30 ms·
Lithium battery costs have fallen by 98% in three decades
- dragosmocrii 6y agoThe article says that today a battery pack the size of a backpack and that weighs about 40kg, can power a house for a day. Is that really so? Would that be a normal house, being powered for an entire day? I find it hard to believe that battery would pack that much energy
- tyingq 6y agoA Tesla Powerwall 2 weighs 114.0 kg and provides 13.5 kWh. Average US household electricity consumption is 877 kWh/month, which would be 29kWh/day. Either they mean a very efficient/small house, or homeowners with unusually frugal habits. Edit: Average UK household electricity consumption appears to be around 10kWh/day.
- Someone 6y agoOr houses not in the USA. http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/average-household-electricity-consumption http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/average-household-electricity...: “The average American or Canadian household in 2010 used about twenty times more than the typical Nigerian household, and two to three times more than a typical European home”
- umvi 6y agoWhy is that? Is it because North Americans use electricity for cooking and heating whereas other countries use gas for that?
- tyingq 6y agoI suspect big houses, poor insulation, air conditioning, and gluttony. Most of the US houses I've been in use either gas or fuel oil for heating.
- galangalalgol 6y agoWe have lots of elctric furnaces or heat pumps in the southern and western states where winters are milder. The air conditioning is the real usage. The insulation in new homes is good, but the insulation to keep heat out needs to be in walls as much as ceilings which is harder to retrofit. Modern AC systems help quite a lot and keeping heat away from ac ducting in the attic by insulating them amd adding roof vents and radiant barrier to keep the attic cool. Lighter colors so your south facing wall doesn't fry eggs (literally) also help.
- fwsgonzo 6y agoProbably due to differences in standards, like wall isolation (I don't know the english terms). My house has 25cm isolation in the walls and 40cm isolation under the roof. I also have 3-layer windows and a thick metal door. The ventilation system is isolated and the air heat is reused to save electricity. This is for a 260sqm house.
- geoduck14 6y agoIt's cause we're #1!!! /s
- nightski 6y agoWe average 400-500 in the spring, fall, and winter. In the summer with AC however we'll double that. We are in a northern climate, I have to imagine in the south it gets pretty spendy for AC.
- ajuc 6y agoAir conditioning isn't needed in many EU countries except for a few days a year (so it's not worth to even install it in private homes, modern offices mostly have them though for some reason). Also depending on the country few people use cloth driers - you just hang your clothes on a cable and let them dry by themselves. Houses in colder parts of EU are also usually better isolated than in US ([1] that's a typical Polish house for example), and more people live in flats in blocks instead of independent houses (so heat loses are vastly reduced because you only have 1 or 2 outdoors walls). Homes are also simply bigger in US. Average home size (including flats) in my country is a little over 70 square meters. It's probably bigger in western Europe but not by that much. Also big houses usually have 2/3 stories instead of being very "wide". And electric heating/cooking isn't very popular, but I think that depends on the country. It all goes back to electricity prices - in Poland in 1980s most houses had no isolation, everybody heated with coal which had fixed (and very low) prices. Then communism ended, prices were free to change with the market, some taxes were introduced, and suddenly everybody isolated their houses in like 10 years. Otherwise you burned money like crazy. [1] https://s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/pressland-cms/cache/__original__/tl/20503051-https-bi.jpeg https://s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/pressland-cms/cache/__...
- baybal2 6y ago> ([1] that's a typical Polish house for example), I believe a typical Polish "house" will be an apartment.
- ajuc 6y ago42% of Poles live in apartaments. It was slightly above 50% several years ago.
- thesteamboat 6y agoSorry to nitpick, but I assume you mean EU houses are better insulated than those in the US, rather than isolated.
- ajuc 6y ago
- fulafel 6y agoUS housing is very roomy, often features AC and poor insulation, and electricity is cheap and avergae incomes are high.
- cwhiz 6y agoSame reason most Americans are poor. Inability to prioritize long term goals over immediate gains. Save $50 today, but spend $500 more over the next decade.
- 300africans 6y agoHere in Burkina faso, I use between 5 and 12kwh per day with air con some months taking it close to 15kwh. If the price keeps coming down and with some solar installation, one can leave the grid in a couple of years time
- marcosdumay 6y agoI imagine most of the aircon energy usage coincides with the times of peak photovoltaic generation. So if you calculate by total energy consumption, you'll overestimate things by a huge margin.
