19 ms·

Batteries: How cheap can they get?

297 points by hoerensagen 2y ago

pfdietz 2y ago
He projects (at current growth and experience rates) that battery cells will reach $8/kWh by 2030. Wow!
- DennisP 2y ago
  But with several math errors, which make him off by a decade. He multiplies by 1.59 annually and gets a 25X increase in total battery in seven years. That actually takes eight years, but whatever. Then he says that's eight doublings, but eight doublings is a 256X increase. That would take nine years at 100% annually (first year to go from 1 to 2, then 2^8=256). But we only have a 59% annual increase so getting to 256X takes about 13 years. He also seems to be off by one in the cost reduction. At 25% per doubling it takes nine doublings to get to 10% of the current price. So add another year or two to get to $8. It's still interesting that we could get to $8/kWh by 2040 or so, especially since it seems physically plausible that sodium batteries could get that cheap, and that we could build several days of grid storage using them. And by 2030 we still get a cost drop of almost two-thirds, down to $28/kWh if we accept his claim of $80/kWh in 2023.
  - pfdietz 2y ago
    > He multiplies by 1.59 annually and gets a 25X increase in total battery in seven years. That actually takes eight years, but whatever. (1.59)^7 = 25.69 But yeah, not eight doublings. I guess we'll have to wait another four years then :).
gorgoiler 2y ago
What level of subsidy do we give to batteries?
- bee_rider 2y ago
  Surely it depends on what country you live in. Battery subsidies are mostly local at least. How do we even calculate the subsidy paid to fossil fuel companies by letting them externalize the cost of their mess onto the planet? Oh well that’s for young people and future generations to care about!
  - gorgoiler 2y ago
    Thanks for fleshing out my quickly written question. I didn’t really mean anything by it, just that I think it’s an important factor that’s overlooked in the linked article. The most useful idea to think about here, for me, is not what the raw market of economics batteries might be. Rather, the societal good that there would be if the state stepped in and just made batteries infinitesimally cheap for everyone. The state provides a lot of things that lubricate society: just as they send electricity to our homes, provide a central bank for the economy, schools for our children, and courts to mete out justice — so too could they potentially ensure every citizen has X number of 18650 cells (or future equivalent) available to them to use as they see fit.
  - sanxiyn 2y ago
    > How do we even calculate the subsidy paid to fossil fuel companies by letting them externalize the cost of their mess onto the planet? I know this was rhetorical, but the standard method in the literature is Optimal Taxes on Fossil Fuel in General Equilibrium (2014). https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA10217 https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA10217
ss64 2y ago
The cost of 50AH Li-Ion batteries is getting close to the point where they may start to compete with Lead acid for gas powered cars.
- catlikesshrimp 2y ago
  The environment be damned: Regarding price / energy density, yes. They even have weight / energy density advantage. But Lithium batteries can't be recycled. Saying "We are almost there" and "The future looks bright about it" is "moving fast and breaking things" again
  - justahuman74 2y ago
    They can be recycled, its just currently more expensive than the post-product
  - bryzaguy 2y ago
    I thought they could be recycled but at the moment it’s cheaper to mine. Is that not true?
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - mrob 2y ago
    Recovering lithium from batteries is not cost effective compared with mining new lithium. However, battery recycling is possible and still worth doing, because it recovers more valuable metals such as cobalt or copper.
    - oulipo 2y ago
      And before recycling, reusing! This is why at https://gouach.com https://gouach.com we've built the first easy-to-repair, easy-to-swap-cell battery! We're launching a Kickstarter soon, stay tuned (on our newsletter!)
  - 2y ago
martythemaniak 2y ago
Current prices are kinda nutty and are largely determined by the size of your buy. Retail prices for home batteries (a few kWhs) are roughly $1000/kWh. A Model 3 gets you about $700/kWh (with two free motors and an ipad). A Tesla megapack is $290/kWh, but you have to spend $1000000 to get that price. Tesla probably gets cells from the factory at round $80-$90/kWh. Long-term it seems pretty reasonable that retail prices should be a small multiple of the factory price (which keeps decreasing), so I think $1000 for a 20kWh battery is totally reasonable.
- justahuman74 2y ago
  At $1k for 20kw/h, I'd be very tempted to massively over-panel the roof and front/back yard on pergolas, install 200kwh of battery and never deal with pg&e again
  - huijzer 2y ago
    Exactly. This is what Tony Seba is talking about for 10 years already! He talked about this in his 2014 book Clean Disruption of Energy and Transportation.
  - NooneAtAll3 2y ago
    what's pg&e?
    - mperham 2y ago
      A source of very expensive electricity in California.
    - oblio 2y ago
      Utility company somewhere in the US.
    - fragmede 2y ago
      They are the utility company that covers most of California. They recently raised rates and customers are unhappy. They are a for-profit and their lack of spending on maintenance has caused a number of fires which has killed people, leading them to be unpopular, among other reasons.
icapybara 2y ago
I'd rather hear a projection from an engineer/scientist/operations person in the industry. This kinda reads like it's written by an armchair expert who thinks about batteries a lot, but doesn't have much to do with building that future being described. Sometimes the technical details matter and projected scaling trends aren't an inevitability.
- jtbayly 2y ago
  He claims the expert estimates have been wrong every year (too conservative).
  - marcosdumay 2y ago
    To the extent that have been expert estimates out there, they do have been consistently wrong. The same happens to solar and wind generation. But well, I haven't seen any that don't have a conflict of interest into claiming fossil fuels will continue to be required. And that's a large part of the problem: you just won't find uninterested experts publishing estimates.
    - XorNot 2y ago
      Well the other issue though is that people looking for predictions want conservative predictions because they're investing. Over-estimate and you lose money, under-estimate and you leave money on the table but don't trade away future possible gains.
      - marcosdumay 2y ago
        Hum... People investing in renewables and batteries do not use predictions. Those have at most some 3 years of building time, usually a few months. People investing in fossil fuel plants need predictions, and despite they wanting to see conservative numbers, that bias means complete doom for them. They need the opposite bias if they want to survive. Things get a lot more complex once you start to look at components industries. But then, it's not clear they use predictions for anything.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
jvanderbot 2y ago
I would love a 5-20kwh battery backup in my home, I even have a place for it. But when I called my local solar/battery installer they said that it was illegal to install grid-charged battery backups in home. I live in Minnesota. They even told me the power from a hypothetical solar rig is sold to the grid utility, not stored, and they give a discount on future winter rates as payment. This seems like a lousy deal.
