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by Manuel_D 41 days ago
Used automotive batteries will be at the end of their life, with only a few hundred more discharge cycles until they've totally degraded.

Again, batteries scaling rapidly still doesn't hold match up with the scale of electricity demand. Again, a day's worth of global electricity consumption is 60,000 GWh. If there's one lesson to take away, it's this: be skeptical of people who talk about "scale" but neglect to actually give figures for that scale.

1 comments

Why are you so afraid of renewables and storage?

All recent research coming are showing that BEV batteries last longer than expected in real world conditions.

You do realize that with 60 TWh we’re arguing about which decimal of 99.x% renewables the grid sits at?

We have in a few years scaled BEVs to 3 TWh per year. For grid duty batteries last 10-15 years. They are essentially the same batteries. Some have different form factors and whatever, but the core is the same.

This seems like grasping for the straws. Denying what’s infront of your eyes because we still need a few more years of scaling until it will happen no matter what, just assuming a continued buildout to saturation.

The grid works on timescales of decades. With the current deployment rate, no matter how you try to belittle it, we’ve already locked in a complete revamping of our grids.

Global battery deliveries in 2025 was 1,600 GWh, not 3,000 GWh. Of that, only 300 GWh was used for grid storage. Even projections a decade out to 2035 only predict that yearly battery storage deployment will be 800 GWh per year, the vast majority of battery production will be used for EVs rather than grid storage.

Again, there's a reason why people talking about batteries scaling don't put their numbers in the context of electricity demand. Even with the predicted exponential growth of battery production, the scale of electricity demand is on a different level.