This is all very encouraging and in particular batteries role in solar
Two interesting data points to that end
1) The "duck curve" for CA is almost neutral - eg the timing imbalance between peak demand and solar power generation - battery utilization is the most straightforward solution here
- https://twitter.com/baker_edmund/status/1750644294673748366
2) There has been a massive decline in rooftop solar applications in CA since solar energy reimbursements dropped - https://twitter.com/thomasopeters/status/1750920941868347539 - some of that is potentially pent up demand, but I think illustrates the role state policy has to play in moving towards "renewables"
Yesterday we peaked out at 3GW discharging rate, and 4GW charging rate. We are plowing ahead in the transition to utilizing all of our excess solar! We peak at 25GW expected today, so we have a little ways to go but it's incredible how far and how fast they're replacing everything. Clean air FTW! Thanks sun!
The amazing thing is there basically were no batteries three four years ago. And they can supply about 10% of the max power demand already. So it feels like the technologies we need are now good to go on an engineering an accounting basis. And adoption can be quite rapid. We're not saying in 50 years, 25 years, 10 years. We're looking at 5 years.
I've looked and not seen numbers on the actual battery capacity. But I think it's about 3-4 hours at name plate power levels. I think from what I know capacity is a function of discharge rate. And wear is also a function of discharge rate and max/min charge levels.
It's a mix of a bunch of things. CA is more heating day dominated than TX, and as a result of that, more households use natural gas for heating, whereas you're more likely to see supplemental electric heat in TX than, particularly, NorCal.
(2) high energy costs lead to more investment in electrical efficiency in CA;
(3) high energy costs mean that if you're running an aluminum smelter (for example), you don't run it in CA. Or building a new mega data center. so there are fewer electricity-intensive industrial facilities in CA than there would otherwise be.
Natural gas is a by-product of much oil extraction, and commonly used for heating, cooking, etc.... Propane is also commonly used, in more rural locations.
But what Texas has is much higher requirements for air conditioning, which can't be easily gas-powered at the level of individual houses. Thus the higher electrical energy requirements. Now, you can run gas turbines at the utility level to generate electricity, but that's much less common at the level of individual homes.
Does home solar usage count on this graph? The electricity never hits the grid so I think it might not. If not California's massive push for home solar could be part of the explanation.
the CAISO website is super rad in general -- so many real-time charts!! demand trend is really cool to watch during heat waves; things get spiky on both the demand side (for obvious reason) and the supply side (peaker plants & "virtual" power plants coming online)
Given the dramatically lower costs of utility-scale solar vs. residential rooftop solar, is it not better at a society level for state policy to incentivize utility over residential solar? Utility-scale battery installations likewise should be much cheaper.
This argument ignores the cost of transmission and distribution, which are higher costs than the generation itself.
And as electricity prices are driven down even further, T&D will come to dominate over energy generation costs.
Few models account for this, but Christopher Clack made one, and the lowest cost energy path was a small amount of investment in distribution now, paired with massive deployment of solar on homes and industrial/commercial.
This won't happen unless utilities are forced into it or their allowed profit model is changed to deliver ratepayers the lowest cost energy, however.
Unless every home is completely off the grid, you’re going to need to pay for most or the majority of that transmission and distribution anyway. Peak winter and summer I also would imagine many or most residential deployments aren’t going to cover their own need, unless they’re incredibly over built with massive batteries. In any case, I should check out your Christopher Clack reference.
(And of course, perhaps one modeler can get it wrong. But over here in California where the majority of our sky high electricity cost is from T&D, it definitet feels very true. And last national stats I saw had T&D as higher than generation costs)
Worst case is months. In the depths of winter you need energy captured from the sun during summer. That's a drastic rethinking of the scale of storage.
Absolutely. For the sake of the topic of discussion I was trying to think of Californian conditions but for places like Sweden you'll need completely different solutions (Sweden has been powered 100% on Hydro+Nuclear for decades now so that's one way)
As long as the houses are still connected to the grid you will indeed by paying for distribution costs. But I think that you should expect to see transmission savings since you'll have more of the demand met locally.
Why? If there's any possibility those homes will draw 100% of their power from the grid on any given day, then the cost of infrastructure will be pretty much the same since a grid failure is a disaster.
And there is a 100% chance they will, like my home is today, because 11kW of solar is making about 800W due to cloud cover which has persisted most days of summer.
Wouldn't that mean further subsidizing rich homeowners?
The people best positioned to take advantage of incentives own their own home and have the disposable cash to make the initial outlay for residential generation.
Yep, it definitely would. It doesn't mean we shouldn't still do it -- especially because richer folks tend to use more electricity and pollute more in general.
Residential solar may still make sense for new construction (maybe?) in the right areas. But there was a lot of scammy behavior around home solar installation at one point. Given that home solar does not effectively give you a backup generator for free (barring a lot of batteries and specific electrical hookups as I recall), it's not clear it's a big win in general. A lot of utility things aren't ideal at the individual house level if there's an option.
A lot of home solar installers now include grid tied batteries as part of a standard installation, which is what NEM 3 was intended to do (secondarily, after its primary goal of giving CA IOUs a massive free lunch).
- Distribution systems today can only handle some percentage of EV penetration in a given area, not 100%. Charging an EV from the roof skips the grid entirely
- The bulk of the cost is labor and permitting, not the modules themselves. Given that, California requires solar on newly constructed homes
- California updated their net metering program so that ratepayers aren’t subsidizing rooftop solar anymore (in NEM 3.0, homeowners get paid wholesale rates)
"Charging an EV from the roof skips the grid entirely"
As long as you have enough sunshine hours in your region.
Southern Spain is fine year-round, but you won't get any meaningful output out of a solar panel in Finnish winter. The rest of Europe lies between those two extremes.
Northern winter will be made more challenging by addition of EVs to the grid, because a lot of electricity is being used for heating as well.
As far as rooftop solar, it makes a big difference if solar PV is built into the design process at the beginning, rather than tacked on as an afterthought. Similarly, a household battery might be as common in the future as a household hot water heater (with a similar footprint, size-wise).
There's also regional variability - cities absolutely require utility-scale solar, just as they require dedicated agricultural land to feed the population, because there's not enough surface area in a city. Rural/suburban areas on the other hand are ideal for integrated rooftop solar.
> Given the dramatically lower costs of utility-scale solar vs. residential rooftop solar
According to Wikipedia the LCOE on small roof top solar is about twice that of utility solar. [0] So yes, it's dramatically better. But typically the price difference between what the utility is paid and what the customer is charged is 3 times, so your average household is better off installing solar despite generating it at twice the cost of a utility.
The price difference isn't just transmission costs. It's also retail markup, regulatory charges and metering and billing.