- Armisael16 6y agoYou can imagine that, but it isn’t true. AC usage is relatively low in the middle of the day because people let their houses warm up while their at work. It jumps at the end of the workday.
- nicoburns 6y ago> AC usage is relatively low in the middle of the day because people let their houses warm up while their at work Presumably if electricity was free during th day and expensive at night, that habit would change rapdily.
- _JamesA_ 6y agoIs that still true in the work from home post covid era?
- baybal2 6y agoHow is life in Burkina Faso?
- ghaff 6y agoIt also looks like a Powerwall 2 costs about $7,500 plus about another $5K for installation. I use about 20kWh per day--I have a somewhat smaller house--and vaguely looked into whole house batteries a few months back and concluded they would only make sense if I had it wired into just a few critical systems like my furnace. But, at the end of the day, I should still just get a propane-fueled generator at this point if I ever got anything. So $2K for a battery that can power a house for a day seems almost an order of magnitude off if they literally mean power an entire normal house.
- quickthrowman 6y ago> But, at the end of the day, I should still just get a propane-fueled generator at this point if I ever got anything. Yes, a propane or natural gas generator is a lot more flexible/higher capacity
- dv_dt 6y agoIt’s enough for the twilight evening usage for a household when paired with a solar system.
- adrianmonk 6y agoYour point still stands, but there's probably some small correction factor necessary since the article seems to be talking about the weight of the cells only. Although I'd bet the weight of the cells does make up the majority of the mass of a Powerwall, other components might have significant weight. From some quick, cursory research, it seems to have a metal frame/cover and apparently has some kind of liquid cooling. (Also, minimizing weight for a Powerwall seems less important than for an EV.)
- natch 6y agoThe average US house is not the average house, nor is it representative of normal in the world we live in, which happens to dwarf the US by a factor of roughly 25.
- tyingq 6y agoI don't assume they mean something smaller than a factor of 25 either. 1.2kWh would be substantially less than 40kg.
- kragen 6y agoNo, no, the world is 25 times bigger than the US, by population. So it's ridiculous to equate houses with US houses, especially when reading a British publication.
- tyingq 6y agoThe article uses US dollars quite a lot. That's why I posted US stats, marked as such. I did update it with a UK average as well. Also, FWIW, the North American edition of the Economist accounts for more than half the readers. UK readers are less than 20% of the total.
- natch 6y agoKragen was right, I was talking about the size of the world. The US is not representative of average or normal. Nor is the UK. And UK publications, due perhaps to colonial history, tend to take a more global view so I would not assume their notion of an average house is centered on the UK either.
- tyingq 6y agoNeither is air conditioning representative of the world, or people with a "house" that have $2k to spend on a 40kg lithium battery plus more on the other stuff like inverters, frames, installation. But all are clearly noted in the article as part of the target audience.
- sgt 6y agoSouth Africa here. Our house uses about 20 kWh a day during the summer, with some minor AC usage in one of the rooms when needed. During the winter probably about 30kWh, and that excludes extra costs like wood for fireplace. My house is fully insulated and all windows are double glazed, so that keeps energy usage more efficient. I also have a solar heater (aka "geyser") which lowers energy costs even more. So with that in mind, I really can't believe they're using less than this in Europe...
- bobthepanda 6y agoThey might be just using less electricity but other means to generate their needs. I've heard that the EU has a lot more district heating (which wouldn't show up in an electricity bill, AFAIK) and I'd imagine a fair deal of older buildings have a boiler using oil or gas or something else to burn. AC is also just not very prevalent.
- nicoburns 6y ago> I'd imagine a fair deal of older buildings have a boiler using oil or gas or something else to burn. In the UK gas boilers are common even in newbuild homes. I don't know a single person with AC (though it's common in offices).
- brucehoult 6y agoFar north New Zealand, 4 bedroom house, no insulation, no double glazing, electric hot water and cooking. 9-10 kWh/day October-May, ~18 kWh/day June-September (dehumidifier). Wood burner (about US$150/winter) when the heat from the dehumidifier isn't enough to maintain 20 C.