- lazide 2y ago
  Keep in mind, they also might be lying.
  - jvanderbot 2y ago
    This is totally reasonable. I can't find any confirmation of this anywhere.
- BenjiWiebe 2y ago
  Is a grid-charged battery backup different than a UPS? I guarantee there's UPSs in use in Minnesota.
  - jvanderbot 2y ago
    I asked and they said "yeah it's the same and yeah it's still illegal." The difference is what side of the electrical box your equipment is on.
- jonathanlydall 2y ago
  Aside from it benefiting energy companies, is there any justification for such a law? In South Africa we’ve had load shedding on and off since 2008. It’s becoming pretty standard for middle class homes to have inverters with batteries and optionally solar. It does create an issue though that when a load shedding window ends, a whole lot of batteries start charging all at once (especially during non-daylight hours). Also due to load shedding, I don’t get full use of my batteries. Ideally I would like my batteries to pretty much fully discharge over night with energy from my solar during the day, however, because load shedding is somewhat irregular here, I have it set to not go too low so it has enough energy to tide me over.
duffpkg 2y ago
Lifepo4 (lithium iron phosphate) batteries for the home are pretty cheap as of today. Power storage for residential use in a 48v metal rackable linkable system with battery management system (BMS) is $89/kwh shipped/duty paid from reputable chinese suppliers CATL/Seplos etc. You have to wait for sea shipping, add $30/kwh if you want to buy it in the US today. From the same suppliers sodium batteries are currently $130/kwh and about 26% less efficient in the same form factor. I look forward to this changing. Due to rising power costs I moved one of my homes completely to solar and battery (lifepo4) and haven't had any problems. I can't imagine ever going back to the power company. Panels have gotten to the point of being ridiculously cheap. I have a lot of space. I purchased pallets of used panels for more or less the cost of transportation ($34 per panel 270w). They produce about 85% of their nominal rating. I mention this because other comments mention costs that are much much higher.
- reaperman 2y ago
  > Due to rising power costs I moved one of my homes completely to solar and battery Were you able to disconnect that home from the grid? Most places you're required to maintain a grid connection unless the home is in an exceptionally remote location. While pricing tends to be usage-based, true costs tend to be dominated by the capital expense of building base-load capacity for the few days your home might need to run fully on grid power. So as long as you're connected to the grid, you're still forcing the utility to spend about the same amount of money even if you only use grid power a few days out of the year.
  - duffpkg 2y ago
    Yes. Totally disconnected, zero power bill. That home is in a jurisdiction where that is permissible.
    - ManuelKiessling 2y ago
      How do you get through winter? I’m asking in good faith, I‘m using a PV installation myself and cannot see how I could realistically get off the grid.
Aurornis 2y ago
This blog post is all over the place. The 2030 price projections are taken from extrapolations of Lithium battery costs, but he’s assuming Sodium chemistry batteries will take over and become ubiquitous at rock bottom prices. The first Sodium batteries barely became available within the past year. He’s also treating batteries like the only component of the system. The associated charging, inverter, and physical structure components aren’t going to follow the same downward curve. Those are fixed costs on top of the battery itself. Finally, there’s a lot of vague futurist writing mixed in, from congratulating himself on predicting in 2017 that EV trucks would be a thing some day to something about the blockchain for coordinating power grids: > I think this is also an area where distributed ledgers with low energy requirements (so not Proof of Work but Proof of Stake) could shine by creating an ‘trustless’ system (meaning the system justs works, also if there is no ‘trusted’ party that plays the boss). This statement doesn’t even make sense when you read it. He defines “an [sic] ‘trustless’ system” as meaning a system that “just works” which suggests to me that he doesn’t really know what he’s talking about but has been led to believe that blockchain is the future for everything. Fun read, but I didn’t get much out of this article other than “prices are going down”
- SCUSKU 2y ago
  As someone who knows little about battery technology I was interested and trusted the author. But once I read the part about blockchain PoW vs PoS it seemed so off base that it threw the entire article into doubt...
- Animats 2y ago
  > This blog post is all over the place. Which is sad. He has something useful to say, but destroys his credibility by not focusing. Here's the "poster wall" of the organization he claims to head.[1] "Disciplinary convergence through creative story telling". For a much better summary of the subject, see the cover story in this week's Economist. OK, how cheap can batteries get, really? Well, the price of lithium dropped 80% in the last year.[2] Overproduction at the moment. Exxon has a lithium production unit, and they're expanding. New, large lithium mines under construction in Nevada, Sonora (Mexico), five new mines in Western Australia, Quebec, Zimbabwe... Plus, of course, recycling old batteries, a far more concentrated source than anything in the ground. Lithium supplies do not look like a problem. The prices do go wildly up and down because the price of raw lithium doesn't affect car sales much in the short term. That's normal behavior for minor commodities. This also means that sodium batteries will probably be unnecessary. This is good, because of the fire risk. For fixed installations and low end car, lithium iron phosphate is cheap, not subject to thermal runaway, and in most of BYD and CATL products right now. (APS, please get with the program and start shipping small UPSs with LiPoFe batteries so those things last 10 years.) Coming along next are solid state batteries. Huge hype, a few samples, and production cost problems.[3] Here's the manufacturing process at lab scale, at the Franuhofer Institute.[4] Works in the lab. Here it is at production test scale.[5] The IEEE consensus is that solid-state battery production technology is about 10 years behind existing lithium-ion production. With production in test everywhere from Shenzhen to Belgium to Maryland, progress is being made rapidly. This is the kind of process that gets cheaper as it scales up. Solid-state batteries are important because 10-minute charging is needed to increase consumer acceptance rates. Between solar and battery technology, fossil fuels are going to be crushed. Soon. [1] https://neonresearch.nl/poster-wall/ https://neonresearch.nl/poster-wall/ [2] https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/lithium-producers-bullish-long-term-demand-despite-recent-price-drop-2024-06-28/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/lithium-producer... [3] https://spectrum.ieee.org/solid-state-battery-production-challenges https://spectrum.ieee.org/solid-state-battery-production-cha... [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5SVrp8N-1M& https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5SVrp8N-1M& [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eZGuDaqZAE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eZGuDaqZAE
ck2 2y ago