State policy is fundamental to the entire green revolution. None of it would have been possible without nations incentivizing it. Eventually once the entire energy generation/consumption cycle is entrenched and we are all dependent on it, they can safely take away the incentives.
It's a bit like changing the tires on a moving bus. Somebody had to pay for the new tires and wheels, and the support truck to run along side the bus, and the extra fuel, and a discount for the new tires, etc. Once the new tires are on the bus can keep driving without support.
That duck curve tweet is disingenuous. That curve in the tweet is for the lowest net load day (net load is actual load or usage minus generation from renewables). In 2023, if you took the day that had the least amount of net load, yes, it was almost entirely covered by solar power. That does _not_ mean the claim made in the tweet that California is run totally by solar power from 10am-4pm every day (today at 11:56 AM PST, it's about 51% run by solar power). California's grid has enough good things going for it that we don't need to lie about it.
Regarding price, leading manufacturers are already selling at a price below what was always understood as the point where EVs win in terms of economics:
If ubiquitous and cheap charging infrastructure is not being priced in, which is still a blocker for many.
For example, I cannot reasonably run lengths of 110v extension cords down the block to charge a car overnight, and acquiring my own house with a garage is dramatically more expensive than any fuel savings. :p
True. Good point. But that will change surprisingly rapidly. We've experienced it in Norway already. It's been a huge change over the last 5 years.
I don't have a garage attached to my house, it's a shared garage building. But once a few owners got EVs, and it became clear to others that EVs were the future, we got some minimal renovations done that allowed anyone to pay to have a slow AC charger installed.
Oslo has been rolling out street-side AC charging poles. There's never quite enough but the growth is steady.
Other countries may not have the same incentives, but that just shifts the point where the rapid transition starts by a few years I think, since cars get cheaper and better all the time. And remember that Norway is fairly cold, which is brutal on range in the winter, so it's not really a fully ideal place for EVs (though at least the car starts reliably every time unlike diesel)
The only reason I lack a Tesla is I would have to pay $150 a month for a parking spot in my apartment's garage to charge it. That's public parking downtown pricing where I live, which is absurd. Ubiquity of chargers would fix my issue too.
Also I rarely use my car which should probably be a bigger factor than it is, lol
Works if you live in a first-floor, street-facing unit and can reliably park in front of it. Otherwise it can be tough.
It's unfortunate that EVs make the most immediate sense in high-density urban settings, but those same settings have lots of people who can't use the simple kinds of charging infrastructure (eg, Level 1/2 chargers).
IMO EVs work best in medium density urban settings, where people still probably have their own garages or at least private parking spots but aren't likely to need to do 100+mi drives constantly.
Truly high-density urban settings should ideally find transportation solutions without cars.
Bandaid-ing plants and naively making public spaces often doesn't work in the US. It's a little more work to make spaces where people actually want to be.
Look at the numerous existing city public spaces built into high profile architecture, where basically no one ever hangs out in. (There's a TED talk about this.)
Why would their worth be determined on how many people hang out there? I prefer to see green spaces and am okay appreciating them from a distance, such a in a nearby town with a tree lined main street through town. I don't think it would invoke the same aestetic pleasure with people and litter occupying these spaces.
Cities are going to have to invest in lamppost and curb charging. These already exist. The good news is that with a modest surcharge to the base electricity cost, they will produce a stream of revenue that can be financialized to pay for the install cost (which is basically AC wiring.) The billing needs to be standardized (this is already mostly done with NACS/CCS.) It’s low hanging fruit and will happen within the next few years.
Works if you live in a first-floor, street-facing unit
I was not exactly in that situation. First time, I lived in a room on the 3rd floor of a house, but I'd run the extension cord out of the house owner's workshop basement window. I could reliably park in front of the house, however.
2nd time, I ran the cord out of a 2nd story window from my room, but the parking space was behind the house's fence under my window.
3rd situation, I would run the cord from the apartment exercise room, out the window to the fenced in parking lot behind the building. However, the building management actually removed those outlets! Then, that law requiring them to let us charge passed, but by then, it was time for us to move out. Now, I have a garage of my own!
> I cannot reasonably run lengths of 110v extension cords down the block to charge a car overnight, and acquiring my own house with a garage is dramatically more expensive
You don't need a garage, just some sort of reserved parking space... There are plenty of weatherproof electrical boxes. It costs a bit of money to have a trench from your home to your car parking area, but far less than buying a house.
And that "110v extension cord" can supply 240V with just a change of connectors on either end (e.g.: 6-30p) allowing charging twice as fast.
In most places you can't just put a trench and an electrical box through public spaces. I'd also worry about someone stealing electricity from me. Double the voltage is hopefully ok on the extension cord- just don't be tempted to run higher current. Extension cords are also not recommended for permanent usage.
> You don't need a garage, just some sort of reserved parking space
I don't think the OP was worried about people who have the ability to dig a trench and install underground wiring to a reserved spot in a "car parking area". I suppose it's not technically having a garage but it sure feels like it in spirit.
For a road trip it's slow, for overnight it's plenty fast. A big battery is 100 kWh. Assuming one only uses the middle, from 20 to 80%, that's 60 kWh, which would charge in 8 hours and 20 minutes at that rate. The vast majority of folks spend at least that long in one location every day. How often do you tend to arrive home at 10 p.m. and leave before 6:30 a.m.?
My bet is probably 90% (99%?) of home charging is done at 7.2kW or less. 7.2 kW is in the higher end, not "awfully slow". Myself I often charge at 3.6 kW.
The Biden admin targeted $7.5 billion for exactly this, but apparently the ramp up has been slow so far. They announced $620 million to specific projects just a week or so ago, so it may be accelerating.
Since Q2 of 2022, the majority of Teslas produced have been LFP. As of right now, the standard range and long range Model 3 and Model Y are LFP. The Model S, X, and the Performance versions of the 3/Y are NCA.
And 200 wh/kg LFP and 160 wh/kg sodium ion is coming into mass production.
To the main parent, the runway for further EV drivetrain cost reductions is at least a decade more. The LFP and sodium ion production roadmaps have almost 200 wh/kg sodium ion and 230 wh/kg LFP on it, so that is reasonably a five year likelihood.
10-20 year is solid state, sulfur techs, and other chemistries poised to double or triple density of the cells.
The first curve shows the really low commercial vehicle demand on batteries. This will not be the case, commercial vehicles from busses to worksite vehicles to town delivery vans are going to goddamn explode in demand, once all the business owners realize the TCO of EV drivetrains is so low.
I've been pretty disappointed in electric companies, perhaps they are pricing in grid adaptation, but wind and solar should be relentlessly driving down the cost of electricity and something is up with that.
The dual headed dragon of economies of scale/density in batteries combined with the price drop in electricity for wind/solar is something that ICEs simply cannot win against.
