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Battery prices are still falling @ 10-15% a year. In 10 years you would be able to replace old batteries with new batteries for cheap a $6000-7000 battery in 10

Battery prices are still falling @ 10-15% a year. In 10 years you would be able to replace old batteries with new batteries for cheap a $6000-7000 battery in 10 years will be $1500-2000 new only.

mradek 4y ago
Is it true we will run out of lithium in 20-30 years?
- colechristensen 4y ago
  We'll never "run out of lithium". The question is "how much will lithium cost?" It can be extracted from the ocean, there are undeveloped known mineral deposits and you always expect there are unknown deposits to be found. Production will grow as demand grows, when there is lag because new sources take time to develop and proven demand is needed before someone spends a lot of money developing a new source there will be cost growth, when new sources, recycling, etc. develop, prices will drop. In 20-30 years one of the alternatives (like sodium batteries, we'll never run out of sodium) aren't so unlikely to be found.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    > It can be extracted from the ocean Indeed, and we already have research into using concentrated desalination brine to recover lithium from [0]. Unfortunately, a lot of desalination plants are positioned in Arabia [1], so we'd trade dependency on these dictatorships from oil to lithium. [0] https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2019/em/c8em00498f https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2019/em/c8em0... [1] https://www.aquatechtrade.com/news/desalination/worlds-largest-desalination-plants/ https://www.aquatechtrade.com/news/desalination/worlds-large...
    - quickthrower2 4y ago
      Why can’t you build desalination plants elsewhere?
      - mschuster91 4y ago
        Desalination plants are expensive to run (you either need a lot of energy or a lot of space for a solar evaporation plant) and create a lot of extremely toxic brine, which means you only want them when you don't have an alternative source of drinkable water. Recovering lithium from the brine is essentially just using the waste these plants generate as part of their operation.
      - SapporoChris 4y ago
        They certainly can be built elsewhere, however it's currently cheaper to import. It is very common to import when it's cheaper than producing domestically despite it having a history of problems like shortages and fluctuating costs. Helium and rare elements(which aren't very rare) are some examples. Rare earth mines were shutdown in countries when China started undercutting prices.
        mschuster91 4y ago
        It would have done the world a lot of good, had the WTO, EU and US actually taken massive reaction to Chinese price dumping politics. Instead, all we got was a bit of verbal acrobatics.
      - netrus 4y ago
        For the same reason you "cannot" drill for gas in Germany: it's very hard to do something that someone else can do cheaper. It requires constant work against the market, either by tarifs or subventions. And desalination will always be cheaper if you have to do it anyway, because the (local) value of water is so high
    - bryanlarsen 4y ago
      There's a massive difference. You buy lithium once, and from then on it's cheaper to recycle it. If Arabia cuts off our supply, our current EVs are still useful. OTOH you have to buy gasoline regularly. If supply gets cut off, current vehicles are scrap metal.
  - int0x2e 4y ago
    "we'll never run out of lithium" is the new "640k ought to be enough for anybody". As we make lithium battery capacity more affordable, it gets applied more broadly, and the rate of use goes up. There is a very finite amount of any resource here on earth, and while we can get things more and more efficient, there will be a moment where we can no longer extract lithium (or other materials) required for battery production. Treating these as an endless resource is the same error we made with fossil fuels, just hopefully without as much climate change as a direct result...
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - colechristensen 4y ago
      The oceans of earth contain enough lithium for every human to have 4000 teslas. Thats… 200 MWh per person worth of lithium. Or energy storage equal to 200 tons of TNT. Unlike fossil fuels it is not consumed and will be recycled. In short, there’s a few orders of magnitude of more lithium around than anyone will ever need. It all comes down to price of extraction. Taking enough out of the oceans for everybody to have a Tesla won’t even take 0.1% of what’s there.
