This is all very encouraging and in particular batteries role in solar
Two interesting data points to that end
1) The "duck curve" for CA is almost neutral - eg the timing imbalance between peak demand and solar power generation - battery utilization is the most straightforward solution here
- https://twitter.com/baker_edmund/status/1750644294673748366
2) There has been a massive decline in rooftop solar applications in CA since solar energy reimbursements dropped - https://twitter.com/thomasopeters/status/1750920941868347539 - some of that is potentially pent up demand, but I think illustrates the role state policy has to play in moving towards "renewables"
Yesterday we peaked out at 3GW discharging rate, and 4GW charging rate. We are plowing ahead in the transition to utilizing all of our excess solar! We peak at 25GW expected today, so we have a little ways to go but it's incredible how far and how fast they're replacing everything. Clean air FTW! Thanks sun!
The amazing thing is there basically were no batteries three four years ago. And they can supply about 10% of the max power demand already. So it feels like the technologies we need are now good to go on an engineering an accounting basis. And adoption can be quite rapid. We're not saying in 50 years, 25 years, 10 years. We're looking at 5 years.
the CAISO website is super rad in general -- so many real-time charts!! demand trend is really cool to watch during heat waves; things get spiky on both the demand side (for obvious reason) and the supply side (peaker plants & "virtual" power plants coming online)
Given the dramatically lower costs of utility-scale solar vs. residential rooftop solar, is it not better at a society level for state policy to incentivize utility over residential solar? Utility-scale battery installations likewise should be much cheaper.
This argument ignores the cost of transmission and distribution, which are higher costs than the generation itself.
And as electricity prices are driven down even further, T&D will come to dominate over energy generation costs.
Few models account for this, but Christopher Clack made one, and the lowest cost energy path was a small amount of investment in distribution now, paired with massive deployment of solar on homes and industrial/commercial.
This won't happen unless utilities are forced into it or their allowed profit model is changed to deliver ratepayers the lowest cost energy, however.
Residential solar may still make sense for new construction (maybe?) in the right areas. But there was a lot of scammy behavior around home solar installation at one point. Given that home solar does not effectively give you a backup generator for free (barring a lot of batteries and specific electrical hookups as I recall), it's not clear it's a big win in general. A lot of utility things aren't ideal at the individual house level if there's an option.
- Distribution systems today can only handle some percentage of EV penetration in a given area, not 100%. Charging an EV from the roof skips the grid entirely
- The bulk of the cost is labor and permitting, not the modules themselves. Given that, California requires solar on newly constructed homes
- California updated their net metering program so that ratepayers aren’t subsidizing rooftop solar anymore (in NEM 3.0, homeowners get paid wholesale rates)
As far as rooftop solar, it makes a big difference if solar PV is built into the design process at the beginning, rather than tacked on as an afterthought. Similarly, a household battery might be as common in the future as a household hot water heater (with a similar footprint, size-wise).
There's also regional variability - cities absolutely require utility-scale solar, just as they require dedicated agricultural land to feed the population, because there's not enough surface area in a city. Rural/suburban areas on the other hand are ideal for integrated rooftop solar.
> Given the dramatically lower costs of utility-scale solar vs. residential rooftop solar
According to Wikipedia the LCOE on small roof top solar is about twice that of utility solar. [0] So yes, it's dramatically better. But typically the price difference between what the utility is paid and what the customer is charged is 3 times, so your average household is better off installing solar despite generating it at twice the cost of a utility.
The price difference isn't just transmission costs. It's also retail markup, regulatory charges and metering and billing.
State policy is fundamental to the entire green revolution. None of it would have been possible without nations incentivizing it. Eventually once the entire energy generation/consumption cycle is entrenched and we are all dependent on it, they can safely take away the incentives.
It's a bit like changing the tires on a moving bus. Somebody had to pay for the new tires and wheels, and the support truck to run along side the bus, and the extra fuel, and a discount for the new tires, etc. Once the new tires are on the bus can keep driving without support.