Which is why I chuckle at every mainstream media article about EV sales fluctuations or anti-EV stories, or the inevitable "I can't charge because Apartment/Parking Garage/City". People, this is an economic tsunami coming, and it has already started. All those infrastructure problems will be solved.
The "I rent" is the most mystifying thing, indicative of local governments not getting ahead of this. What should be cheaper to wire up, a suburban development sprawled over 10 square miles, or 100 cars in a one block radius? Governments need to be incentivizing apartment charging pronto.
I think the reason for the wide variety of battery tech in Tesla's model range is partly to reduce/spread costs incase one battery is found to catch fire/fail when it hits 7 years old.
YEah it's been frustrating. Those two stroke horror shows in leafblowing/lawnmowing/etc need to be cycled out, but e-tools are still priced as luxury.
I'm hoping in about 5 years, especially with sodium ion in production, that changes.
The really cool thing about battery production is that it's not like an ICE engine where you have to design an ICE for this size application and an ICE for that size application: the batteries can be used in a leaf blower, a moped, a car, a truck, or a massive grid.
The battery supply can be routed wherever needed. That should result in a vastly cheaper overall industry than the ICE drivetrain industry. Sure you need different electric motors, but those aren't THAT different, and the industrial world has already been building all the necessary sizes and variations for a century now.
I really don't get how battery manufacturers have have the better part of a decade of with batteries sold pretty much before they've been manufactured and still haven't scaled up to capture that demand
This is Tesla's margins collapsing because of less than forcasted demand for luxury vehicles. Battery prices have dropped much more slowly than the prices of EVs.
They're the only ones who have been mass producing EVs for more than a few years. Sure it's their margins decreasing, but that's because the decreased cost of batteries mean that other car makers were finally offering competitive offerings, in part due to the accumulated decrease in battery price since the original models were released.
What do you mean? In the past year there have been substantial price cuts in many markets, particularly in the US. The price gap between the average EV and average ICE has also closed could considerably.
This is a great set of charts and analysis, although I have two problems with it.
1. On the chart of energy density, I'd like to see the the energy density of petrol for comparison. It's much higher, and even though extrapolation is dangerous, I'd like to see how long it could take to reach parity given some of the different forecasting models they mention. Specifically regarding their mention of air travel, I'd like to know what the minimum viable energy density would be for a vessel's fuel source, because my current understanding is that commercial air travel powered by electricity is not feasible.
2. They mention S-curve adoption, but that reaches a horizontal asymptote eventually, it doesn't go up forever. I'd like to see more analysis on where we think we're at on the S-curve, and why. I'd like to see a guess on where it levels out displayed on that chart, instead of the arrow simply pointing at the sky. If nothing else, show where the chemical limit might be based on current battery technology.
I want to displace fossil fuels and reduce pollution and slow the greenhouse effect as much as possible. I think transparency and realistic expectations need to be part of the transition. The more information available to markets, the more efficiently they can work towards the goal. I find it very difficult to get answers to these types of questions when discussing renewable energy generation and storage. I'm sure part of it is my own ignorance on where to look, which is why I ask: especially here, hopefully an expert can see this and quickly point me in the right direction.
> I'd like to see the the energy density of petrol for comparison.
Petrol's higher energy density doesn't matter as much as people think.
Electric vehicles are around four times as efficient as petrol. In a petrol car, only 20% of the energy is converted to motion. In electric cars, this is around 80% (with some variation dependent on regenerative braking). I wrote about this extensively in a previous article: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/electrification-en...
That is not even comparing apples to oranges, that is comparing apples to steel. You are correct in that energy density does not matter very much for weight-insensitive generation such as grid-scale generation, but energy density matters for weight-constrained applications such as airplanes and rockets as the poster mentioned.
However, assuming that the renewable generation cost curve continues to improve exponentially then the most likely outcome for a carbon-neutral or carbon-negative future will be using electricity to manufacture high density combustible fuels out of atmospheric carbon, effectively using it as a high density "battery" for use cases that demand high energy density.
To the extent that your analysis is relevant to the concerns of the poster, all it means is that batterys are actually ~4x better than the raw energy density would indicate. As to the specifics, Wikipedia claims petrol is ~12,888 W*h/kg or ~24x the battery energy density in the article, so ~6x better with respect to car motion. Note that the current curve has only gone from ~100 W*h/kg to ~500 W*h/kg, so we would need to see density growth comparable to the last 30 years to happen again.
Excellent question! A sufficiently advanced battery can theoretically beat gasoline.
Any given energy storage technology can store a maximum amount of energy in a fixed volume or mass. Behold one of my favorite plots: [1]
From lowest to highest energy density:
- springs, which use mechanical elastic potential energy, are kinda horrible
- capacitors, which use electric permittivity, aren't great
- next are both batteries and combusted fuels, which both use chemical reactions.
- nuclear gets us another few orders of magnitude
- finally, antimatter (E=mc^2) is a ways beyond that
Both batteries and fuels rely on the energy difference between unreacted molecules, so their theoretical energy density is the same. Well, actually, fuels are burnt to create heat which is converted to energy, and this heat->energy conversion is fundamentally thermodynamically inefficient (only ~tens of percent), whereas batteries are the same sorts of reaction but much more controlled. A sufficiently clever battery, which moves atoms around to react in the right places at the right time, is thus more efficient and thus energy-dense than fuel. However, moving atoms around like this to make a more efficient battery is much more advanced nanotech than what we currently have. But it's theoretically possible.
This is what biology does: us humans are powered by chemical storage (sugar/fat/glucose), which is used more efficiently than current batteries but without combustion. (lithium-ion is ~0.8 MJ/kg, glucose is ~16 MJ/kg, gasoline ~46 MJ/kg)
One thing I wanted to add is that fat (lipids) are much more energy dense than glucose. ~38 Mj/kg, though I am not sure what fraction of that the body recovers. Which makes sense, you want to maintain your long-term storage in a denser format.
What makes one chemical more able to store a greater energy per unit mass than another? Wouldn't the theoretical limit be a volume of pure electrons compressed in the densest unit volume possible? Say, stored in a magnetic field?
Compressing neon gas won't do much, aside storing energy as compressed fluid.
My point was the traditional fuels (incl. the edible ones) use more material/weight than their own. So it is very likely they'll be more efficient. The batteries require a reversible action by just applying current - this is quite the climb compared to most chemical reactions.
We have not done much since the li-ion inception, using FePO4 instead of cobalt is more sensible from an economic point of view but the energy density is even lower.
>Petrol's higher energy density doesn't matter as much as people think.
When vehicles uphill, ramp, and fight with the increasing wind resistance due speed, it is needed a high torque for to motion.
