3 ms·

Take lithium for example. Famous for being the big part of an EV battery. Lithium is up about 5x in approximately a year and about 3x in 3-4 years, in terms of

Take lithium for example. Famous for being the big part of an EV battery. Lithium is up about 5x in approximately a year and about 3x in 3-4 years, in terms of price. And we are going to need even more, hence we need to procure supplies. How long does a lithium mine take to build? Can we build this lithium mine in a country that Europe/US can do business with(question that is really serious after Ukraine)? Do people want to see a lithium lake in Europe/USA, knowing the sorts of pollution it causes? What about recycling those batteries? And all of those questions just for lithium. Cobblt, REMs needed for solar panels, etc have their own questions.

AtlasBarfed 4y ago
One of the issues with energy historians, if you want to call them, like the ones doing alternative energy adoption projections, is that they have been so conditioned to fossil fuel and previous alt energy failures that they just don't seem to appreciate the bare economics of solar/wind/EV. In solar/wind, the economics are so clear (even gas turbine is losing on LCOE) that nothing can stop it. I think we are running into a "humans don't comprehend nonlinear/exponential curves". Much like Moore's law, there is enough convergent economies of scale and research development that there has been and probably will be a decade of exponential improvement. I believe some of this is because there was so much large scale suppression of alt energy and EV tech by big oil that so many researches and projects are now being linked together to produce an effective 20-30 year exponential improvement curve. We're now a solid 5 years into economic supremacy of solar and wind. The 60% efficient gas turbine was the last gasp of big oil, they have nothing else to fire back with. Mazda and some other companies are trying compression-combustion gas engines now, and there's a spate of articles on inside out rotaries and other desperation, but the ICE drivetrain is going the same route: economic obsolesence in the face of an exponential improvement curve by BEVs. Their projects of adoption of alt energy and EV were head scratchingly conservative given the raw economics, and thankfully real adoption has been much more rapid. I wonder if there was political pressure applied to slow any policy aids/regs/subsidies from coming through congress. Thankfully, the Ukraine war and inflation have turbocharged policy. Thanks Putin! EVs are rapidly heading that way towards total economic supremacy over the ICE. Sodium Ion is coming into mass production next year, and that should be at densities that should enable the 200-300 mile EV use cases (SR Model 3s, city cars of the european/chinese design, the cars that at least five billion people would use in the world). High density LFP (200 wh/kg at pack level allegedly in mass production this year) should do the 300-400 mile range cars. Solid state, which has some fusion "always five years away" does seem poised for five years away, and will probably handle most of the luxury and ultralongrange applications, probably won't beat LFP or sodium ion in cost for quite a while though. Lithium apparently just needs development (salton sea, etc). Battery recycling is likely going to take care of itself between grid batteries, resale/reuse markets, etc. The nice thing about a big battery pack is that you can disassemble it and reuse the batteries that still work, and use them in a ton of different ways. Only after several cycles will you get to the issue of actual materials recycling. Solar panels will probably get an LFP-style "good enough and ultracheap" design with some perovskite derivative in the short term. Yes there are scale issues, but grid storage may be solved by the move of transportation to batteries and reusing car batteries as distributed grid storage. Home solar will reduce grid load of cars moving to EV drivetrains, and make civilization more resilient. There is so much investment and research in this, with lots of headroom, that the old guard doesn't seem to wrap their heads around it. It's the closest thing to a real technological miracle/magic in my lifetime, with the transistor/semiconductor scaling being the other contender. What kills me about batteries and solar is I wonder how much earlier we could have moved to this without oil/gas companies actively blocking it. But I'm not super familiar on what materials technologies and imaging/analysis would have been necessary to get to usable 200 mile EVs back in the 1970s or 1980s. The author is right though, when we look back when we MOST NEEDED to get efficient on gas vehicles for global warming, in the 1990s, the big SUV trend went exactly the opposite direction. I shook my head back then at people that bought those, and I still do.
- mamonster 4y ago
  I'm not saying that renewables will loose(IMO they will eventually win simply because this is the final nail in "commodities trade is not political", having self sufficiency is and will continue to be a natsec question), but I predict a very bumpy ride price-wise. This is a tech board, but IMO this is probably the highest alpha trade for the next 5-10 years if you nail correctly.

