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Solar and Battery I am well versed with and follow quite closely (you can check my comment history). I am actually personally sold on LFP battery tech but despi

Solar and Battery I am well versed with and follow quite closely (you can check my comment history). I am actually personally sold on LFP battery tech but despite claims of 135$/kwh prices within companies I have never seen retail prices < 300 $/kwh. I guess this decade will be better in converging retail vs B2B prices but scaling production is not a trivial issue. Having said that, wonder what impacts global supply chain crisis and geopolitical changes will have on thi

abetusk 5y ago
$300/kWh is essentially what lead acid is at, which is maybe why you chose it, but, point being, there are already batteries out there that hit this mark. In terms of availability of LiFePO4 batteries, just a quick check on Alibaba and Aliexpress shows many options for anywhere from $100/kWh to $150/kWh (if the prices are to believed, shipping is reasonable, etc. etc.). My assumption is that this prices will keep dropping and batteries, in some shape or form, will follow their own Moore's law like behavior, becoming cheaper at an exponential pace. I'm not sure if you believe the Alibaba and Aliexpress prices or whether you consider that "consumer" or not, but the $100/kWh is essentially already here and potentially available at small scale volumes. Scaling up production, scaling up adoption, finding markets, interleaving with local regulation, etc. are all challenges of adoption solar and battery technology for use in energy, especially in developed nations where there's a legacy infrastructure to consider. My opinion is that when the cost of the hardware is sufficiently low, there is a large pressure to adopt the new technology because the potential savings are so high. With a high potential upside, impediments to adoption are overcome. In my opinion, the low cost of solar and batteries make this almost an inevitability and so the better question is when will it be adopted and what markets will spring out from it. In terms of supply chain issues, this is, from what I understand, a localized problem due to the global pandemic and I would expect this to be resolved within the next year or two. This might just speak to my own ignorance on how the whole shipping industry works and maybe this is pointing to a potential other market involving supply chains, shipping containers or some other technology, that I'm missing. Anyway, you were asking for "exciting" technology. There's kind of nothing more fundamental than energy. Solar and battery technology promise to create an abundance of cheap energy. An abundance of energy has the potential to create a booming economy, so it's not just the technology proper that has innovation, which could include things like a decentralized energy grid, smart power monitoring, etc. but also all the other side effects from energy abundance that comes with it.

abetusk 5y ago

$300/kWh is essentially what lead acid is at, which is maybe why you chose it, but, point being, there are already batteries out there that hit this mark. In terms of availability of LiFePO4 batteries, just a quick check on Alibaba and Aliexpress shows many options for anywhere from $100/kWh to $150/kWh (if the prices are to believed, shipping is reasonable, etc. etc.). My assumption is that this prices will keep dropping and batteries, in some shape or form, will follow their own Moore's law like behavior, becoming cheaper at an exponential pace. I'm not sure if you believe the Alibaba and Aliexpress prices or whether you consider that "consumer" or not, but the $100/kWh is essentially already here and potentially available at small scale volumes. Scaling up production, scaling up adoption, finding markets, interleaving with local regulation, etc. are all challenges of adoption solar and battery technology for use in energy, especially in developed nations where there's a legacy infrastructure to consider. My opinion is that when the cost of the hardware is sufficiently low, there is a large pressure to adopt the new technology because the potential savings are so high. With a high potential upside, impediments to adoption are overcome. In my opinion, the low cost of solar and batteries make this almost an inevitability and so the better question is when will it be adopted and what markets will spring out from it. In terms of supply chain issues, this is, from what I understand, a localized problem due to the global pandemic and I would expect this to be resolved within the next year or two. This might just speak to my own ignorance on how the whole shipping industry works and maybe this is pointing to a potential other market involving supply chains, shipping containers or some other technology, that I'm missing. Anyway, you were asking for "exciting" technology. There's kind of nothing more fundamental than energy. Solar and battery technology promise to create an abundance of cheap energy. An abundance of energy has the potential to create a booming economy, so it's not just the technology proper that has innovation, which could include things like a decentralized energy grid, smart power monitoring, etc. but also all the other side effects from energy abundance that comes with it.