Lithium has actually dropped in price by 80% over the last two years, so this part of the article is (currently) wrong:
“ The lithium commonly used for batteries isn’t that common. It makes up about 20 parts per million of the Earth’s crust, compared to sodium, which makes up 20,000 parts per million.
This scarcity, combined with the surge in demand for the lithium-ion batteries for laptops, phones and EVs, have sent prices skyrocketing, putting the needed batteries further out of reach.”
Yes, and conflate "totals" with proven reserves while failing to mention that people aren't really actively looking for more reserve as aggressively. But this is a PR piece for the University for which the standard problem is to magnify both the problems it avoid as well as the impact it produces.
But at its core, an anode free battery has a lot of desirable properties which make this engineer feat notable. Perhaps the most important is that the materials are readily available in a number of countries which could source their own raw materials to produce batteries. They also do not fail exothermically[sp?] when cell integrity is breached, that makes them a better battery for cars than the current Lithium ones.
So the next bridge to cross (and one so many battery breakthroughs fall down on) is what is the cost to produce batteries at scale. If, as we read yesterday they can get them down to $1/kWh then you'll be seeing a whole lot of these.
There is zero chance right now of any battery storage being in the $3/kwh range. Even in the manager-of-the-battery-factory-took-some-home-for-cost situation.
A Tesla battery is roughly 80kWh, and costs $5k - $10k. If it were $3/kWh then it would cost $240. And since most home batteries are 10kWh they would cost $30 (plus electrician labor costs and wiring).
Solar panels have indeed become much cheaper, although it is important to distinguish between energy "provided" and energy "stored." Which why the combination is so important. It is often great to look at solar in terms of a "solar day" which is defined as the hours during which the panels deliver peak capacity. On my house, there is about 6kW of solar panels, and under optimum productions they produce for 5 hours in a day, so a total of 30kWh. What gets to the house or the grid is reduced by efficiency losses and the difference between performance under "standard test conditions"[1] and what is actually their environment. My house reliably produces just over 5kW at its peak or about 25kWh in a solar day.
In California, if you are tied to the grid as my system is, you are still at the mercy for how much the power company will credit you for power you generate vs charge you for power you consume. That has been a source of argument hear for the last 20 years. With sufficient local storage, you can completely disconnect from the grid and that removes this pricing power of the power company over your energy production. Something I hope to do within the next 5 years.
[1] This is sort of the MPG equivalent rating for solar panels, good for comparing panels to other panels but bad for guessing how much power they will produce for you.
I've been considering it, and I figured $2 CAD/kW is the 10-year break even point for me, which would be amazing since you can get a 10 year interest free loan for it.
I googled around for a while, and found pioneersolarenergy.com. Super helpful, good shipping price, etc.
As well as the 10 year interest free loan check if your province has any rebates. The "Greener Homes" grant gave me $5k (So I only have $8k on the loan). It just made 1000 kWh in June, I'm super happy.
Are the figures wrong, 20 parts per million of the Earth’s crust, compared to sodium, which makes up 20,000 parts per million? If not, surely sodium will be easier to obtain, in the long run.
Not just by a little bit, but by a huge margin. They are predicting prices will come down and that especially new, costly batteries will have a hard time competing with the more established manufacturers dropping their prices.
We'll make more batteries in the next few years than we have ever made. Production is growing from slightly below 1 twh/per year to multiple terawatt hours per year. Bloomberg NEF puts demand for next year around 1.6 twh/y and is tracking 7.9 twh/y of investments related to new factories. Not all of those will get built but that's a lot of capacity and lithium demand. Yet prices are dropping, as you pointed out. That's because there's plenty of lithium and we don't have a shortage anymore.
All this is of course before you start considering battery chemistries that don't use lithium. Sodium ion is looking pretty good right now. No lithium, cobalt, nickel, etc. And used for some cheap cars and grid storage already. Especially for grid storage, lithium based batteries aren't necessarily the most obvious thing to use.
If the "oversupply" does occur, it would likely be temporary due to limits on the quantity that can be deployed per year. Grids in the US at least have very long interconnection queues. The technical and regulatory challenges that are limiting the deployments are being worked on.
Aside from that, prices can only dip for so long because investments were made assuming a specific price. Too much production means that prices go down and the investment becomes unprofitable which is only sustainable for so long - producers will either go out of business or cut back on production to lower their burn rate (at which point prices will go back up). Basic supply/demand curves tend to ignore the impact of pricing on investment. Larger suppliers might keep prices lower to try to acquire more market share but even they don’t have unbounded ability to run a loss forever and more importantly they’ll have a limited amount of capacity anyway which will cause prices to go back up anyway as the rest of the market cuts production.
If you're the one making claims its on you to provide sources. If you're just saying things and putting question marks on the end people are going to treat it the same way they treat newspaper headlines, which is to say any headline ending in a question mark probably has an answer of no.
As the only post of an account created less than an hour ago, I lean towards it being more likely a bad faith attempt at trolling than an honest inquiry.
It was clearly a combative "question", and entirely orthogonal to the topic under discussion, which was the accuracy of the claims about the scarcity of lithium.
It would have been entirely within the guidelines of polite discussion (and the site) to point out that scarcity isn't the only deciding factor, but the OP never made any assertions to that effect.
It's worth reading an article about "just asking questions" as a bad faith debating tactic if you haven't heard of it before. Here's a random article about it: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions
As an aside, Betteridge's law of headlines, to the extent that it has been studied, appears to be incorrect. The answer is slightly more likely to be yes.
“ The lithium commonly used for batteries isn’t that common. It makes up about 20 parts per million of the Earth’s crust, compared to sodium, which makes up 20,000 parts per million.
This scarcity, combined with the surge in demand for the lithium-ion batteries for laptops, phones and EVs, have sent prices skyrocketing, putting the needed batteries further out of reach.”
Source: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium
https://www.bradley.com/insights/publications/2024/02/lithiu...