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> Li-ion battery costs are falling at a constant ~15% per year and there is no real reason why this shouldn't continue. There are of course a variety of good r

> Li-ion battery costs are falling at a constant ~15% per year and there is no real reason why this shouldn't continue. There are of course a variety of good reasons why exponential cost reduction won't continue, such as the cost of raw materials, shipping, and so on - but most importantly that almost nothing works like that for long. Li-ion battery manufacturing has seen a good uptick in efficiency due to quickly growing demand and a lot of money poured into squeezing out efficiencies, but there is no reason to assume exponential cost reductions to continue indefinitely. Indeed, it does't work that way for nearly any other industrial product, and (current) batteries aren't special in any way that would make them obviously different. > Similar to what Moore's law did to semiconductors ... Actually it is not similar at all. Semiconductors were actually special. There was an exponential reduction in feature size for many years, which led to exponential increases in performance, power efficiency, etc, per dollar. The massive gains were a direct result of the underlying process being scaled in an exponential manner. Almost nothing else works like this, certainly not batteries. The basic chemistry and efficiency of batteries, including Li-on has been pretty much the same for decades. There are occasional improvements in chemistry or anode construction or whatever, but these are a few % here or a few % there, and many claimed improvements don't pan out at all [1]. That's nothing like the doubling of transistor density that continued for decades. In particular, the total storage of batteries is related to number of atoms of the active ingredient, and that generally puts a fairly hard cap on size and other efficiency factors. Batteries are becoming cheaper because the production has been scaled up and efficiencies of scale achieved, but this will probably follow a similar curve as for any other popular product like lettuce or vehicles. There is no magic [2] and you'll hit a wall pretty quickly. --- [1] Just go back five years and look for "big" battery news, e.g., big suggested improvements in any characteristic and see if any of them are being used today. Very few are. [2] Of course there might be magic in terms of a very different battery chemistry, or some totally new way of storing energy that replaces batteries. There have been a lot of contenders over the years, but very few winners. A look at the periodic table also indicates that when it comes to batteries you can do better than Li-ion batteries, but not that much better.

ricw 8y ago
The main reason semiconductors scaled the way the did, was due to economies of scale. The more refined the process, the more R&D money had to be put behind the next node to make it work, the more production you needed to justify the investment. The end result being that we currently only have 3 (?) companies that are actively working on bringing out the next-gen semi-conductor node. The same principally applies to almost anything. In fact, for typical physical products the saying is that double the production will halve the cost. This is no different. Moore's law was much the same, just that it's scaling was much faster than anything seen before, such that every 18 months we were able to halve the costs. And of course semiconductors revolutionized almost everything. For li-ion batteries, this seems to be every 4-5 years and has been for the past 20 years or so. Rumors have it that Tesla is even beating this... Call it "Ric's law": every 4-5 years li-ion battery prices will halve ;)
- BeeOnRope 8y ago
  Moore's law was very different because the underlying process was being scaled. CPUs just process information, and the inherent limit on the amount of "stuff" needed to perform say an addition has an incredibly small physical limit [1] which existing chips don't approach. So through scaling the feature size of chips, CPU manufacturers were able to take the same amount of silicon, the same size wafer, and get "double" the computational power (roughly speaking) out of it. So with about the same amount of "assembly line" work you can churn out something that is twice as fast in 18 months. After a decade its 100 times as fast, but your "assembly line" looks about the same. That's not "efficiencies of scale" - that's fundamentally making something much better due improved physics, with the same amount of work. It particular, it would apply even to "small" producers. Now don't get me wrong, CPU manufacture was also subject to traditional efficiencies of scale: the biggest fabs got bigger, and a few large players squeezed out the rest and were able to sell more and average our their R&D costs over more sales, but that effect is small compared to the million-fold improvement in the underlying physical design. Batteries have no such scaling. The power stored is basically related to number of lithium ions and the capacity of the anode to accommodate them all. There are some small efficiencies: you can increase efficiency from 80% to 90%, but never to 2000%. You can make materials thinner or cheaper. You can change form factors to use materials more efficiently. You can standardize on battery sizes to make more use of a single production line. You can secure long term lithium contracts and open more mines. These are all the traditional "efficiency of scale" things and they all hit a wall pretty quickly. You could probably easily sustain a 15% reduction for a while longer, but certainly not 40 years like Moore's law. > The same principally applies to almost anything. It doesn't, just look around. What else has decreased in cost by a factor of a million over the past few decades? Cars have increased in popularity by many-fold since the 40s , and after an initial period of traditional "efficiencies of scale", costs have remained relatively fixed. Look at any random food product that suddenly increases a surge in popularity, perhaps reaching a 10x sales multiplier: final cost and production costs don't drop 10x. If all of a sudden we start eating 2 avocados every meal they aren't going to start costing 10 cents. > In fact, for typical physical products the saying is that double the production will halve the cost. I can imagine this rule is true... up to a point! That's the "traditional efficiencies of scale" at work: it's usually an S-curve [2]. If you want some custom widget, you are probably going to have to pay $100 for the first one, and $1 each or whatever for your run of 100. When you order one million, maybe it drops to 1 cent. When you order a billion, they don't cost 0.001 cents though. You don't have to take my word for it though: just look at any two big companies, but where one is bigger than the other, and look at their costs of production. Let's say Coke sells 5x as much as Pepsi: does Pepsi cost 5x as much to produce? Not all, they are virtually identical. Many models of vehicles sell 10x or 100x of some unpopular rivals, but the production cost is about the same. --- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle [2] Approximately, at least - although it depends heavily on the product. For example, the initial part of the curve might not be very flat for some things (e.g., with large fixed one-off costs) - but they almost all share the "rightmost" flat part of the S-curve.