- sjwright 6y agoRemarkable. I’m in Sydney, my house sounds similar by description but I have gas hot water and stovetop. My house uses over 5 kWh/day for ambient/idle power alone.
- 6y ago
- petra 6y agoSo 29kWH/day. Say you get half of that from your solar panels at sunrise. 13.9kWh is almost the other half.
- gok 6y agoAt best it would store about 8kWh, so... it would have to be a pretty efficient house.
- Phenomenit 6y agoI think that depends on how much heating/cooling is being used.it should be enough for just lights and devices.
- Tade0 6y ago40kg translates to 4-9kWh depending on the chemistry, meanwhile houses in the UK draw around 3kWh/day averaged over a year so unless a house is woefully inefficient, it checks out.
- labawi 6y ago> Average US household .. 29kWh/day > houses in the UK .. 3kWh/day Seems believable from what I've heard.
- turbinerneiter 6y agoI think in the US it's common to heat and cool badly insulated houses with electricity, whereas in europe almost nobody cools, heat comes from other sources and insulation is taking way more seriously, especially for anything built recently. The best way to reduce your energy bill (whichever source) is to live in the right climate zone I guess.
- ghaff 6y agoElectric heat isn't super common, especially in standalone houses, in areas where you need a lot of heat in the US. I don't know the numbers off the top of my head but electricity costs a lot more than gas or oil. You're right about the AC but I still use 20 kWh even with no AC (and no electric heat).
- turbinerneiter 6y agoThanks for the insight. I vaguely remembered that people run the ac in reverse for heat, but that is probably only in paces that almost need no heating. Do you know why you use that much? Do you heat your water with electricity? Fridge, freezer, tv, WiFi, Desktop PC, charging phones and laptop, ligths.
- ncallaway 6y ago- AC is a very common consumer of large amounts of electricity (depending on the region, many regions will have almost no AC while other regions will have it in every building running almost constantly) - Electrical heat is not the most common form of heating, but it's been growing a lot and is also a big consumer when it is used - Laundry Washer/Dryer are pretty large consumers (mostly the dryer) - Water heaters are often electrical - Electrical ovens and stove ranges are pretty common, which can pull quite a bit depending on how much use they receive - Microwaves pull a bit, but not huge
- f6v 6y agoVery much depends on the home. Tesla Powerwall 2 seems to be 13.5 kWh at 114 kg. Energy consumption can be anything from 30 to 40[1]. So one Powerwall 2 unit probably won't get you through the day if you use that much. [1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/electricity-use-in-homes.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/electricit...
- natch 6y agoGetting you through the day is not really the point though. The point is 1) shifting some consumption during peak hours off of peak rates and 2) having backup to get you through a limited outage, not necessarily at your full normal consumption level but without having to be in the dark / without internet / without phone and possibly car charging. Nobody should evaluate this by whether one battery pack by itself provides all the energy anyone needs for everything with no limits. It’s one component with several good use cases.
- spockz 6y agoI’m not sure about regulations in the US but in The Netherlands you cannot just attach a battery and think you are independent of the grid. To protect the net and people working on the net, power sources behind the meter must disengage when the net/mains power drops. This effectively disables your independence plan. If you want to be independent you have to get some expensive mechanism installed that will decouple your house from the net in case of net failure and bring it back when the mains is up again. And you need get it certified periodically. So unless you have enough generation to completely decouple from the net you are not really independent or it will cost you.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- turtlebits 6y agoThe wording in the article isn't great, but they are referring to the power consumption for a household in 1990.
