How dirt cheap batteries will completely transform our electricity grid, paving the way for solar and wind and replacing grid reinforcements with grid buffers.
Growth from 2410 GWh to 61917 GWh is ~4.7 doublings, not 8:
log (61917/2410) / log 2 = 4.7
That would result in ~$20/kWh:
80 * (0.75^4.7) = 20.7
Did I misunderstand your calculation? It is getting late. If I don't post this now, I never will, I guess.
Referring to:
"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. Each time the price would be reduced by 25%. If we started with $80/kWh in 2023 and subtracted 25% eight times in a row, the end result would be battery cells costing just $8 per kWh."
I think he just misplaced the decimal, meant to put 619,000 GWh ~(2^8 * 2400). However, I don't know how he gets 8 doublings in 7 or 8 years when each year is 60% growth according to him ... that's 1.6^7 or 1.6^8, not 2^8. This all reads like nonsense to me.
7 doublings from 2410 GWh at 59% a year comes to ~61 TWh. However, a doubling takes about 63 weeks and 7 doublings would be 441 weeks which would put us at roughly June 2032, not 2030.
Not if the 60% rate he quoted is correct. Either you are pulling that 63-week figure from somewhere else, or you got your math wrong.
You don't even need to do any math to figure out that if you gain 60% over 52 weeks, you will need more than 11 additional weeks to gain 25% (the 25% of the 1.6x after 52 weeks being the additional amount required to get to 2x).
The math is correct because it's compounded growth. The compounding actually happens daily in practice as more production comes online which can happen at any time. For compound growth you have to use the rule of 72. Look it up.
Excited to see such promising developments, especially for those of us who have been innovating in this space.
We’ve been working on a project that perfectly aligns with this trend, focusing on Na-Ion batteries and enhancing their durability without sacrificing cost-effectiveness. ⚡
This synergy between cutting-edge research and practical solutions is paving the way for a more sustainable and economically viable energy future. 🌍
My understanding of Wrights Law is that prices are expected to drop at a fixed percentage relative to cumulative production. Not due to annual production. Which is why the price of petrol engines would take such a long time from here to decline because a single doubling of the total historical cumulative production would now take a very long time.
Sodium batteries look promising. But lithium sulphur batteries will also likely be great. They still have lithium, but they offer the prospect of a lot my energy storage per unit of lithium.
Regarding the source of the data (IEA report), it seems like the graph should rather be titled "battery volume in use in GWh". This is also not the cumulative production, but maybe closer to it?
Would agree that a shift will happen when battery prices fall further, only a small increase in storage would make a big difference to the grid services that storage could provide. Enterprise level OSS to manage it all and herd those cats: https://solarnetwork.net
Build the nukes. Grid Storage needs to be funded in parallel. Disappointed to see residential consumers assumed to take on the cost and initiative to purchase and install home systems to make up for failing infrastructure. If a residential consumer needs battery Storage to combat peak pricing and poor grid stability, the infrastructure is the problem.
20 kWh? How about 100kWh of storage? At $20/kWh that's just $2000. An even bigger battery would not only "smooth out the curve" but turn the utility into a backup power source for the rare times the sun and the batteries cannot supply your need. Net-metering permit queue backup? No problem. Batteries mean we don't need to sell back to the utility, just avoid buying whenever possible. With solar buy back rates sliding downward, we don't need to worry. Savings from not buying utility supplied grid electrons can exceed net metering income. All we need are inexpensive batteries. Bring 'em on.
I was just in Professor Trancik's (Jessika) course. We were fact/data/numerically driven--leaving silly opinions based on assumptions behind us. There is way too much of that these days. Also we can DIRECT the market and the adoption, and the tech readiness, by inserting actions/policy/$ in the right places. There is no "free" market. Interested parties are always rigging and influenncing. Coming at that from a CLEAN FUTURE motivation seems like a worthy pursuit. Manipulating the market happens everyday. Doing that for societal benefit, rather than profit is all good, as they say.
