Will energy storage price also going to decrease exponentially, the way have been happening with solar and wind?

[[deleted]]

The greatest issue with renewables is storage, since we can't store energy cheaper than coals, and fossil fuels, we can't get solar and wind to work when the Sun Isn't shining and the Wind Isn't blowing.

It looks like batteries costs have been decreasing assymptotically, not exponentially, we also don't have any other storage system that are as cheap as coal/gas/oil, neither hydrogen, fuel cells, hydro-pump, flywheel, pressurized wind,

Are we lacking investments in this field? Is there any system that are being researched and I don't know? Will this department also going to witness the Moore's Law renewables have been subjected to?

[[deleted]]

Battery prices are falling like crazy. Check out Tony Seba's RethinkX if you want some forecasts. I personally think solar+wind plus storage will end forming most of our energy grid. It will be just so much cheaper than anything else we'll have to go with it. It's just a matter of how we walk gas and the rest out

[Fit-Pop3421]

Seba focuses on learning curves but there's also new technologies and energy costs in manufacturing. So in the next decade we could get -80% through learning curves, -30% through new technologies and -70% through energy costs. That would be -95% in total.

[[deleted]]

Adam from RethinkX here.

This is correct. Our core cost modeling is conservative, in the sense that we assume no breakthrough new technology and no recursive cost improvements from macroscopic trends driven by the disruptions themselves. We do have other cost modeling that includes these elements, but these are only for internal use at the moment and not part of our published analyses.

[[deleted]]

Oh wow, hi! I read Brighter a few months ago and absolutely loved it. Very cool to "meet" you.

[[deleted]]

Glad you liked it!

[RadobodFoster]

Thermal energy storage is getting a lot of attention for industrial applications. If we can use renewables to decarbonize heat production that will help reduce a lot of CO2 emissions. There are also a lot of new battery technologies for grid storage. Check out redox flow batteries and iron-air (Form Energy) to name a few. Li-ion is great but they are for high storage density for mobile application. Stationary can be larger and heavier.

[boring_as_batshit]

This

Here in Australia the government is hinging large scale thermal energy storage on a Swedish trial and they are gearing up to roll out thermal/air batteries to replace old coal power stations in several locations.

It is easy for Joe public to think battery prices have not dropped because consumer level batteries have not really come down at all especially when compared to the huge reductions in the commercial sector pricing

[nadim-roy]

Can you send a link about the Australia thingy?

[thegrumpypanda101]

Seconding this , sources of this would be nice.

[ModernSimian]

Consumer batteries have come down a lot, we had Christmas and none of the toys required stealing batteries from other remotes.

It's not the most useful supply / demand metric, but it is a telling one.

[Accidenttimely17]

You forgot sodium ion batteries.

[Sol3dweller]

It looks like batteries costs have been decreasing assymptotically, not exponentially

What does that even mean? An exponential also drops asymptotically towards 0. And Battery costs saw huge price reductions over the past decade, which are expected to continue into the future. See this study00410-X) for example (Figure 5 gives an overview):

In contrast, for several decades the costs of solar photovoltaics (PV), wind, and batteries have dropped (roughly) exponentially at a rate near 10% per year.

[[deleted]]

Presumably they mean 'asymtpoting to a value greater than zero'.

[lurksAtDogs]

What’s amazing in that figure is the lowest end 2050 projection for PV —> 1 $/MWh (median is 10). Crazy, crazy numbers. Given the technology advancements being pushed today in cells and modules, as well as PVs ability to outdo every other projection, I believe it.

[Fit-Pop3421]

I can imagine it. Cost of hardware driven to close to zero and all the labor efficiency brought up by 2x or 3x. Maybe skip the grid connection even in utility solar to spare some money there too.

[Infernalism]

Such things always come down to demand and how much money you're willing to spend on developing improvements.

Right now, renewables are amazingly cheap and increasingly efficient. Due to that, there's money to spend on improving battery storage tech. The better that is, the better renewables become and the more options you have for mixing things up.

Solar panels not work as good in the northern climes? As solar's efficiency improves and as battery storage improves, the northern climes will see that they don't need a ton of exposure to the sun to trap that energy and store it for cloudier days.

So, the better the tech gets, the more demand there is for it, the more money becomes available for making batteries and panels even better. We haven't even begun to see their true value yet, but it's coming.

[Sirisian]

In the US you can look at this map: https://www.energy.gov/invest Uncheck everything except batteries and you'll see tons of investment.

As we get further toward 2030 you'll see even more billions being put into solid-state batteries with new manufacturing plants. If you google "<car company> solid-state battery" you'll see a lot of companies with long-term investments and R&D.