- kragen 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density_Extended_Reference_Table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density_Extended_Refere... lists "battery, Lithium ion" as 0.46–0.72 MJ/kg. : user@host:~; units 2529 units, 72 prefixes, 56 nonlinear units You have: 40 kg * 0.6 MJ/kg You want: MJ * 24 / 0.041666667 (The 13.5 kWh in 114 kg tyingq cites for a Powerwall 2 in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26682770 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26682770 works out to 0.43 MJ/kg, which includes some power electronics as well as the batteries themselves. The US$12500 price ghaff cites in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26682837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26682837 works out to under 4 kJ/US$, or US$925/kWh, which is a terribly high price even for lithium-ion.) 24 MJ would be 1 MJ/hour for 24 hours, or 3 MJ/hour for 8 hours, about 300 or 800 watts, respectively. Some houses use much more than that; others use much less. If you're looking at your electric bill, 500 watts would be about 370 kWh per month: You have: 500 watts * 1 month You want: kWh * 365.2422 / 0.0027379093 40 kg of lithium-ion batteries are indeed roughly the size of a backpack (≈20 liters), though I wouldn't call it a small backpack. Around here, the retail price for the batteries would probably be closer to US$2400 retail than the less than US$2000 they cite, but that's not an error in their calculations; it's just that they're using a lower price of US$140/kWh. The article claims that in the early 01990s this quantity of batteries would have cost US$75k. I'm pretty sure this is wrong. This quantity of lithium-ion batteries might have cost US$75k, but even today lead-acid batteries cost half what lithium-ion batteries do. I don't think the price of lead-acid batteries has changed that much over the last 25 or even 50 years, though admittedly I don't have any 30-year-old battery catalogs to check pricing in. Lithium-ion batteries in the 01990s would have weighed only a little more than lithium-ion batteries today, so it looks like they're using the pricing of lithium-ion batteries and the weight of lead-acid batteries. If you're powering your house from batteries, you should probably do it with lead-acid batteries, not lithium-ion batteries. The big disadvantage of lead-acid batteries is that they weigh roughly three times what lithium-ion batteries do (per joule), so lead-acid electric cars had roughly a third the range of lithium-ion electric cars. But the weight is not enough to matter for a house. There is enough lithium in Earth's crust to power the world economy through the night. There is, I think, not enough lead. So although lead is currently cheaper, lithium is more scalable. Other less developed candidate options include sodium batteries and aluminum fuel cells. Nickel-iron batteries might be even cheaper, though I'm not sure, and they're definitely more scalable. Nobody sells them anymore, though lots of telecom centers still run on them. It's unfortunate that the article cites a power capacity, "1.2 gigawatts-worth of storage", but not an energy capacity, for the US's utility-scale storage rampup last year. 1.2 gigawatts for five minutes would be 100 MWh, in the quaint units used in the energy markets; 1.2 gigawatts for 12 hours would be 14'400 MWh. There is a very significant difference between these; one requires 144 times as much battery behind it than the other. By contrast, the difference between 100 MWh over 5 minutes (1.2 gigawatts) and 100 MWh over 12 hours (0.008 gigawatts) is mostly a matter of what shape the batteries are and how much active cooling is needed. One wonders if this is not simply an error because the author did not know the difference between gigawatts and gigawatt-hours.
- shoo 6y agoAnother anecdote: I rent a 50m^2 apartment. Electricity consumption for the apartment, averaged over trailing 12 months, is 4.5 kWh / day. This excludes: energy for stove top/oven (natural gas) and energy for hot water (paid for as part of rent, cannot see the details). Consumption for two people, including one person working from home full time. Relatively modern apartment that is warm enough in winter without active heating. This will not be representative of energy usage in houses, larger apartments with many exterior sides & lots of exposed glass. edit: house prior to that was an older 100 m^2 semi-detached house with much worse insulation. Similar setup with natural gas for cooking & hot water. Annual electricity consumption was 1750 kWh / year so about 4.8 kWh / day on average, for two people. Not so different to the current situation. Curious. From memory we ran the air conditioner on a few days in summer and electric heating in the depths of winter. From memory the house was somewhat unpleasantly cold some of the time so perhaps we tended to put on warm clothing rather than try to heat the whole place.
- kccqzy 6y agoThat sounds reasonable. My house is about twice your size and so is my electricity consumption (8.8 kWh/day last billing cycle). Also doesn't exclude stove/oven/hot water as these are all powered by natural gas. I was shocked by a few other comments saying 30 kWh/day. Is it because they use electricity to cook and heat water?