I think many are missing the boat: as prices drop, batteries WILL become a ubiquitous homeowner asset, subject to economics and Wright's Law (and Moore's Law). There are also many chemistries in the pipeline (sodium, solid state, sulfur, aluminum), and many alternatives being developed. Battery is not synonymous with NMC or LFP. That's a current tech. We shouldn't get caught up with supply chain caveats, as there will also be recycling/recovery (we are currently able to recover 98%).
Battery cost WILL come down, and stationary home batteries supplant the need for smart-everything. they also are not requiring the same space efficiency (energy density) of EV battery packs, although the EV manufacturers are the logical source for home cells. Storage at the location of renewable generation changes EVERYTHING. Solar + storage will be a great appliance for power generation, to add to refrigeration (for food) and heat pumps (for heat and hot water) and stoves (for cooking). It also reduces the need to upgrade the grid, as most electrical flow is local, and reduces the input side of the Sankey chart, since there would be no fuel and virtually no line loss.
Changing to a model where there are DERs with storage makes the homeowner a producer and reduces the grid to a potential backup for homes with enough production and storage. At $20-50/kWh, a battery that obfuscates the need for grid as the primary source is a blessing we need to encourage and nurture..
...where a study by Prof. Jessica Transik, that concluded you have to get down below $20/kWh of CAPEX for the battery, for it to make renewable power work affordably as base-load.
This is the goal of "Form Energy", also profiled in that article - but your calculations indicate that their "iron-air battery" is in a race with sodium.
You should not confuse batteries for daily storage with long term storage.
The iron batteries mentioned here have a roundtrip efficiency of around 50% and are ideal for long duration (usually seasonal) storage but would be wasteful when used more than a few times per year. For long duration storage $20/kWh is not too strange a number.
Lithium batteries are for daily storage. So they are not cycled once or twice a year but e.g. 100 to 500 times a year. For those batteries efficiency is very important and prices mentioned to be commercially dominant over fossil fuel (usually in combination with wind or solar) are usually between $50 and $250, depending on location.
Hi Auke, question: Do you think batteries can also be the solution for seasonal storage? Here in Switzerland we have a gap of about 7TWh of electricity demand in winter. Could battteries help store from sunny to gloomy days?
Hang on , all that graph shows is that in successful products as prices drop , sales increase and as volume increase production costs decrease. Your inverting that fact is a good article strategy though.
There is no way this trend can be sustained for another 8 years. An additional 60 TWh of batteries produced in the next 8 years is just not possible. If we produce 500 GWh this year, at 59% a year growth we would have to produce 13.5 TWh in 2031. I can see 5-7 TWh maybe. But not 13.5 TWh especially not at 300 wh/kg, not to mention 200 wh,/kg.
If gravimetric energy density grew to 500 wh/kg it would require far less cells to be produced to get to 5-7 TWh.
You have a wonderful insight into the technological aspects of battery development and usage. I too, have been following this closely as I would like to see electric aircraft replace the gas guzzling ICE powered ones I have flown. What you point out regarding the past and how that extrapolates to a future of low-cost batteries is probably spot on, but only from a purely manufacturing standpoint. Historically the benefits of advancements like this are corralled by the rich and are never seen by society at large. Many examples exist. Even though sodium is quite low in relative cost, there is a significant infrastructure required to use it and that can only be obtained with large capital investments, essentially only available to the rich. The rich will once again find a key part of this that can be controlled and extort profits from the general population. The problems in society are not technological, they are due to greed, and power, and control. The solutions therefore will not be acquired without addressing the real root causes.
I'm bemused by extrapolation applied to physics.
Did you make a mistake in your calculation?
Growth from 2410 GWh to 61917 GWh is ~4.7 doublings, not 8:
log (61917/2410) / log 2 = 4.7
That would result in ~$20/kWh:
80 * (0.75^4.7) = 20.7
Did I misunderstand your calculation? It is getting late. If I don't post this now, I never will, I guess.