- epistasis 4y ago
  What an odd claim, I haven't heard anybody say that we will "run out" of lithium, much less at a particular date. More likely, we will stop more lithium extraction, and get most of it from recycling old batteries. 20 years from now is probably too soon for that, but 30-40 seems like it could be possible where we can circularized the lithium economy. (Circularization assumes that per capita needs are not every increasing, and that population levels off, which seems likely to me but definitely not certain)
- Roverlord 4y ago
  I heard (on here I think) that copper shortages will be a factor before lithium runs out?
  - bryanlarsen 4y ago
    We ran out of easily extractable copper a long time ago. OTOH copper is available in hard to extract, highly diluted quantities pretty much every where. It's just a matter of price.
xbmcuser 4y ago
With how solar and wind electricity prices are still falling at similar rate. I think people don't realise how fast the move to electric is going to be as battery production keeps going up. Think about it just like pc gets cheap each year. Vehicles and fuels are also going to get cheaper as battery and electricity prices get cheaper
- Eisenstein 4y ago
  It all depends on supply, as well as safety. As long as we have an excess of supply of the materials needed to produce the batteries and the increased production doesn't lead to safety issues with the batteries (remember -- Lithium ion battery packs are essentially incendiary bombs under the right circumstances) then all will be fine. However current trends do not indicate continuing trends. If the switch to battery stored power occurs very quickly, there is potential for a price shock.
  - hulitu 4y ago
    > It all depends on supply, as well as safety. The safety part seems to be completely ignored. I would not want to have around me a 10 year old battery pack.
  - SturgeonsLaw 4y ago
    > Lithium ion battery packs are essentially incendiary bombs under the right circumstances So is petrol for that matter - a Tesla Model 3 extended range battery pack stores 82kWh of energy, whereas a 60L tank full of unleaded is holding 570kWh of energy
    - anextio 4y ago
      Gasoline is not in itself an incendiary bomb, it has a specific meaning: — it burns for a long time - it resists suppression https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incendiary_device https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incendiary_device If you want gasoline to meet the definition you have to make napalm out of it.
    - 4y ago
VBprogrammer 4y ago
The other thing people seem to underestimate is the how strong the used battery market is between repairs to another car, after market conversions of internal combustion cars and conversion back into stationary storage. Even the 24kWh of the Nissan Leaf battery pack, having suffered from say 20% degradation is still 20kwh of battery storage, more than a days worth for most households. For example one of those original Leaf batteries will still fetch nearly £2000. The 40kWh and above much more because they open the possibility of re-batterying an original Leaf.
- anonuser123456 4y ago
  >Even the 24kWh of the Nissan Leaf battery pack, having suffered from say 20% degradation is still 20kwh of battery storage This is not quite true. The failure rate and capacity decline dramatically incr
  - solardev 4y ago
    I guess this is also true for Hackernews repl
  - VBprogrammer 4y ago
    I mean you couldn't sell is warranted as a 20kWh pack. That much is true. But for most home stationary storage purposes I'm not sure how important the exact capacity is, things like shifting power use onto the low side of a dual rate tariff and maximizing the potential of roof top solar.
    - solardev 4y ago
      It depends on the use case. For time-shifting loads and playing power arbitrage, maybe not much. But in some cases having a few days of autonomy can be nice during a storm or ~freak~/"new normal" weather events. If you live in the US West, wildfires are increasingly common (and we're just getting started) and much of California is expected to have to learn to deal with rolling brownouts and blackouts for the next few years during the warm season while PG&E is upgrading and burying their sparkly infrastructure. And if you live in Texas, I guess you're just signed up to pay infinite dollars for power whenever the market demands it. In a functional grid, each home shouldn't need its own battery system. But we've neglected ours for so long, both technically and politically, that there's no real hope in improving it in the short term, so homeowners can either take it into their own hands or just go without electricity a week or two out of the year.
