Batteries: How cheap can they get?

Lifepo4 (lithium iron phosphate) batteries for the home are pretty cheap as of today. Power storage for residential use in a 48v metal rackable linkable system with battery management system (BMS) is $89/kwh shipped/duty paid from reputable chinese suppliers CATL/Seplos etc. You have to wait for sea shipping, add $30/kwh if you want to buy it in the US today.

From the same suppliers sodium batteries are currently $130/kwh and about 26% less efficient in the same form factor. I look forward to this changing.

Due to rising power costs I moved one of my homes completely to solar and battery (lifepo4) and haven't had any problems. I can't imagine ever going back to the power company. Panels have gotten to the point of being ridiculously cheap. I have a lot of space. I purchased pallets of used panels for more or less the cost of transportation ($34 per panel 270w). They produce about 85% of their nominal rating.

I mention this because other comments mention costs that are much much higher.

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”

I would love a 5-20kwh battery backup in my home, I even have a place for it. But when I called my local solar/battery installer they said that it was illegal to install grid-charged battery backups in home. I live in Minnesota.

They even told me the power from a hypothetical solar rig is sold to the grid utility, not stored, and they give a discount on future winter rates as payment. This seems like a lousy deal.

As a layperson, the first thing the title made me think of is "How safe can they get?" Let RESCI be the Risk of Explosion/Surge/Combustion/Inhalation. Here are some measures that are interesting to me that I can't really approximate when evaluating products:

- Incremental RESCI when buying from the cheapest 25% of vendors

- Incremental RESCI when drawing from the product population that shouldn't have passed QA

- Incremental RESCI when buying on AliExpress or random sites

- Incremental RESCI when dropping, hitting with a hammer, leaving in the sun, subjecting to a power surge

- Incremental RESCI from living in a dense neighborhood where dense people are buying from the cheapest 25% of vendors on AliExpress, occasionally dropping or hitting with a hammer, etc.

In the West, we have about a buck's worth of experience with residential electric service. By many measures, it's still much more dangerous than it should be.

> 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.

There's an order of magnitude error here. That's an increase of about 26x. 8 doublings would require an increase of 256x.

Now, anyone can make a simple math error. But, like, it should be totally obvious to anyone that 7 years of 60% annual growth can't possibly be anywhere near 8 years of 100% annual growth? Or if not anyone, then at least for someone like the author who spends the first page of the article bragging about their credentials in reasoning about exponential growth.

Edit: and this isn't just nitpicking, this faulty result is then used as the basis of the cost reduction estimates.

I really appreciate folks who include their reasoning with their argument as it makes it possible to evaluate their conclusions through external sources. So hats off here.

One of the things that helped solar take off in California (besides subsidies) was being 'grid tied' relieved you have having to manage all the battery technology. Initially this led to some effective rate plans (trading watts for watts) but once the power companies realized the lack of profit on selling power was affecting their ability both maintain infrastructure AND pay off their monetary judgements levied by courts for blowing up towns and burning down forests they managed to get the CPUC to switch to a model that turns home owners with Solar into sharecroppers for the power company[1]. On the plus side this is rekindling the interest in being 100% "off grid" as that removes the power company leverage and puts pricing control back into the market/consumer's hands.

What I find interesting is that now I am starting to hear rumbles about how the power company wants to use consumer and commercial building "whole building" power systems as back up for the grid in peak power consumption emergencies that would mandate being tied to the grid even if you didn't "need" to be. I have been writing diligently to representatives that I refuse to let the CPUC tell me what I have to sell power back to the power companies to sustain the grid in emergencies and reserve the right to charge what ever the market will bear. It's a bit Texan in its dysfunctionalness but my goal is to encourage zero carbon emission home power grids faster, and driving the existing power companies out of business will assist in that endeavor.

Batteries are a huge part of that and if the author is correct that we can get to $1/kWh batteries by 2030 I feel like I will live to see it which makes me happy.

[1] Am I bitter? What make you say that :-)

I'd rather hear a projection from an engineer/scientist/operations person in the industry. This kinda reads like it's written by an armchair expert who thinks about batteries a lot, but doesn't have much to do with building that future being described.

Sometimes the technical details matter and projected scaling trends aren't an inevitability.

He projects (at current growth and experience rates) that battery cells will reach $8/kWh by 2030. Wow!

I have 4 x 230Ah LiFePo4 cells in a 12 volt setup to power my solar powered blog during the night. It also runs my computer setup at 90W for many hours using an inverter.

People should really understand how cheap these cells have become and how feasible it is to setup your own battery storage system.

I’m now on a variable (next-day / day-ahead) dynamic electricity tariff that changes by the hour. On some days there are multiple hours where I get Paid to use electricity, it’s crazy that we have such an abundance of wind and solar.

It’s such fun to play with the Tiber API + Python and using those cheap hours to charge my battery a bit, while leaving room for solar.

The cost of 50AH Li-Ion batteries is getting close to the point where they may start to compete with Lead acid for gas powered cars.

