Great writeup. I think ebikes are not as widely covered in US media because most of the USA doesn't have good bike infrastructure. Try biking to work in Houston from the suburbs or Phoenix and you'll see what I mean. Maybe as part of general densification and the revival of urbanism we can see proper bike infrastructure.
Worth noting the US just plowed a ton of money into their battery supply chains as part of the IRA. Literally every segment, plus R&D, factories, and spurred massive demand. Tens of billions. Countries are taking this v seriously as part of industrial policy.
In addition, the recyclability of metals is insane. Like 99%+, this is such a change in circularity compared to use once fossil fuels. BFD, great article!
That's great data, and I hope to find time to pore over some of your sources. Long ago (1990 - 2000), I plotted up energy density vs year of introduction (on a log scale plot of course), starting about 1900, with the Voltaic cell. In the early years it took about 20 years for each new technology to come on stream, and over the previous century the doubling time stayed about 10 years. It has increased, so that now capacities triple in 10 years or less. I suspect the acceleration comes in bursts as manufacturing scales up with much greater total delivered capacity. It has still taken over 20 years for lithium battery systems to dominate, so the total amount of the technology delivered has to be a factor in the faster recent growth. If you run across estimates of the total delivered capacity, it may give a more accurate characterization of the potential growth in batteries going forward, since we can estimate the battery content implied by various product adoption rates.
Incidentally, handheld power tools, I suspect, have driven a big part of this increase. They come into wide use in the 1990s, and at first were the last big use of the previous, Ni-metal hydride batteries, which could provide higher currents. And then digital cameras exploded, but are now seeing their niche filled by the smartphone.
100% agree that batteries and autonomous machines go together and love to see it highlighted. Electrification not only makes industrial machines clean and quiet but also dramatically more robust without all the moving parts required by ICE power. It also gives far better self-diagnostics with all the sensors that can be trivially implanted.
You mention mowers and robots separately, so I thought I’d shamelessly plug Scythe https://ScytheRobotics.com where we’re leveraging all those battery-electric advantages to build the next generation of off-road power equipment to be clean, quiet and autonomous. Strong believer in the decade of the battery _and_ AI since they’re so symbiotic.
One thing I realized the other day is how well batteries deal with the intermittency of renewable generation. We could well get a situation where electricity has substantially different prices over the course of a day and a season, maybe with difficult to predict fluctuations over the week. But if all of your home appliances have batteries, then (for instance) your air conditioner could fill up its battery on a cheap electricity day rather than contributing to peak demand while the wind has stopped blowing and the sun is covered. I’ve gotten used to putting my dishwasher on delay to run in the middle of the night when electricity demand is low, but with batteries, you can run whenever you want, and just charge when demand is low, particularly with devices that are either stationary, or plugged in whenever you’re not using them.
Check this out. Not for cars or devices but for multi GW power grids (and will free up more resources for the other categories. First project is underway and opens in NV in October. Www.aresnorthamerica.com
Great to see e-bikes get a shout out. Also, ramping up manufacturing and supply chain will be a big lift. It's a great opportunity for SE Asia and India.
Hard tech, deep tech are really the future. It’s pieces like these that help get people focused on the big problems we face, and start the process of building solutions towards it.
I’d like to see the innovation and development state side.
But we will need to really focus (re-focus?), be patient and invest (over invest?).
Govt will have to support with more CHIPS like programs.
Electronic devices have been pretty pervasive as is, but I'm sure having higher capacity smaller batteries will make them even more widespread. AR glasses? Health monitoring clothes? Personal drone? So many potential uses.
Aug 30, 2022·edited Aug 30, 2022Liked by Noah Smith
Nice post. Finally got me to be a paid subscriber. I'm curious if Noah has any thoughts on iron flow batteries, like the ones ESS is said to be making? It's essentially made of iron, salt and water, so it isn't dependent on mining the ocean floor or mining in unfriendly countries for lithium, cobalt, nickel, etc. The materials are readily available and the technology would be workable for energy scale storage.
I followed the links at the end of the post, but didn't see any mention of it. Peter Coy mentioned it in his newsletter a few months back. Maybe is the future is the Iron Age?
Great writeup. I think ebikes are not as widely covered in US media because most of the USA doesn't have good bike infrastructure. Try biking to work in Houston from the suburbs or Phoenix and you'll see what I mean. Maybe as part of general densification and the revival of urbanism we can see proper bike infrastructure.