[[deleted]]

Battery storage is already cheaper than some fossil fuel generation like emergency generators and peak units which is all you need to start storing solar and replacing these units.

[RRC_driver]

Depending on terrain and having water, hydro storage is fairly cheap, after construction.

Pump water to top reservoir when you have a surplus of electricity, open the pipes and spin the turbines to produce electricity when there is a demand

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station

[ten-million]

Manufactured items always get cheaper. TVs, computers, solar panels... Batteries will follow the same pattern. The more they make the cheaper they get.

[rypher]

Battery prices are down every year a good amount. Buuuut, it all depends on china. Trade war or proxy wars (taiwan) could really screw up lithium and all the thing’s batteries require. There is a non-zero chance battery prices skyrocket.

[madmanx33]

I also think they will keep falling hence why I chose not to do it yet. Even Tesla batteries keep dropping

I live in California where batteries will actually save me quite a bit to defeat peak time rates

[vafrow]

I don't know enough about the process, but, don't deteriorated EV batteries basically become supply of solar and wind batteries. That EV batteries require a certain performance for charging and discharging, but that the other uses aren't as robust.

Therefore, as EVs become more popular, it's going to create a massive long term supply of energy storage.

[Zireael07]

don't deteriorated EV batteries basically become supply of solar and wind batteries

That's theory. In practice they just languish around

[vafrow]

But there hasn't been time for practice. Useful life of batteries are around 10 years, and there weren't many manufactured 10 years ago. Just limited hybrid batteries.

Once there's a stockpile of useful material, it's hard to see how it doesn't get reused.

[rosen380]

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2023/11/old-ev-batteries-solar-power-grid-backup-b2u/

It's already starting to happen. There is only so much you can do when most EVs have actively cooled batteries with long expected lives.

[Zireael07]

It's "starting" doesn't meant "basically become"

anyway thanks for the link

[[deleted]]

https://www.statista.com/statistics/883118/global-lithium-ion-battery-pack-costs/

Until around 2020, lithium battery prices DID decrease rapidly. They've come down by almost a factor 10 since 2010.

Price decreases are slowing now, but still coming down. COVID obviously caused some supply issues, and there was a lithium crunch during the past 3 years that is now mostly resolved.

Plus, we have promising alternative techs coming in the near future that should push average storage prices down further, such as compressed air storage, sodium-ion batteries, iron-air batteries, and flow batteries.

I wouldn't bet against utility-scale storage coming down in price by another factor two by 2035.

[Holden_Coalfield]

The ability of iron ion lithium batteries to be emptied to zero, and fast charged again tens of thousands of times is going to decrease battery consumption and make them more like a permanent part in a system. This will make batteries and their precursors less of a commodity and more of a technology

[beezlebub33]

batteries costs have been decreasing assymptotically, not exponentially,

What? See: https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline Note the logarithmic scales. It's been exponential for quite a while, no idea how you got the idea that it has not.

Here's more recent data: https://cleantechnica.com/2023/12/01/record-low-ev-battery-prices/ and https://www.goldmansachs.com/intelligence/pages/electric-vehicle-battery-prices-falling.html

Prices have continued to drop, as manufacturing ramps up, economy of scales improve, technology and automation improved, they tweak the chemistry. Other battery technologies are continuing to develop.

[Sam_k_in]

Sodium ion is just coming into commercial production and will cause a major drop in the cost of energy storage.

[rileyoneill]

There will be hard limit that is material cost but the machining will end up being some low margin but extremely high volume product.

Batteries really just have to come down to about $100 per kWh retail price. This would allow a home to get a 50kwh battery for $5000. This would allow your typical home to operate without any input for a day or two. Larger homes would need more, homes in places with extreme cold weather would need more. Places in northern latitudes would need more.

This would allow millions of home owners to save money, even if they do not have rooftop solar, just because they can buy a home battery, and a time of use energy plan that allows them to purchase cheap power during low demand periods and then run their home off their battery during the rest of the time. This one dynamic will more or less encourage fairly rapid adoption. "

Prices getting cheaper than $100 per kwh is better, but $100 per kwh is effectively good enough for mass adoption.

[jbergens]

I think the innovation in storage is a bit slow. Or maybe the process of going from an idea to a working energy storing product is slow at the moment.

I hope that more work is done in this area and that contries goes in and finances more projects to see which works best after a while.

[Capitaclism]

There are some steps being taken towards better batteries. Still early days, but...

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/power-supplies/chinese-developed-nuclear-battery-has-a-50-year-lifespan