- kumarvvr 6y agoA tesla 2 powerwall, weighs about 120 kg and holds about 14 kWh of power. In India, the average household has a 2.5 kW Peak Power meter and usually, about 10 kWh per day is consumed. So, not exactly a back-pack, but yeah. The average individual house in India, is constructed in a plot of about 200 Square Yards. Usually available roof space is about 1000 sft. Assuming no shadows or high rises in the vicinity (80% of homes have good sunshine even in dense cities), this area is sufficient for about 5 kW of installed capacity. Most of the deccan plateau gets about 6 hours of good sunshine year-round. So that translates to about 30 kWh of power generation capability. So, a 3 kW installed capacity, with 1 powerwall will be sufficient to power an average household for most of the year. Of course, this does not take into account usage of ACs (a fast increasing power consumption category in India) However, it costs about Rs. 100,000 for 1 kW of installed capacity (including inverter and grid connected meter, no batteries) For 5 kW, that is 500,000 Rs. (about 7000 USD) of investment. Average annual salary of an Indian household in an urban area is about 15000 USD. About half of that in rural areas. If there are good financing options and grid connected reverse selling meters (they are being encouraged by many local and state governments), there could be a revolution in installed solar capacity and utilization.
- 1cvmask 6y agoElectricity consumption varies from household to household. Reminds me of this piece: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/GlobalWarming/story?id=2906888&page=1 https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/GlobalWarming/story?id=29068... “Armed with Gore's utility bills for the last two years, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research charged Monday that the gas and electric bills for the former vice president's 20-room home and pool house devoured nearly 221,000 kilowatt-hours in 2006, more than 20 times the national average of 10,656 kilowatt-hours.”
- brtkdotse 6y ago10k kWh per year seems really low. Does that include heating?
- reportingsjr 6y agoIt does not, and the vast majority of people in the US have natural gas heating.
- BostonEnginerd 6y agoWe use about 8500kWh per year in the northeast US. This does not include space heating yet, but does include our Chevy Volt charging.
- wcarss 6y agoIt's about 27kWh/day, and according to the stats in the link fv6 provided elsewhere in this threadset, that's average for a northeast US house. Houses in the south tend to use more like 15-16k kWh/year, due to air conditioning mostly, leaving the 2015ish national average for single detached homes closer to 13k kWh. This post has been an interesting eye-opener for me. Somehow I've never really thought about the numbers deeply, but, having a 100-watt lightbulb on for 8 hours is almost 1kWh. My and my partners' computers + home server, at a mix of wattages and uses but mostly left on a lot, are probably using 15-20kWh daily. That's... a lot of power.
- ghaff 6y ago
- kragen 6y agohttps://archive.fo/OiXyO https://archive.fo/OiXyO is lacking images; is there an alternative?
- aszantu 6y agolithium is just cheap because it wrecks some 3rd world countries natural resources. If they'd slap the price of recovery times it will need to regrow nature in that place, it wouldn't be as cheap.
- mensetmanusman 6y agoWe would just scale up extraction from the ocean, lithium is very prevalent.
- justatdotin 6y agoridiculously energy intensive to extract
- mavhc 6y agoWhich countries? In what way does it wreck them?
- seveneightn9ne 6y agoBolivia. The US-backed coup against Evo Morales may very well have been in part because of his intention to implement state control of lithium extraction, preventing foreign companies from ransacking the country's natural resource. https://www.humanrightspulse.com/mastercontentblog/bolivian-indigenous-people-lose-out-on-lithium https://www.humanrightspulse.com/mastercontentblog/bolivian-...
- nickik 6y agoYou shouldn't believe every conspiracy theory you read. Basically one guy claimed lithium is the reason for a US backed coup. This is not proven and most expert don't believe this is true. Its neither proven that it was a US backed coup, and even if that was proven, lithium is very, very unlikely to be the reason. Lithium is not gold or oil, lithium is everywhere, the reason you produced in this region of South America is because it is cheap to let the sun do a lot of the work. But the reality is, its still more like a complex chemical, more then a metal. The technology to refine it and get it to the grade needed to be valuable, is very difficult, and the outlandish claims made by the president about the government doing all of this extremely advanced processing (and even build cars) were simply political BSing. It seems what is going on her is that a president made a lot of claims about the value of this resources, over-hyped its value and potential, and when opposed claimed lithium is the reason and its all the evil US fault. This is what I would call narrative building. Lithium projects are happening literally all over the world, the waste majority of expansion of supply is not happening in South America anymore. If Bolivia ever wants to make real money from this resources they need foreign company that have DLE technology do it and tax them. With DLE much less manual work is required so it will not be an industry that creates massive amounts of jobs. > salt flats that stretch across Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia and hold over 75% This is flat out false. > Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni salt flat alone holds an estimated 17% of lithium globally. Wrong.
