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And we are not even close to the scale of an industry with world-wide relevance. Semiconductors is a nearly 500billion$ industry for example. If batteries reach

And we are not even close to the scale of an industry with world-wide relevance. Semiconductors is a nearly 500billion$ industry for example. If batteries reach 100billion$ we could probably expect prices well below 50$/kwh. That means you can put a sufficiently large powerwall into your home for around the price of a new laptop. That in turn enables homeowners to generate most of their energy needs themselves via (also cheap) pv arrays. This technology has the chance to completely turn around the home energy market.

luis8 7y ago
Wouldnt prices of the grid go down as well? The grid could switch to a storage model too. Making it not that attractive to deal with all the maintenance.
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  With renewables knocking on 1 cent/kwh at utility scale, retail prices will go down, and the majority of the cost will be storage and transmission. You might expect prices to be higher at night (the reverse of now), as more of the light vehicle fleet moves to EVs and everyone charges their cars at night (unless you can incentivize workplace charging, when the sun is shining).
  - perilunar 7y ago
    > You might expect prices to be higher at night For people with rooftop solar and no batteries, that's already the case (depending on the feed-in tariff of course). Saw an article about this today: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-12-05/solar-panels-rebates-energy-is-it-worth-it/11738270 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-12-05/solar-panels-rebates-...
    - toomuchtodo 7y ago
      Yeah, definitely going to see tariffs disfavor rooftop solar (utilities don't want to be the "battery" if they can avoid it), which is going to increase battery uptake rate (to consume your own generation first instead of export it for no value to the grid), which will drive battery prices down faster.
- AtlasBarfed 7y ago
  If there's that much storage in cars if a large % of transport switches over, especially consumer commuters with long-range batteries, perhaps a service can allow EV owners to get paid to allow their daily commute cars to store excess solar in the day and stream it back at night.
  - basch 7y ago
    At what point does switching to something more trolleybus like, where your car charges while driving down the road, maybe in contact with a rail, make more sense than all this self driving and battery capacity? Even if it was just interstates.
    - toomuchtodo 7y ago
      Likely never (if you look at Tesla's luxury vehicles almost at 400 miles of range [S and X with Raven drivetrains] and their Supercharger charge rates [0-80% SOC in ~15-20 minutes]). Battery capacity per kg and charge rates are likely to improve faster than coordinating the deployment of nationwide rail or overhead wire electrical infrastructure on interstates (a Supercharger station only takes about two weeks to install, and costs ~$150k-200k). https://supercharge.info/map https://supercharge.info/map
      - Jamwinner 7y ago
        Yes, but energy density is terrible. You are having to move 3x the weight not to mention the huge effincicy hit . You arent taking reality into account.
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
        jsight 7y ago
        The Model 3 weighs hundreds of lb more than its equivalent in an ICE car, not 3x as much. These numbers are still improving as well.
- germinalphrase 7y ago
  Maybe not. I’ve heard that the fixed costs of a traditional grid are substantial enough that if large numbers of homeowners moved to PV generation the grid costs could become unsustainable and ultimately unmaintainable/collapse.
  - abraae 7y ago
    The grid would not collapse but instead would evolve (maybe wiping out whole swatches of companies and utilities in the process but so what). Many people won't (or can't) install their own PV/storage, but everyone needs electricity. Those without PV and/or storage will need to purchase their electricity from others. The mechanism for getting the electricity from seller to purchaser will be a grid of some sort. La plus ca change and all that.