Worth noting the US just plowed a ton of money into their battery supply chains as part of the IRA. Literally every segment, plus R&D, factories, and spurred massive demand. Tens of billions. Countries are taking this v seriously as part of industrial policy.
In addition, the recyclability of metals is insane. Like 99%+, this is such a change in circularity compared to use once fossil fuels. BFD, great article!
That's great data, and I hope to find time to pore over some of your sources. Long ago (1990 - 2000), I plotted up energy density vs year of introduction (on a log scale plot of course), starting about 1900, with the Voltaic cell. In the early years it took about 20 years for each new technology to come on stream, and over the previous century the doubling time stayed about 10 years. It has increased, so that now capacities triple in 10 years or less. I suspect the acceleration comes in bursts as manufacturing scales up with much greater total delivered capacity. It has still taken over 20 years for lithium battery systems to dominate, so the total amount of the technology delivered has to be a factor in the faster recent growth. If you run across estimates of the total delivered capacity, it may give a more accurate characterization of the potential growth in batteries going forward, since we can estimate the battery content implied by various product adoption rates.
Incidentally, handheld power tools, I suspect, have driven a big part of this increase. They come into wide use in the 1990s, and at first were the last big use of the previous, Ni-metal hydride batteries, which could provide higher currents. And then digital cameras exploded, but are now seeing their niche filled by the smartphone.
100% agree that batteries and autonomous machines go together and love to see it highlighted. Electrification not only makes industrial machines clean and quiet but also dramatically more robust without all the moving parts required by ICE power. It also gives far better self-diagnostics with all the sensors that can be trivially implanted.
You mention mowers and robots separately, so I thought I’d shamelessly plug Scythe https://ScytheRobotics.com where we’re leveraging all those battery-electric advantages to build the next generation of off-road power equipment to be clean, quiet and autonomous. Strong believer in the decade of the battery _and_ AI since they’re so symbiotic.
One thing I realized the other day is how well batteries deal with the intermittency of renewable generation. We could well get a situation where electricity has substantially different prices over the course of a day and a season, maybe with difficult to predict fluctuations over the week. But if all of your home appliances have batteries, then (for instance) your air conditioner could fill up its battery on a cheap electricity day rather than contributing to peak demand while the wind has stopped blowing and the sun is covered. I’ve gotten used to putting my dishwasher on delay to run in the middle of the night when electricity demand is low, but with batteries, you can run whenever you want, and just charge when demand is low, particularly with devices that are either stationary, or plugged in whenever you’re not using them.
Check this out. Not for cars or devices but for multi GW power grids (and will free up more resources for the other categories. First project is underway and opens in NV in October. Www.aresnorthamerica.com
Great to see e-bikes get a shout out. Also, ramping up manufacturing and supply chain will be a big lift. It's a great opportunity for SE Asia and India.
Hard tech, deep tech are really the future. It’s pieces like these that help get people focused on the big problems we face, and start the process of building solutions towards it.
I’d like to see the innovation and development state side.
But we will need to really focus (re-focus?), be patient and invest (over invest?).
Govt will have to support with more CHIPS like programs.
Electronic devices have been pretty pervasive as is, but I'm sure having higher capacity smaller batteries will make them even more widespread. AR glasses? Health monitoring clothes? Personal drone? So many potential uses.
Nice post. Finally got me to be a paid subscriber. I'm curious if Noah has any thoughts on iron flow batteries, like the ones ESS is said to be making? It's essentially made of iron, salt and water, so it isn't dependent on mining the ocean floor or mining in unfriendly countries for lithium, cobalt, nickel, etc. The materials are readily available and the technology would be workable for energy scale storage.
I followed the links at the end of the post, but didn't see any mention of it. Peter Coy mentioned it in his newsletter a few months back. Maybe is the future is the Iron Age?
I wonder if Berkeley will once again offer classes on mining in the Hearst Mining Building.
Hoping the vast resources of the american west get put to good use
Reminds me of this very cool thread on the energy density of batteries vs gasoline https://twitter.com/DrSimEvans/status/1540332129745342465
I'm surprised e-bikes get more mention than electric scooters, like Yadea
https://yadea.com/electric-scooter/yadea-m6l-electric-scooter
Once you stop trying to shoehorn the bicycle components and styling it just seems much more useful.
But outside of Asia I never really see them discussed, only e-bikes.
https://www.nationalgrideso.com/news/electricity-explained-battery-storage
Some notes on battery storage in the UK.
Great and interesting article! Thank you!
This is the kind of unique content I subscribe to you for, Noah. Well done, kiddo.