Except we are not going to have cheap batteries and solar in the USA and never ever cheap EVs Remember how tariffs were called "asinine" when the last administration did them? Next year tariffs will double the price of batteries and solar imports, except there's no domestic production to even compete at that high price. Oh semiconductors are going to double in price too in 2025, buy soon. https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/14/24156249/us-biden-china-tariffs-ev-solar-battery-semiconductor-critical-minerals https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/14/24156249/us-biden-china-t...
- philipkglass 2y ago
  Next year tariffs will double the price of batteries and solar imports, except there's no domestic production to even compete at that high price. I agree that the tariffs are going to hurt adoption, but the US does have domestic battery and solar manufacturing. Tesla manufactures large quantities of lithium ion batteries in Nevada and Texas. First Solar (3 manufacturing sites in Ohio): https://www.firstsolar.com/About-Us/Locations https://www.firstsolar.com/About-Us/Locations Hanwha Qcells solar manufacturing in Georgia: https://apnews.com/article/us-solar-panel-plant-hanwha-qcells-georgia-c7717cef3435a2c3197261edf6d0272f https://apnews.com/article/us-solar-panel-plant-hanwha-qcell... Actually it's faster to link this report about existing and planned North American solar manufacturing: https://media-01.imu.nl/storage/sinovoltaics.com/14240/sinovoltaics-solar-supply-chain-map-north-america-q2-2024-1.pdf https://media-01.imu.nl/storage/sinovoltaics.com/14240/sinov... There's a lot of work in progress right now but also several operating plants.
- dangus 2y ago
  Just a little math issue here, tariffs jumping from 25 percent to 100% isn’t doubling the price, and the tariff cost used for the percentage isn’t the final retail cost. Let’s say I have a widget. I sell it for $10, and it cost me $1 for me to produce. There’s a 25 percent tariff, which is 25 cents. Now I sell the item for $10.25 to pay for the tariff. If the tariff goes up to 100%, that now means that I need to raise the price of the product to $11 to pay for it.
worstspotgain 2y ago
As a layperson, the first thing the title made me think of is "How safe can they get?" Let RESCI be the Risk of Explosion/Surge/Combustion/Inhalation. Here are some measures that are interesting to me that I can't really approximate when evaluating products: - Incremental RESCI when buying from the cheapest 25% of vendors - Incremental RESCI when drawing from the product population that shouldn't have passed QA - Incremental RESCI when buying on AliExpress or random sites - Incremental RESCI when dropping, hitting with a hammer, leaving in the sun, subjecting to a power surge - Incremental RESCI from living in a dense neighborhood where dense people are buying from the cheapest 25% of vendors on AliExpress, occasionally dropping or hitting with a hammer, etc. In the West, we have about a buck's worth of experience with residential electric service. By many measures, it's still much more dangerous than it should be.
- DaoVeles 2y ago
  With a lot of new chemistry the risk of fire is greatly reduced. It seems to be an issue mostly with lithium based systems. Things like Iron or sodium based are much safer, energy density is also lower because of this but it is a reasonable trade off. Also tend to have much greater life time charge cycles. Potential to go tens of thousands of cycles rather than just a thousand or so.
  - rootusrootus 2y ago
    > an issue mostly with lithium based systems. Things like Iron or sodium based are much safer The iron battery you are thinking of is a lithium battery. It is not the lithium that is a fire risk; lithium ion batteries do not contain metallic lithium. In an LFP battery the phosphate-oxide bond is much more stable and not subject to thermal runaway compared with e.g. cobalt-oxide.
    - DaoVeles 2y ago
      That sounds much better than the dribble I was spouting. Thanks!
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
“…this is also an area where distributed ledgers with low energy requirements (so not Proof of Work but Proof of Stake) could shine by creating an ‘trustless’ system (meaning the system justs works, also if there is no ‘trusted’ party that plays the boss).” What? This bit at the end has nothing to do with the thesis! Carthago delenda est much?
torginus 2y ago
Ladies and gents this is what standard-issue Silicon Valley style grift looks like (following in the footsteps of the great Kurzweil). Ignore basic physics, massage data so you can more credibly fit an exponential curve on it, and extrapolate a fantastic future for it. All this to underpin the grand illusion of capitalism that exponential YoY growth is sustainable to justify insane VC valuations. Which is even more perverse when all this is done in the name of saving the planet.
- lanstin 2y ago
  Having a lot of cheap electricity is also a trope in an anarcho-syndicalist utopian paradise for all the people.
- pfdietz 2y ago
  Which basic physics did he ignore?
- dangus 2y ago
  When you’re responding to an article with a large amount of data and sources provided, the burden is on you to show which data is incorrect or which assumptions are too rosy and how you quantitatively arrived at those conclusions. I’d be with you if the author was just hand waving their way to this conclusion but they seem to have done their research and used real numbers.
- SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago
  We know that tech adoption follows an s-curve that is only exponential in the lower parts. No-one is claiming truly unbounded exponentials for these techs. The thing is that they have been exponential so far. clean energy forecasts based on linear trends, not on doubling of installations or on halving of prices have been consistently too pessimistic. We can expect this to continue for a short while longer, until inflection points are reached.
kkfx 2y ago
A small note: I have a domestic p.v. system with small LFP storage and well... It's ~3 years old and now the same battery capacity (8kWh) cost a bit less the THE DOUBLE, witch is ~9000€ instead of a bit more than 5000€... Industrial battery prices are lowered, in China, definitively not here in the EU, and at this rates the expensive small UPS for a home, that's are such capacity, because to being semi-autonomous a typical home need at least 80-100kWh to avoid too deep DoD and support heating in new all-electric and very well insulated homes. And I talk about mild climate where there is enough Sun in the winter to have not the autonomy but at least margin also in December, January and February. Oh, and I talk about self-assembled systems like mine witch is legal here, but not legal in every countries, because retail prices for a complete systems installed by them are FAR more expensive, about THREE time more, enough to make the investment so expensive to be a nonsense.
richardw 2y ago
I think this underestimates the benefits of focus and serendipity and new materials. There’s a non zero chance that grid scale fixed batteries get made from things like sand or liquid metal or (insert cheap thing you can heat here). Claims of 10 euros/kwh, months of energy storage: https://thenextweb.com/news/startup-sand-battery-funding-polar-night-finland https://thenextweb.com/news/startup-sand-battery-funding-pol... How big a battery can you make when it’s made from sand? The trick with grid is that because you’re building at scale, you can give the benefits to many in one shot and you can build it out of town. Think Australia’s original big battery from Tesla in 90 days vs. messing with installing lots of little ones in houses, with all the maintenance, education and dangers that brings.
epups 2y ago