  - kjksf 7y ago
    Or the company maintaining the grid will raise prices. If you had to make the choice between "no electricity to power my fridge, my lights, my laptop" vs "pay double for the electricity", you'll pay double. If people respond rationally, this would lead to re-designing the grid to be more decentralized and maintain the lower cost of energy we get from solar.
  - mr_toad 7y ago
    This a largely an accounting problem. Most consumers pay by kWh, with no separation between generation and transmission cost components. If more people generated their own power, they’d have to seperate out the generation and transmission costs.
    - cobookman 7y ago
      PGE & Peninsula Clean Energy already breaks out transmission and generation costs. Most the costs are for transmission. https://www.peninsulacleanenergy.com/for-residents/ https://www.peninsulacleanenergy.com/for-residents/ https://www.peninsulacleanenergy.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/PCE_EcoPlus_Sample_Bill.pdf https://www.peninsulacleanenergy.com/wp-content/uploads/2017...
    - 7y ago
- marcosdumay 7y ago
  I imagine cities will stay centralized. There is some money selling electricity from large plots to small ones (and apartment), a nice amount of it on selling from houses to industry, and a huge amount of it on intermediating the PV and storage transactions. But cheap batteries will probably means a large downsizing on the large distance distribution grid.
- jillesvangurp 7y ago
  Grid prices will go down as demand goes down when people start producing and storing energy themselves. With the cost of solar panels and batteries dropping and production capacity growing exponentially while prices continue to drop, the grid will be less important but still essential to many. It will also accelerate the demise of coal, gas, and nuclear as they are already too expensive and will have no chance whatsoever in an open market where prices are trending down massively over the next decades. The status quo of course is that they are effectively state protected monopolies currently in many places, which will slow things down in some places and is also the reason you get to pay many times the actual market price per kwh.
  - 9HZZRfNlpR 7y ago
    If people still need the grid but don't oat for anymore, then the prices go up since the powerline companies are usually required to maintain them. It doesn't matter than you need power only 8 days a year few kw.
stefan_ 7y ago
Oil is a $70 trillion industry and yet a barrel of crude is currently $60. What does that mean? Nothing. You are just creating a faux correlation between two prices with no justification.
- tlamponi 7y ago
  Yeah, and a barrel of oil is about 1.7 MWh, so the proportion seems to be about right. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrel_of_oil_equivalent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrel_of_oil_equivalent OP gave an implicit justifications, bigger industry can mean that the goal to more efficient produce gets backed by more $€£, and thus gets reached more faster - at least if no monopoly will be created (as then the consumer is screwed 100%).
- cjohnson318 7y ago
  It currently costs about $10-12 million to drill and produce a well in West Texas. The fact that a barrel of crude is only ~$60 is absolutely mind-boggling.
  - toomuchtodo 7y ago
    The current crude price is due to a worldwide glut in the oil market along with weakening demand growth, OPEC facing forces that are causing it to make production missteps it has no choice but to make, and US shale having to pump to service debt they've overextended themselves with. Chesapeake Energy, previously an O&G industry darling, is struggling under $9 billion in crushing debt, and has made statements they may not be able to continue as a going concern. At the same time, investors are not so interested in overly optimistic and aggressive well depletion projections. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-oil-opec/opec-extends-oil-cut-to-prop-up-prices-as-economy-weakens-idUSKCN1TW1LF https://www.reuters.com/article/us-oil-opec/opec-extends-oil... (OPEC extends oil cut to prop up prices as economy weakens) https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-09-08/the-world-s-oil-glut-is-much-worse-than-it-looks https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-09-08/the-wo... (The World’s Oil Glut Is Much Worse Than It Looks)
