12 ms·

Energy Storage Investments Boom as Battery Costs Halve in the Next Decade

127 points by zeristor 7y ago

zeristor 7y ago
I had assumed fold was the same as 2^x, as in the number of layers for each fold of a piece of paper. The artice talks about a 122 fold increase in the amount the power of installed battery power, I assume that a 2^122 increase is impossible, even accounting for replacement of end of life power packs.
- ben_w 7y ago
  I believe “x-fold” means “times x“.
  - wpietri 7y ago
    Exactly. For example, threefold is 3x: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/threefold https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/threefold
  - zeristor 7y ago
    Perhaps a question of mere semantics but why use the word 'fold' when it means times? Is it just to sound more "sophisticated"?
    - ben_w 7y ago
      Apparently “fold” is an archaic suffix that means the same thing as times. I grew up with that so I haven’t really thought about it much.
      - dwheeler 7y ago
        "Fold" is not archaic, but it may be more common in some regions compared to others (see "pop" vs. "soda"). The "-fold" suffix is in Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary and it does NOT have an "archaic" marking. It's also one of the answers when you ask Google to "define fold" (you have to look lower because suffixes are sorted after the main word). I use the suffix myself; it's nice and short when you need to express the concept.
    - reitzensteinm 7y ago
      Accusing the author of using "122 fold" instead of "times 122" to sound smart with a comment containing the phrase "a question of mere semantics" just might be peak HN.
new_realist 7y ago
For long term energy storage batteries are not ideal. Their costs increase linearly with time of storage and amount of storage. Peak shaving is an OK use for them, though.
- est31 7y ago
  Also batteries lose their stored energy over time.
- ZeroGravitas 7y ago
  What percentage of our global storage needs do you believe are "long term" in this dichotomy? Is this at the "electric cars can't do my daily commute" or "electric cars can't tow my boat 600 miles without stopping, once a year" stage? Seems like most of the world just needs solar to last until the next day with a decent chunk of that power needed immediately after the sun sets and any wind power available could get smoothed out and/or stored for the morning by the same batteries.
  - StavrosK 7y ago
    If an electric car can do 200km on a charge, that's 99.9% of my annual driving needs met.
  - the8472 7y ago
    The sun does not shine every day. And not equally throughout all seasons. As the percentage of renewables increases so will the gaps on bad days/weeks. The differences can be dramatic and must be compensated some way. https://www.energy-charts.de/power.htm?source=solar-wind&year=2019&month=1 https://www.energy-charts.de/power.htm?source=solar-wind&yea...
    - ZeroGravitas 7y ago
      I'm familiar with the concept of seasons, just as I'm familiar with the concept of yearly boat trips. But lots of people live near the equator, just like lots of people don't really ever go for long drives so rather than focus on one particularly difficult case and then giving up I was looking for some kind of rough quantification of the problem. In analogy I'm just wondering whether the equivalent of the "daily commute" for most of the planet can be easily covered with current tech at a cost less than curent alternatives and we only need to worry about a comparitively small fraction that remains, which we could apply those savings to dealing with.
dwheeler 7y ago
If this prediction turns out to be true, it would be a real boon for reducing carbon emissions. Changing from 7% to 40% of electrical generation is a big deal. I'm sure it's not enough, but it sounds like a start.
- kragen 7y ago
  It's pretty much guaranteed: even current photovoltaic pricing, let alone another factor of ten down the learning curve, means energy in the daytime is super cheap to free. This creates an immense market opportunity for utility-scale storage.
  - Brakenshire 7y ago
    And for finding ways of using energy at peak times. I could imagine everyone charging their cars at work if it turns out the electricity is cheap at that time.
    - kragen 7y ago
      Absolutely! I think demand response is going to be even bigger than storage; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20664835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20664835 for more thoughts on this.
- tim333 7y ago
  It seems a little conservative to me - I'd expect it to do that earlier than 2040.
- adrianN 7y ago
  Let's hope we didn't just replace 40% of electricity with renewables by 2040, or we can probably kiss civilization as we know it goodbye. We need to reduce global carbon emissions by 50% by 2030 if we want a fighting chance of staying below 2°. That's much more than just electricity.
  - eloff 7y ago
alexandra_cgg 7y ago
This is not happening, this is larger than the amount of energy demand in the US and renewables forecasted
- pfdietz 7y ago
  Many such forecasts have been embarrassingly wrong as of late, grossly underestimating the pace of renewable installation.
volak 7y ago
No companies listed in article - anyone have a list of companies developing new battery technology? Been something I've tried researching in the past with little luck
- dharma1 7y ago
  Maxwell, now owned by Tesla. I think Tesla will become a big player in the battery tech space
  - toomuchtodo 7y ago
    Maxwell dry battery electrode tech [1] is going to rapidly drive down cell costs (while increasing energy density) for Tesla. I posit this is also how they intend to pack 200kw of storage into the 2020 Roadster. Disclaimer: TSLA investor [1] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/02/tesla-buys-maxwell-to-eventually-triple-battery-energy-density.html https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/02/tesla-buys-maxwell-to-...