The petrol's energy density is translated in high torque, that the gearbox latter transforms progressively.
In electric vehicles, generating high torque and cooling the overheated coils for to obtain such high torque drains the battery quickly, the range drops quickly.
And for to increase the range, more weight is added (more batteries), that requires higher torque for motion, that requires more energy again, and so on.
This is why the energy density it is important, in batteries are the watts hour per kilogram. As also it is important the number of cycles before such batteries start to drop energy density until to fail (to note the weight keeps being the same along all of this degradation).
With the current technology, due the magnetic fields strength generated in the coils, and the energy density of the batteries, EVs just can not compete with petrol vehicles. It is about torque, among other things.
What is needed? batteries with bigger energy density ( higher Wh/Kg with higher number of recharge cycles), and/or higher efficiency generating magnetic fields of high strength (ambient superconductivity, also stronger magnets would help some coil's topologies).
Regardless of theorical efficiency or not of the energy, in practice the ICE gets the torque needed by the vehicle for driving on all types of slopes (and speed, by transforming part of that high torque with the gearbox).
This is why electric and combustion vehicles have such different ranges at even the same weight. Nowadays.
Such high torque is needed at the same moment the vehicle doesn't circulate on a flat terrain, or when have to reach highway speeds.
For to get at least the same ranges, the electric vehicle must reduce the energy consumption for the generation of the required torque (and speed), or needs to increase the energy density of the battery in companion of increasing the recharge cycles.
will be possible to achieve this? of course.
(The losses cooling or heating the battery and avoid the self-discharge should get the same advances, as it's counted as stored energy but it's not used for motion)
By "significantly heavier" it is often a difference of a few hundred pounds on a few thousand pound vehicle. A 2L engine is about 400lbs, an automatic transmission is another 220lbs, 20 gallons of gas is 120 lbs, add another 100ish pounds for a much larger cooling system. So sure, the battery is like 1,000lbs but you traded 840 pounds for 200 pounds of EV motors (assuming two of them!) so in reality you're up like 360lbs.
Combined with regenerative braking, it doesn't make that big of difference in total energy usage. A massive chunk of the energy used in an EV is aero drag which makes little difference about weight. Weight makes a bigger impact with stop and go traffic on non-regen cars as slowing down that extra mass turns more energy into heat. An object in motion wants to stay in motion and all, once you're up to speed you're using about the same energy. This is why a lot of the EV trucks have close to the same range if the bed is full or not assuming it has the cover on the bed, but towing even a small trailer becomes a massive range hit.
I get on average 3.5mi/kWh in my EV, ~1MJ/mi. A gallon of gas is like 120 MJ, an average hybrid will get like 40mpg, so 3 MJ/mi being burned. You'd need to get like 120mpg to match my average efficiency of energy usage, and my EV isn't even that incredibly efficient of an EV.
We don't have billions of people living in the wilderness. And technology has reached a price level where off-grid solar is actually an affordable and superior alternative to propane and diesel for household use in rural Africa.
Heat pump heat, in the wilderness or otherwise, is about 4x as efficient as resistance or fire.
This is somewhat silly, since a gas-fired heat pump can be very efficient, but gas-fired heat pumps are quite rare.
(California has a pricing/policy problem here, IMO. Electricity is absurdly expensive, gas is somewhat reasonable, and the result is that electric heating is not nearly as economical as it should be.)
Gas-fired heat pumps are neither economical nor efficient for single-apartment or single-house systems. Internal combustion engines with shaft power output of 1-2 kW are inefficient, loud and maintenance intensive.
They can start to make sense from around 50 kW heating/cooling capacity and upwards, so the smallest units are suitable for 8-15 apartments depending on size.
“Heat in the wilderness” must be so small in terms of global emissions footprint to be almost irrelevant, no? The wilderness implies ultra low density sort of by definition.
Doesn't matter for WHAT? You start out talking about energy density, and then cite some numbers regarding efficiency. What does one have to do with the other? You've done nothing to support your opening claim here.
"Energy" value of gasoline and "energy" value of a battery pack are measuring two very different things even though they are both units of energy. When you burn gas in an engine, the engine has a theoretical upper limit on its efficiency which is FAR below 100%, and electric vehicle does not. So saying that gasoline has an energy content of 115,000 BTU/gal doesn't mean much since you'll be lucky to see 30% of that be turned into useful work.
Well, acording to wikipedia gasoline has an energy density of 46.4 MJ/Kg and LiPo batteries have an energy density of 0.36–0.875 MJ/Kg. So if your electric drivetrain has a 100% efficiency and your gas drivetrain has a 30% efficiency then the gasoline car would be able to do 16 times more work per unit of fuel.
A Tesla Model 3 has 1060 pounds of batteries. If you replace those with a 177 gallon gas tank (at 6 lbs/gal) you should be able to go 4,780 miles at 27 MPG. It’s just that nobody wants to give up that much volume (visualize a 6x6x5 cube of gallon milk jugs).
I’m not accounting for a gas engine having more heavy parts, that mostly matters in city driving.
Not enough for what? The energy densities of both LiPo batteries and gasoline are enough to make a passenger vehicle with an acceptable range. For gasoline it is more than enough and for LiPo it’s barely enough.
Yea it doesn't really follow. I think the idea is that the energy density being 50 times lower doesn't matter because the battery is efficient enough that you can make an EV with a 300 mile range which is good enough for most people. Of course if anyone wanted one, you could build a gas car with a 5,000 mile range if it had a gas tank as massive as an EV battery.
The mention of air travel was strange. I wasn't aware of anyone who thought long range flight would ever be electrified. At least not without some fundamental breakthrough.
S-curves are hard to predict. Basically every time someone attempts to do it, they are way off. This [0] is a neat paper that addresses the question. We've blown past every single prediction.
Why do you mention long range flight? I don't see anything in the article saying batteries will take 100% of the airplane market.
It does say batteries will start to take market share in 2030. That's almost certainly true. It's a high priority for the Norwegian company to electrify the short distance airplane network in the next coming years. There are already battery electric planes coming out. And battery chemistries suitable for short range planes are starting early production.
I suspect battery electric plane will get a surprisingly good range once we start to get highly optimized battery chemistries and optimized airplane designs for that market. The hardest part is to get the first few products to mass market.
They might creep into the medium range market by 2050.
But long range? It might never happen. Unless we get something like aluminum-air batteries that can exploit oxygen in the air somehow. But it doesn't matter. Long range flights are not the majority of flights. It's a small enough market that e-fuels could cover it.
Since flying battery electric will be so much cheaper it's also possible people will have to switch planes multiple times on a journey. Maybe there will be some innovations/optimizations that make that faster and easier.