Referring to:
"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. Each time the price would be reduced by 25%. If we started with $80/kWh in 2023 and subtracted 25% eight times in a row, the end result would be battery cells costing just $8 per kWh."
I think he just misplaced the decimal, meant to put 619,000 GWh ~(2^8 * 2400). However, I don't know how he gets 8 doublings in 7 or 8 years when each year is 60% growth according to him ... that's 1.6^7 or 1.6^8, not 2^8. This all reads like nonsense to me.
7 doublings from 2410 GWh at 59% a year comes to ~61 TWh. However, a doubling takes about 63 weeks and 7 doublings would be 441 weeks which would put us at roughly June 2032, not 2030.
>> However, a doubling takes about 63 weeks
Not if the 60% rate he quoted is correct. Either you are pulling that 63-week figure from somewhere else, or you got your math wrong.
You don't even need to do any math to figure out that if you gain 60% over 52 weeks, you will need more than 11 additional weeks to gain 25% (the 25% of the 1.6x after 52 weeks being the additional amount required to get to 2x).
The math is correct because it's compounded growth. The compounding actually happens daily in practice as more production comes online which can happen at any time. For compound growth you have to use the rule of 72. Look it up.
This article is truly enlightening! 🔋
Excited to see such promising developments, especially for those of us who have been innovating in this space.
We’ve been working on a project that perfectly aligns with this trend, focusing on Na-Ion batteries and enhancing their durability without sacrificing cost-effectiveness. ⚡
This synergy between cutting-edge research and practical solutions is paving the way for a more sustainable and economically viable energy future. 🌍
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=If1y4ExSTQc)
My understanding of Wrights Law is that prices are expected to drop at a fixed percentage relative to cumulative production. Not due to annual production. Which is why the price of petrol engines would take such a long time from here to decline because a single doubling of the total historical cumulative production would now take a very long time.
Sodium batteries look promising. But lithium sulphur batteries will also likely be great. They still have lithium, but they offer the prospect of a lot my energy storage per unit of lithium.
Regarding the source of the data (IEA report), it seems like the graph should rather be titled "battery volume in use in GWh". This is also not the cumulative production, but maybe closer to it?
Man this is pure fantasy, did the author take into account the quantity of raw material needed if double production every year?
Batteries are not made of dollars.
Would agree that a shift will happen when battery prices fall further, only a small increase in storage would make a big difference to the grid services that storage could provide. Enterprise level OSS to manage it all and herd those cats: https://solarnetwork.net
So we can install 14 TWh of batteries (10 billion euro that our government reserved for 4 new nuclear power plants)
Build the nukes. Grid Storage needs to be funded in parallel. Disappointed to see residential consumers assumed to take on the cost and initiative to purchase and install home systems to make up for failing infrastructure. If a residential consumer needs battery Storage to combat peak pricing and poor grid stability, the infrastructure is the problem.
20 kWh? How about 100kWh of storage? At $20/kWh that's just $2000. An even bigger battery would not only "smooth out the curve" but turn the utility into a backup power source for the rare times the sun and the batteries cannot supply your need. Net-metering permit queue backup? No problem. Batteries mean we don't need to sell back to the utility, just avoid buying whenever possible. With solar buy back rates sliding downward, we don't need to worry. Savings from not buying utility supplied grid electrons can exceed net metering income. All we need are inexpensive batteries. Bring 'em on.
I was just in Professor Trancik's (Jessika) course. We were fact/data/numerically driven--leaving silly opinions based on assumptions behind us. There is way too much of that these days. Also we can DIRECT the market and the adoption, and the tech readiness, by inserting actions/policy/$ in the right places. There is no "free" market. Interested parties are always rigging and influenncing. Coming at that from a CLEAN FUTURE motivation seems like a worthy pursuit. Manipulating the market happens everyday. Doing that for societal benefit, rather than profit is all good, as they say.