    - 7y ago
retrovm 7y ago
I think this is an important point. The lithium-ion battery market is _still_ smaller than the lead-acid battery market. This business is still ramping up.
- Enginerrrd 7y ago
  Wow, really? I've got dozens of Li-ion batteries in my house and only two lead-acid. One in my truck and one I use as a backup power supply for my radio equipment.
  - retrovm 7y ago
    Well, estimates I can google up at the moment put the Pb-acid worldwide market at ~$42bn/year and the Li-ion market at ~$40bn/year. The latter is growing much faster but the former is also growing.
  - jartelt 7y ago
    Lead acid batteries are used in pretty much everything ICE vehicle and are used in large quantities as uninterruptible power supplies (data centers use a ton). It's a huge industry.
    - slfnflctd 7y ago
      They're cheap, simple (don't require a complex BMS), predictable/safe, have a long-enough lifetime and are easy to recycle. The biggest drawback really is weight - and thereby shipping cost - but for long term stationary applications that doesn't matter. Lithium Ion attached to a supercapacitor with a sophisticated BMS is a much more complex setup-- yet even so, it will probably end up being the gold standard in the long run at this point, I would say even in most places lead-acid is still being used. I would not have predicted anything like that even five years ago, but barring some unlikely breakthrough it seems like where we're headed.
      - oceanplexian 7y ago
        Honestly it’s just market inefficiencies at this point. I build battery packs for drones and RC planes and the lead acid stuff is just garbage. They can’t perform to more than 60% of their rated capacity and then start voltage sagging. The energy density is pitiful. A small UPS under your desk with LiFePo4 cells would outperform the lead acid 3-4x for the same space and last longer for the same or less money.
lonelappde 7y ago
How are you comparing the cost to fill a powerwall with consumable energy, to a durable good like a laptop?
- choeger 7y ago
  By overallocating. In Europe, most homes can do well with 10kwh daily electric energy. Make that 20 to be on the safe side. To fill that reliably you might need something between 10 and 50kwp solar energy. Everything can be bought once.
m463 7y ago
I've thought it could not only change the home energy market, but housing. Housing could become much more distributed, as people could live independently where they chose. (not that socially they would do that)
- Aaron_Putnam 7y ago
  This still relies on bureaucratic changes - in many jurisdictions, connecting to the grid is mandatory. That's the current situation in Australia, for example: https://reneweconomy.com.au/the-40-australian-towns-that-could-and-should-quit-the-grid-93813/ https://reneweconomy.com.au/the-40-australian-towns-that-cou...
  - m463 7y ago
    In the US these restrictions are usually tied to nearby cities. The larger but sparsely populated unincorporated areas don't require (or have) utilities.
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  I'd guess electricity is only 1 of ~20 things I need civilization for.
- erikpukinskis 7y ago
  > (not that socially they would do that) Factor in that once VR headsets hit MVP status, you won’t need to commute for basic “we need you to be in a room with these people to talk to them” tasks, it becomes even more plausible. What happens to the property market if “you don’t need to commute to be in meetings” comes true?
  - sjy 7y ago
    What makes you think that VR will deliver on the remote work dream where videoconferencing failed? I don’t think the 2D nature of videoconferencing is the problem here.
- pjc50 7y ago

