| 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” |
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/
[2] https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/lithium-producer...
[3] https://spectrum.ieee.org/solid-state-battery-production-cha...
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5SVrp8N-1M&
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eZGuDaqZAE