That duck curve tweet is disingenuous. That curve in the tweet is for the lowest net load day (net load is actual load or usage minus generation from renewables). In 2023, if you took the day that had the least amount of net load, yes, it was almost entirely covered by solar power. That does _not_ mean the claim made in the tweet that California is run totally by solar power from 10am-4pm every day (today at 11:56 AM PST, it's about 51% run by solar power). California's grid has enough good things going for it that we don't need to lie about it.
Regarding price, leading manufacturers are already selling at a price below what was always understood as the point where EVs win in terms of economics:
If ubiquitous and cheap charging infrastructure is not being priced in, which is still a blocker for many.
For example, I cannot reasonably run lengths of 110v extension cords down the block to charge a car overnight, and acquiring my own house with a garage is dramatically more expensive than any fuel savings. :p
True. Good point. But that will change surprisingly rapidly. We've experienced it in Norway already. It's been a huge change over the last 5 years.
I don't have a garage attached to my house, it's a shared garage building. But once a few owners got EVs, and it became clear to others that EVs were the future, we got some minimal renovations done that allowed anyone to pay to have a slow AC charger installed.
Oslo has been rolling out street-side AC charging poles. There's never quite enough but the growth is steady.
Other countries may not have the same incentives, but that just shifts the point where the rapid transition starts by a few years I think, since cars get cheaper and better all the time. And remember that Norway is fairly cold, which is brutal on range in the winter, so it's not really a fully ideal place for EVs (though at least the car starts reliably every time unlike diesel)
> I cannot reasonably run lengths of 110v extension cords down the block to charge a car overnight, and acquiring my own house with a garage is dramatically more expensive
You don't need a garage, just some sort of reserved parking space... There are plenty of weatherproof electrical boxes. It costs a bit of money to have a trench from your home to your car parking area, but far less than buying a house.
And that "110v extension cord" can supply 240V with just a change of connectors on either end (e.g.: 6-30p) allowing charging twice as fast.
The Biden admin targeted $7.5 billion for exactly this, but apparently the ramp up has been slow so far. They announced $620 million to specific projects just a week or so ago, so it may be accelerating.
Since Q2 of 2022, the majority of Teslas produced have been LFP. As of right now, the standard range and long range Model 3 and Model Y are LFP. The Model S, X, and the Performance versions of the 3/Y are NCA.
And 200 wh/kg LFP and 160 wh/kg sodium ion is coming into mass production.
To the main parent, the runway for further EV drivetrain cost reductions is at least a decade more. The LFP and sodium ion production roadmaps have almost 200 wh/kg sodium ion and 230 wh/kg LFP on it, so that is reasonably a five year likelihood.
10-20 year is solid state, sulfur techs, and other chemistries poised to double or triple density of the cells.
The first curve shows the really low commercial vehicle demand on batteries. This will not be the case, commercial vehicles from busses to worksite vehicles to town delivery vans are going to goddamn explode in demand, once all the business owners realize the TCO of EV drivetrains is so low.
I've been pretty disappointed in electric companies, perhaps they are pricing in grid adaptation, but wind and solar should be relentlessly driving down the cost of electricity and something is up with that.
The dual headed dragon of economies of scale/density in batteries combined with the price drop in electricity for wind/solar is something that ICEs simply cannot win against.
Which is why I chuckle at every mainstream media article about EV sales fluctuations or anti-EV stories, or the inevitable "I can't charge because Apartment/Parking Garage/City". People, this is an economic tsunami coming, and it has already started. All those infrastructure problems will be solved.
The "I rent" is the most mystifying thing, indicative of local governments not getting ahead of this. What should be cheaper to wire up, a suburban development sprawled over 10 square miles, or 100 cars in a one block radius? Governments need to be incentivizing apartment charging pronto.
What do you mean? In the past year there have been substantial price cuts in many markets, particularly in the US. The price gap between the average EV and average ICE has also closed could considerably.
This is a great set of charts and analysis, although I have two problems with it.
