Mentioning the pedal assist bikes is important, for the amount of battery a cybertruck ships with, you could ship 400 of the ebike I use for 90% of my trips.
And I can create an infinite number of "real" bicycles since they don't use a battery at all, plus they're even better for your health than an e-bike!
Snark aside, e-bikes are great, I don't have one but that's because between my nice road bike that can crank out 100 miles no problem, and my battery car, I don't need one. But they do work for lots of people. I wish I could get one for my kid, but it is illegal for anyone under 14 to ride one, where I live.
That a non-electric bike is better for your health is often wrong. If you are very sporty, you are fine. But there are plenty of people who would get better exercise with an e-bike, as they are more likely to use it or just use the electric assist to bike more often or longer distances.
Also, there are a lot of regions where there are steep roads which could be obstacles without assist.
This - an e-tricycle kept my dad active until the day he died - he loved it. There is no way he could have ridden entirely under his own steam, but the e-trike was a life-changer for him, and us as a family.
Might be a dumb question but I’ll ask anyways.
One of the main factors preventing me from owning a bike is the lack of a permanent residence. I’m forced to move every few months/years, sometimes to a different country. What’s the best way to bring such a large object with me? So far I’ve been forcing myself to own as little as possible such that I can bring everything with me in a single luggage and backpack
There are a lot of folding bikes that can compact small enough to go in an overhead bin or get checked as luggage. You could also just stick with budget non-folding options then sell your old one and buy a new one at your destination. You'll lose some money every time but on the upside you can buy a bike that fits your lifestyle at every destination, or skip getting one when it doesn't make sense.
Brompton bikes are one of the classic recommendations for folding bikes but there tons of other options nowadays as well.
I have moved around a fair bit in the past decade, and for me the most effective movers I have used have been SendMyBag [1]. They are great for shipping luggage and other reasonably large items. They arrange an DHL pickup and drop, with a lot of flexibility, and their support has been great for me when I needed it.
SendMyBag do ship bikes, but I have mostly used more dedicated bike shipping services, which have been very reliable. SendBike [2] iswho I haved used in the past, but I have also had friends use ShipMyBike [3] successfully in the past. The advantage of these companies is that they will first ship you a box to use, if you dont have one already.
It's a stupid thing, but I wish I could hack the cargo bike I use to bring my kids to school so it wasn't at the second highest level of assist when it turns on. I often forget to turn it down and miss out on a lot of exercise that way...
Let me tell you, since I have only access to an analogue bike, and no car at all, an e-bike is looking more and more like a it'll be life changing for me. We have some rental e-bikes in my town that I've used from time to time, but I don't like them as the designated parking spots is not ideal for my use case.
Access to an ebike will probably result in me taking significantly more trips with it, where I would otherwise have opted to either rent a car for an hour, or just not make the trip.
I don't have hard evidence to back up the claim, but I'm certain that an e-bike will rack up more than enough km's in a time period that the overall volume of ebike-exercise outweighs analogue-bike exercise, even if you subtract the "lost" exercise due to the e-bike assistance.
The amount of emotional and confidence boost you get from 250W of electricity honestly cannot be measured.
"they're even better for your health than an e-bike!" - debatable. Ppl with ebikes tend to have more exercise since they don't get tired that quickly, unless you are talking about electric scooters or hyper ebikes where you don't need to pedal bc of powerful motor
It sorts of is, actually? If our capacity to make batteries is limited (or make batteries within some fixed, acceptable, level of environmental impact.)
I think I read in Walter Isaacson's Musk biography that when the Model S came out, it was using something like 10% of the worlds supply of Lithium ion batteries. And that was a pretty small number of Model Ss. EVs have scaled up massively since that time and battery quantity has kept up -- my point being, as long as the price of the ebike is able to pay market prices for the batteries, it seems like supply will scale.
Unfortunately that's now how humanity builds stuff.
It's rarely the case that "we all decide that we have this very important thing to do for humanity" and focus on doing just that.
More often the benefits for humanity flow down as side effects from other more basic incentives like making money selling fast sport electric vehicles used to signal that you're rich or whatever
I already started seeing Sodium based batts on Alibaba. But they are 3.1 volts, so I imagine there will be a new slew of supporting BMSs and other things that need to get involved.
Wow, yeah, they have even trickled down to AliExpress already [1]! Hadn't seen that, thanks for the tip!