> If we start with 2410 GWh in 2023 and grow with 59% per year that gives us 61.917 GWh in 2030. That would mean almost exactly 8 doublings in 2030. For context, the global electricity consumption in 2019 was around 23 TWh [1]. [1] https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-information-overview/electricity-consumption https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-information-overview...
- drozycki 2y ago
  23000 TWh, or 23 PWh according to your link
sholladay 2y ago
Lowering cost per kWh is great, but if power demand increases at about the same rate or faster, then the impact is minimal. Cost per bit of internet plans has also gone down a lot in the past decade, but you’d be forgiven for not noticing on account of all the new JavaScript, ads, and other website bloat. Using less exotic materials is exciting, though! Regardless of whether the cost feels different.
louwrentius 2y ago
I have 4 x 230Ah LiFePo4 cells in a 12 volt setup to power my solar powered blog during the night. It also runs my computer setup at 90W for many hours using an inverter. People should really understand how cheap these cells have become and how feasible it is to setup your own battery storage system. I’m now on a variable (next-day / day-ahead) dynamic electricity tariff that changes by the hour. On some days there are multiple hours where I get Paid to use electricity, it’s crazy that we have such an abundance of wind and solar. It’s such fun to play with the Tiber API + Python and using those cheap hours to charge my battery a bit, while leaving room for solar.
k8sagic 2y ago
I thought a few years back already that owning a bigger house will be cheaper than ever due to the progress of cheap renewable energy, cheaper and cheaper heat pump technology and batteries. Nice to see blog
xbmcuser 2y ago
I have been predicting over the last year that with many US and European manufacture suddenly giving up on ev growth rate and feed in tariff for solar not getting a good price. The next big thing is going to be home batteries. Looking at what Tesla is charging for powerwall and the actual materials cost which are still dropping people will start trying to get in on these margins.
tuatoru 2y ago
Once material costs fall far enough, other costs start to dominate. Design and permitting, sales and marketing, transport, finance and insurance, installation, support structures, safety systems, interconnections (wires), converters and so on. $11/kWh seems optimistic for 2030.
ineedaj0b 2y ago
this might not be the right thread to ask this question, but I have an older car and the battery inside went. In the past the battery was $50 to replace. Post-COVID, it runs for a whopping $250 at most automotive places... sometimes cheaper on sale. So why not swap it out for a lithium battery (which still run around $50)? Are there any downsides beyond rewiring the connector types I'm not aware of? *the battery type is 51R
- shagie 2y ago
  https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B0013ZGZ9Q?context=search&active=amazon https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B0013ZGZ9Q?context=searc... The price jump from $150 to $250 was in 2017. --- I have a hybrid car - it has both a traditional lead acid battery and a lithium ion battery. And while I also have a lithium ion jump starter battery, they have issues in many situations that make them ill-suited for a cranking starter battery. https://www.batteriesplus.com/blog/power/lithium-starting https://www.batteriesplus.com/blog/power/lithium-starting
bilsbie 2y ago
I think it would be cool if appliances started coming with batteries. You could give them times of day to charge, and to not use the outlet. And they could work in power outages.
ChuckMcM 2y ago
I really appreciate folks who include their reasoning with their argument as it makes it possible to evaluate their conclusions through external sources. So hats off here. One of the things that helped solar take off in California (besides subsidies) was being 'grid tied' relieved you have having to manage all the battery technology. Initially this led to some effective rate plans (trading watts for watts) but once the power companies realized the lack of profit on selling power was affecting their ability both maintain infrastructure AND pay off their monetary judgements levied by courts for blowing up towns and burning down forests they managed to get the CPUC to switch to a model that turns home owners with Solar into sharecroppers for the power company[1]. On the plus side this is rekindling the interest in being 100% "off grid" as that removes the power company leverage and puts pricing control back into the market/consumer's hands. What I find interesting is that now I am starting to hear rumbles about how the power company wants to use consumer and commercial building "whole building" power systems as back up for the grid in peak power consumption emergencies that would mandate being tied to the grid even if you didn't "need" to be. I have been writing diligently to representatives that I refuse to let the CPUC tell me what I have to sell power back to the power companies to sustain the grid in emergencies and reserve the right to charge what ever the market will bear. It's a bit Texan in its dysfunctionalness but my goal is to encourage zero carbon emission home power grids faster, and driving the existing power companies out of business will assist in that endeavor. Batteries are a huge part of that and if the author is correct that we can get to $1/kWh batteries by 2030 I feel like I will live to see it which makes me happy. [1] Am I bitter? What make you say that :-)
jsnell 2y ago
> If we start with 2410 GWh in 2023 and grow with 59% per year that gives us 61.917 GWh in 2030. That would mean almost exactly 8 doublings in 2030. There's an order of magnitude error here. That's an increase of about 26x. 8 doublings would require an increase of 256x. Now, anyone can make a simple math error. But, like, it should be totally obvious to anyone that 7 years of 60% annual growth can't possibly be anywhere near 8 years of 100% annual growth? Or if not anyone, then at least for someone like the author who spends the first page of the article bragging about their credentials in reasoning about exponential growth. Edit: and this isn't just nitpicking, this faulty result is then used as the basis of the cost reduction estimates.
- ppsreejith 2y ago
  I think the unit is off. Starting from 2410 GWh & a compound increase of 59% per year gives us: 61,915 GWh (2410 * 1.59^7) which is about 61.915 TWh. So perhaps the author meant 61.915 TWh instead of GWh. No way is this in anyway close to 8 doublings though. That would take 12 years or by 2035. (1.59^12 = 261x)
  - jsnell 2y ago
    I think it's rather that they're using the dot as a thousand separator, not as a decimal separator.
aitchnyu 2y ago
Tangential, whats the low energy distributed ledger tech he's talking about?
- iSnow 2y ago
  Probably he wasn't talking about a concrete solution, but Powerledger on the Ethereum chain or EWT token on Gnosis.
SergeAx 2y ago
> stormy electricity grid For me (living in Europe), stable 220V 50Gz from any wall socket is one of the traits of civilization, like potable water tap and flush toilets. "Stormy grid" is something from a rural village lifestyle, with a water well and a cold basement to keep winter food supply. Is it really that huge problem in parts of US?
- throwawayffffas 2y ago
  There were a couple of large scale very long outages in Texas due to very bad weather in the last few years that made the news even on this side of the Atlantic.
ZeroGravitas 2y ago
The mention of Blockchain threw me off but I generally agree with this analysis. Worth remembering that even enthusiastic supporters of the energy transition have underestimated the historical trends in wind, solar and batteries. It's just hard to comprehend the S-curve ramp.

