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FYI, 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 approachin

FYI, 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 ago
Collusion 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 ago
  Wish 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.
- HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
  And phone batteries are even more expensive. This is about grid tier batteries or cars where the volume constraints are less tight.
  - amelius 6y ago
    Your sibling commenter jeffbee says they have replaced the cells in an existing battery, so I'm not convinced volume constraints are the problem here.

nickik 6y ago

Collusion 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 ago
Wish 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.
HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
And phone batteries are even more expensive. This is about grid tier batteries or cars where the volume constraints are less tight.
- amelius 6y ago
  Your sibling commenter jeffbee says they have replaced the cells in an existing battery, so I'm not convinced volume constraints are the problem here.