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Battery prices are collapsing and we are at an inflection point where electric vehicles will soon be more economical to purchase, drive and maintain for a much greater number of people. This is as inevitable as the phaseout of coal.
Sodium ion batteries are also supposedly gearing up to be a solid li-ion alternative in the next 2-3 years. Not as energy dense yet but they're closing the gap.
Fingers crossed that pans out.
Not only that, but lithium sulfur is coming too.
I heard this as well and am sweating the anticipation. They make another breakthrough on density and it'll blow li-io out of the water, at least for on-site storage. Would be crazy to see backup diesel generators replaced by batteries.
Solar panels also seems to be on a tipping point
Oh it tipped a few years ago. It's just still being implemented. There may be less startup to ramping up fossil fuel plants still, but solar is cheaper to build and operate
So I guess what kind of tipping point we're talking about, I meant we'll soon be drowning in cheap solar panels, it's just as you said not yet at capacity.
I looked at adding solar to my house 6-7 years ago and it was going to cost $60k. The return on investment would have taken 25-30 years.
What does it cost these day?
To give you an Australian perspective here are some current indicative prices for solar installations over here. https://www.solarquotes.com.au/panels/cost/
I'd broaden that to a whole host of "green" and "alternative energy" sectors.
All the panic about Chinese "overproduction" of EVs and similar technologies is just China going whole hog on those industries. It's not an "overproduction" in the traditional sense, where a company produces more than the market will bear and has to sell excess inventory at a loss. China just produces all of this stuff cheaply and at a huge scale.
About 20 years ago the general perception was that EVs were a joke https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2HX5wsQVEA Now we have cost effective solar and wind, efficient battery storage, good and cheap EVs and drones, modern heat pumps etc.
I don't even think all the tariffs will matter in the long run. China is currently adopting all that stuff at a breakneck pace. Their production capacity won't just go away once they've saturated the domestic market and the growing number of countries that have trade agreements with China). At that point, Chinese manufacturers will have no choice but to start actually selling below cost, just so they can clear inventory.
And this has a snowball effect too. Energy is often the limiting factor in production. An abundance of cheap energy makes it cheaper to produce more cheap energy production.
Yeah, I was shopping for lithium on phosphatase leisure batteries maybe two years ago and was looking at spending over £1000 per battery. Now those batteries are not much over £100 and prices still seem to be falling.
What would one use lithium on phosphatase leisure batteries for? I'm not familiar with those
LiFePo (Lithium Iron Phosphate) is heavier than traditional Lithium Ion batteries for the same amount of energy storage, but doesn’t degrade when discharged to zero the way traditional Lithium Ion does.
That looks like autocorrect or text-to-speech mangled 'lithium iron phosphate'
Well, you know...sometimes you just need a vibrator that can go a continuous month between recharges...
Unless you live in the US where tarrifs will keep that from being a reality.
There's too much money in renewables for rich people. The tariffs may or may not happen, but the renewable switch is a runaway train, and almost entirely in the country.
On the electricity futures market, wind producers regularly sell their power for negative prices (paying transmission companies to take their power) because it's so cheap for them to make, with such negligible overhead; since the government subsidies are based on the mWh they produce, they can sell it at a loss and still make money. But even if those subsidies go away, renewables can still easily undercut every other producer on the grid.
That's just one example. The same tipping point is approaching fast all over just about every industry. Obama and Biden got the renewable energy industry over the hump of research and infrastructure outlay, so now Tr*mp gets to take the credit for their work while it all falls into place; and because the rich people are benefiting from it financially, they're going to protect the industry.
The 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs already happened in September. Joe Biden announced them in May and they kicked off already. I don't expect Trump to change anything with that.
I'm talking about batteries, specifically. And the US is decades behind on batteries.
Definitely true, though Elon paid enough money to Trump that he's probably going to make sure there's a cutout in any tariffs for Tesla's batteries (which are largely made by CATL in China). Besides, cheap power means that even with tariffs raising the prices of batteries, BEVs are still going to be worth driving.
Yeah, but that will be true for the electric cars made in the coming years, not the ones made in the past few years. People were right to be put off by the prices.
And even then, will these new cheap batteries be durable? I worry a lot about all these EVs becoming unusable in 10 years because the batteries are ruined, just like my 10 year old laptop
People who didn't lease will lose their shirts but the price of new cars is the primary driver for the price of used cars. New, cheap, and more useable EVs will make used ones cheap.
As to the reliability, it remains to be seen. Considering the size of a vehicle I think an aftermarket will pop up for refurbishing and replacing batteries like it has for the earliest modern EVs in the us, the leaf.