Long haul might not be the majority of flights by number, but they account for ~40% of the emissions from commercial aviation (well more accurately, wide-bodies do.) Regional flights that are prime targets to go fully electric only account for around 6% of emissions.
But you're right that starting somewhere is better than not doing that.
There are some very early stage tests, there is some kind of island hopper electric airplane that flys regular service, and it's only like 5 or 10 miles across water.
Batteries will get more energy dense, the range will increase a bit. But yeah, it's hard to see it getting to a few 100 miles.
Testing and development by an actual operational airline, but running into regulation and certification issues. Could be a while even for this relatively narrow use case of seaplane flights of under an hour duration. Interesting update. https://harbourair.com/earth-day-eplane-update/
In terms of battery density, the fact that they have an operational, flyable aircraft, just stuffing batteries and an electric motor into a 60 year old air frame... pretty good and only going to get better!
There are people researching it, I believe Airbus is about to test flying with hydrogen. It's the usual thing though for "green hydrogen", there's not much green hydrogen, there are some testbeds but just like for cars it seems to be mostly extracted from natural gas. You can extract it with any energy source like solar power. There's still the challenge that hydrogen fuel is not very compact, so it's hard to carry enough energy (in a car or plane) for much use, you end up with very very high pressure tanks. I think hydrogen will make sense eventually for trucks, tractors maybe. The question is will the massive investments in improving batteries make hydrogen vehicles obsolete or not.
If advances in solar continue, yes. Currently, the IRA provides very lucrative investment and tax credits for green hydrogen projects (solar and wind powered electrolyzers). Power producers like AES are already building multi-billion dollar projects, and there are a lot more in the pipeline. One day the tax credits may not be needed for this to be economically feasible.
Companies like terraform industries are doing something similar, but creating natural gas. With enough cheap solar, all hydrocarbons are pretty much on the table as well.
It'll be a decade or more until this is scaled up and not dependent on subsidies.
Diesel is more like 3.175 (25%) due to the inefficiencies of small heat engines. You're throwing away like 3/4 of the energy as waste heat. Electric motors are >95% efficient and lithium batteries are in the high-90s percent efficient.
Electricity is already low-entropy, whereas energy from burning petrol is high entropy and thus contains less useful work.
It's still waste, because if you're in a fixed location (which you'd have to be in order to benefit from much of the heat) you'd be better off running a heat pump.
True if you are cogenerating, but few people do that. Only a miniscule fraction of waste heat from a car engine is required to heat a car.
Tangent but: I've always wondered why home cogeneration never took off. Too bad we don't have gas water heaters and gas furnaces that generate electricity and dump the excess onto the grid and heat with the waste heat.
Even a low-efficiency thermoelectric generator would recover some useful energy that is otherwise kind of wasted.
That's not really their point, it's do we have any reasonable hope of applications that require the energy density of fossil fuels (flight) to be powered by electricity.
Flight will never be powered by electricity, so you can stop checking. Using synthetic liquid fuels for flight is the only currently-foreseeable path to carbon-neutral, long-haul passenger flight.
Long haul yes, but it's a little known story that regional airlines are on the edge of disaster because: (1) they can't find pilots, (2) manufacturers have stopped making the 50-seat jets that are the mainstay of that business. Airports like ITH are already at the top of the "regional development problems" in third-tier cities and it is not so clear they're going to be able to have service in 20 years the way things are going.
Given that the status quo is "go out of business when old planes can't be maintained anymore" the possibility of some radical change like electrification or a change in the scope rules is increasingly likely.
...which 50 seat jets are you talking about? At that size I would expect turboprops to be preferred, and turboprops of that size are definitely still being built..
both of which stopped manufacturing circa 2020. We used to get the DASH-8 which I liked to fly more but they stopped using it because it breaks down more often which is no problem if it happens at PHL but takes hours to get a crew to fix if it breaks down at ITH.
Perhaps I am missing your broader point, but the fact that ITH exists and only has scheduled service to New York is a bit ridiculous. That should be a high-speed rail route that takes you from city center to center, if America intends to become a developed nation.
God it's gotten worse. Last time I looked they had flights to PHL and DTW.
As it is now there is fierce competition for bus service from Ithaca to NYC (budget to various grades of premium) and I find it almost unimaginable that I'd fly to NYC to get to NYC because flying to JFK or atrocious EWR (never once made a transfer at EWR that didn't involve re-entering the secure zone) wouldn't save time to get to Midtown.
If you try to take the bus in the other direction you find you can't get from here to there. A friend of mine who used to ride the bus through Canada to get to the Detroit suburbs now takes the bus up to Syracuse, then takes Amtrak and gets out at 4am. On the way back one time there was no room on the bus although he paid for a ticket ahead of time.
The real significance of the regional airport is that it connects to a hub that goes everywhere. As it is if I have to fly somewhere I'll probably have to go up to SYR where at least I can fly on Jetblue and know I'm flying on an Airbus.
which I really enjoyed flying in, but they got replaced with 50-seat regional jets because regional jets are less likely to break down at a small airport requiring a crew to travel two hours to repair them.
As it is, academics at Cornell and Ithaca College will struggle to bring in speakers and it's just one more bit of "stave the countryside" that will drive knowledge workers to go to blue cities where their votes don't count -- it's how you hand the next election to a Demagogue.
You're right I was not thinking of the probable more common use case that a trip originating at ITH is only connecting at JFK and eventually arriving elsewhere. For that traveler a train to Manhattan doesn't work as well.
If it was all integrated it could be great. I have always been puzzled about how few Americans will use public transit to the airport. When I go to a conference in San Francisco I run into European conference goers on the BART but if I am with American coworkers they always insist on taking the SuperShuttle. Similarly I’ve usually taken the subway to JFK even when it meant riding on an insipod shuttle bus
Flight will never be powered by electricity, so you can stop checking.
Fuel cells could well enable 30X better power densities. That would count to me as flight powered by electricity. There's also beamed power. Perhaps this wouldn't be practical, but it's a thought experiment that shows there's nothing impossible from first principles for electrical powered flight.
I'm a little surprised by that energy density chart. Who's selling batteries that carry 500 Wh/kg? Those are research prototype numbers; I think that Amprius and the gamma-sulfur people have hit (or passed) that mark. But cars and cellphones have been using the Ni-Mn-Al-Co oxide family of cathodes for a decade. The recent large-scale development has been bringing on LiFePO4 which actually accepts a lower density in exchange for lower cost and longer life.
That doesn't discredit the predictions, but I don't think that the connection they're trying to draw between energy density and market demand really holds water. The development of higher density batteries is good for certain applications like that ground-effect electric seaplane, but it isn't necessary for cars or grid storage, where the first case is mostly viable already and the second is concerned with the cost outlook and the self-discharge rate.
