3 ms·

What I don't understand is why the focus for stationary batteries is still on lithium. I don't really care about energy density (weight / volume) because I don'

What I don't understand is why the focus for stationary batteries is still on lithium. I don't really care about energy density (weight / volume) because I don't have to carry it around. Aren't there cheaper and safer solutions for stationary batteries?

_ph_ 2y ago
LFP batteries are cheaper, very safe, and currently the most popular for storage and cars which don't need maximum range - the standard range Teslas are using them too. But Sodium based batteries are coming into the market and would be even cheaper.
sanderjd 2y ago
This is what I'm excited about. I think lithium still wins in this space due to the economies of scale driven by cars and smaller electronics. But as the market for stationary storage grows, there will be more paths to scale technologies that wouldn't be competitive for mobile use cases, but are a good fit for stationary ones. A lot of discussions of the learning curves for batteries seem to bundle all of this together, but I think there are two or three different learning curves that are at different points: The most visible one is mobile batteries, where lithium-based technologies dominate and have preferred quite far down the learning curve. But then I think there is a separate curve for stationary storage, which is at a much earlier stage, with huge room for improvement, and a number of promising technologies that exist but haven't yet made it to commercial scale. And I think there's another, separate and even more nascent curve for stationary and long duration storage, where there are initial indications that some of the initial technologies might be scalable, but it's still years away, and I think it's so early that we may well see entirely different approaches come out of the labs and win this market.

3 ms·

What I don't understand is why the focus for stationary batteries is still on lithium. I don't really care about energy density (weight / volume) because I don'

by katzenversteher 2y ago

_ph_ 2y ago
LFP batteries are cheaper, very safe, and currently the most popular for storage and cars which don't need maximum range - the standard range Teslas are using them too. But Sodium based batteries are coming into the market and would be even cheaper.
sanderjd 2y ago
This is what I'm excited about. I think lithium still wins in this space due to the economies of scale driven by cars and smaller electronics. But as the market for stationary storage grows, there will be more paths to scale technologies that wouldn't be competitive for mobile use cases, but are a good fit for stationary ones. A lot of discussions of the learning curves for batteries seem to bundle all of this together, but I think there are two or three different learning curves that are at different points: The most visible one is mobile batteries, where lithium-based technologies dominate and have preferred quite far down the learning curve. But then I think there is a separate curve for stationary storage, which is at a much earlier stage, with huge room for improvement, and a number of promising technologies that exist but haven't yet made it to commercial scale. And I think there's another, separate and even more nascent curve for stationary and long duration storage, where there are initial indications that some of the initial technologies might be scalable, but it's still years away, and I think it's so early that we may well see entirely different approaches come out of the labs and win this market.