297 points by hoerensagen 2y ago

pfdietz 2y ago

He projects (at current growth and experience rates) that battery cells will reach $8/kWh by 2030. Wow!

DennisP 2y ago
But with several math errors, which make him off by a decade. He multiplies by 1.59 annually and gets a 25X increase in total battery in seven years. That actually takes eight years, but whatever. Then he says that's eight doublings, but eight doublings is a 256X increase. That would take nine years at 100% annually (first year to go from 1 to 2, then 2^8=256). But we only have a 59% annual increase so getting to 256X takes about 13 years. He also seems to be off by one in the cost reduction. At 25% per doubling it takes nine doublings to get to 10% of the current price. So add another year or two to get to $8. It's still interesting that we could get to $8/kWh by 2040 or so, especially since it seems physically plausible that sodium batteries could get that cheap, and that we could build several days of grid storage using them. And by 2030 we still get a cost drop of almost two-thirds, down to $28/kWh if we accept his claim of $80/kWh in 2023.
- pfdietz 2y ago
  > He multiplies by 1.59 annually and gets a 25X increase in total battery in seven years. That actually takes eight years, but whatever. (1.59)^7 = 25.69 But yeah, not eight doublings. I guess we'll have to wait another four years then :).

gorgoiler 2y ago

What level of subsidy do we give to batteries?

bee_rider 2y ago
Surely it depends on what country you live in. Battery subsidies are mostly local at least. How do we even calculate the subsidy paid to fossil fuel companies by letting them externalize the cost of their mess onto the planet? Oh well that’s for young people and future generations to care about!
- gorgoiler 2y ago
  Thanks for fleshing out my quickly written question. I didn’t really mean anything by it, just that I think it’s an important factor that’s overlooked in the linked article. The most useful idea to think about here, for me, is not what the raw market of economics batteries might be. Rather, the societal good that there would be if the state stepped in and just made batteries infinitesimally cheap for everyone. The state provides a lot of things that lubricate society: just as they send electricity to our homes, provide a central bank for the economy, schools for our children, and courts to mete out justice — so too could they potentially ensure every citizen has X number of 18650 cells (or future equivalent) available to them to use as they see fit.
- sanxiyn 2y ago
  > How do we even calculate the subsidy paid to fossil fuel companies by letting them externalize the cost of their mess onto the planet? I know this was rhetorical, but the standard method in the literature is Optimal Taxes on Fossil Fuel in General Equilibrium (2014). https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA10217 https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA10217

ss64 2y ago

The cost of 50AH Li-Ion batteries is getting close to the point where they may start to compete with Lead acid for gas powered cars.

catlikesshrimp 2y ago
The environment be damned: Regarding price / energy density, yes. They even have weight / energy density advantage. But Lithium batteries can't be recycled. Saying "We are almost there" and "The future looks bright about it" is "moving fast and breaking things" again
- justahuman74 2y ago
  They can be recycled, its just currently more expensive than the post-product
- bryzaguy 2y ago
  I thought they could be recycled but at the moment it’s cheaper to mine. Is that not true?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- mrob 2y ago
  Recovering lithium from batteries is not cost effective compared with mining new lithium. However, battery recycling is possible and still worth doing, because it recovers more valuable metals such as cobalt or copper.
  - oulipo 2y ago
    And before recycling, reusing! This is why at https://gouach.com https://gouach.com we've built the first easy-to-repair, easy-to-swap-cell battery! We're launching a Kickstarter soon, stay tuned (on our newsletter!)
- 2y ago

martythemaniak 2y ago

Current prices are kinda nutty and are largely determined by the size of your buy. Retail prices for home batteries (a few kWhs) are roughly $1000/kWh. A Model 3 gets you about $700/kWh (with two free motors and an ipad). A Tesla megapack is $290/kWh, but you have to spend $1000000 to get that price. Tesla probably gets cells from the factory at round $80-$90/kWh. Long-term it seems pretty reasonable that retail prices should be a small multiple of the factory price (which keeps decreasing), so I think $1000 for a 20kWh battery is totally reasonable.

justahuman74 2y ago
At $1k for 20kw/h, I'd be very tempted to massively over-panel the roof and front/back yard on pergolas, install 200kwh of battery and never deal with pg&e again
- huijzer 2y ago
  Exactly. This is what Tony Seba is talking about for 10 years already! He talked about this in his 2014 book Clean Disruption of Energy and Transportation.
- NooneAtAll3 2y ago
  what's pg&e?
  - mperham 2y ago
    A source of very expensive electricity in California.
  - oblio 2y ago
    Utility company somewhere in the US.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    They are the utility company that covers most of California. They recently raised rates and customers are unhappy. They are a for-profit and their lack of spending on maintenance has caused a number of fires which has killed people, leading them to be unpopular, among other reasons.

icapybara 2y ago

I'd rather hear a projection from an engineer/scientist/operations person in the industry. This kinda reads like it's written by an armchair expert who thinks about batteries a lot, but doesn't have much to do with building that future being described. Sometimes the technical details matter and projected scaling trends aren't an inevitability.

jtbayly 2y ago
He claims the expert estimates have been wrong every year (too conservative).
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  To the extent that have been expert estimates out there, they do have been consistently wrong. The same happens to solar and wind generation. But well, I haven't seen any that don't have a conflict of interest into claiming fossil fuels will continue to be required. And that's a large part of the problem: you just won't find uninterested experts publishing estimates.
  - XorNot 2y ago
    Well the other issue though is that people looking for predictions want conservative predictions because they're investing. Over-estimate and you lose money, under-estimate and you leave money on the table but don't trade away future possible gains.
    - marcosdumay 2y ago
      Hum... People investing in renewables and batteries do not use predictions. Those have at most some 3 years of building time, usually a few months. People investing in fossil fuel plants need predictions, and despite they wanting to see conservative numbers, that bias means complete doom for them. They need the opposite bias if they want to survive. Things get a lot more complex once you start to look at components industries. But then, it's not clear they use predictions for anything.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

jvanderbot 2y ago

I would love a 5-20kwh battery backup in my home, I even have a place for it. But when I called my local solar/battery installer they said that it was illegal to install grid-charged battery backups in home. I live in Minnesota. They even told me the power from a hypothetical solar rig is sold to the grid utility, not stored, and they give a discount on future winter rates as payment. This seems like a lousy deal.