I think Amprius are further along than you might think, ready to scale commercial production, not research prototype. Super neat factory tour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_Hd4HfH1ss
There are a few go-kart places here, I hadn't been there for a few years, and now I learned that they all switched to electrical. Much quieter, no fumes, works great indoors
Full torque at zero RPM makes motor racing much more exciting - especially compared to the low end karts with puny 2-stroke engines that took forever to accelerate my heavy ass !
This is why I say electricity revolution is coming and a lot people and countries are going to be shell shocked by it. Solar and wind electricity costs are also decreasing at a similar rate.
It’s already here, it’s been here for a decade, renewables are a mature industry. They’ve already effectively destroyed the economics of coal, and natural gas is next.
I was gonna say "then why did China add so much coal last year", because I remembered reading that they added something like 50GW of coal, even as they added more than 150GW renewable.
But as of Jan 1 2024, they also had to introduce a financial incentive just to keep coal plants online, because otherwise the coal plants can't compete on price, just like you said! Some weird economics going on here, but it seems like China is still adding coal just to maximize total power deployed, even if it's uneconomic at the margins.
Yeah even I was not aware that China has from 2023 started installing more solar and wind than its annual energy consumption growth ie they have actually started replacing coal produced electricity. And with all the new solar and battery production capacity coming online in 2024 by 2030 China coal usage should be down dramatically.
Chart #2: Top Tier Energy Battery Density vs. Battery Cost.
That seems like an odd comparison to me. Is it normal to compare the Top Tier Anything to the Average of another thing?
Top Tier Car 0-60 Times vs Average Car Costs? IDK, it doesn't seem to contain any REAL information. Shouldn't the comparison be the costs of the SAME cars and not include cars that aren't top tier?
Top Tier Car 0-60 Times vs Average Car Costs? IDK, it doesn't seem to contain any REAL information.
Actually, if you know the details of the development of consumer cars, you'll find that advances and levels of performance in top tier cars tends to trickle down into average cars. Not without some dilution, but that's a definite trend! So things like disc brakes, fuel injection, microprocessor control.
This sort of thing definitely happens with batteries over time. It's a way of peeking into the future. Just fudge factor for a little dilution.
Stationary systems for grid scale storage have amazing options - e.g. Form Energy - that needn't rely on power density benefits of Lithium chemistries. I wouldn't be surprised to see this sector dominate the GWh/yr chart in the next 6 years.
Does a battery with low cycle efficiency actually beat hydrogen for seasonal storage?
The major problem with hydrogen is the fuel cell efficiency. Electrolysis is above 80%, but fuel cells are barely at 60% and it gets lower when you try to make the design more practical (lower temperature, less platinum). So batteries just have to hit 50% to compete. But that 50% includes both inherent cycle efficiency and self-discharge and Form Energy isn't putting their numbers up front, as far as I can see.
More importantly, seasonal storage is heavily concerned with heating, and the conversion of hydrogen to heat is a different matter. The batteries have heat pumps going for them, but you can make a gas-powered heat pump too. So rather than the fuel cell efficiency you look at the CoP difference between electric and gas heat pumps. The latter have received little attention, but could see a surge of interest if green hydrogen becomes more popular (and easier to transport). But here we exhaust my understanding of the situation.
It's difficult to see any of the alternatives displacing batteries for short-term storage. Batteries aren't a good fit for long-term storage, which is where alternatives should be competitive. But that market is essentially 0 right now.
There's also various schemes to use gravity. Pump water uphill above a dam when power demand is low like at night, also I have read speculation of trying to do this in some underground mine or something so it doesn't evaporate.
Yes, there are excellent non-"battery" technologies. I'm explicitly talking about the high capacity chemical batteries everyone's crazy for these days.
Sodium ion batteries are chemical and can have as much capacity as you like. They just need a bit more space, but not too much more, as they are already used in cheaper electric cars.
"Chinese automaker Yiwei debuted the first sodium-ion battery-powered car in 2023. It uses JAC Group’s UE module technology, which is similar to CATL's cell-to-pack design.[82] The car has a 23.2 kWh battery pack with a CLTC range of 230 kilometres (140 mi)."
And for grid storage, "slightly bigger size" really doesn't matter.
There are lots of companies trying to build out different kinds of flow batteries for storage. Think of a shipping container filled with some substance that stores charge and just sits there, waiting for you to use it, grid storage. But they all seem like research projects. https://news.mit.edu/2023/flow-batteries-grid-scale-energy-s...
There have already been some flow battery startups going bust since that started.
But there are many battery companies for gird batteries. Flow is just one type and one that seems far less poplar now-days. They were all the hype like 10-15 years ago.
The problem is the Li-commodity race has already beaten most of those designs. You need to use very, very cheap materials. Form Energy considered some flow designs but rejected them.
That's why Form Energy are going to things like Iron batteries, because Li batteries will never reach those numbers.
But very few of those alternative have had any real commercial success yet.
Depends on what long term means. But batteries are used for power grid storage. Tesla is selling huge numbers of tesla megapacks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Megapack) often used to replace peaker plants.
Peaker plants are power plants sitting there ready to turn on during peak power usage. I think they used to be often coal, which took a while to start up and produced lots of pollution, but then more recently natural gas plants start up faster and have much lower emissions. So during an evening power usage peak, or during really cold or hot times when power demand is high, the grid can tap that power source. Now you can replace those plants with a bunch of batteries that are ready in milliseconds to provide additional power, and then you can charge them if they get used up at night when electric usage is low.
Yeah, I think my question was a bit fuzzy, what is the definition of long term? Batteries are excellent for short term storage, days or weeks but they don’t have the same storage performance as fossil fuels of where talking months and years.
Form Energy has made a huge amount of marketing before they had proven anything and claimed to have a product very fast. They have not build a single large better ever. Maybe not exactly the best example.
Most of the non Li-Battery grid cell systems have not yet proven much. Many of the first generation of such system went bust. And many of the others have taken a long time and are still not deployed.
So far the successful grid battery companies are mostly repackaging other cells.
Stem is effectively a services company. There’s a lot of room for general-use hardware and software in this space, especially as more battery storage is deployed and financial incentives for energy arbitrage emerge.
Take 25% of the money spend on EV batteries and instead spend it on domestic solar panels. I cannot stand the smugness of people who will pay $$,$$$ for a car but won't spend $,$$$ on the thing to make power for that car. Even batteries. The net carbon saved by in-home battery+solar is far more than putting batteries in the family car. The car runs a few hours a day. A total off-grid solar+batteries domestic system saves carbon 27/7.
In other words, (Honda civic IC + home solar/batteries) saves more carbon than a Tesla with no actual power generation capacity. But that just isn't fashionable.