luis8 7y ago

Wouldnt prices of the grid go down as well? The grid could switch to a storage model too. Making it not that attractive to deal with all the maintenance.

toomuchtodo 7y ago
With renewables knocking on 1 cent/kwh at utility scale, retail prices will go down, and the majority of the cost will be storage and transmission. You might expect prices to be higher at night (the reverse of now), as more of the light vehicle fleet moves to EVs and everyone charges their cars at night (unless you can incentivize workplace charging, when the sun is shining).
- perilunar 7y ago
  > You might expect prices to be higher at night For people with rooftop solar and no batteries, that's already the case (depending on the feed-in tariff of course). Saw an article about this today: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-12-05/solar-panels-rebates-energy-is-it-worth-it/11738270 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-12-05/solar-panels-rebates-...
  - toomuchtodo 7y ago
    Yeah, definitely going to see tariffs disfavor rooftop solar (utilities don't want to be the "battery" if they can avoid it), which is going to increase battery uptake rate (to consume your own generation first instead of export it for no value to the grid), which will drive battery prices down faster.
AtlasBarfed 7y ago
If there's that much storage in cars if a large % of transport switches over, especially consumer commuters with long-range batteries, perhaps a service can allow EV owners to get paid to allow their daily commute cars to store excess solar in the day and stream it back at night.
- basch 7y ago
  At what point does switching to something more trolleybus like, where your car charges while driving down the road, maybe in contact with a rail, make more sense than all this self driving and battery capacity? Even if it was just interstates.
  - toomuchtodo 7y ago
    Likely never (if you look at Tesla's luxury vehicles almost at 400 miles of range [S and X with Raven drivetrains] and their Supercharger charge rates [0-80% SOC in ~15-20 minutes]). Battery capacity per kg and charge rates are likely to improve faster than coordinating the deployment of nationwide rail or overhead wire electrical infrastructure on interstates (a Supercharger station only takes about two weeks to install, and costs ~$150k-200k). https://supercharge.info/map https://supercharge.info/map
    - Jamwinner 7y ago
      Yes, but energy density is terrible. You are having to move 3x the weight not to mention the huge effincicy hit . You arent taking reality into account.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - jsight 7y ago
        The Model 3 weighs hundreds of lb more than its equivalent in an ICE car, not 3x as much. These numbers are still improving as well.
germinalphrase 7y ago
Maybe not. I’ve heard that the fixed costs of a traditional grid are substantial enough that if large numbers of homeowners moved to PV generation the grid costs could become unsustainable and ultimately unmaintainable/collapse.
- abraae 7y ago
  The grid would not collapse but instead would evolve (maybe wiping out whole swatches of companies and utilities in the process but so what). Many people won't (or can't) install their own PV/storage, but everyone needs electricity. Those without PV and/or storage will need to purchase their electricity from others. The mechanism for getting the electricity from seller to purchaser will be a grid of some sort. La plus ca change and all that.
- kjksf 7y ago
  Or the company maintaining the grid will raise prices. If you had to make the choice between "no electricity to power my fridge, my lights, my laptop" vs "pay double for the electricity", you'll pay double. If people respond rationally, this would lead to re-designing the grid to be more decentralized and maintain the lower cost of energy we get from solar.
- mr_toad 7y ago
  This a largely an accounting problem. Most consumers pay by kWh, with no separation between generation and transmission cost components. If more people generated their own power, they’d have to seperate out the generation and transmission costs.
  - cobookman 7y ago
    PGE & Peninsula Clean Energy already breaks out transmission and generation costs. Most the costs are for transmission. https://www.peninsulacleanenergy.com/for-residents/ https://www.peninsulacleanenergy.com/for-residents/ https://www.peninsulacleanenergy.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/PCE_EcoPlus_Sample_Bill.pdf https://www.peninsulacleanenergy.com/wp-content/uploads/2017...
  - 7y ago
marcosdumay 7y ago
I imagine cities will stay centralized. There is some money selling electricity from large plots to small ones (and apartment), a nice amount of it on selling from houses to industry, and a huge amount of it on intermediating the PV and storage transactions. But cheap batteries will probably means a large downsizing on the large distance distribution grid.
jillesvangurp 7y ago
Grid prices will go down as demand goes down when people start producing and storing energy themselves. With the cost of solar panels and batteries dropping and production capacity growing exponentially while prices continue to drop, the grid will be less important but still essential to many. It will also accelerate the demise of coal, gas, and nuclear as they are already too expensive and will have no chance whatsoever in an open market where prices are trending down massively over the next decades. The status quo of course is that they are effectively state protected monopolies currently in many places, which will slow things down in some places and is also the reason you get to pay many times the actual market price per kwh.
- 9HZZRfNlpR 7y ago
  If people still need the grid but don't oat for anymore, then the prices go up since the powerline companies are usually required to maintain them. It doesn't matter than you need power only 8 days a year few kw.

stefan_ 7y ago

Oil is a $70 trillion industry and yet a barrel of crude is currently $60. What does that mean? Nothing. You are just creating a faux correlation between two prices with no justification.