I have been predicting over the last year that with many US and European manufacture suddenly giving up on ev growth rate and feed in tariff for solar not getting a good price. The next big thing is going to be home batteries. Looking at what Tesla is charging for powerwall and the actual materials cost which are still dropping people will start trying to get in on these margins.

> stormy electricity grid

For me (living in Europe), stable 220V 50Gz from any wall socket is one of the traits of civilization, like potable water tap and flush toilets. "Stormy grid" is something from a rural village lifestyle, with a water well and a cold basement to keep winter food supply. Is it really that huge problem in parts of US?

I think this underestimates the benefits of focus and serendipity and new materials. There’s a non zero chance that grid scale fixed batteries get made from things like sand or liquid metal or (insert cheap thing you can heat here).

Claims of 10 euros/kwh, months of energy storage:

https://thenextweb.com/news/startup-sand-battery-funding-pol...

How big a battery can you make when it’s made from sand?

The trick with grid is that because you’re building at scale, you can give the benefits to many in one shot and you can build it out of town. Think Australia’s original big battery from Tesla in 90 days vs. messing with installing lots of little ones in houses, with all the maintenance, education and dangers that brings.

Current prices are kinda nutty and are largely determined by the size of your buy. Retail prices for home batteries (a few kWhs) are roughly $1000/kWh. A Model 3 gets you about $700/kWh (with two free motors and an ipad). A Tesla megapack is $290/kWh, but you have to spend $1000000 to get that price. Tesla probably gets cells from the factory at round $80-$90/kWh.

Long-term it seems pretty reasonable that retail prices should be a small multiple of the factory price (which keeps decreasing), so I think $1000 for a 20kWh battery is totally reasonable.

I thought a few years back already that owning a bigger house will be cheaper than ever due to the progress of cheap renewable energy, cheaper and cheaper heat pump technology and batteries.

Nice to see blog

Except we are not going to have cheap batteries and solar in the USA and never ever cheap EVs

Remember how tariffs were called "asinine" when the last administration did them?

Next year tariffs will double the price of batteries and solar imports, except there's no domestic production to even compete at that high price.

Oh semiconductors are going to double in price too in 2025, buy soon.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/14/24156249/us-biden-china-t...

> 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.

For context, the global electricity consumption in 2019 was around 23 TWh [1].

[1] https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-information-overview...

“…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).”

What? This bit at the end has nothing to do with the thesis! Carthago delenda est much?

Once material costs fall far enough, other costs start to dominate. Design and permitting, sales and marketing, transport, finance and insurance, installation, support structures, safety systems, interconnections (wires), converters and so on. $11/kWh seems optimistic for 2030.

A small note: I have a domestic p.v. system with small LFP storage and well... It's ~3 years old and now the same battery capacity (8kWh) cost a bit less the THE DOUBLE, witch is ~9000€ instead of a bit more than 5000€...

Industrial battery prices are lowered, in China, definitively not here in the EU, and at this rates the expensive small UPS for a home, that's are such capacity, because to being semi-autonomous a typical home need at least 80-100kWh to avoid too deep DoD and support heating in new all-electric and very well insulated homes. And I talk about mild climate where there is enough Sun in the winter to have not the autonomy but at least margin also in December, January and February. Oh, and I talk about self-assembled systems like mine witch is legal here, but not legal in every countries, because retail prices for a complete systems installed by them are FAR more expensive, about THREE time more, enough to make the investment so expensive to be a nonsense.

The mention of Blockchain threw me off but I generally agree with this analysis.

Worth remembering that even enthusiastic supporters of the energy transition have underestimated the historical trends in wind, solar and batteries.

It's just hard to comprehend the S-curve ramp.

Tangential, whats the low energy distributed ledger tech he's talking about?

I think it would be cool if appliances started coming with batteries. You could give them times of day to charge, and to not use the outlet. And they could work in power outages.

this might not be the right thread to ask this question, but I have an older car and the battery inside went. In the past the battery was $50 to replace. Post-COVID, it runs for a whopping $250 at most automotive places... sometimes cheaper on sale.

So why not swap it out for a lithium battery (which still run around $50)? Are there any downsides beyond rewiring the connector types I'm not aware of?

*the battery type is 51R

Lowering cost per kWh is great, but if power demand increases at about the same rate or faster, then the impact is minimal.

Cost per bit of internet plans has also gone down a lot in the past decade, but you’d be forgiven for not noticing on account of all the new JavaScript, ads, and other website bloat.

Using less exotic materials is exciting, though! Regardless of whether the cost feels different.

What level of subsidy do we give to batteries?

Ladies and gents this is what standard-issue Silicon Valley style grift looks like (following in the footsteps of the great Kurzweil). Ignore basic physics, massage data so you can more credibly fit an exponential curve on it, and extrapolate a fantastic future for it.

All this to underpin the grand illusion of capitalism that exponential YoY growth is sustainable to justify insane VC valuations. Which is even more perverse when all this is done in the name of saving the planet.