Batteries are a required part of the transition to pure renewables. When demand for EVs drops low enough you can bet grid operators will be in line to soak up the cheap batteries.
Further, V2G/H is more than likely to be a thing in the near future further putting the EV batteries to work stabilizing the grid.
>V2G/H is more than likely to be a thing in the near future further putting the EV batteries to work stabilizing the grid.
Yes. Even before we get to full V2G, managed charging provides a helpful degree of flexibility.
An EV is a giant battery (several times the size of a Tesla PowerWall, for example) that happens to move sometimes. The battery can be used for other things when the car isn't moving - and it will be.
I bought an EV because I assumed the dollars I had to spend would have more “leverage” by incentivizing an electric-car business, which would in turn drive improvements and reduced cost in battery production, and that would have follow-on benefits well beyond the car industry. I think the recent drop in battery prices is good evidence that this process is a real one. It goes without saying that any individual’s contribution is negligible.
From my interaction with local utilities/electrical companies, they _hate_ domestic solar. They'll do everything in their power to stonewall you getting them installed and make it seem like a useless/expensive option.
Then ditch the local connection and go with off-grid solar. These days, a totally off-grid solution is sometimes the cheaper option. Panels are cheap. Batteries are cheap. Interest rates are cheap. And no monthly minimums.
I'm sitting in a house right now, streaming top gear on a 50-inch tv, completely off-grid.
Domestic solar isn't as efficient as solar power plants. If we took this 25% and instead built solar farms, we would be farther ahead. Domestic battery power plants do make sense however.
I wonder when if ever we'll see this re-evaluated.
It's still a terrifying amount of energy, but I'd feel much much different about someone with a 300WH LFP pack sitting next to me than I would a lipo pack.
It'll probably be a while before you see them widely available, much less in small consumer devices. eVTOL and other battery aircraft can't really work without this level of density so I imagine they'll consume all available supply (at premium prices) for a while.
Batteries are great, but some of those charts look off.
Where are they getting batteries that are 500Wh/kg for commercial applications? Even state of the art NMC cells in the 21700 and 46800 form factors barely scrape at 300Wh/kg, and everything else (LFP) is significantly below that number.
For real. I’m trying to diy a battery now with 304ah lifepo4 cells and it works out to 125wh/kg. Doesn’t seem like even 300wh/kg will trickle down to the public anytime soon.
High energy density isn't the only desirable goal of course. Really cheap, bulk storage, hard to damage, with long lifetime and many recharge cycle batteries are good for grids even if they're too heavy for the mobile | car market.
Also, battery-powered >=737-size passenger airplanes (also not so sure about trains and cargo ships) will need at least a revolution in battery technology - batteries won't do, they're just too heavy for the little energy they output:
I doubt there’s any reason why trains couldn’t run on batteries. Anything that either stops and then starts again before refueling, or goes down and then up again before refueling, should be compatible with batteries due to regenerative braking. Trains have both of those properties.
Planes have neither of those properties which is what makes them hard to run off batteries.
Cargo ships also wouldn’t seem to have a problem. My understanding is that the drag on a hull increases sub-linearly relative to displacement. So a 10% increase in displacement might only increase drag by 1%. So it’s unlikely the weight penalty of batteries would be prohibitive.
You would need a whole other ship full of lithium batteries in tow so a useful size cargo ship would have the enormous energy required for a regular cargo trip.
Trains work better, but charge time would impact operation feasibility, and just electrifying the railway with overhead cables is currently cheaper than lithium battery solutions.
Hence the case for hydrogen fuel cells for train applications.
Given these trends, what is the predicted year that we'd expect the last fossil fuel burning power plant to be greenlit for construction in China, India, and the US?
Follow-up: At what point is continued operation of existing coal become uneconomical (to simplify the question assume decent solar generation locations are available/ grid connected nearby).
As a point of interest, for particular types of investors, underneath all the hoo-rah of the charts
How fast will batteries continue to grow and improve? The answer is a lot faster than today’s consensus view.
isn't exactly true in reality for the billion+ dollar end of the resources market who expected battery demand to be much much higher than it is, leading to temporary(?) setbacks such as:
What's behind the drastic downturn in nickel and lithium prices, and what does it mean?
Not an expert, but the biggest downside from renewables seems to be the swings in production. Solar is obviously not useful at night. Wind comes and goes.
Batteries and other forms of energy storage to normalize distribution are more important for renewables than fossil fuels.
Indeed. Assuming you have a sustainable source, the next most important thing is distribution and storage.
The cleanest candidate (Hydrogen-from-electrolysis) suffers from storage and distribution issues. These can be overcome, but at high cost.
The easiest (batteries) suffer from a combination of storage and distribution issues (heavy batteries have to be transported, you can't pipe them around, energy grids have power transmission costs/depend on batteries to work, an ouroborian problem) as well as toxicity issues.
Given that batteries cannot indefinitely become cheaper, and likely that demand will outpace supply, clean hydrogen, not batteries, seem the logical ultimate choice.
You probably want kWh_e (electric) instead of kWh_t (thermal), and probably should include the weight of the engine/transmission. Diesel is better still, but not quite the same gap.
If battery growth is exponential, but mining of ore isn't, that's a pretty big red flag imo. Once raw material production hits a wall, prices go back up, profits droop, advancement declines. After a while there'll probably be a new OPEC for batteries. Batteries are here to stay, but the growth rate isn't.
I hope we find that "battery" is a sufficiently broad category such that individual bottlenecks (lithium extraction, for instance) end up being worked around by using different materials.
I also think that biotech has picked up some new tricks lately (alphafold, etc) that might let it branch out from academia, medicine, and agriculture and affect things like mining re: bioleeching fungi to move minerals through mycelial networks to the surface.
OPEC is a possibility because ease of access to petrofuels was very sporadic, but the same is not true for battery chemistries, sodium and iron batteries are being used for storage scale and even some transport cases [0][1] and even lithium can be extracted from sea water [2]. Given how ubiquitous those 3 things are, there'll be a pretty hard ceiling/competition amongst different options. I suspect we'll encounter something more like agricultural cartels than petrostate cartels.
The comparison to Oil is interesting. Because people have also been saying we would hit a production wall there, and have been saying that for about 90 years now.
Lithium is abundant and recyclable, and the main thing holding recycling back at the moment is the supply of depleted batteries. It is highly unlikely that the market for lithium will ever look like oil.
First, battery technology has changed to require only one rare ore: lithium. Older battery chemistries required nickel and cobalt, but the most popular chemistry in electric vehicles today is lithium iron phosphate.[1] It has lower energy density than nickel manganese cobalt (NMC) or nickel cobalt aluminum (NCA), but lasts longer and is safer.