Pricing for the one linked (cheapest when I sorted my search results, but magic happens when you sort by price on AE so take with a pinch of ... sodium I guess) is around $9 for a single cell (3 V, 3500 mAh) or $100 for a 20-pack. No idea if chargers are available, haven't checked.
Sodium-ion batteries are rechargeable batteries that use sodium ions (Na+) as its charge carriers12.
They are similar to lithium-ion batteries in terms of working principle and cell construction, but they replace lithium with sodium as the intercalating ion1.
Sodium-ion batteries are cheaper to produce, safer to use, and operate better in extreme temperatures than lithium-ion batteries3.
However, sodium batteries of equal capacity are heavier and larger than their lithium equivalents3.
I don't think this is a healthy level of suspicion to levy against an otherwise correct summary. If you think their comment would be improved with a citation then simply adding it would be good - cited comments are relatively common here but not mandatory and generally not how people communicate.
Yeah, I have enough high school chemistry knowledge to know that lithium and sodium are in the same column on the periodic table at least and can read about energy density and cost, but I'm really wondering where these things will fit in in the economy. In theory I might dabble with hobbyist level solar systems and controllers and battery packs, but I don't exactly feel like sourcing a bunch of 18650 cells and spot welding things together - give me an already packaged battery please.
When you mention lithium people put up all sorts of objections about "scarcity". Whereas sodium is an extremely abundant component of seawater. (You do have to find something to do with the spare chlorine ion, though)
It's just getting started. Solid state batteries are getting close. There are big companies, from Toyota on down, putting together manufacturing facilities. Nio is already shipping an early semi-solid-state battery.
The solid state battery era looks like this:
- Much better safety. No thermal runaway problem. Survives nail test.
- Upwards of 5,000 charge cycles.
- Charge times around 5 minutes.
- Maybe better energy density.
- Cost not yet well understood. Manufacturing is hard.
For small devices, the battery should outlive the device.
For cars, the usage model looks more like gas cars. Drive 300-400 miles, recharge in 5-10 minutes.
This has land-use implications. Gas stations can convert to charging stations in the same
footprint and layout. No need for giant parking lots of chargers.
Supermarkets and small malls might take over the charging locations as they already have plenty of parking space.
Only reason for gas stations to be a seperate type of shop is how expensive and dangeous it is to have a gasoline pipes to every parking space. This is easy and cheap to do for electricity.
To bring in more revenue many gas stations try to be a "bit of a supermarket" in addition to selling gas. With electricity it will likely go the other way around, so supermarkets will extend with selling electricity and there will less reason to have gas stations as a seperate business location.
I already see supermarkets here getting a few charging spaces, usually a bit in the back.
While the land use might not change the electricity requirement will change dramatically! To the point I'm not sure if it is economically feasible to convert a liquid fuel station.
Maybe the new 'hot' sites for such will be next to grid substations.
Perhaps installing a big battery bank that trickle charges would smooth the load.
How many MWs would a carpark roofed with solar panels generate? My calculations say you need about 4k square meters to get 1MW whilst the sun is shining bright. That's about the size of medium sized supermarket carpark. Double that if you cover the building as well. You might get a good 2MW at peak, enough to allow a few cars charging at once. Not much good at after the afternoon sun has gone down and the after work rush is happening at the supermarket.
Given most drivers will be charging at home, I wonder what percentage of cars we can expect to be wanting to charge whilst shopping?
There is no "first charge of the day". The only first charge is the one following a power failure of the grid. During billing rollover, the charger's battery is powered up from yesterday's power.
the cost thing seems pretty crucial. if room-temperature solid-electrolyte batteries end up costing ten times as much as lithium-ion batteries per joule, they'll remain a niche technology, though potentially one that's used in every cellphone, like tantalum capacitors. if they end up being one tenth the cost of lithium-ion batteries, indeed, it's just getting started. can we even confidently bound the ultimate cost to within that interval?
Cost is a big problem. Some sources say 3x to 4x the cost of lithium-ion batteries, at least initially. Nissan and Toyota both claim manufacturing cost breakthroughs.
Apparently this is hard to do, but not a raw materials problem.
Lithium-iron-phosphate batteries have taken over the low end of the market. Cheaper and safer, but less energy per kilogram.
> Some sources say 3x to 4x the cost of lithium-ion batteries, at least initially.
If that's true, that's miraculous. Given the order of magnitude reduction that will come with economies of scale and commercialisation (as we've experienced with Li-ion), they'll be cheaper than Li-ion in no time.