- Ekaros 6y agoI wonder how much there is left to reduce costs? 98% cost reduction for physical chemical products is pretty good. And many additional gains are likely increased complexity...
- ed25519FUUU 6y agoWe need to go a lot lower. Prices are still high for retail investor. Was just quoted $16K for an LG 16kwh matter. That’s $1k per kWh after installation costs. And a 16kwh battery doesn’t even supply my house with 1 day of power.
- neolog 6y agoWhy are they measuring in kg instead of kWh?
- Retric 6y agoBecause the kWh is unchanged, but the weight and cost decreased.
- ErikVandeWater 6y agoIt doesn't seem too clickbaity. $73k/$75k = 97% (assuming the figures are correct). Knowing that the weight is reduced is good, because the weight determines where the batteries are useful; no matter how low the price per kW h goes, if the kW h/g is too low, the battery isn't going on a spaceship.
- hristov 6y agoThis is important to keep in mind when you read articles and/or studies about how electric cars or wind or solar power is impractical. A lot of the data these studies use is just obsolete. Say you have an opinion piece in a news paper that says that electric cars will always be expensive toys for the rich. It relies on a scientific paper published in a technical journal 2 years ago. The scientific paper does not perform original research but relies on a study published 2 years ago, which study relies on official data reported by companies six months before publication. Perhaps nobody in this propagation chain meant to mislead. But in the end they are using old data that assumes that battery costs are five times what they are in reality and twenty times what they will be in the near future (for example) and draws all the wrong conclusions. Similar things are happening with articles and public comments about renewable energy. There are numerous arguments about how we will always need coal power or nuclear power, or natural gas and they all base it on old studies with obsolete high costs of batteries. These articles commit a further error by also neglecting the every decreasing costs of solar and wind power. These articles are even more egregious because while a car lasts only 10-15 years a power plant is supposed to last at least 30 (for coal or gas) and up to 60 (for nuclear). Furthermore, nuclear plants take 5 to 10 years to even build. In those years the costs of batteries and renewables will only go down further. In the financial press there were many articles about how Tesla will never be profitable, how it is an extravagant way for shareholders to subsidize luxury car buyers, how it will always rely on government subsidies and will need more of them, etc. Well, guess what the federal tax credit expired and lo and behold tesla is profitable. They weren't necessarily lying. But they were using automotive industry assumptions, and the auto industry with their internal combustion engines is a mature industry with few opportunities for cost reductions. But as far as batteries and electric motors and power semiconductors go ... well we are just getting started on them and hopefully we will have many opportunities for cost reductions.
- throwaway0a5e 6y agoYes, using obsolete data from when tech was bleeding edge in 1999 to imply things about cost going forward is misleading. On the other hand using improvement over the same timeline, drawing a line on a graph and saying "look how X Y is gonna be in Z years" is the same exact type of stupid but pointed in a different direction. In 1991 lithium was highly immature technology and would take about a decade to make it into fragile electronics. It took another decade to make it into power tools. Now it's viable in high end commuter vehicles. If it was easy to predict the future a decade out with any reliability we wouldn't be having this discussion.
- baybal2 6y agoFYI, the cost of individual cells has long, long gone below $100 per kWh in wholesale volumes. And believe the cost of a pack itself is very quickly approaching $100/kWh as well if not crossed it already. Making batteries is still a rather profitable business with double digit margins, it's just latest equipment, and cathode materials became way more expensive, and hard to get than what small battery makers can afford. Despite China dominating the metallic cobalt supply chain, the cathode materials market are dominated by Japanese chemical companies, and I suspect some form of collusion is there. With cathode being the most expensive part of the lithium battery cell, it's hard to fathom how a free market price for it can be many times the cost of input materials for years on end.