1. On the chart of energy density, I'd like to see the the energy density of petrol for comparison. It's much higher, and even though extrapolation is dangerous, I'd like to see how long it could take to reach parity given some of the different forecasting models they mention. Specifically regarding their mention of air travel, I'd like to know what the minimum viable energy density would be for a vessel's fuel source, because my current understanding is that commercial air travel powered by electricity is not feasible.
2. They mention S-curve adoption, but that reaches a horizontal asymptote eventually, it doesn't go up forever. I'd like to see more analysis on where we think we're at on the S-curve, and why. I'd like to see a guess on where it levels out displayed on that chart, instead of the arrow simply pointing at the sky. If nothing else, show where the chemical limit might be based on current battery technology.
I want to displace fossil fuels and reduce pollution and slow the greenhouse effect as much as possible. I think transparency and realistic expectations need to be part of the transition. The more information available to markets, the more efficiently they can work towards the goal. I find it very difficult to get answers to these types of questions when discussing renewable energy generation and storage. I'm sure part of it is my own ignorance on where to look, which is why I ask: especially here, hopefully an expert can see this and quickly point me in the right direction.
> I'd like to see the the energy density of petrol for comparison.
Petrol's higher energy density doesn't matter as much as people think.
Electric vehicles are around four times as efficient as petrol. In a petrol car, only 20% of the energy is converted to motion. In electric cars, this is around 80% (with some variation dependent on regenerative braking). I wrote about this extensively in a previous article: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/electrification-en...
That is not even comparing apples to oranges, that is comparing apples to steel. You are correct in that energy density does not matter very much for weight-insensitive generation such as grid-scale generation, but energy density matters for weight-constrained applications such as airplanes and rockets as the poster mentioned.
However, assuming that the renewable generation cost curve continues to improve exponentially then the most likely outcome for a carbon-neutral or carbon-negative future will be using electricity to manufacture high density combustible fuels out of atmospheric carbon, effectively using it as a high density "battery" for use cases that demand high energy density.
To the extent that your analysis is relevant to the concerns of the poster, all it means is that batterys are actually ~4x better than the raw energy density would indicate. As to the specifics, Wikipedia claims petrol is ~12,888 W*h/kg or ~24x the battery energy density in the article, so ~6x better with respect to car motion. Note that the current curve has only gone from ~100 W*h/kg to ~500 W*h/kg, so we would need to see density growth comparable to the last 30 years to happen again.
>Petrol's higher energy density doesn't matter as much as people think.
When vehicles uphill, ramp, and fight with the increasing wind resistance due speed, it is needed a high torque for to motion.
The petrol's energy density is translated in high torque, that the gearbox latter transforms progressively.
In electric vehicles, generating high torque and cooling the overheated coils for to obtain such high torque drains the battery quickly, the range drops quickly.
And for to increase the range, more weight is added (more batteries), that requires higher torque for motion, that requires more energy again, and so on.
This is why the energy density it is important, in batteries are the watts hour per kilogram. As also it is important the number of cycles before such batteries start to drop energy density until to fail (to note the weight keeps being the same along all of this degradation).
With the current technology, due the magnetic fields strength generated in the coils, and the energy density of the batteries, EVs just can not compete with petrol vehicles. It is about torque, among other things.
What is needed? batteries with bigger energy density ( higher Wh/Kg with higher number of recharge cycles), and/or higher efficiency generating magnetic fields of high strength (ambient superconductivity, also stronger magnets would help some coil's topologies).
Doesn't matter for WHAT? You start out talking about energy density, and then cite some numbers regarding efficiency. What does one have to do with the other? You've done nothing to support your opening claim here.
The mention of air travel was strange. I wasn't aware of anyone who thought long range flight would ever be electrified. At least not without some fundamental breakthrough.
S-curves are hard to predict. Basically every time someone attempts to do it, they are way off. This [0] is a neat paper that addresses the question. We've blown past every single prediction.
Why do you mention long range flight? I don't see anything in the article saying batteries will take 100% of the airplane market.
