The battery market is a pretty interesting market to follow. Bloomberg New Energy Fund (NEF) published an interesting report a few months ago titled "China Alre

The battery market is a pretty interesting market to follow. Bloomberg New Energy Fund (NEF) published an interesting report a few months ago titled "China Already Makes as Many Batteries as the Entire World Wants". https://about.bnef.com/blog/china-already-makes-as-many-batteries-as-the-entire-world-wants/ https://about.bnef.com/blog/china-already-makes-as-many-batt... I like their reports because it injects facts into what is otherwise a very opinion driven public debate. And the facts are quite impressive. Some key points: - they are tracking about 6 twh of new battery production related investment for 2025 world wide - that's about 4x the projected demand of 1.5 twh for 2025; which is up from slightly under 1 twh last year (2023). So, they are signalling massive over production of batteries is about to happen. That's quite a change from the shortages companies were dealing with in the last few years. - they expect that to have some obvious effects on prices and some of those investments: not all these projects will make it and battery over supply will drop prices and endanger producers that can't do that. I would add to that that it is likely that wider availability of cheaper batteries is going to create new use cases as well. So their demand projection might be off. If prices drop low enough, a lot of household equipment might start coming with batteries, for example. Things like fridges and ovens for example. That's a market that barely exists now. But if prices drop enough, why not? Another thing I find interesting is the average charge state and longevity of batteries. We're accumulating many twh of batteries on a year to year basis and they might have a life measured in decades. That's just how long it takes to get through the many thousands of charging cycles these things support even when you use them very intensively. But mostly these batteries are at pretty high charge states because they actually aren't used that intensively. You don't drain your EV's battery every day. And your powerwall that can run your house hours is only used very lightly on a day to day basis because power outages don't happen that often. So, that's a lot of potential energy that is pre-distributed and ready for use that the grid doesn't have to supply on demand. Tens to hundreds of twh pretty soon. Some virtual power plants are starting to rival nuclear power plants in the amount of power they can make available. And that's while these virtual power plants are still operating at relatively small scales. They can only do so in short bursts of course but it starting to affect how grid investments are being allocated.