lazide 2y ago
Keep in mind, they also might be lying.
- jvanderbot 2y ago
  This is totally reasonable. I can't find any confirmation of this anywhere.
BenjiWiebe 2y ago
Is a grid-charged battery backup different than a UPS? I guarantee there's UPSs in use in Minnesota.
- jvanderbot 2y ago
  I asked and they said "yeah it's the same and yeah it's still illegal." The difference is what side of the electrical box your equipment is on.
jonathanlydall 2y ago
Aside from it benefiting energy companies, is there any justification for such a law? In South Africa we’ve had load shedding on and off since 2008. It’s becoming pretty standard for middle class homes to have inverters with batteries and optionally solar. It does create an issue though that when a load shedding window ends, a whole lot of batteries start charging all at once (especially during non-daylight hours). Also due to load shedding, I don’t get full use of my batteries. Ideally I would like my batteries to pretty much fully discharge over night with energy from my solar during the day, however, because load shedding is somewhat irregular here, I have it set to not go too low so it has enough energy to tide me over.

duffpkg 2y ago

Lifepo4 (lithium iron phosphate) batteries for the home are pretty cheap as of today. Power storage for residential use in a 48v metal rackable linkable system with battery management system (BMS) is $89/kwh shipped/duty paid from reputable chinese suppliers CATL/Seplos etc. You have to wait for sea shipping, add $30/kwh if you want to buy it in the US today. From the same suppliers sodium batteries are currently $130/kwh and about 26% less efficient in the same form factor. I look forward to this changing. Due to rising power costs I moved one of my homes completely to solar and battery (lifepo4) and haven't had any problems. I can't imagine ever going back to the power company. Panels have gotten to the point of being ridiculously cheap. I have a lot of space. I purchased pallets of used panels for more or less the cost of transportation ($34 per panel 270w). They produce about 85% of their nominal rating. I mention this because other comments mention costs that are much much higher.

reaperman 2y ago
> Due to rising power costs I moved one of my homes completely to solar and battery Were you able to disconnect that home from the grid? Most places you're required to maintain a grid connection unless the home is in an exceptionally remote location. While pricing tends to be usage-based, true costs tend to be dominated by the capital expense of building base-load capacity for the few days your home might need to run fully on grid power. So as long as you're connected to the grid, you're still forcing the utility to spend about the same amount of money even if you only use grid power a few days out of the year.
- duffpkg 2y ago
  Yes. Totally disconnected, zero power bill. That home is in a jurisdiction where that is permissible.
  - ManuelKiessling 2y ago
    How do you get through winter? I’m asking in good faith, I‘m using a PV installation myself and cannot see how I could realistically get off the grid.

Aurornis 2y ago

This blog post is all over the place. The 2030 price projections are taken from extrapolations of Lithium battery costs, but he’s assuming Sodium chemistry batteries will take over and become ubiquitous at rock bottom prices. The first Sodium batteries barely became available within the past year. He’s also treating batteries like the only component of the system. The associated charging, inverter, and physical structure components aren’t going to follow the same downward curve. Those are fixed costs on top of the battery itself. Finally, there’s a lot of vague futurist writing mixed in, from congratulating himself on predicting in 2017 that EV trucks would be a thing some day to something about the blockchain for coordinating power grids: > I think this is also an area where distributed ledgers with low energy requirements (so not Proof of Work but Proof of Stake) could shine by creating an ‘trustless’ system (meaning the system justs works, also if there is no ‘trusted’ party that plays the boss). This statement doesn’t even make sense when you read it. He defines “an [sic] ‘trustless’ system” as meaning a system that “just works” which suggests to me that he doesn’t really know what he’s talking about but has been led to believe that blockchain is the future for everything. Fun read, but I didn’t get much out of this article other than “prices are going down”

SCUSKU 2y ago
As someone who knows little about battery technology I was interested and trusted the author. But once I read the part about blockchain PoW vs PoS it seemed so off base that it threw the entire article into doubt...
Animats 2y ago
> This blog post is all over the place. Which is sad. He has something useful to say, but destroys his credibility by not focusing. Here's the "poster wall" of the organization he claims to head.[1] "Disciplinary convergence through creative story telling". For a much better summary of the subject, see the cover story in this week's Economist. OK, how cheap can batteries get, really? Well, the price of lithium dropped 80% in the last year.[2] Overproduction at the moment. Exxon has a lithium production unit, and they're expanding. New, large lithium mines under construction in Nevada, Sonora (Mexico), five new mines in Western Australia, Quebec, Zimbabwe... Plus, of course, recycling old batteries, a far more concentrated source than anything in the ground. Lithium supplies do not look like a problem. The prices do go wildly up and down because the price of raw lithium doesn't affect car sales much in the short term. That's normal behavior for minor commodities. This also means that sodium batteries will probably be unnecessary. This is good, because of the fire risk. For fixed installations and low end car, lithium iron phosphate is cheap, not subject to thermal runaway, and in most of BYD and CATL products right now. (APS, please get with the program and start shipping small UPSs with LiPoFe batteries so those things last 10 years.) Coming along next are solid state batteries. Huge hype, a few samples, and production cost problems.[3] Here's the manufacturing process at lab scale, at the Franuhofer Institute.[4] Works in the lab. Here it is at production test scale.[5] The IEEE consensus is that solid-state battery production technology is about 10 years behind existing lithium-ion production. With production in test everywhere from Shenzhen to Belgium to Maryland, progress is being made rapidly. This is the kind of process that gets cheaper as it scales up. Solid-state batteries are important because 10-minute charging is needed to increase consumer acceptance rates. Between solar and battery technology, fossil fuels are going to be crushed. Soon. [1] https://neonresearch.nl/poster-wall/ https://neonresearch.nl/poster-wall/ [2] https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/lithium-producers-bullish-long-term-demand-despite-recent-price-drop-2024-06-28/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/lithium-producer... [3] https://spectrum.ieee.org/solid-state-battery-production-challenges https://spectrum.ieee.org/solid-state-battery-production-cha... [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5SVrp8N-1M& https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5SVrp8N-1M& [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eZGuDaqZAE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eZGuDaqZAE

ck2 2y ago

Except we are not going to have cheap batteries and solar in the USA and never ever cheap EVs Remember how tariffs were called "asinine" when the last administration did them? Next year tariffs will double the price of batteries and solar imports, except there's no domestic production to even compete at that high price. Oh semiconductors are going to double in price too in 2025, buy soon. https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/14/24156249/us-biden-china-tariffs-ev-solar-battery-semiconductor-critical-minerals https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/14/24156249/us-biden-china-t...