- nickik 6y agoCollusion is kind of a strong statement. There is a fair bit of competition, its not only China and only Japan, and in these places its not one company. There are cathode companies in Korea as well. There are also multiple cell manufactures in multiple countries. Tesla on battery day gave a pretty good exploitation of why the price is what it is, and they didn't say 'we need to solve this by trust busting'. Elon Musk basically said 'if you attach a GPS tracker to a nickel atom its journey would be crazy'. Many, many steps are involved. Many processes, that then need to be reprocessed, and reprocessed again, and reprocessed again with a lot of shipping in between. The problem is the industry was to small so far to really consolidate all these steps, localize production and mining. Rather many chemicals need are just bought in the form they were available from other industries, and then processed were built on top of that. This video is a pretty nice visualization of the current process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4i1T6s_NdAQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4i1T6s_NdAQ
- amelius 6y ago> FYI, the cost of individual cells has long, long gone below $100 per kWh in wholesale volumes. Electric bicycle batteries are still $500 for 500Wh (consumer price, but 10x as expensive).
- jeffbee 6y agoWish I could find one that cheap. The Bosch PowerPack 500 is $900 retail and Specialized recently raised the price of the 600Wh pack in certain bikes to $1300. The price is so silly I pried open my obsolete Specialized pack and just replaced the cells myself.
- supernova87a 6y agoI'm pretty interested to know what parts of this cost have hit their practical limit, and which still have cost to be squeezed out? -- Mineral scarcity/cost of mining -- Cost of processing, refining lithium -- Cost of making battery chemical contents -- Cost of assembling rest of complete battery Any info on how much more advance there is to go on these aspects? And, after all that is squeezed out, is lithium still going to be the thing for 30 years?
- 908B64B197 6y agoI also wonder how much work it is to recondition older battery packs. Weight and volume is really important for a car, but for a residential installation? Not so much.
- baybal2 6y agoOnes which can be squeezed more > -- Cost of making battery chemical contents > -- Cost of assembling rest of complete battery Mining, and refining is pretty efficient at this point, even when Chinese dominate the market. It's cathode materials which is the single biggest cost point. Cathode materials are dominated by Japanese companies, especially nickel based ones. LFP is so cheap because making cathode powder for them is a fairly low-tech process with many Chinese garage scale chem companies jumping on it 10 years ago. Nickel based cathodes are on other hand fairly hard to make with competitive capacities because control of particle size, structure, and shape is a tightly held chemical black magic. For this reason, I don't expect the new generation of 200WH/kg+ LFP cathodes to be that cheap in comparison to nickel ones.
- Obi_Juan_Kenobi 6y ago> Mining, and refining is pretty efficient at this point Hardly. Nickel goes through a rube-goldberg process of extraction, smelting into pure nickel, made into a sulfate, transported around the world, remade into a nickel carbonate, and finally input into cathode manufacture. The supply chain simply isn't set up for batteries yet. Nickel metal powder is the best form to transport, and likely the best input for cathode manufacture as well. But the industry formed around the sulfate which was a mature market from other industrial use.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- vilvo 6y agoGreat progress. Still the lithium chemistry energy density is nowhere near what is needed for flight and heavy traffic. We are at 200-400Wh/kg and we need 2000Wh/kg.
- ExcavateGrandMa 6y agoI swear I've sold my drones and can't buy new one :/
- StreamBright 6y agoWe just need a 100x increase in density and we are good to go.
- h2odragon 6y agoI recall the first time someone showed me lithium batteries, in a radio control car that outperformed a real car. Even then, the price while high wasn't the biggest barrier to getting large quantities; you just couldn't get as many as you wanted. Don't think that has ever eased. I think that's why TSLA is such a hot stock, people feel there's much more market thats undeserved and TSLA seems to be the only folks gearing up to build batteries until everyone has all they want.
- ffggvv 6y agoby that logic panasonic should be a 2 trillion dollar company
- ffggvv 6y agoso why should i buy an electric car now if batteries will be way better in a few years and mine will be obsolete with bad range?
- ec109685 6y agoIf it meets your needs today and tomorrow, go for it!
- bdcravens 6y agoToday I bought a new lawn mower, weed eater, and blower, all electric, with batteries, for less than $600 total (not even the cheapest models). They have comparable power to gas-driven models.