It does say batteries will start to take market share in 2030. That's almost certainly true. It's a high priority for the Norwegian company to electrify the short distance airplane network in the next coming years. There are already battery electric planes coming out. And battery chemistries suitable for short range planes are starting early production.
I suspect battery electric plane will get a surprisingly good range once we start to get highly optimized battery chemistries and optimized airplane designs for that market. The hardest part is to get the first few products to mass market.
They might creep into the medium range market by 2050.
But long range? It might never happen. Unless we get something like aluminum-air batteries that can exploit oxygen in the air somehow. But it doesn't matter. Long range flights are not the majority of flights. It's a small enough market that e-fuels could cover it.
Since flying battery electric will be so much cheaper it's also possible people will have to switch planes multiple times on a journey. Maybe there will be some innovations/optimizations that make that faster and easier.
There are some very early stage tests, there is some kind of island hopper electric airplane that flys regular service, and it's only like 5 or 10 miles across water.
Batteries will get more energy dense, the range will increase a bit. But yeah, it's hard to see it getting to a few 100 miles.
Diesel is more like 3.175 (25%) due to the inefficiencies of small heat engines. You're throwing away like 3/4 of the energy as waste heat. Electric motors are >95% efficient and lithium batteries are in the high-90s percent efficient.
Electricity is already low-entropy, whereas energy from burning petrol is high entropy and thus contains less useful work.
That's not really their point, it's do we have any reasonable hope of applications that require the energy density of fossil fuels (flight) to be powered by electricity.
I'm a little surprised by that energy density chart. Who's selling batteries that carry 500 Wh/kg? Those are research prototype numbers; I think that Amprius and the gamma-sulfur people have hit (or passed) that mark. But cars and cellphones have been using the Ni-Mn-Al-Co oxide family of cathodes for a decade. The recent large-scale development has been bringing on LiFePO4 which actually accepts a lower density in exchange for lower cost and longer life.
That doesn't discredit the predictions, but I don't think that the connection they're trying to draw between energy density and market demand really holds water. The development of higher density batteries is good for certain applications like that ground-effect electric seaplane, but it isn't necessary for cars or grid storage, where the first case is mostly viable already and the second is concerned with the cost outlook and the self-discharge rate.
I think Amprius are further along than you might think, ready to scale commercial production, not research prototype. Super neat factory tour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_Hd4HfH1ss
There are a few go-kart places here, I hadn't been there for a few years, and now I learned that they all switched to electrical. Much quieter, no fumes, works great indoors
Full torque at zero RPM makes motor racing much more exciting - especially compared to the low end karts with puny 2-stroke engines that took forever to accelerate my heavy ass !
This is why I say electricity revolution is coming and a lot people and countries are going to be shell shocked by it. Solar and wind electricity costs are also decreasing at a similar rate.
It’s already here, it’s been here for a decade, renewables are a mature industry. They’ve already effectively destroyed the economics of coal, and natural gas is next.
I was gonna say "then why did China add so much coal last year", because I remembered reading that they added something like 50GW of coal, even as they added more than 150GW renewable.
But as of Jan 1 2024, they also had to introduce a financial incentive just to keep coal plants online, because otherwise the coal plants can't compete on price, just like you said! Some weird economics going on here, but it seems like China is still adding coal just to maximize total power deployed, even if it's uneconomic at the margins.
Chart #2: Top Tier Energy Battery Density vs. Battery Cost.
That seems like an odd comparison to me. Is it normal to compare the Top Tier Anything to the Average of another thing?
Top Tier Car 0-60 Times vs Average Car Costs? IDK, it doesn't seem to contain any REAL information. Shouldn't the comparison be the costs of the SAME cars and not include cars that aren't top tier?
Top Tier Car 0-60 Times vs Average Car Costs? IDK, it doesn't seem to contain any REAL information.
Actually, if you know the details of the development of consumer cars, you'll find that advances and levels of performance in top tier cars tends to trickle down into average cars. Not without some dilution, but that's a definite trend! So things like disc brakes, fuel injection, microprocessor control.