The bottleneck for charging hasn't been the battery for a while, because we're already at the point where we could hook up multiple chargers for better performance. The bottleneck is in electricity as an energy vector, because someone either needs to start generating several MW per car, which is expensive, or be curtailing the same amount, which is wasteful.
As someone who has been blissfully oblivious to electricity prices due to a 36 month contract at $0.10/kWh, I looked up the recent rates and saw that they're now in the $0.15/kWh range. Makes me a bit more receptive to biting the bullet and just going with solar with battery if this trend is going to continue in that fashion.
Where I am, the local council/county co-organises group-purchasing deals of solar and battery systems. There are constantly incentives offered for solar or more energy- or water-efficient options at home.
Not sure where you're at but in California the gov't incentivized everyone to install rooftop solar and now that Sempra isn't increasing revenue at the same rate they did before, they're aggressively lobbying to increase rates on rooftop solar customers to make up for it.
I'm very eager to get off the grid completely and be rid of this profit-chasing nonsense.
I know this is going to get me a bunch of responses about how much more pressure is on the grid because of EVs, solar doesn't help during off-peak hours, etc. Boo-hoo cry me a river. These energy companies have gotten billions in gov't grants and credits and they're still massively profitable and continue gouging customers.
That price could easily be dollars. Most places in the US have far cheaper electric rates than California. Three years ago I had a pretty similar rate in Texas. I'm in a similar boat, my 11¢/kWh plan just finished and new rates were ~14¢+.
USD. I live in Texas and locked in a 3 year rate. It comes with a larger cancellation fee ($250ish), but if I'm doing 1500-2000kWh a month most months, I'm easily saving money even if I cancel before the year is even up because the rate difference is usually 1.5-2c.
Can anyone break down why it is still so expensive to get battery storage at my house?
A single Tesla Powerwall is something like $10000 (before incentives) for 13 kWh capacity. I regularly see articles about battery costs being ~$150/kWh now. Thats about $2000 and yet the Powerwall is 5x that cost. Even if it was $200/kWh that doesn't get close to adding up.
Is it all installation costs? extra hardware costs? Or something related to trade where we just can't get cheap batteries here in the US?
You can find much cheaper batteries. But they will require additional components that are included in the Powerwall, will be less integrated, less pretty to look at, the mobile apps not as pretty, more complex to purchase, etc
I vaguely recall a youtube comparison of "Ford F-150 lightning vs 3x Tesla Powerwall" and that the lightning was a better deal for the same amount of backup, even if you left it parked. (Different spot on the curve, you can't buy a third of an F-150... but at the time, actually getting 3 powerwalls actually delivered was a challenge too.) So there are definitely opportunities to push the consumer price down quite a bit further...
I'm still surprised that there isn't a remotely affordable consumer friendly solution for "I want these batteries to take over when my power goes out". I don't need an app or something pretty to look at. I want to insert my credit card and a couple weeks later someone has installed it in my house and I rarely have to think about it again.
> there isn't a remotely affordable consumer friendly solution for "I want these batteries to take over when my power goes out".
That's called a UPS. You can buy them in stores. Closer fit for this purpose might be solar-charging portable power stations, which are also COTS hardware that similarly costs a few hundred dollars each.
Anything more elaborate than that needs to be wired into your breaker box, requiring licensed electricians and inspections. Not terribly expensive, though. Installing an automatic transfer switch in your home is pretty common in rural areas with frequent power outages, for generator installations.
The fancy app is just something extra you get for close to no cost. Vertical integration is where Tesla is really strong at. An app or something pretty to look at is almost guaranteed once you get the rest right, IMHO.
There are European suppliers selling LiFePO4 cells for €100/kWh, but you need electronics to support the cells - battery management system, charger controller, inverter and so on. You are also paying for the brand name
This is almost certainly a standard supply/demand curve problem. Especially when you factor in that the supply side is in rather heavy flux and that the optimization side of supply has not caught up to the advancement side of it.
Did you mean to say you are working on a project or that the link is a working project? Because (a) 115.9V is some no-kidding-don't-touch-the-wrong-wire (b) that linked page cites a bunch of extra thermal management stuff which presumably its source EV managed but in any such home setup someone else is going to have to manage
The link is one of the batteries im using in a project for home power wall. You are correct, 100+ volts, and 1000+amps and fire if things go wrong is no joke. Im EE so doesnt make me fire proof but can appreciate the scope of the safety measures required for the project.