philipkglass 2y ago
Next year tariffs will double the price of batteries and solar imports, except there's no domestic production to even compete at that high price. I agree that the tariffs are going to hurt adoption, but the US does have domestic battery and solar manufacturing. Tesla manufactures large quantities of lithium ion batteries in Nevada and Texas. First Solar (3 manufacturing sites in Ohio): https://www.firstsolar.com/About-Us/Locations https://www.firstsolar.com/About-Us/Locations Hanwha Qcells solar manufacturing in Georgia: https://apnews.com/article/us-solar-panel-plant-hanwha-qcells-georgia-c7717cef3435a2c3197261edf6d0272f https://apnews.com/article/us-solar-panel-plant-hanwha-qcell... Actually it's faster to link this report about existing and planned North American solar manufacturing: https://media-01.imu.nl/storage/sinovoltaics.com/14240/sinovoltaics-solar-supply-chain-map-north-america-q2-2024-1.pdf https://media-01.imu.nl/storage/sinovoltaics.com/14240/sinov... There's a lot of work in progress right now but also several operating plants.
dangus 2y ago
Just a little math issue here, tariffs jumping from 25 percent to 100% isn’t doubling the price, and the tariff cost used for the percentage isn’t the final retail cost. Let’s say I have a widget. I sell it for $10, and it cost me $1 for me to produce. There’s a 25 percent tariff, which is 25 cents. Now I sell the item for $10.25 to pay for the tariff. If the tariff goes up to 100%, that now means that I need to raise the price of the product to $11 to pay for it.

worstspotgain 2y ago

As a layperson, the first thing the title made me think of is "How safe can they get?" Let RESCI be the Risk of Explosion/Surge/Combustion/Inhalation. Here are some measures that are interesting to me that I can't really approximate when evaluating products: - Incremental RESCI when buying from the cheapest 25% of vendors - Incremental RESCI when drawing from the product population that shouldn't have passed QA - Incremental RESCI when buying on AliExpress or random sites - Incremental RESCI when dropping, hitting with a hammer, leaving in the sun, subjecting to a power surge - Incremental RESCI from living in a dense neighborhood where dense people are buying from the cheapest 25% of vendors on AliExpress, occasionally dropping or hitting with a hammer, etc. In the West, we have about a buck's worth of experience with residential electric service. By many measures, it's still much more dangerous than it should be.

DaoVeles 2y ago
With a lot of new chemistry the risk of fire is greatly reduced. It seems to be an issue mostly with lithium based systems. Things like Iron or sodium based are much safer, energy density is also lower because of this but it is a reasonable trade off. Also tend to have much greater life time charge cycles. Potential to go tens of thousands of cycles rather than just a thousand or so.
- rootusrootus 2y ago
  > an issue mostly with lithium based systems. Things like Iron or sodium based are much safer The iron battery you are thinking of is a lithium battery. It is not the lithium that is a fire risk; lithium ion batteries do not contain metallic lithium. In an LFP battery the phosphate-oxide bond is much more stable and not subject to thermal runaway compared with e.g. cobalt-oxide.
  - DaoVeles 2y ago
    That sounds much better than the dribble I was spouting. Thanks!

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

“…this is also an area where distributed ledgers with low energy requirements (so not Proof of Work but Proof of Stake) could shine by creating an ‘trustless’ system (meaning the system justs works, also if there is no ‘trusted’ party that plays the boss).” What? This bit at the end has nothing to do with the thesis! Carthago delenda est much?

torginus 2y ago

Ladies and gents this is what standard-issue Silicon Valley style grift looks like (following in the footsteps of the great Kurzweil). Ignore basic physics, massage data so you can more credibly fit an exponential curve on it, and extrapolate a fantastic future for it. All this to underpin the grand illusion of capitalism that exponential YoY growth is sustainable to justify insane VC valuations. Which is even more perverse when all this is done in the name of saving the planet.

lanstin 2y ago
Having a lot of cheap electricity is also a trope in an anarcho-syndicalist utopian paradise for all the people.
pfdietz 2y ago
Which basic physics did he ignore?
dangus 2y ago
When you’re responding to an article with a large amount of data and sources provided, the burden is on you to show which data is incorrect or which assumptions are too rosy and how you quantitatively arrived at those conclusions. I’d be with you if the author was just hand waving their way to this conclusion but they seem to have done their research and used real numbers.
SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago
We know that tech adoption follows an s-curve that is only exponential in the lower parts. No-one is claiming truly unbounded exponentials for these techs. The thing is that they have been exponential so far. clean energy forecasts based on linear trends, not on doubling of installations or on halving of prices have been consistently too pessimistic. We can expect this to continue for a short while longer, until inflection points are reached.

kkfx 2y ago

A small note: I have a domestic p.v. system with small LFP storage and well... It's ~3 years old and now the same battery capacity (8kWh) cost a bit less the THE DOUBLE, witch is ~9000€ instead of a bit more than 5000€... Industrial battery prices are lowered, in China, definitively not here in the EU, and at this rates the expensive small UPS for a home, that's are such capacity, because to being semi-autonomous a typical home need at least 80-100kWh to avoid too deep DoD and support heating in new all-electric and very well insulated homes. And I talk about mild climate where there is enough Sun in the winter to have not the autonomy but at least margin also in December, January and February. Oh, and I talk about self-assembled systems like mine witch is legal here, but not legal in every countries, because retail prices for a complete systems installed by them are FAR more expensive, about THREE time more, enough to make the investment so expensive to be a nonsense.

richardw 2y ago

I think this underestimates the benefits of focus and serendipity and new materials. There’s a non zero chance that grid scale fixed batteries get made from things like sand or liquid metal or (insert cheap thing you can heat here). Claims of 10 euros/kwh, months of energy storage: https://thenextweb.com/news/startup-sand-battery-funding-polar-night-finland https://thenextweb.com/news/startup-sand-battery-funding-pol... How big a battery can you make when it’s made from sand? The trick with grid is that because you’re building at scale, you can give the benefits to many in one shot and you can build it out of town. Think Australia’s original big battery from Tesla in 90 days vs. messing with installing lots of little ones in houses, with all the maintenance, education and dangers that brings.