    - ridewinter 7y ago
      If this tech allows BEVs a significantly higher range it would be a game changer. Currently the range is about the same as gasoline cars with a longer refueling time. For your average consumer that’s not an improvement. But if I can go 800 miles per charge all the sudden my BEV looks like an iPhone X compared to your flipphone traditional vehicle.
      - dharma1 7y ago
        I think it's 20-30% better energy density than current batteries
      - toomuchtodo 7y ago
        Model S and X with the new Raven drivetrain is already pushing 370 miles of range. Very few people are going to drive 4 hours at a time without a break, definitely not going 600-800 between stops, although I could see this as beneficial to the Tesla Semi and their truck offering (where higher energy density is crucial).
josmala 7y ago
The numbers given in article the world wide battery installations are predicted in 2040 to cover about 20 minutes of world electricity consumption assuming it would be equal close to 2016 figures, where majority of world is in relative poverty. It definitely is at least two orders of magnitude too little to stop climate change. People assume the reducing emissions would stop climate change. Nope, emissions are only related to rate of change not absolute value. Reducing emissions by 90% would only slow down the change, it reducing 99% would actually stop it, and it would need to be about 100% to slowly reverse the effects of what has been done by the time humanity gets there.
- x43b 7y ago
  I actually work on reducing emissions tangentially and am absolutely not a "denier", but I have not seen any evidence that our models are so accurate that we can predict the tipping point from halting increases to decreases within 1%.
  - adrianN 7y ago
    You're probably right, but that's really nothing good. Our models are poor and despite not knowing where irrecoverable tipping points lie exactly, we blast full steam ahead with our emissions.
  - josmala 7y ago
    Just took a number which carbon is removed from air-sea-plants natural circulation. The increase in CO2 stops when emissions match the removal of CO2 from circulation as permanent basis. And that figure seems to be about 1% of our emissions. But the key issue is that those two numbers need to match in order to actually stop the climate change permanently which is so far away from every politicians discussion points. All the renewables and storage technologies fail when we start to calculate amount of material required to build them and mining of those resources. Only energy technology so far that could actually do it is nuclear. As for uranium limited reserves they are calculated about 0.1 cent per kwh price limit. It is one of those situations where emotions points towards renewables while numbers are clearly for the nuclear if people could accept tiny risk of having two bananas worth of radiation or even the extreme case of getting so high radiation dose that it would give as high cancer risk as the average alcohol consumption.
deepnotderp 7y ago
What happened to molten salt batteries?
spenrose 7y ago
That halving will make variable renewables much more effective: https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/8/9/20767886/renewable-energy-storage-cost-electricity https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/8/9/20767886...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
Animats 7y ago
It irks me to see predictions talked about as if past events. But this is a more solid guess than most. Actual progress has been impressive: 85% reduction in the 2010-18 period, says the article. Graph here: [1] Getting another 50% in 10 years can probably be done from manufacturing scale alone. Giant battery pack factories seem to be going up all over. This is something that ought to be almost totally automated, but doesn't yet seem to be. You're making large numbers of identical units for years per model, the best case for automation. Somebody will get that right soon. Do we get more energy density? 2x more, and gasoline cars are toast. [1] https://about.bnef.com/blog/behind-scenes-take-lithium-ion-battery-prices/ https://about.bnef.com/blog/behind-scenes-take-lithium-ion-b...
- Gustomaximus 7y ago
  Halve the cost and I suspect energy utilities as we know them are in trouble too. Currently solar is a no brainer in my country of Australia. Typically around a 6 year payoff for a 20 year benifit. Batteries are about break over ~10 years payback. But if you could half that it's becomes something many people will do. And once that starts happening it's a death spiral for utilities as they will have a every reducing customer base for a business with large fixed costs. As they put these expenses onto a shrinking base it only encourages more people to swap. So for a country with a large suburban population that has the solar battery option this is going to hit utilities hard. Their market could shrink to largely providing high density areas where households dont have the roof space to generate their own power.
  - reitzensteinm 7y ago
    Are you aware of anyone that's actually cut the grid connection? There's a big difference between generating enough energy over a year to be net zero, and being able to instantaneously supply power from batteries and solar throughout the year.
    - Animats 7y ago
      That's a problem in Hawaii. Hawaii got rid of net metering in 2015, because the utility was paying for solar power at a flat rate regardless of demand or time of day. Homeowners can still sell power to the utility, but at something like wholesale market rate. Or they can get batteries. Utilities fear being required to maintain electrical distribution and generating capacity and only getting revenue on cloudy days. This is a real issue in Hawaii, which has so much sun and no local fuel sources, but less of a problem elsewhere. It's a good problem to have.
qbaqbaqba 7y ago
Do we know how to safely dispose these batteries?