The short version is residential scale anything usually isn't cost-effective. Roof top solar panels are the one exception and it's marginal - basically coz the land is worth more then the panels by a lot.
What's the go to rack mount inverter charger to go along with that? Asking for a friend...who only needs about 800 watts of capacity to act as the certified hacker version of a UPS. I've only done Victron stuff in the past, and those are not rackmount nor is there a 48V in 120V out model of less than 3000VA capacity.
same reason massive video streamers pay $0.0005/GB for cdn bandwidth while you and I are paying $0.05/GB for aws egress.
the demand at the grid and commercial scale is so huge right now that anyone putting cells into suburban-home sized systems and dealing with that type of customer (the absolute worst kind) are practically throwing money away when they could be doing 1 - 10 big deals with competent (electrical and financial) counterparties. in a supply constrained world there's no point in serving the bottom of the market. talking to you is an opportunity cost.
it'll come soon though as production ramps. the recent inflection of EV growth below expectations has created the slack for it to be possible, but it'll still be a few years as those are all NMC lines.
Why would you expect a Tesla product to have a competitive price? This is like saying: the CPU costs $100, the RAM costs $50, the flash costs $20, so why does an iPhone 15 cost $900?
Other competing companies in this space charge similar rates for home batteries.
Also, the Tesla Model 3 and Y are currently some of the most affordable EVs on the market. It's only the X, S, and Cybertruck that are the high priced ones.
> Also, the Tesla Model 3 and Y are currently some of the most affordable EVs on the market.
Different markets - here in Oz BYD is half to two thirds the price of "equivalent" Tesla.
I put the word equivalent in quotes because everyone has an opinion on what a product is worth and what equivalency means. Honestly, when I eventually get to buy an EV I will avoid both brands like the plague so I'm not about to argue any points in this regard.
Firstly, I will admit some reasons aren't entirely rational in terms of economic self interest. I am fortunate enough to be able to choose.
Secondly, my reasoning is in the context that I don't think the time is right to buy one now. I bought a car 3 months ago, second hand. My EV alternative was twice the already quite large price. My conclusion was that buys me 10 years of running costs and the difference after taking depreciation into account made it more.
But reasons against are as follows with some weighting.
Tesla: 100% no.
50% The technology "integration" and all that comes with it. I don't want my car connected to the internet. I don't want an app for my car. At this point I have the perception Tesla is the "Apple of Cars" - an ecosystem built around car ownership that is overpriced and restrictive. I don't need my experience being monitored or reported or collected.
25% With Apple it seems you get good customer service for your $. I haven't heard similar for Tesla.
20% Engineering. Tesla is building a car. There are many other car manufacturers that have been doing this for much longer. Yes going electric is a big change, but the many years of solid domain experience will count.
5% I don't want my $ going to Musk or anything to do with him. Seriously, at this point I would think the best thing Tesla could do would be to quietly cut any ties with him. Note this is 5% weighting because it is more a "bad taste" thing than anything.
BYD 120% no. Yup, 20% more No than Tesla.
50% Same technology integration as the Tesla. Lessened due to lesser perceived (note I have not studied every aspect) reliance on that integration but greater due to data concerns with China. I have greater concerns with China because every company is literally state apparatus when it comes to information. At least the US is slightly separate between corp and state - slowing things in an ever so minor practicable sense.
40% chinese engineering. Don't get me wrong, I see the huge strides in improvement Chinese manufacturing has made but I have seen too much stupid chinese engineering in my lifetime. That "perception debt" is costing them.
30% I don't want to support China's destruction of world capability in manufacturing. BYD is significantly subsidised by the State which goes a long way to why they are so cheap.
If I had to spend money on an EV today, I'd seriously check out Hyundai.
Isn't the Tesla Powerwall a fully integrated system with multiple MPPTs, inverter, and charger? (Maybe I'm confusing the new one with the older versions) I imagine that's where the cost comes in.
Where I live in Europe I can buy a lifepo4 cell for 97€ from a trusted supplier, 300Ah x 3.2V = almost a kWh. For a full battery you need to add the cost of a BMS and a balancer.
If you buy a 16 cells to make a 48V battery than yeah the vast majority of the cost would be the lithium cells, a 16s 250A BMS should be around 150€, an active 16s balancer 50€.
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?
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.
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.
It’s a little off topic, but it’s probably a good thing that it’s not very accessible while it would be lithium. When they burn they are almost impossible to put out. Which isn’t too much of an issue with your phone or other small appliances, but things like cars (and especially buses) are a real hazard.