popol12 4y ago
I read that lithium is above x15 more expensive than 18 months ago (https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium) So, what makes you think battery prices are going to continue falling ? Isn't lithium mineral the main cost in building these batteries ?
- xbmcuser 4y ago
  The price increases have been because of supply and demand mismatches and speculation that happened because of Covid as production stabilises so will the prices. This is temporary aberration which should avg out over a decade.
  - bald 4y ago
    Not sure why you're being downvoted, but this is the right answer
    - mrelectric 4y ago
      You can't predict the markets.
      - hamilyon2 4y ago
        It is difficult to predict markets fast, reliable and precisely enough to reliably beat them. It is certainly possible to predict markets and be good at it, people do it all the time
      - HPsquared 4y ago
        They have a lot of variability. It's the difference between predicting the weather and predicting the average weather (that is, the climate).
      - bryanlarsen 4y ago
        It's easy to predict the markets, just as it's easy to predict the weather. I predict it will rain sometime in the next month at my address. I also predict that it will freeze hard in the same time period. This is a useful prediction, given that I will be winterizing my yard today. Making a prediction better than an expert's is hard. Useful predictions are often easy. If my father in law decides to plant 1000 acres in wheat next year, he is making a prediction about the markets. Given the situation in Ukraine and with global climate, wheat prices are one of the most difficult to predict precisely. But he is a low cost producer compared to many, so he knows he is likely to make a profit whether the price is high or low. A precise prediction would be nice, but producers everywhere operate with imprecise but useful predictions all the time.
calineczka 4y ago
What's the source of this claim, especially the "still" part. I could never find newest data which would confirm it easily.
orgonio 4y ago
NIO has a pretty cool battery swap tech which treats batteries like replenished fuel, over the course of the cars lifetime. The battery gets swapped many times depending on the charge levels and location. https://joinyaa.com/guides/nio-battery-swaps-coming-to-america/ https://joinyaa.com/guides/nio-battery-swaps-coming-to-ameri... I kinda wish Tesla would merge with them in China. The car companies should standardize their batteries as well and provide market differentiation on how the car makes efficient use of the power. That would eliminate a lot of waste, kinda like the USB-C standard for mobile devices. EU needs to get on this.
- lnsru 4y ago
  Not sure about reliability of battery swapping. First thing is that one needs now 2 batteries per car while one battery is being charged somewhere. It’s technically hard problem to connect and disconnect 1000s of cycles coolant lines and thick wires to the very bulky and heavy object. While it works nicely in the demos with new cars it brings huge problems in the reality after couple years.
  - chargetimezzzx 4y ago
    2 batteries per car is assuming everyone is charging at the same time. In reality there are people driving their cars while batteries are being charged and new batteries being built. The batteries charge time efficiency over time also plays a role as infrastructure scales. I wouldn't be surprised if we will see this tech in the US soon. Especially after we get back to a somewhat normal business environment with China. Next election I hope. Consumers win when they have more choice.
  - VBprogrammer 4y ago
    I'd go as far as to say it doesn't make sense except as an exceptional process, a battery upgrade or replacement due to manufacturing fault. Moving 300kg+ batteries around is just not very sensible. Maybe it might be possible for heavy plant machinery where removing the battery and transporting it to the charger is easier than transporting the machine back to the charge point.
  - 4y ago