This sort of thing definitely happens with batteries over time. It's a way of peeking into the future. Just fudge factor for a little dilution.
Stationary systems for grid scale storage have amazing options - e.g. Form Energy - that needn't rely on power density benefits of Lithium chemistries. I wouldn't be surprised to see this sector dominate the GWh/yr chart in the next 6 years.
Does a battery with low cycle efficiency actually beat hydrogen for seasonal storage?
The major problem with hydrogen is the fuel cell efficiency. Electrolysis is above 80%, but fuel cells are barely at 60% and it gets lower when you try to make the design more practical (lower temperature, less platinum). So batteries just have to hit 50% to compete. But that 50% includes both inherent cycle efficiency and self-discharge and Form Energy isn't putting their numbers up front, as far as I can see.
More importantly, seasonal storage is heavily concerned with heating, and the conversion of hydrogen to heat is a different matter. The batteries have heat pumps going for them, but you can make a gas-powered heat pump too. So rather than the fuel cell efficiency you look at the CoP difference between electric and gas heat pumps. The latter have received little attention, but could see a surge of interest if green hydrogen becomes more popular (and easier to transport). But here we exhaust my understanding of the situation.
It's difficult to see any of the alternatives displacing batteries for short-term storage. Batteries aren't a good fit for long-term storage, which is where alternatives should be competitive. But that market is essentially 0 right now.
Form Energy has made a huge amount of marketing before they had proven anything and claimed to have a product very fast. They have not build a single large better ever. Maybe not exactly the best example.
Most of the non Li-Battery grid cell systems have not yet proven much. Many of the first generation of such system went bust. And many of the others have taken a long time and are still not deployed.
So far the successful grid battery companies are mostly repackaging other cells.
Stem is effectively a services company. There’s a lot of room for general-use hardware and software in this space, especially as more battery storage is deployed and financial incentives for energy arbitrage emerge.
Readit News
Two interesting data points to that end
1) The "duck curve" for CA is almost neutral - eg the timing imbalance between peak demand and solar power generation - battery utilization is the most straightforward solution here - https://twitter.com/baker_edmund/status/1750644294673748366
2) There has been a massive decline in rooftop solar applications in CA since solar energy reimbursements dropped - https://twitter.com/thomasopeters/status/1750920941868347539 - some of that is potentially pent up demand, but I think illustrates the role state policy has to play in moving towards "renewables"
Yesterday we peaked out at 3GW discharging rate, and 4GW charging rate. We are plowing ahead in the transition to utilizing all of our excess solar! We peak at 25GW expected today, so we have a little ways to go but it's incredible how far and how fast they're replacing everything. Clean air FTW! Thanks sun!
-- Temperatures are mild throughout most of TX (50s and 60s F); temps in CA are similar, perhaps a bit warmer;
-- It's roughly mid-day in both places (3PM TX, 1PM CA);
-- TX has a population of ~30M, CA has ~39M
..yet somehow right now TX is consuming ~47GW (per ercot) while CA is only consuming ~23.5GW (per caiso). What gives?
ERCOT: https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards
And as electricity prices are driven down even further, T&D will come to dominate over energy generation costs.
Few models account for this, but Christopher Clack made one, and the lowest cost energy path was a small amount of investment in distribution now, paired with massive deployment of solar on homes and industrial/commercial.
This won't happen unless utilities are forced into it or their allowed profit model is changed to deliver ratepayers the lowest cost energy, however.
- Distribution systems today can only handle some percentage of EV penetration in a given area, not 100%. Charging an EV from the roof skips the grid entirely
- The bulk of the cost is labor and permitting, not the modules themselves. Given that, California requires solar on newly constructed homes
- California updated their net metering program so that ratepayers aren’t subsidizing rooftop solar anymore (in NEM 3.0, homeowners get paid wholesale rates)
There's also regional variability - cities absolutely require utility-scale solar, just as they require dedicated agricultural land to feed the population, because there's not enough surface area in a city. Rural/suburban areas on the other hand are ideal for integrated rooftop solar.