- Shivetya 6y agoJust be sure when using a electric mower you opt for the higher amp batteries. They are also far more limited by wet or tall grass and heaven forbid trying both at once. Many push mowers will come with a 4amp or higher battery while blowers, weed eaters, and such, use 2 to 2.5amp battery. While the lower amp batteries can work in the mower they will heat up faster and may actually stop if the load they are put under ramps up too fast. Still even the cost of a 4amp or higher is well worth it to never have oil or gasoline in my garage. Just understand the limitations. I mow a little under 10k square feet which can require a recharge of one or both batteries depending on conditions.
- bdcravens 6y agoYes, I shied away from the lowest models. The mower is 6A; the weed eater and blower uses 4A.
- manmal 6y agoLast time I looked, lawn mowers were not glaring examples of battery driven tech, just like vacuum cleaners. They provided 2-3x less energy output than their wired counterparts, and required charging after just 20 minutes.
- justatdotin 6y agoI use a range of mowers, and I love the battery one because it is so maneuverable. One battery is enough for my house block. I have a second battery and I sometimes use it for larger areas, simply because it is so light and fast. After 40 mins I'm happy to stop for a beve while the first finishes recharging.
- spookthesunset 6y agoIt’s remarkable what energy dense batteries have enabled. Drones and the entire quadcopter scene wouldn’t be possible without them. Some maneuvers made on a 5” quad can pull more than 100 amps on a 6S, 22V battery. That is around 2,200 watts—more than most consumer microwave ovens! The fact that a battery weighing no more than half a kilogram can supply this much power almost instantly is truly remarkable.
- cbozeman 6y agoZero-Point Energy Modules when?
- jpeter 6y agoWhen we find atlantis
- StavrosK 6y agoNeither would my 300 gram plane that can fly for an hour and 60 kilometers. Technology is great.
- urthor 6y agoTo be fair, people were doing a LOT with model airplanes ~60 years ago with kerosene engines.
- 6y ago
- FpUser 6y ago>" $140 per kilowatt hour" I wish I could buy at this price. Maybe for some large manufacturers. If one is shopping for eBike batteries privately for example the price is sky high comparatively.
- neonate 6y agohttps://archive.is/OiXyO https://archive.is/OiXyO
- paiute 6y agoA 2021 publication with data only to 2018... Why is that? Why do they use a strange metric? Did prices stabilize? https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium
- Black101 6y agoWere lithium batteries really that popular in 1990? I would think think that they were just starting to get popular so that would make a lot of sense.... but in the last 10 years the price probably didn't change that much.
- Thorentis 6y agoHow is this possible given that we will apparently have a lithium shortage by 2025?
- basicplus2 6y agoRetail in Australia current retail prices are roughly 10 times what this article is stating.
- pyuser583 6y agoWow!
- blendo 6y agoA study with newer data discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26686969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26686969
- aktan_00zerp 6y agos
- Naracion 6y agoWeb Archive version (no wall): https://web.archive.org/web/20210404040950if_/https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/03/31/lithium-battery-costs-have-fallen-by-98-in-three-decades https://web.archive.org/web/20210404040950if_/https://www.ec...
- metandre 6y agoI just hope at some point we will just stop using lithium thanks to better battery tech
- oort-cloud9 6y agoHmm.. The price I pay for my laptops never goes down. It was 2000 ten years ago, it's still 2000. Of course if I buy a laptop with approximately the same specs, I'll pay less. But then I'd be severely behind in my computing power. Same with the batteries as they get better. Also take into account the economic situation we are in now. What we have is not a free market economy. The government messing with the economy creates huge distortions. Under these circumstances you can't guarantee that the prices will keep falling. The prices of the Commodities are going up. One of these days, the inflation or even hyperinflation is going to hit us. Then what? Also, have you ever heard of the Great Reset? The plan is to slow the economies down inthe nameof Climate Change fight. As Klaus Schwab said you will own nothing and be happy.
- tim333 6y agoThe battery isn't a big percentage of laptop cost.
- AtlasBarfed 6y agoThe thought exercise I most would like the answer to is: how much of this (that is batteries and solar/wind) could have been advanced in the 50s and 60s if the petrol companies weren't, uh, redirecting investment. Was the transistor or imaging or key materials engineering needed to enable modern batteries and solar five decades earlier, or was there just a lack of real funding?