Second, lithium is everywhere. The reason why most lithium comes from salt flats in Australia, Chile, and China is because that's the cheapest way to get it. But there are plenty of other salt flats around the world, and the oceans themselves contain over 100 billion tons of lithium (1,000x more than known land resources). If today's biggest producers form a cartel and try to control prices, other sources will become economically viable.
Third, lithium is a tiny fraction of the cost of an electric vehicle. LFP batteries have around 160 grams of lithium per kWh, so a typical car battery (60-90kWh) has 10-15kg of lithium. The spot price for lithium is $15/kg, so the materials cost per car is around $150-250. If lithium prices went up by a factor of 10, the cost of the car would only go up by 5%. In contrast, doubling the price of petroleum almost doubles the cost of driving.
Fourth, demand for lithium extraction will go down in the long run. This is because unlike petroleum, lithium stays in the car. Older EVs contain lots of lithium (and other raw materials) that can be recycled into new batteries. Old batteries are basically very high quality ore. Lithium recycling may sound unlikely to some, but we already have existence proofs of recycling happening with other cheaper elements. 80% of all copper ever mined is still in use. The number for aluminum is almost as high. Remember that the cost per kg of copper is half that of lithium, and aluminum is 1% the cost of lithium.
I'm really not worried about rare ores being the bottleneck for electric vehicle adoption. In 2022, world lithium production was around 130,000 metric tons. That's enough to produce 9 million cars. In that same year, 85 million motor vehicles were built. Assuming we wanted all vehicle production to be EVs, and assuming an average battery capacity of 90kWh, that would require 1,224,000 tons of lithium. If lithium production increases at the same rate it did from 2016-2022 (3.5x)[2], it will take another 12 years before there is enough capacity to make every vehicle electric. I doubt things will take off that quickly, but you never know. EV designs are simpler than combustion vehicles, and the raw materials costs are similar. As EV production volumes increase and manufacturers design for farther down-market, we should see prices continue to drop.
> Third, lithium is a tiny fraction of the cost of an electric vehicle. LFP batteries have around 160 grams of lithium per kWh, so a typical car battery (60-90kWh) has 10-15kg of lithium. The spot price for lithium is $15/kg, so the materials cost per car is around $150-250. If lithium prices went up by a factor of 10, the cost of the car would only go up by 5%. In contrast, doubling the price of petroleum almost doubles the cost of driving.
From what I've read this causes the lithium market to be very chaotic.
Supply is complicated and capital intensive to bring online while the demand is essentially inelastic.
We are still finding new deposits of lithium. Also its very likely we will eventually switch to other technologies that possibly wont require the same ingredients we need today.
For now. (And not everywhere. In Norway, 90% of that power would come from hydro plants.)
One of the most common objections to a wholesale switch to renewables is "what if it's cloudy / not windy" sort of thing. Cheap, widely deployed energy storage is key to answering that objection.
They go hand in hand. More batteries, more renewables, more batteries, more renewables, etc. etc. etc.
Eventually, the obvious goal is to charge everything via renewable power.
It frustrates me that you think this is a genuine talking point.
If we're talking about powering cars, then even if your power comes from 100% coal, it's still cleaner to drive the EV than gasoline, simply because the coal power plant benefits from the economy of scale. It merely takes longer for the trade-off of the higher carbon footprint of manufacturing an EV to happen. But it does eventually happen.
If we're talking about powering an energy grid, nobody expects them to be charged via consumables. That's just silly. But battery storage is how you make wind/solar energy work without requiring burning consumables as a backup.
Currently used? Probably quite a bit. But usually still a net emissions win for using an EV vs a fossil fuel vehicle even with current grids.
Required? None. There's nothing in EV battery production or charging or usage that requires burning fossil fuels. That fossil fuels are a major source of our current energy is part of the problem that we are also working to solve. And mass production of economical batteries is part of how we do that with renewable energy.
Building grids and vehicles that burn fossil fuels means you need to keep drilling, refining, and transporting that fossil fuel for every future kWH generated or mile driven. Forever.
A battery is made once and used for its lifetime, and most of its critical materials can be recycled at end of life into new batteries.
If you want current stats on total lifetime emissions of manufacturing and using batteries vs fossil fuels, search for "EV cradle to grave emissions" and there are a few studies. My recollection is that the results show that an EV will have lower lifetime emissions than a fossil fuel vehicle even with today's mostly dirty grids in most cases, and break-even in the worst grid mixes. As grids shift to renewables and recycling increases those numbers should only improve.
> David Checkel, a professor at the University of Alberta and an electric car expert, did some back-of-the-napkin math to dispute the claim. Checkel calculated that if each gallon of fuel costs $3, then 21 billion gallons would cost $63 billion annually. If $63 billion was the price tag for 250,000 batteries, then the cost of raw materials for each battery would be more than $250,000.
> Nonetheless, it is shown that conventional gasoline and diesel vehicles emit the highest amount of total life-cycle GHGs in comparison to vehicles powered by other available energy resources. When using green electricity, plug-in hybrid electric and fully electric vehicles can reduce the total life-cycle emission in comparison to combustion engine vehicles by 73 % and 89 %, respectively.
Plenty of other papers with similar results. Current total lifecycle emissions are already net negative for EV vs ICE including production of the battery and vehicle, and production of the electricity using the current grid. That margin improves as the grid gets cleaner.
Many batteries deployed today, in 2024, spend their entire lifecycle being charged entirely from solar. Are you asking what year none of them will be charged with electricity from fossil fuels? I’d bet that we’ll hit that mark in California before 2040.
Every solution has tradeoffs . What is so wrong about discussing them. We discuss the tradeoffs of everything else. Then electric comes up and that’s off limits
They're not fair questions because they've been answered. Multiple times. Every time electrification comes up.
Cost and environmental impact has been accounted for. And it turns out, using solar/wind energy for production and storing the excess in batteries for when the sun goes down or the wind gets lighter is better for the environment than constantly burning natural gas and coal. Yes, building batteries has a carbon footprint, but that footprint only needs to be done ONCE, whereas burning fuel for electrical generation requires constant burning.
For some reason, this fact upsets you, and rather than accept it, you try to act like nobody has done the studies.
I don't know how else to explain this to you. The studies have been done. This is settled science.
So again. Your questions are bad faith. You have no interest in learning.
Two interesting data points to that end
1) The "duck curve" for CA is almost neutral - eg the timing imbalance between peak demand and solar power generation - battery utilization is the most straightforward solution here - https://twitter.com/baker_edmund/status/1750644294673748366
2) There has been a massive decline in rooftop solar applications in CA since solar energy reimbursements dropped - https://twitter.com/thomasopeters/status/1750920941868347539 - some of that is potentially pent up demand, but I think illustrates the role state policy has to play in moving towards "renewables"