epups 2y ago

> If we start with 2410 GWh in 2023 and grow with 59% per year that gives us 61.917 GWh in 2030. That would mean almost exactly 8 doublings in 2030. For context, the global electricity consumption in 2019 was around 23 TWh [1]. [1] https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-information-overview/electricity-consumption https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-information-overview...

drozycki 2y ago
23000 TWh, or 23 PWh according to your link

sholladay 2y ago

Lowering cost per kWh is great, but if power demand increases at about the same rate or faster, then the impact is minimal. Cost per bit of internet plans has also gone down a lot in the past decade, but you’d be forgiven for not noticing on account of all the new JavaScript, ads, and other website bloat. Using less exotic materials is exciting, though! Regardless of whether the cost feels different.

louwrentius 2y ago

I have 4 x 230Ah LiFePo4 cells in a 12 volt setup to power my solar powered blog during the night. It also runs my computer setup at 90W for many hours using an inverter. People should really understand how cheap these cells have become and how feasible it is to setup your own battery storage system. I’m now on a variable (next-day / day-ahead) dynamic electricity tariff that changes by the hour. On some days there are multiple hours where I get Paid to use electricity, it’s crazy that we have such an abundance of wind and solar. It’s such fun to play with the Tiber API + Python and using those cheap hours to charge my battery a bit, while leaving room for solar.

k8sagic 2y ago

I thought a few years back already that owning a bigger house will be cheaper than ever due to the progress of cheap renewable energy, cheaper and cheaper heat pump technology and batteries. Nice to see blog

xbmcuser 2y ago

I have been predicting over the last year that with many US and European manufacture suddenly giving up on ev growth rate and feed in tariff for solar not getting a good price. The next big thing is going to be home batteries. Looking at what Tesla is charging for powerwall and the actual materials cost which are still dropping people will start trying to get in on these margins.

tuatoru 2y ago

Once material costs fall far enough, other costs start to dominate. Design and permitting, sales and marketing, transport, finance and insurance, installation, support structures, safety systems, interconnections (wires), converters and so on. $11/kWh seems optimistic for 2030.

ineedaj0b 2y ago

this might not be the right thread to ask this question, but I have an older car and the battery inside went. In the past the battery was $50 to replace. Post-COVID, it runs for a whopping $250 at most automotive places... sometimes cheaper on sale. So why not swap it out for a lithium battery (which still run around $50)? Are there any downsides beyond rewiring the connector types I'm not aware of? *the battery type is 51R

shagie 2y ago
https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B0013ZGZ9Q?context=search&active=amazon https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B0013ZGZ9Q?context=searc... The price jump from $150 to $250 was in 2017. --- I have a hybrid car - it has both a traditional lead acid battery and a lithium ion battery. And while I also have a lithium ion jump starter battery, they have issues in many situations that make them ill-suited for a cranking starter battery. https://www.batteriesplus.com/blog/power/lithium-starting https://www.batteriesplus.com/blog/power/lithium-starting

bilsbie 2y ago

I think it would be cool if appliances started coming with batteries. You could give them times of day to charge, and to not use the outlet. And they could work in power outages.

ChuckMcM 2y ago

I really appreciate folks who include their reasoning with their argument as it makes it possible to evaluate their conclusions through external sources. So hats off here. One of the things that helped solar take off in California (besides subsidies) was being 'grid tied' relieved you have having to manage all the battery technology. Initially this led to some effective rate plans (trading watts for watts) but once the power companies realized the lack of profit on selling power was affecting their ability both maintain infrastructure AND pay off their monetary judgements levied by courts for blowing up towns and burning down forests they managed to get the CPUC to switch to a model that turns home owners with Solar into sharecroppers for the power company[1]. On the plus side this is rekindling the interest in being 100% "off grid" as that removes the power company leverage and puts pricing control back into the market/consumer's hands. What I find interesting is that now I am starting to hear rumbles about how the power company wants to use consumer and commercial building "whole building" power systems as back up for the grid in peak power consumption emergencies that would mandate being tied to the grid even if you didn't "need" to be. I have been writing diligently to representatives that I refuse to let the CPUC tell me what I have to sell power back to the power companies to sustain the grid in emergencies and reserve the right to charge what ever the market will bear. It's a bit Texan in its dysfunctionalness but my goal is to encourage zero carbon emission home power grids faster, and driving the existing power companies out of business will assist in that endeavor. Batteries are a huge part of that and if the author is correct that we can get to $1/kWh batteries by 2030 I feel like I will live to see it which makes me happy. [1] Am I bitter? What make you say that :-)

jsnell 2y ago

> If we start with 2410 GWh in 2023 and grow with 59% per year that gives us 61.917 GWh in 2030. That would mean almost exactly 8 doublings in 2030. There's an order of magnitude error here. That's an increase of about 26x. 8 doublings would require an increase of 256x. Now, anyone can make a simple math error. But, like, it should be totally obvious to anyone that 7 years of 60% annual growth can't possibly be anywhere near 8 years of 100% annual growth? Or if not anyone, then at least for someone like the author who spends the first page of the article bragging about their credentials in reasoning about exponential growth. Edit: and this isn't just nitpicking, this faulty result is then used as the basis of the cost reduction estimates.

ppsreejith 2y ago
I think the unit is off. Starting from 2410 GWh & a compound increase of 59% per year gives us: 61,915 GWh (2410 * 1.59^7) which is about 61.915 TWh. So perhaps the author meant 61.915 TWh instead of GWh. No way is this in anyway close to 8 doublings though. That would take 12 years or by 2035. (1.59^12 = 261x)
- jsnell 2y ago
  I think it's rather that they're using the dot as a thousand separator, not as a decimal separator.

aitchnyu 2y ago

Tangential, whats the low energy distributed ledger tech he's talking about?

iSnow 2y ago
Probably he wasn't talking about a concrete solution, but Powerledger on the Ethereum chain or EWT token on Gnosis.

SergeAx 2y ago

> stormy electricity grid For me (living in Europe), stable 220V 50Gz from any wall socket is one of the traits of civilization, like potable water tap and flush toilets. "Stormy grid" is something from a rural village lifestyle, with a water well and a cold basement to keep winter food supply. Is it really that huge problem in parts of US?

throwawayffffas 2y ago
There were a couple of large scale very long outages in Texas due to very bad weather in the last few years that made the news even on this side of the Atlantic.

ZeroGravitas 2y ago

The mention of Blockchain threw me off but I generally agree with this analysis. Worth remembering that even enthusiastic supporters of the energy transition have underestimated the historical trends in wind, solar and batteries. It's just hard to comprehend the S-curve ramp.