Battery prices are still falling @ 10-15% a year. In 10 years you would be able to replace old batteries with new batteries for cheap a $6000-7000 battery in 10 years will be $1500-2000 new only.

mradek 4y ago

Is it true we will run out of lithium in 20-30 years?

colechristensen 4y ago
We'll never "run out of lithium". The question is "how much will lithium cost?" It can be extracted from the ocean, there are undeveloped known mineral deposits and you always expect there are unknown deposits to be found. Production will grow as demand grows, when there is lag because new sources take time to develop and proven demand is needed before someone spends a lot of money developing a new source there will be cost growth, when new sources, recycling, etc. develop, prices will drop. In 20-30 years one of the alternatives (like sodium batteries, we'll never run out of sodium) aren't so unlikely to be found.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > It can be extracted from the ocean Indeed, and we already have research into using concentrated desalination brine to recover lithium from [0]. Unfortunately, a lot of desalination plants are positioned in Arabia [1], so we'd trade dependency on these dictatorships from oil to lithium. [0] https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2019/em/c8em00498f https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2019/em/c8em0... [1] https://www.aquatechtrade.com/news/desalination/worlds-largest-desalination-plants/ https://www.aquatechtrade.com/news/desalination/worlds-large...
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    Why can’t you build desalination plants elsewhere?
    - mschuster91 4y ago
      Desalination plants are expensive to run (you either need a lot of energy or a lot of space for a solar evaporation plant) and create a lot of extremely toxic brine, which means you only want them when you don't have an alternative source of drinkable water. Recovering lithium from the brine is essentially just using the waste these plants generate as part of their operation.
    - SapporoChris 4y ago
      They certainly can be built elsewhere, however it's currently cheaper to import. It is very common to import when it's cheaper than producing domestically despite it having a history of problems like shortages and fluctuating costs. Helium and rare elements(which aren't very rare) are some examples. Rare earth mines were shutdown in countries when China started undercutting prices.
      - mschuster91 4y ago
        It would have done the world a lot of good, had the WTO, EU and US actually taken massive reaction to Chinese price dumping politics. Instead, all we got was a bit of verbal acrobatics.
    - netrus 4y ago
      For the same reason you "cannot" drill for gas in Germany: it's very hard to do something that someone else can do cheaper. It requires constant work against the market, either by tarifs or subventions. And desalination will always be cheaper if you have to do it anyway, because the (local) value of water is so high
  - bryanlarsen 4y ago
    There's a massive difference. You buy lithium once, and from then on it's cheaper to recycle it. If Arabia cuts off our supply, our current EVs are still useful. OTOH you have to buy gasoline regularly. If supply gets cut off, current vehicles are scrap metal.
- int0x2e 4y ago
  "we'll never run out of lithium" is the new "640k ought to be enough for anybody". As we make lithium battery capacity more affordable, it gets applied more broadly, and the rate of use goes up. There is a very finite amount of any resource here on earth, and while we can get things more and more efficient, there will be a moment where we can no longer extract lithium (or other materials) required for battery production. Treating these as an endless resource is the same error we made with fossil fuels, just hopefully without as much climate change as a direct result...
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - colechristensen 4y ago
    The oceans of earth contain enough lithium for every human to have 4000 teslas. Thats… 200 MWh per person worth of lithium. Or energy storage equal to 200 tons of TNT. Unlike fossil fuels it is not consumed and will be recycled. In short, there’s a few orders of magnitude of more lithium around than anyone will ever need. It all comes down to price of extraction. Taking enough out of the oceans for everybody to have a Tesla won’t even take 0.1% of what’s there.
epistasis 4y ago
What an odd claim, I haven't heard anybody say that we will "run out" of lithium, much less at a particular date. More likely, we will stop more lithium extraction, and get most of it from recycling old batteries. 20 years from now is probably too soon for that, but 30-40 seems like it could be possible where we can circularized the lithium economy. (Circularization assumes that per capita needs are not every increasing, and that population levels off, which seems likely to me but definitely not certain)
Roverlord 4y ago
I heard (on here I think) that copper shortages will be a factor before lithium runs out?
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  We ran out of easily extractable copper a long time ago. OTOH copper is available in hard to extract, highly diluted quantities pretty much every where. It's just a matter of price.

xbmcuser 4y ago

With how solar and wind electricity prices are still falling at similar rate. I think people don't realise how fast the move to electric is going to be as battery production keeps going up. Think about it just like pc gets cheap each year. Vehicles and fuels are also going to get cheaper as battery and electricity prices get cheaper

Eisenstein 4y ago
It all depends on supply, as well as safety. As long as we have an excess of supply of the materials needed to produce the batteries and the increased production doesn't lead to safety issues with the batteries (remember -- Lithium ion battery packs are essentially incendiary bombs under the right circumstances) then all will be fine. However current trends do not indicate continuing trends. If the switch to battery stored power occurs very quickly, there is potential for a price shock.
- hulitu 4y ago
  > It all depends on supply, as well as safety. The safety part seems to be completely ignored. I would not want to have around me a 10 year old battery pack.
- SturgeonsLaw 4y ago
  > Lithium ion battery packs are essentially incendiary bombs under the right circumstances So is petrol for that matter - a Tesla Model 3 extended range battery pack stores 82kWh of energy, whereas a 60L tank full of unleaded is holding 570kWh of energy
  - anextio 4y ago
    Gasoline is not in itself an incendiary bomb, it has a specific meaning: — it burns for a long time - it resists suppression https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incendiary_device https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incendiary_device If you want gasoline to meet the definition you have to make napalm out of it.
  - 4y ago

VBprogrammer 4y ago

The other thing people seem to underestimate is the how strong the used battery market is between repairs to another car, after market conversions of internal combustion cars and conversion back into stationary storage. Even the 24kWh of the Nissan Leaf battery pack, having suffered from say 20% degradation is still 20kwh of battery storage, more than a days worth for most households. For example one of those original Leaf batteries will still fetch nearly £2000. The 40kWh and above much more because they open the possibility of re-batterying an original Leaf.

