Not sure where Boomberg is getting its digits.<p>Wholesale price for LFP cells in China has been stably below $100 per kwh for like 5 years.<p>The only problem is getting to those wholesale quantities.<p>All major LFP cell makers seem to run a cartel to cut off small distributors from preferential pricing. Anything you can buy in small wholesale is at least 2x the price of what companies making EVs are getting.<p>Once upon a time good offers like these <a href="https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=599076665397" rel="nofollow">https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=599076665397</a> come up, and then vanish.
Vandium Redox Batteries [1] sound like they have a bright future, I recently came across a startup building home kits which have a significantly longer lifespan than Tesla Powerpacks (allegedly):<p><a href="https://www.startengine.com/storen-technologies" rel="nofollow">https://www.startengine.com/storen-technologies</a><p>There's a huge plant being built in Dalian, China with 200MW/800MWh with Vanadium (for comparison Tesla Australia plant is 129MW/100MWh with Lithium-ion with plans to double scale this year, but currently only powers 30k homes which isn't much)<p><a href="https://electrek.co/2017/12/21/worlds-largest-battery-200mw-800mwh-vanadium-flow-battery-rongke-power/" rel="nofollow">https://electrek.co/2017/12/21/worlds-largest-battery-200mw-...</a><p>Wikipedia has a nice list of largest battery deployments in the world:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_energy_storage_projects" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_energy_storage_project...</a><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium_redox_battery" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium_redox_battery</a>
A kilowatt hour of car battery pack costs ~$150 now. I was looking at battery powered lawn mowers last night, and noticed that a 0.42 kWh battery pack costs $350[0]. I know that power tool batteries have different requirements than car battery packs, but that base .42 kWh should still be under $100.<p>I feel like this is the printer/razor model, where you sell the base item for cheap, but the consumables cost are extreme.<p>Although, for long lasting durable goods, you have to make money somewhere, as a good battery mower may last a very long time.<p>0: <a href="https://community.egopowerplus.com/ego/topics/kilowatt-hours-kwh-required-to-fully-charge-the-5-ah-battery?topic-reply-list[settings][filter_by]=all&topic-reply-list[settings][reply_id]=20372921#reply_20372921" rel="nofollow">https://community.egopowerplus.com/ego/topics/kilowatt-hours...</a>
I'd say home storage is about $750 a kWh in the UK. Plus installation. What do you think, is the future a domestic 50kwh battery in every house or will they be fewer giant ones owned and run by the power company out of sight?
Higher demand causes lower prices? From the article:<p>> "But a battery electric car needs so much battery capacity—40 to 100 kWh, thousands of times more than a smartphone—that they've significantly increased the global demand for lithium-ion batteries. That has helped drive additional price declines, which have started to make it cost-effective to use batteries to improve the electric grid."<p>You need to know both demand and supply to forecast price effects when either or both change. The simplistic assertion that higher demand leads to lower prices is wrong on its face.<p>I'm no expert, nor an economist, but I think it'd be more correct to say that higher demand inspired investments that resulted in more supply, which grew faster than demand, thus driving price declines.<p>EDIT: Another inconsistency that bugs me:<p>> "Frith told Ars that a common battery technology in the last decade was "NMC 111" batteries with equal parts nickel, magnesium, and cobalt. Now companies are starting to move to NMC ratios of 811—with eight times as much nickel as manganese or cobalt. Nickel is two to five times cheaper than manganese or cobalt, so a formula with more nickel is cheaper to produce per kg."<p>So does the "M" in NMC refer to magnesium (as stated first), or manganese (as stated second)?
Somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, there is still potential in lead-acid battery technology. Ecoult [1] is combining them with supercapacitors to try to get the best of both technologies for grid-scale storage.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.ecoult.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ecoult.com/</a>
That article was somewhat disappointing, but maybe I've been watching too much Tesla battery investor day hype.<p>Between the tabless design patent, the maxwell dry electrode, and other chemistry improvements, I'm interested to see what the battery presentation boils down to in terms of improved density from the dry cathode and cost improvements from tabless and the various chemistries discussed.<p>That million mile reliability is nice, but I'm really hoping for under 100$/KWhr at pack level with improved density to enable 400+ mile ranges.<p>The Tesla prototype around the Nurburgring had me speculating about really dense batteries that enabled a much lighter racing car than what the Taycan was limited by.
Is the durability of batteries also improving?<p>Having a significant improvement in this area would have a magnificent effect on some industries. Making batteries last twice as long (e.g. from 2000 cycles to 4000) would basically reduce battery cost by a factor of 2 for trucks, public transport or grid energy storage (6y to 12y lifespan if cycled once per day).
>"In 2010, a lithium-ion battery pack with 1 kWh of capacity—enough to power an electric car for three or four miles—cost more than $1,000. By 2019, the figure had fallen to $156 [...]<p>Forecasters project the average cost of a kilowatt-hour of lithium-ion battery capacity to <i>fall below $100</i> by the mid-2020s."
60 Minutes once did a segment on batteries made from seawater and dirt. They were large (low power density), but very cheap, and perfect for grid storage.<p>Haven't heard anything about that since.
> Batteries have already gotten six times cheaper within the last decade,<p>Pedant here:, but you can't get "six times cheaper." You can get one-sixth as expensive, but "six times cheaper" implies some sort of relative comparison being made about rates, not absolute values.<p>The same issue is apparent in the HN title ("costs fell six-fold."
As far as I know so far most of the lithium used has been from existing copper mines, where there's a lot of lithium, so that's made pinpointing it and extract it fairly cheap. I remember reading there's 5-10 years worth of lithium left in these mines.
It will be interesting to see what happens once we need to start looking for new sources again.
We have a systemic problem, our economic system is based on productivity and that is a opposite goal to efficiency. Every time we gain efficiency we have a choice of keep our consumption and pay less for electricity but we choose to increase consumption, for instance any improvement in phone batteries is counter by more powerful chips. Home appliances have improved but we choose to have more appliances instead of less energy consumption. This is called jevons paradox [1] and it needs to happen otherwise there is no profit or job creation.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox</a>