I think many are missing the boat: as prices drop, batteries WILL become a ubiquitous homeowner asset, subject to economics and Wright's Law (and Moore's Law). There are also many chemistries in the pipeline (sodium, solid state, sulfur, aluminum), and many alternatives being developed. Battery is not synonymous with NMC or LFP. That's a current tech. We shouldn't get caught up with supply chain caveats, as there will also be recycling/recovery (we are currently able to recover 98%).
Battery cost WILL come down, and stationary home batteries supplant the need for smart-everything. they also are not requiring the same space efficiency (energy density) of EV battery packs, although the EV manufacturers are the logical source for home cells. Storage at the location of renewable generation changes EVERYTHING. Solar + storage will be a great appliance for power generation, to add to refrigeration (for food) and heat pumps (for heat and hot water) and stoves (for cooking). It also reduces the need to upgrade the grid, as most electrical flow is local, and reduces the input side of the Sankey chart, since there would be no fuel and virtually no line loss.
Changing to a model where there are DERs with storage makes the homeowner a producer and reduces the grid to a potential backup for homes with enough production and storage. At $20-50/kWh, a battery that obfuscates the need for grid as the primary source is a blessing we need to encourage and nurture..
Readers may wish to head to MIT News:
https://news.mit.edu/2024/power-when-sun-doesnt-shine-0229
...where a study by Prof. Jessica Transik, that concluded you have to get down below $20/kWh of CAPEX for the battery, for it to make renewable power work affordably as base-load.
This is the goal of "Form Energy", also profiled in that article - but your calculations indicate that their "iron-air battery" is in a race with sodium.
Who wins that race? The human race.
You should not confuse batteries for daily storage with long term storage.
The iron batteries mentioned here have a roundtrip efficiency of around 50% and are ideal for long duration (usually seasonal) storage but would be wasteful when used more than a few times per year. For long duration storage $20/kWh is not too strange a number.
Lithium batteries are for daily storage. So they are not cycled once or twice a year but e.g. 100 to 500 times a year. For those batteries efficiency is very important and prices mentioned to be commercially dominant over fossil fuel (usually in combination with wind or solar) are usually between $50 and $250, depending on location.
Hi Auke, question: Do you think batteries can also be the solution for seasonal storage? Here in Switzerland we have a gap of about 7TWh of electricity demand in winter. Could battteries help store from sunny to gloomy days?
Hang on , all that graph shows is that in successful products as prices drop , sales increase and as volume increase production costs decrease. Your inverting that fact is a good article strategy though.
Like EVs , the answer to that will determine their adoption as with Solar PV
There is no way this trend can be sustained for another 8 years. An additional 60 TWh of batteries produced in the next 8 years is just not possible. If we produce 500 GWh this year, at 59% a year growth we would have to produce 13.5 TWh in 2031. I can see 5-7 TWh maybe. But not 13.5 TWh especially not at 300 wh/kg, not to mention 200 wh,/kg.
If gravimetric energy density grew to 500 wh/kg it would require far less cells to be produced to get to 5-7 TWh.
You have a wonderful insight into the technological aspects of battery development and usage. I too, have been following this closely as I would like to see electric aircraft replace the gas guzzling ICE powered ones I have flown. What you point out regarding the past and how that extrapolates to a future of low-cost batteries is probably spot on, but only from a purely manufacturing standpoint. Historically the benefits of advancements like this are corralled by the rich and are never seen by society at large. Many examples exist. Even though sodium is quite low in relative cost, there is a significant infrastructure required to use it and that can only be obtained with large capital investments, essentially only available to the rich. The rich will once again find a key part of this that can be controlled and extort profits from the general population. The problems in society are not technological, they are due to greed, and power, and control. The solutions therefore will not be acquired without addressing the real root causes.