Maybe it’s not so much of an issue in the US where cities are designed for a lot of cars, but here in the EU it’s actually quite dangerous. If a car catches fire it’ll have to be dumped into a specialised container of sorts, which works ok for cars. If a bus catches fire on the wrong street it’ll risk burning the entire street down.
Just imagine what power walls would do to neighbourhoods where buildings are close to each other. You’d frankly burn an entire town-part down of every home had a power wall and just one of them caught fire.
Data from the National Transportation Safety Board showed that EVs were involved in approximately 25 fires for every 100,000 sold. Comparatively, approximately 1,530 gasoline-powered vehicles and 3,475 hybrid vehicles were involved in fires for every 100,000 sold: https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/environment-energy-coordinatio...
Statistics from 2015 showed that 174,000 vehicle fires were reported, and almost all of them involved gasoline vehicles. Tesla claims that gasoline cars are 11x more likely to catch fire than a Tesla, and that the best comparison of safety is fires per billion miles driven. If we compare using this method, there are approximately five EV fires for every billion miles traveled, compared to 55 fires per billion miles traveled in gasoline cars: https://driveelectriccolorado.org/myth-buster-evs-fire/
These stats always get trotted out, but they're not an apples-to-apples comparison for a few reasons:
1) the fleet average is around 12 years old, when most EVs are new enough to still be covered by factory warranty.
2) incidents and risk in cars is coupled with driving patterns and trip length. There's no analysis to tell us whether or not it's the EVs themselves that are safer, or the way they're driven. This is also why the claim of incidents per billion miles needs further qualification. It assumes the driving profile matches the fleet driving profile, but that may not be the case due to charging requirements.
3) a lithium battery fire isn't the same as a gasoline car catching fire, and we shouldn't pretend that they are. Even taking it at face value that EVs catch fire less often, the metric for most people isn't "will my car catch fire?" but rather "will this kill me?". If an EV is actually five times less likely to catch fire, but you're six times more likely to die, that's a net loss in safety. And given the nature of some of the battery fire deaths that have occurred, alongside the -- until recently -- relative scarcity of EVs, I wouldn't fault someone for waiting to see how things shake out.
4) regardless of what stats collected by those in the industry say, you're still paying a higher premium to insure an EV. And I get that there are multiple factors that go into determining that, but I trust the people who's job it is to make money by evaluating risk more than I trust companies trying to sell me an EV.
The way I see it, any improvements to the safety of batteries when things go wrong is a good thing. Even if it's the case that batteries are already better, an improvement that eliminates the horror fires that stick in people's minds, even if those fires are incredibly rare, is a big gain in public perception.
> 1) the fleet average is around 12 years old, when most EVs are new enough to still be covered by factory warranty.
Does factory warranty prevent fires?
> 2) incidents and risk in cars is coupled with driving patterns and trip length. There's no analysis to tell us whether or not it's the EVs themselves that are safer, or the way they're driven. This is also why the claim of incidents per billion miles needs further qualification. It assumes the driving profile matches the fleet driving profile, but that may not be the case due to charging requirements.
So, its the drivers fault the car catches fire? But its not the gas car drivers fault, but only EV car drivers fault?
> 3) a lithium battery fire isn't the same as a gasoline car catching fire, and we shouldn't pretend that they are.
Most of the newer cars have LiFePO4 batteries, which don't have the same risks as Li-Ion cars.
Non-flammable electrolyte: LiFePO4 batteries use a non-flammable electrolyte that does not catch fire even if the battery is punctured or damaged. The electrolyte is a mixture of lithium salts and a solvent that is less volatile and less flammable than the organic electrolytes used in other types of lithium-ion batteries.
High safety: LiFePO4 batteries have a lower risk of overheating and catching fire due to their more stable cathode material and lower operating temperature. They also have built-in protection circuits that prevent overcharge, over-discharge, short-circuit, and physical damage.
> 4) regardless of what stats collected by those in the industry say, you're still paying a higher premium to insure an EV. And I get that there are multiple factors that go into determining that, but I trust the people who's job it is to make money by evaluating risk more than I trust companies trying to sell me an EV.
All new cars have higher insurance because they cost more.
In the US, we pump natural gas directly into most homes, which is extremely dangerous. Yet NG still causes very little death compared to, say, cars, and we tolerate NG in homes and >100 car deaths a day.