AtlasBarfed 4y ago

One of the issues with energy historians, if you want to call them, like the ones doing alternative energy adoption projections, is that they have been so conditioned to fossil fuel and previous alt energy failures that they just don't seem to appreciate the bare economics of solar/wind/EV. In solar/wind, the economics are so clear (even gas turbine is losing on LCOE) that nothing can stop it. I think we are running into a "humans don't comprehend nonlinear/exponential curves". Much like Moore's law, there is enough convergent economies of scale and research development that there has been and probably will be a decade of exponential improvement. I believe some of this is because there was so much large scale suppression of alt energy and EV tech by big oil that so many researches and projects are now being linked together to produce an effective 20-30 year exponential improvement curve. We're now a solid 5 years into economic supremacy of solar and wind. The 60% efficient gas turbine was the last gasp of big oil, they have nothing else to fire back with. Mazda and some other companies are trying compression-combustion gas engines now, and there's a spate of articles on inside out rotaries and other desperation, but the ICE drivetrain is going the same route: economic obsolesence in the face of an exponential improvement curve by BEVs. Their projects of adoption of alt energy and EV were head scratchingly conservative given the raw economics, and thankfully real adoption has been much more rapid. I wonder if there was political pressure applied to slow any policy aids/regs/subsidies from coming through congress. Thankfully, the Ukraine war and inflation have turbocharged policy. Thanks Putin! EVs are rapidly heading that way towards total economic supremacy over the ICE. Sodium Ion is coming into mass production next year, and that should be at densities that should enable the 200-300 mile EV use cases (SR Model 3s, city cars of the european/chinese design, the cars that at least five billion people would use in the world). High density LFP (200 wh/kg at pack level allegedly in mass production this year) should do the 300-400 mile range cars. Solid state, which has some fusion "always five years away" does seem poised for five years away, and will probably handle most of the luxury and ultralongrange applications, probably won't beat LFP or sodium ion in cost for quite a while though. Lithium apparently just needs development (salton sea, etc). Battery recycling is likely going to take care of itself between grid batteries, resale/reuse markets, etc. The nice thing about a big battery pack is that you can disassemble it and reuse the batteries that still work, and use them in a ton of different ways. Only after several cycles will you get to the issue of actual materials recycling. Solar panels will probably get an LFP-style "good enough and ultracheap" design with some perovskite derivative in the short term. Yes there are scale issues, but grid storage may be solved by the move of transportation to batteries and reusing car batteries as distributed grid storage. Home solar will reduce grid load of cars moving to EV drivetrains, and make civilization more resilient. There is so much investment and research in this, with lots of headroom, that the old guard doesn't seem to wrap their heads around it. It's the closest thing to a real technological miracle/magic in my lifetime, with the transistor/semiconductor scaling being the other contender. What kills me about batteries and solar is I wonder how much earlier we could have moved to this without oil/gas companies actively blocking it. But I'm not super familiar on what materials technologies and imaging/analysis would have been necessary to get to usable 200 mile EVs back in the 1970s or 1980s. The author is right though, when we look back when we MOST NEEDED to get efficient on gas vehicles for global warming, in the 1990s, the big SUV trend went exactly the opposite direction. I shook my head back then at people that bought those, and I still do.

mamonster 4y ago
I'm not saying that renewables will loose(IMO they will eventually win simply because this is the final nail in "commodities trade is not political", having self sufficiency is and will continue to be a natsec question), but I predict a very bumpy ride price-wise. This is a tech board, but IMO this is probably the highest alpha trade for the next 5-10 years if you nail correctly.