According to Wikipedia the LCOE on small roof top solar is about twice that of utility solar. [0] So yes, it's dramatically better. But typically the price difference between what the utility is paid and what the customer is charged is 3 times, so your average household is better off installing solar despite generating it at twice the cost of a utility.
The price difference isn't just transmission costs. It's also retail markup, regulatory charges and metering and billing.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_sourc... - there are a lot of tables in that page. Twice looks to be generous to the utilities.
It's a bit like changing the tires on a moving bus. Somebody had to pay for the new tires and wheels, and the support truck to run along side the bus, and the extra fuel, and a discount for the new tires, etc. Once the new tires are on the bus can keep driving without support.
You can look this up for yourself: https://www.gridstatus.io/live/caiso
People also learned that the cheap Chinese solar cells die in 5-10 years and aren't worth installing unless your electricity costs are really high.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/01/ev-lfp-battery-price-w...
The recent price war in China is a testament to that.
If ubiquitous and cheap charging infrastructure is not being priced in, which is still a blocker for many.
For example, I cannot reasonably run lengths of 110v extension cords down the block to charge a car overnight, and acquiring my own house with a garage is dramatically more expensive than any fuel savings. :p
I don't have a garage attached to my house, it's a shared garage building. But once a few owners got EVs, and it became clear to others that EVs were the future, we got some minimal renovations done that allowed anyone to pay to have a slow AC charger installed.
Oslo has been rolling out street-side AC charging poles. There's never quite enough but the growth is steady.
Other countries may not have the same incentives, but that just shifts the point where the rapid transition starts by a few years I think, since cars get cheaper and better all the time. And remember that Norway is fairly cold, which is brutal on range in the winter, so it's not really a fully ideal place for EVs (though at least the car starts reliably every time unlike diesel)
I used to run extension cords out of windows and across the sidewalk to charge a Fiat 500e.
You don't need a garage, just some sort of reserved parking space... There are plenty of weatherproof electrical boxes. It costs a bit of money to have a trench from your home to your car parking area, but far less than buying a house.
And that "110v extension cord" can supply 240V with just a change of connectors on either end (e.g.: 6-30p) allowing charging twice as fast.
Dead Comment
I presume manufacturers make packs using whatever cell sizes they can source?
I had thought the trend was away from cylindrical (eg 4680) and towards prismatic or pouch cells? Whatever happened to the 1 metre long BYD cell: https://pushevs.com/2020/05/26/byd-blade-prismatic-battery-c...
[1] https://cnevpost.com/2024/01/17/battery-price-war-catl-byd-c...
Do they have a model using LiFePOs now?
To the main parent, the runway for further EV drivetrain cost reductions is at least a decade more. The LFP and sodium ion production roadmaps have almost 200 wh/kg sodium ion and 230 wh/kg LFP on it, so that is reasonably a five year likelihood.
10-20 year is solid state, sulfur techs, and other chemistries poised to double or triple density of the cells.
The first curve shows the really low commercial vehicle demand on batteries. This will not be the case, commercial vehicles from busses to worksite vehicles to town delivery vans are going to goddamn explode in demand, once all the business owners realize the TCO of EV drivetrains is so low.
I've been pretty disappointed in electric companies, perhaps they are pricing in grid adaptation, but wind and solar should be relentlessly driving down the cost of electricity and something is up with that.
The dual headed dragon of economies of scale/density in batteries combined with the price drop in electricity for wind/solar is something that ICEs simply cannot win against.
Which is why I chuckle at every mainstream media article about EV sales fluctuations or anti-EV stories, or the inevitable "I can't charge because Apartment/Parking Garage/City". People, this is an economic tsunami coming, and it has already started. All those infrastructure problems will be solved.
The "I rent" is the most mystifying thing, indicative of local governments not getting ahead of this. What should be cheaper to wire up, a suburban development sprawled over 10 square miles, or 100 cars in a one block radius? Governments need to be incentivizing apartment charging pronto.
