just a different destination.
> however, corporations won’t stand for that, and they effectively govern us over here in the United States.
How does this square with this?
> 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).
People have the power to vote in the US. They have had many decades to vote for politicians that will increase taxes on fossil fuel. European countries have voted to do that many, many years ago.
It befuddles me when blame is placed on corporations in a country whose population explicitly prioritizes driving pickup trucks and SUVs for grocery and school runs. Any upwards movement in fossil fuel prices, which are already among the lowest for large democratic countries, results in the general public to be furious at politicians.
The facts illustrate a simple truth: Voters in America only want a reduction in usage of fossil fuels as long as it does not affect their expected future lifestyle.
I’m on mobile, so I don’t have the study link handy, but a bill which is very popular among ordinary people and very unpopular among corporations stands something like a 30% chance of being passed into law while a bill which is very popular among corporations but very unpopular among voters has nearly 100% chance of being signed into law (I don’t remember exact numbers).
> It befuddles me when blame is placed on corporations in a country whose population explicitly prioritizes driving pickup trucks and SUVs for grocery and school runs. Any upwards movement in fossil fuel prices, which are already among the lowest for large democratic countries, results in the general public to be furious at politicians.
Everyone is just responding to market incentives at the end of the day, which is the point behind carbon pricing: align our environmental and financial incentives. So I prefer to focus on systemic solutions rather than placing blame, although I certainly think it’s good and useful to blame/shame corporations and politicians who actively oppose the public good (even though this kind of corruption is another form of responding to incentives).
> Voters in America only want a reduction in usage of fossil fuels as long as it does not affect their expected future lifestyle
Perhaps, but that’s irrelevant because we don’t actually need to change our lifestyles very much. Implement a carbon tax and gradually raise the price over time so it gives corporations some time to optimize their processes for efficiency thereby keeping consumer costs low. That corporations can and do respond to legislated incentives is one of the takeaways of TFA, after all.
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.
i mean the lead acid in comparison seems dirt cheap, somewhere like INR 15000 for a 200ah12v which is 2400kwh or $187~. that is like $78/kwh so paying 3.5~times more for the tech is too much right now. i mean, sure there are benefits of longer life and deep discharge but the upfront cost at good quantities is too much. so if i had to get say 20kwh, or 48400 that would be like $5500 or inr440000. compared to a similar lead acid 19200wh, 12200*8 at inr 120000 or $1500. that is a large delta. i could be wrong in these rough calculations though
Lead acid has far fewer cycles (500 typical) than LFP (5000 typical) so if you look at the prices per kWh out from the battery LFP is way cheaper (and lighter).
Even $250 per kWh of LFP storage with 5000 cycles means 5 cents per kWh out of the battery.
And in reality the cost is even less since after 5000 cycles the battery will still have 70-80% of original capacity and can keep going for more cycles.
i can get 200ah for this price for same 5 years warranty included and no shipping. its sold at the shop on the other block so shipping and warranty is included.
oh, btw you cant really buy stuff from china to india. the borders are either closed or you have to pay 40% customs so that is out of question. the reason why i think LFP at 275 is expensive , again because the replacement before 5 years gives me another 5 years without paying again so essentially i would be getting for $1500, 12 * 200 * 16 and sure its bulky AF but i do not have to drive more than a mile for getting it to home so yeah
uh, this one says
Long cycles (1500 @80% DOD, 5000 @ 20% DOD); AH efficiency > 90%; WH efficiency > 80%
sure 1500 is not 5000 but its also not 500. second, it says 60 months warranty which they mean "replacement" so if i exhaust the 1500 in 5 years,they would replace it at no extra charge, suppose it happens after 4 years. the new batteries would give me another 4 ~ years so in total i would get around 5+4~5 years life out of paying just once.
i'm not saying LFP is bad, just expensive.
Price is 215 USD for 12x150 1.8 kWh (and 61 kg) looks very expensive to me for a very short lifetime (5000 at 20% DoD means 1000 cycle). (I assume shipping is free or do you have to pay it for warranty ?)
I paid $100/kWh for LFP 3.2V 280Ah cells delivered from China to my country in Europe.
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.
wrt price maker vs price taker, just to verify, batteries are a minor application for iron whereas lithium is the largest application (market). I ask because I hadn't heard that phrase before. (No reply necessary if I guessed correctly. :) )
> 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?
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 :(