anonuser123456 4y ago
>Even the 24kWh of the Nissan Leaf battery pack, having suffered from say 20% degradation is still 20kwh of battery storage This is not quite true. The failure rate and capacity decline dramatically incr
- solardev 4y ago
  I guess this is also true for Hackernews repl
- VBprogrammer 4y ago
  I mean you couldn't sell is warranted as a 20kWh pack. That much is true. But for most home stationary storage purposes I'm not sure how important the exact capacity is, things like shifting power use onto the low side of a dual rate tariff and maximizing the potential of roof top solar.
  - solardev 4y ago
    It depends on the use case. For time-shifting loads and playing power arbitrage, maybe not much. But in some cases having a few days of autonomy can be nice during a storm or ~freak~/"new normal" weather events. If you live in the US West, wildfires are increasingly common (and we're just getting started) and much of California is expected to have to learn to deal with rolling brownouts and blackouts for the next few years during the warm season while PG&E is upgrading and burying their sparkly infrastructure. And if you live in Texas, I guess you're just signed up to pay infinite dollars for power whenever the market demands it. In a functional grid, each home shouldn't need its own battery system. But we've neglected ours for so long, both technically and politically, that there's no real hope in improving it in the short term, so homeowners can either take it into their own hands or just go without electricity a week or two out of the year.

popol12 4y ago

I read that lithium is above x15 more expensive than 18 months ago (https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium) So, what makes you think battery prices are going to continue falling ? Isn't lithium mineral the main cost in building these batteries ?

xbmcuser 4y ago
The price increases have been because of supply and demand mismatches and speculation that happened because of Covid as production stabilises so will the prices. This is temporary aberration which should avg out over a decade.
- bald 4y ago
  Not sure why you're being downvoted, but this is the right answer
  - mrelectric 4y ago
    You can't predict the markets.
    - hamilyon2 4y ago
      It is difficult to predict markets fast, reliable and precisely enough to reliably beat them. It is certainly possible to predict markets and be good at it, people do it all the time
    - HPsquared 4y ago
      They have a lot of variability. It's the difference between predicting the weather and predicting the average weather (that is, the climate).
    - bryanlarsen 4y ago
      It's easy to predict the markets, just as it's easy to predict the weather. I predict it will rain sometime in the next month at my address. I also predict that it will freeze hard in the same time period. This is a useful prediction, given that I will be winterizing my yard today. Making a prediction better than an expert's is hard. Useful predictions are often easy. If my father in law decides to plant 1000 acres in wheat next year, he is making a prediction about the markets. Given the situation in Ukraine and with global climate, wheat prices are one of the most difficult to predict precisely. But he is a low cost producer compared to many, so he knows he is likely to make a profit whether the price is high or low. A precise prediction would be nice, but producers everywhere operate with imprecise but useful predictions all the time.

calineczka 4y ago

What's the source of this claim, especially the "still" part. I could never find newest data which would confirm it easily.

orgonio 4y ago

NIO has a pretty cool battery swap tech which treats batteries like replenished fuel, over the course of the cars lifetime. The battery gets swapped many times depending on the charge levels and location. https://joinyaa.com/guides/nio-battery-swaps-coming-to-america/ https://joinyaa.com/guides/nio-battery-swaps-coming-to-ameri... I kinda wish Tesla would merge with them in China. The car companies should standardize their batteries as well and provide market differentiation on how the car makes efficient use of the power. That would eliminate a lot of waste, kinda like the USB-C standard for mobile devices. EU needs to get on this.

lnsru 4y ago
Not sure about reliability of battery swapping. First thing is that one needs now 2 batteries per car while one battery is being charged somewhere. It’s technically hard problem to connect and disconnect 1000s of cycles coolant lines and thick wires to the very bulky and heavy object. While it works nicely in the demos with new cars it brings huge problems in the reality after couple years.
- chargetimezzzx 4y ago
  2 batteries per car is assuming everyone is charging at the same time. In reality there are people driving their cars while batteries are being charged and new batteries being built. The batteries charge time efficiency over time also plays a role as infrastructure scales. I wouldn't be surprised if we will see this tech in the US soon. Especially after we get back to a somewhat normal business environment with China. Next election I hope. Consumers win when they have more choice.
- VBprogrammer 4y ago
  I'd go as far as to say it doesn't make sense except as an exceptional process, a battery upgrade or replacement due to manufacturing fault. Moving 300kg+ batteries around is just not very sensible. Maybe it might be possible for heavy plant machinery where removing the battery and transporting it to the charger is easier than transporting the machine back to the charge point.
- 4y ago