For batteries not put in EVs a slightly lower price will get them installed in grid storage solutions.
Consumers will be the last to see lower prices while demand outpaces supply.
Companies will gladly pocket the difference between what they charge the customers and their $100/KWh bulk price.
1. On the chart of energy density, I'd like to see the the energy density of petrol for comparison. It's much higher, and even though extrapolation is dangerous, I'd like to see how long it could take to reach parity given some of the different forecasting models they mention. Specifically regarding their mention of air travel, I'd like to know what the minimum viable energy density would be for a vessel's fuel source, because my current understanding is that commercial air travel powered by electricity is not feasible.
2. They mention S-curve adoption, but that reaches a horizontal asymptote eventually, it doesn't go up forever. I'd like to see more analysis on where we think we're at on the S-curve, and why. I'd like to see a guess on where it levels out displayed on that chart, instead of the arrow simply pointing at the sky. If nothing else, show where the chemical limit might be based on current battery technology.
I want to displace fossil fuels and reduce pollution and slow the greenhouse effect as much as possible. I think transparency and realistic expectations need to be part of the transition. The more information available to markets, the more efficiently they can work towards the goal. I find it very difficult to get answers to these types of questions when discussing renewable energy generation and storage. I'm sure part of it is my own ignorance on where to look, which is why I ask: especially here, hopefully an expert can see this and quickly point me in the right direction.
Petrol's higher energy density doesn't matter as much as people think.
Electric vehicles are around four times as efficient as petrol. In a petrol car, only 20% of the energy is converted to motion. In electric cars, this is around 80% (with some variation dependent on regenerative braking). I wrote about this extensively in a previous article: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/electrification-en...
However, assuming that the renewable generation cost curve continues to improve exponentially then the most likely outcome for a carbon-neutral or carbon-negative future will be using electricity to manufacture high density combustible fuels out of atmospheric carbon, effectively using it as a high density "battery" for use cases that demand high energy density.
To the extent that your analysis is relevant to the concerns of the poster, all it means is that batterys are actually ~4x better than the raw energy density would indicate. As to the specifics, Wikipedia claims petrol is ~12,888 W*h/kg or ~24x the battery energy density in the article, so ~6x better with respect to car motion. Note that the current curve has only gone from ~100 W*h/kg to ~500 W*h/kg, so we would need to see density growth comparable to the last 30 years to happen again.
When vehicles uphill, ramp, and fight with the increasing wind resistance due speed, it is needed a high torque for to motion.
The petrol's energy density is translated in high torque, that the gearbox latter transforms progressively.
In electric vehicles, generating high torque and cooling the overheated coils for to obtain such high torque drains the battery quickly, the range drops quickly.
And for to increase the range, more weight is added (more batteries), that requires higher torque for motion, that requires more energy again, and so on.
This is why the energy density it is important, in batteries are the watts hour per kilogram. As also it is important the number of cycles before such batteries start to drop energy density until to fail (to note the weight keeps being the same along all of this degradation).
With the current technology, due the magnetic fields strength generated in the coils, and the energy density of the batteries, EVs just can not compete with petrol vehicles. It is about torque, among other things.
What is needed? batteries with bigger energy density ( higher Wh/Kg with higher number of recharge cycles), and/or higher efficiency generating magnetic fields of high strength (ambient superconductivity, also stronger magnets would help some coil's topologies).
How does it settle out when you take into account the significantly higher weight of EVs?
Really hard to beat propane or diesel for heat in the wilderness right now.
Doesn't matter for WHAT? You start out talking about energy density, and then cite some numbers regarding efficiency. What does one have to do with the other? You've done nothing to support your opening claim here.
Deleted Comment
S-curves are hard to predict. Basically every time someone attempts to do it, they are way off. This [0] is a neat paper that addresses the question. We've blown past every single prediction.
[0] https://www.inet.ox.ac.uk/files/energy_transition_paper-INET...