127 points by zeristor 7y ago

I had assumed fold was the same as 2^x, as in the number of layers for each fold of a piece of paper. The artice talks about a 122 fold increase in the amount the power of installed battery power, I assume that a 2^122 increase is impossible, even accounting for replacement of end of life power packs.

ben_w 7y ago
I believe “x-fold” means “times x“.
- wpietri 7y ago
  Exactly. For example, threefold is 3x: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/threefold https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/threefold
- zeristor 7y ago
  Perhaps a question of mere semantics but why use the word 'fold' when it means times? Is it just to sound more "sophisticated"?
  - ben_w 7y ago
    Apparently “fold” is an archaic suffix that means the same thing as times. I grew up with that so I haven’t really thought about it much.
    - dwheeler 7y ago
      "Fold" is not archaic, but it may be more common in some regions compared to others (see "pop" vs. "soda"). The "-fold" suffix is in Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary and it does NOT have an "archaic" marking. It's also one of the answers when you ask Google to "define fold" (you have to look lower because suffixes are sorted after the main word). I use the suffix myself; it's nice and short when you need to express the concept.
  - reitzensteinm 7y ago
    Accusing the author of using "122 fold" instead of "times 122" to sound smart with a comment containing the phrase "a question of mere semantics" just might be peak HN.

new_realist 7y ago

For long term energy storage batteries are not ideal. Their costs increase linearly with time of storage and amount of storage. Peak shaving is an OK use for them, though.

