The auto industry is just the first, and most visible, domino in a number of industries that will be upended by falling battery prices. A report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance and McKinsey & Co., cited by Bloomberg, found that the average battery-pack price fell 65% from $1,000 per kWh in 2010 to $350 per kWh last year. It even came out last year that General Motors is paying LG Chem just $145 per kWh for battery cells to make packs for the upcoming Chevy Bolt.
Wow, from $1000 to only $145 per kWh. And Elon Musk who is a principle at the Giga factory in Nevada says they expect the price to go down another big jump to $100 per kWh.
Can Li-Ion batteries really get that inexpensive? They can, and even a little below $100 per kWh, but not more than that. The material cost just won't allow it. And there have to be other costs in there somewhere like construction and transportation costs.
But the hope of getting far below $100 per kWh is not totally hopeless. Many hopeful batteries and super capacitors in the lab can be a great deal less if they work anywhere near as theorized that they might.
But when will we get the change in our lives and economies? It was thought that the $100 per kWh was it by a lot of people. But that changes things in an evolutionary way, not a revolutionary way, and economists figured that. For economists, the number is closer to $30 per kWh. Although there are other factors included in that figure that I'm not going to discuss in this post - energy density and safety - it is the price at which other competing technologies will be moved out of the way.
What will happen when we hit that mark? Home solar will be big, we surmise, which will cascade into other changes. But beyond that, we cannot really predict what innovations will happen when this technology gets into the hands of a very wide base of innovators.
No comments :
Post a Comment