It does say batteries will start to take market share in 2030. That's almost certainly true. It's a high priority for the Norwegian company to electrify the short distance airplane network in the next coming years. There are already battery electric planes coming out. And battery chemistries suitable for short range planes are starting early production.
I suspect battery electric plane will get a surprisingly good range once we start to get highly optimized battery chemistries and optimized airplane designs for that market. The hardest part is to get the first few products to mass market.
They might creep into the medium range market by 2050.
But long range? It might never happen. Unless we get something like aluminum-air batteries that can exploit oxygen in the air somehow. But it doesn't matter. Long range flights are not the majority of flights. It's a small enough market that e-fuels could cover it.
Since flying battery electric will be so much cheaper it's also possible people will have to switch planes multiple times on a journey. Maybe there will be some innovations/optimizations that make that faster and easier.
Batteries will get more energy dense, the range will increase a bit. But yeah, it's hard to see it getting to a few 100 miles.
When I've actually tried it with tools like
https://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/generated/scipy.o...
it's frequently been terribly, terribly wrong.
I know almost nothing about this space. I would appreciate a comment on why this is feasible or not...
Diesel 12.7 kWh/kg
Electricity is already low-entropy, whereas energy from burning petrol is high entropy and thus contains less useful work.
Once the oil is used it's gone. Batteries can be recharged
That doesn't discredit the predictions, but I don't think that the connection they're trying to draw between energy density and market demand really holds water. The development of higher density batteries is good for certain applications like that ground-effect electric seaplane, but it isn't necessary for cars or grid storage, where the first case is mostly viable already and the second is concerned with the cost outlook and the self-discharge rate.
There are a few go-kart places here, I hadn't been there for a few years, and now I learned that they all switched to electrical. Much quieter, no fumes, works great indoors
But as of Jan 1 2024, they also had to introduce a financial incentive just to keep coal plants online, because otherwise the coal plants can't compete on price, just like you said! Some weird economics going on here, but it seems like China is still adding coal just to maximize total power deployed, even if it's uneconomic at the margins.
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-guarantee-payments...
Batteries with renewables are already cheaper than nuclear and it will only get cheaper while nuclear costs are ballooning.
That seems like an odd comparison to me. Is it normal to compare the Top Tier Anything to the Average of another thing?
Top Tier Car 0-60 Times vs Average Car Costs? IDK, it doesn't seem to contain any REAL information. Shouldn't the comparison be the costs of the SAME cars and not include cars that aren't top tier?
What am I not getting?
Cost is $139/kWh, which on a scale of 0-9000, is pretty close to zero historically. https://about.bnef.com/blog/lithium-ion-battery-pack-prices-...
Actually, if you know the details of the development of consumer cars, you'll find that advances and levels of performance in top tier cars tends to trickle down into average cars. Not without some dilution, but that's a definite trend! So things like disc brakes, fuel injection, microprocessor control.
This sort of thing definitely happens with batteries over time. It's a way of peeking into the future. Just fudge factor for a little dilution.
The major problem with hydrogen is the fuel cell efficiency. Electrolysis is above 80%, but fuel cells are barely at 60% and it gets lower when you try to make the design more practical (lower temperature, less platinum). So batteries just have to hit 50% to compete. But that 50% includes both inherent cycle efficiency and self-discharge and Form Energy isn't putting their numbers up front, as far as I can see.
More importantly, seasonal storage is heavily concerned with heating, and the conversion of hydrogen to heat is a different matter. The batteries have heat pumps going for them, but you can make a gas-powered heat pump too. So rather than the fuel cell efficiency you look at the CoP difference between electric and gas heat pumps. The latter have received little attention, but could see a surge of interest if green hydrogen becomes more popular (and easier to transport). But here we exhaust my understanding of the situation.
Most of the non Li-Battery grid cell systems have not yet proven much. Many of the first generation of such system went bust. And many of the others have taken a long time and are still not deployed.
So far the successful grid battery companies are mostly repackaging other cells.