est31 7y ago
Also batteries lose their stored energy over time.
ZeroGravitas 7y ago
What percentage of our global storage needs do you believe are "long term" in this dichotomy? Is this at the "electric cars can't do my daily commute" or "electric cars can't tow my boat 600 miles without stopping, once a year" stage? Seems like most of the world just needs solar to last until the next day with a decent chunk of that power needed immediately after the sun sets and any wind power available could get smoothed out and/or stored for the morning by the same batteries.
- StavrosK 7y ago
  If an electric car can do 200km on a charge, that's 99.9% of my annual driving needs met.
- the8472 7y ago
  The sun does not shine every day. And not equally throughout all seasons. As the percentage of renewables increases so will the gaps on bad days/weeks. The differences can be dramatic and must be compensated some way. https://www.energy-charts.de/power.htm?source=solar-wind&year=2019&month=1 https://www.energy-charts.de/power.htm?source=solar-wind&yea...
  - ZeroGravitas 7y ago
    I'm familiar with the concept of seasons, just as I'm familiar with the concept of yearly boat trips. But lots of people live near the equator, just like lots of people don't really ever go for long drives so rather than focus on one particularly difficult case and then giving up I was looking for some kind of rough quantification of the problem. In analogy I'm just wondering whether the equivalent of the "daily commute" for most of the planet can be easily covered with current tech at a cost less than curent alternatives and we only need to worry about a comparitively small fraction that remains, which we could apply those savings to dealing with.

dwheeler 7y ago

If this prediction turns out to be true, it would be a real boon for reducing carbon emissions. Changing from 7% to 40% of electrical generation is a big deal. I'm sure it's not enough, but it sounds like a start.

kragen 7y ago
It's pretty much guaranteed: even current photovoltaic pricing, let alone another factor of ten down the learning curve, means energy in the daytime is super cheap to free. This creates an immense market opportunity for utility-scale storage.
- Brakenshire 7y ago
  And for finding ways of using energy at peak times. I could imagine everyone charging their cars at work if it turns out the electricity is cheap at that time.
  - kragen 7y ago
    Absolutely! I think demand response is going to be even bigger than storage; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20664835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20664835 for more thoughts on this.
tim333 7y ago
It seems a little conservative to me - I'd expect it to do that earlier than 2040.
adrianN 7y ago
Let's hope we didn't just replace 40% of electricity with renewables by 2040, or we can probably kiss civilization as we know it goodbye. We need to reduce global carbon emissions by 50% by 2030 if we want a fighting chance of staying below 2°. That's much more than just electricity.
- eloff 7y ago

alexandra_cgg 7y ago

This is not happening, this is larger than the amount of energy demand in the US and renewables forecasted

pfdietz 7y ago
Many such forecasts have been embarrassingly wrong as of late, grossly underestimating the pace of renewable installation.

volak 7y ago

No companies listed in article - anyone have a list of companies developing new battery technology? Been something I've tried researching in the past with little luck

dharma1 7y ago
Maxwell, now owned by Tesla. I think Tesla will become a big player in the battery tech space
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  Maxwell dry battery electrode tech [1] is going to rapidly drive down cell costs (while increasing energy density) for Tesla. I posit this is also how they intend to pack 200kw of storage into the 2020 Roadster. Disclaimer: TSLA investor [1] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/02/tesla-buys-maxwell-to-eventually-triple-battery-energy-density.html https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/02/tesla-buys-maxwell-to-...
  - ridewinter 7y ago
    If this tech allows BEVs a significantly higher range it would be a game changer. Currently the range is about the same as gasoline cars with a longer refueling time. For your average consumer that’s not an improvement. But if I can go 800 miles per charge all the sudden my BEV looks like an iPhone X compared to your flipphone traditional vehicle.
    - dharma1 7y ago
      I think it's 20-30% better energy density than current batteries
    - toomuchtodo 7y ago
      Model S and X with the new Raven drivetrain is already pushing 370 miles of range. Very few people are going to drive 4 hours at a time without a break, definitely not going 600-800 between stops, although I could see this as beneficial to the Tesla Semi and their truck offering (where higher energy density is crucial).