ricw 8y ago

The main reason semiconductors scaled the way the did, was due to economies of scale. The more refined the process, the more R&D money had to be put behind the next node to make it work, the more production you needed to justify the investment. The end result being that we currently only have 3 (?) companies that are actively working on bringing out the next-gen semi-conductor node. The same principally applies to almost anything. In fact, for typical physical products the saying is that double the production will halve the cost. This is no different. Moore's law was much the same, just that it's scaling was much faster than anything seen before, such that every 18 months we were able to halve the costs. And of course semiconductors revolutionized almost everything. For li-ion batteries, this seems to be every 4-5 years and has been for the past 20 years or so. Rumors have it that Tesla is even beating this... Call it "Ric's law": every 4-5 years li-ion battery prices will halve ;)

BeeOnRope 8y ago
Moore's law was very different because the underlying process was being scaled. CPUs just process information, and the inherent limit on the amount of "stuff" needed to perform say an addition has an incredibly small physical limit [1] which existing chips don't approach. So through scaling the feature size of chips, CPU manufacturers were able to take the same amount of silicon, the same size wafer, and get "double" the computational power (roughly speaking) out of it. So with about the same amount of "assembly line" work you can churn out something that is twice as fast in 18 months. After a decade its 100 times as fast, but your "assembly line" looks about the same. That's not "efficiencies of scale" - that's fundamentally making something much better due improved physics, with the same amount of work. It particular, it would apply even to "small" producers. Now don't get me wrong, CPU manufacture was also subject to traditional efficiencies of scale: the biggest fabs got bigger, and a few large players squeezed out the rest and were able to sell more and average our their R&D costs over more sales, but that effect is small compared to the million-fold improvement in the underlying physical design. Batteries have no such scaling. The power stored is basically related to number of lithium ions and the capacity of the anode to accommodate them all. There are some small efficiencies: you can increase efficiency from 80% to 90%, but never to 2000%. You can make materials thinner or cheaper. You can change form factors to use materials more efficiently. You can standardize on battery sizes to make more use of a single production line. You can secure long term lithium contracts and open more mines. These are all the traditional "efficiency of scale" things and they all hit a wall pretty quickly. You could probably easily sustain a 15% reduction for a while longer, but certainly not 40 years like Moore's law. > The same principally applies to almost anything. It doesn't, just look around. What else has decreased in cost by a factor of a million over the past few decades? Cars have increased in popularity by many-fold since the 40s , and after an initial period of traditional "efficiencies of scale", costs have remained relatively fixed. Look at any random food product that suddenly increases a surge in popularity, perhaps reaching a 10x sales multiplier: final cost and production costs don't drop 10x. If all of a sudden we start eating 2 avocados every meal they aren't going to start costing 10 cents. > In fact, for typical physical products the saying is that double the production will halve the cost. I can imagine this rule is true... up to a point! That's the "traditional efficiencies of scale" at work: it's usually an S-curve [2]. If you want some custom widget, you are probably going to have to pay $100 for the first one, and $1 each or whatever for your run of 100. When you order one million, maybe it drops to 1 cent. When you order a billion, they don't cost 0.001 cents though. You don't have to take my word for it though: just look at any two big companies, but where one is bigger than the other, and look at their costs of production. Let's say Coke sells 5x as much as Pepsi: does Pepsi cost 5x as much to produce? Not all, they are virtually identical. Many models of vehicles sell 10x or 100x of some unpopular rivals, but the production cost is about the same. --- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle [2] Approximately, at least - although it depends heavily on the product. For example, the initial part of the curve might not be very flat for some things (e.g., with large fixed one-off costs) - but they almost all share the "rightmost" flat part of the S-curve.