tlamponi 7y ago
Yeah, and a barrel of oil is about 1.7 MWh, so the proportion seems to be about right. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrel_of_oil_equivalent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrel_of_oil_equivalent OP gave an implicit justifications, bigger industry can mean that the goal to more efficient produce gets backed by more $€£, and thus gets reached more faster - at least if no monopoly will be created (as then the consumer is screwed 100%).
cjohnson318 7y ago
It currently costs about $10-12 million to drill and produce a well in West Texas. The fact that a barrel of crude is only ~$60 is absolutely mind-boggling.
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  The current crude price is due to a worldwide glut in the oil market along with weakening demand growth, OPEC facing forces that are causing it to make production missteps it has no choice but to make, and US shale having to pump to service debt they've overextended themselves with. Chesapeake Energy, previously an O&G industry darling, is struggling under $9 billion in crushing debt, and has made statements they may not be able to continue as a going concern. At the same time, investors are not so interested in overly optimistic and aggressive well depletion projections. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-oil-opec/opec-extends-oil-cut-to-prop-up-prices-as-economy-weakens-idUSKCN1TW1LF https://www.reuters.com/article/us-oil-opec/opec-extends-oil... (OPEC extends oil cut to prop up prices as economy weakens) https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-09-08/the-world-s-oil-glut-is-much-worse-than-it-looks https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-09-08/the-wo... (The World’s Oil Glut Is Much Worse Than It Looks)
  - 7y ago

retrovm 7y ago

I think this is an important point. The lithium-ion battery market is _still_ smaller than the lead-acid battery market. This business is still ramping up.

Enginerrrd 7y ago
Wow, really? I've got dozens of Li-ion batteries in my house and only two lead-acid. One in my truck and one I use as a backup power supply for my radio equipment.
- retrovm 7y ago
  Well, estimates I can google up at the moment put the Pb-acid worldwide market at ~$42bn/year and the Li-ion market at ~$40bn/year. The latter is growing much faster but the former is also growing.
- jartelt 7y ago
  Lead acid batteries are used in pretty much everything ICE vehicle and are used in large quantities as uninterruptible power supplies (data centers use a ton). It's a huge industry.
  - slfnflctd 7y ago
    They're cheap, simple (don't require a complex BMS), predictable/safe, have a long-enough lifetime and are easy to recycle. The biggest drawback really is weight - and thereby shipping cost - but for long term stationary applications that doesn't matter. Lithium Ion attached to a supercapacitor with a sophisticated BMS is a much more complex setup-- yet even so, it will probably end up being the gold standard in the long run at this point, I would say even in most places lead-acid is still being used. I would not have predicted anything like that even five years ago, but barring some unlikely breakthrough it seems like where we're headed.
    - oceanplexian 7y ago
      Honestly it’s just market inefficiencies at this point. I build battery packs for drones and RC planes and the lead acid stuff is just garbage. They can’t perform to more than 60% of their rated capacity and then start voltage sagging. The energy density is pitiful. A small UPS under your desk with LiFePo4 cells would outperform the lead acid 3-4x for the same space and last longer for the same or less money.

lonelappde 7y ago

How are you comparing the cost to fill a powerwall with consumable energy, to a durable good like a laptop?

choeger 7y ago
By overallocating. In Europe, most homes can do well with 10kwh daily electric energy. Make that 20 to be on the safe side. To fill that reliably you might need something between 10 and 50kwp solar energy. Everything can be bought once.

m463 7y ago

I've thought it could not only change the home energy market, but housing. Housing could become much more distributed, as people could live independently where they chose. (not that socially they would do that)

Aaron_Putnam 7y ago
This still relies on bureaucratic changes - in many jurisdictions, connecting to the grid is mandatory. That's the current situation in Australia, for example: https://reneweconomy.com.au/the-40-australian-towns-that-could-and-should-quit-the-grid-93813/ https://reneweconomy.com.au/the-40-australian-towns-that-cou...
- m463 7y ago
  In the US these restrictions are usually tied to nearby cities. The larger but sparsely populated unincorporated areas don't require (or have) utilities.
BurningFrog 7y ago
I'd guess electricity is only 1 of ~20 things I need civilization for.
erikpukinskis 7y ago
> (not that socially they would do that) Factor in that once VR headsets hit MVP status, you won’t need to commute for basic “we need you to be in a room with these people to talk to them” tasks, it becomes even more plausible. What happens to the property market if “you don’t need to commute to be in meetings” comes true?
- sjy 7y ago
  What makes you think that VR will deliver on the remote work dream where videoconferencing failed? I don’t think the 2D nature of videoconferencing is the problem here.
pjc50 7y ago