josmala 7y ago

The numbers given in article the world wide battery installations are predicted in 2040 to cover about 20 minutes of world electricity consumption assuming it would be equal close to 2016 figures, where majority of world is in relative poverty. It definitely is at least two orders of magnitude too little to stop climate change. People assume the reducing emissions would stop climate change. Nope, emissions are only related to rate of change not absolute value. Reducing emissions by 90% would only slow down the change, it reducing 99% would actually stop it, and it would need to be about 100% to slowly reverse the effects of what has been done by the time humanity gets there.

x43b 7y ago
I actually work on reducing emissions tangentially and am absolutely not a "denier", but I have not seen any evidence that our models are so accurate that we can predict the tipping point from halting increases to decreases within 1%.
- adrianN 7y ago
  You're probably right, but that's really nothing good. Our models are poor and despite not knowing where irrecoverable tipping points lie exactly, we blast full steam ahead with our emissions.
- josmala 7y ago
  Just took a number which carbon is removed from air-sea-plants natural circulation. The increase in CO2 stops when emissions match the removal of CO2 from circulation as permanent basis. And that figure seems to be about 1% of our emissions. But the key issue is that those two numbers need to match in order to actually stop the climate change permanently which is so far away from every politicians discussion points. All the renewables and storage technologies fail when we start to calculate amount of material required to build them and mining of those resources. Only energy technology so far that could actually do it is nuclear. As for uranium limited reserves they are calculated about 0.1 cent per kwh price limit. It is one of those situations where emotions points towards renewables while numbers are clearly for the nuclear if people could accept tiny risk of having two bananas worth of radiation or even the extreme case of getting so high radiation dose that it would give as high cancer risk as the average alcohol consumption.

deepnotderp 7y ago

What happened to molten salt batteries?

spenrose 7y ago

That halving will make variable renewables much more effective: https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/8/9/20767886/renewable-energy-storage-cost-electricity https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/8/9/20767886...

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

Animats 7y ago

It irks me to see predictions talked about as if past events. But this is a more solid guess than most. Actual progress has been impressive: 85% reduction in the 2010-18 period, says the article. Graph here: [1] Getting another 50% in 10 years can probably be done from manufacturing scale alone. Giant battery pack factories seem to be going up all over. This is something that ought to be almost totally automated, but doesn't yet seem to be. You're making large numbers of identical units for years per model, the best case for automation. Somebody will get that right soon. Do we get more energy density? 2x more, and gasoline cars are toast. [1] https://about.bnef.com/blog/behind-scenes-take-lithium-ion-battery-prices/ https://about.bnef.com/blog/behind-scenes-take-lithium-ion-b...

Gustomaximus 7y ago
Halve the cost and I suspect energy utilities as we know them are in trouble too. Currently solar is a no brainer in my country of Australia. Typically around a 6 year payoff for a 20 year benifit. Batteries are about break over ~10 years payback. But if you could half that it's becomes something many people will do. And once that starts happening it's a death spiral for utilities as they will have a every reducing customer base for a business with large fixed costs. As they put these expenses onto a shrinking base it only encourages more people to swap. So for a country with a large suburban population that has the solar battery option this is going to hit utilities hard. Their market could shrink to largely providing high density areas where households dont have the roof space to generate their own power.
- reitzensteinm 7y ago
  Are you aware of anyone that's actually cut the grid connection? There's a big difference between generating enough energy over a year to be net zero, and being able to instantaneously supply power from batteries and solar throughout the year.
  - Animats 7y ago
    That's a problem in Hawaii. Hawaii got rid of net metering in 2015, because the utility was paying for solar power at a flat rate regardless of demand or time of day. Homeowners can still sell power to the utility, but at something like wholesale market rate. Or they can get batteries. Utilities fear being required to maintain electrical distribution and generating capacity and only getting revenue on cloudy days. This is a real issue in Hawaii, which has so much sun and no local fuel sources, but less of a problem elsewhere. It's a good problem to have.

qbaqbaqba 7y ago

Do we know how to safely dispose these batteries?