I can't speak to the EU risk profile, as the EU has far less fire deaths in home than the US, but we here in the US will tolerate home lithium batteries just fine.
I live in a city where's it's pretty common for people to blast music at what used to be absurd levels because of very large, yet portable, battery powered speakers.
You used to need a decent budget for D batteries if you were going to do this with an 80's boom box, but now you can run a full-sized PA speaker for hours on the built-in Li-ion batteries, so it's way more common.
One of the Startup Weekend ideas I keep playing with is a Bluetooth jammer that can selectively stop these public nuisances. I know it's illegal, but so was Uber when it started.
And yes, being able to block people's headphones and other stuff would be bad, but I'm moving towards that being acceptable collateral damage.
Fed up of rude idiots playing really bad music at massive volume (and why is it that only people with appalling musical taste enjoy blasting it?).
I met someone who claimed to have invented the digital amplifier chips these speakers use, using some new technology I don't remember but it sounded innovative at the time - possibly a new semiconductor material. He said he's very sorry.
Class D is old hat. He claimed to have made them many times smaller or cheaper for the same power output, possibly by changing the material - don't remember exactly.
You can buy 15kWh of battery storage for <2000 Euros if you are willing to assemble the battery yourself. This is roughly the capacity of a single rack-mount battery.
Just the cells are <1400 Euros, this is crazy. Because the battery is now far from the most expensive item for a solar-battery setup.
The battery revolution cannot be overstated, especially now with Sodium batteries entering the market, which don't use lithium.
I was looking at car camping. And i found out that I can get power pack for cooking/boiling water, that is very multipurpose for other things just camping. Def not usable for hiking, but car can take it, solar panel can charge it. No need to fumble with gas stoves.
This guy lives in his van and he does what you describe: he has a big battery (lithium ion IIRC) that powers an induction hot plate for cooking/boiling water. (He also has a propane camping stove.)
He's found that solar is not useful where he lives (Canada) so he replaced the alternator in his van with one that generates more power, and uses that to keep his big battery charged.
I doubt the round trip efficiency of that beats a white gas stove, but the handling is much much simpler. It's a lot easier and less hazard prone to fuel the generator than mess around with a liquid fuel stove.
So what's the tech that was making this decade of the battery possible? I remember 10 years ago reading lots of articles that battery is and will be the bottleneck for the next 20-30 years, but now in only 10 years looks like it's solved already (?). Is there a revolutionary tech that was missed by people 10 years ago? It feels like if suddenly fusion is here.
I don't think it's about technology here. It's about economics.
Electric cars (credits to Tesla), especially the first generation basically used a ton of the same cells found in (some) laptops.
The demand for electric cars, thus batteries fuelled a huge increase in manufacturing capacity, which dropped prices. And maybe I'm wrong but the cheaper batteries made drones more affordable, so that industry got a boost with investment.
A lot of things aren't limited by technology, but by capital and market incentives.
Which to me actually shows the limitations of this system as we could have had electric cars decades ago. We could have had this revolution decades ago. What a different world we would have had.
I think the other commenters are mostly right but also downplaying the technology advances a bit. The basics of the battery chemistries that are making this work existed two or three decades ago, but there have also been meaningful breakthroughs in the specific components during that time, that (I think) eventually pushed the viability over a tipping point.
In 2004, I think it would have been reasonable to think that EVs would always be a niche for small short range "commuting cars". I remember thinking this, and being excited about even that possibility! But now I frequently see these big Rivian trucks and SUVs driving around, and I know their range is similar to a tank of gas. That seems pretty crazy to me!
And it wasn't just the economics of scale that has made that work.
In the case of stationary batteries, I think just the economics driving the price down has indeed been the most important factor, but something else I haven't seen anybody mention yet is that it also has a lot to do with solar barreling down its cost curve, kicking off massive deployment, to the point that it is a fairly common occurrence now for some locations on some grids at some times of some days to have negative power prices due to solar over-production. Batteries are excellent at sopping up extra power that would have otherwise gone nowhere (or to crypto mining perhaps, but maybe I'm repeating myself).
Economics of scale and an absurd amount of investments I guess? There seems to be many synergies around using energy storage in batteries for transportation.
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".
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.
> 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.
The cure for high prices is high prices!
Also I love your thought on how much energy we're distributing around in all these mostly-charged batteries. It would have been unthinkable not all that long ago to have this much energy stored at "the edges" in an extremely accessible form.
