Li-ion battery costs rise for 1st time

From BloombergNEF (BNEF)

Rising raw material and battery component prices and soaring inflation have led to the first ever increase in lithium-ion battery pack prices since BloombergNEF (BNEF) began tracking the market in 2010. After more than a decade of declines, volume-weighted average prices for lithium-ion battery packs across all sectors have increased to $151/kWh in 2022, a 7% rise from last year in real terms. The upward cost pressure on batteries outpaced the higher adoption of lower cost chemistries like lithium iron phosphate (LFP). BloombergNEF expects prices to stay at similar levels next year, further defying historical trends.

The above figures represent an average across multiple battery end-uses, including different types of electric vehicles, buses and stationary storage projects. For battery electric vehicle (BEV) packs in particular, prices were $138/kWh on a volume-weighted average basis in 2022. At the cell level, average BEV prices were just $115/kWh. This indicates that on average, cells account for 83% of the total pack price. Over the last three years, the cell-to-pack cost ratio has diverged from the traditional 70:30 split. This is partially due to changes to pack design, such as the introduction of cell-to-pack approaches, which have helped reduce costs.

On a regional basis, battery pack prices were cheapest in China, at $127/kWh. Packs in the US and Europe were 24% and 33% higher, respectively. Higher prices reflect the relative immaturity of these markets, the higher production costs, the diverse range of applications and battery imports. For the higher end of the range, low volume and bespoke orders push prices up.

Prices could have risen further in 2022 had it not been for the higher adoption of the low-cost cathode chemistry known as LFP, and the continued reduction of expensive cobalt in nickel-base cathodes. On average, LFP cells were 20% cheaper than lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxide (NMC) cells in 2022. However, even low-cost chemistries like LFP, which is particularly exposed to lithium carbonate prices, have felt the bite of rising costs throughout the supply chain. LFP battery pack prices rose 27% in 2022, compared to 2021.[The lithium carbonate price rose 5-fold in 2022, but has since halved again]

Evelina Stoikou, an energy storage associate at BNEF and lead author of the report, said: “Raw material and component price increases have been the biggest contributors to the higher cell prices observed in 2022. Amidst these price increases for battery metals, large battery manufacturers and automakers have turned to more aggressive strategies to hedge against volatility, including direct investments in mining and refining projects.”

While prices for key battery metals like lithium, nickel and cobalt have moderated slightly in recent months, BNEF expects average battery pack prices to remain elevated in 2023 at $152/kWh (in real 2022 dollars).

BNEF expects battery price to start dropping again in 2024, when lithium prices are expected to ease as more extraction and refining capacity comes online. Based on the updated observed learning rate, BNEF’s 2022 Battery Price Survey predicts that average pack prices should fall below $100/kWh by 2026. This is two years later than previously expected and will negatively impact the ability for automakers to produce and sell mass-market EVs in areas without subsidies or other forms of support. Higher battery prices could also hurt the economics of energy storage projects.

Yayoi Sekine, head of energy storage at BNEF, said: “Despite a setback on price declines, battery demand is still reaching new records each year. Demand will reach 603GWh in 2022, which is almost double that in 2021. Scaling up supply at that rate of growth is a real challenge for the industry, but investment in the sector is also rising rapidly and technology innovation is not slowing down.”

Kwasi Ampofo, head of metals and mining at BloombergNEF, added: “Lithium prices remain high due to persistent supply chain constraints and the slow ramp up in new production capacity. Additional lithium supply could ease the pressure on prices in 2024, while geo-politics and trade tension remain the biggest uncertainties for other key battery metal prices in the short-term. Resolving these tensions could help calm prices in 2023 and beyond.”

Continued investment in R&D, manufacturing process improvements, and capacity expansion across the supply chain will help to improve battery technology and reduce costs over the next decade. BloombergNEF expects next-generation technologies, such as silicon and lithium metal anodes, solid-state electrolytes and new cathode material and cell manufacturing processes, to play an important role in enabling further price reductions.

The new sodium-ion batteries that BYD is putting in its cheaper cars (at 160 Wh per kilo, they have a lower energy density than li-ion's 180 Wh/kg) cost US$77/ kWh, or half the cost of li-ion, and are expected to drop to $40/kWh as mass production starts.   Even if li-ion battery pack prices only fall slowly from now on, that won't slow down the EV boom.  Cars will just have sodium-ion or perhaps a mixture of li-ion and sodium-ion batteries.  This means that average battery pack prices will fall below $100/kWh this year.  And that is the point at which EVs have the same sticker price as petrol/diesel cars.  They are already cheaper to run, because they're much more efficient and require far less servicing than ICEVs. Now they'll be cheaper to buy, too.

Welcome to the EV revolution.

Will we have enough minerals for the energy transition?

 An interesting video from Just Have A Think.

The answer: prolly, yes, because we'll need less than it seems, as only one third of primary energy ends up being used.  The rest is wasted.  

And the argument that we'll need massive storage is wrong.  What we'll do instead is have excess renewable generation capacity, with the surplus output either being curtailed or used for processes that don't require 24/7 availability of electricity, such as desalination and charging EVs.  Also, energy return on energy invested is now higher for renewables than for fossil fuels. Finally, battery technology is shifting, with new technologies such as sodium-ion using readily available, cheap minerals.  Sodium-ion batteries will cost half of lithium-ion batteries.

However, there's this article which suggests that price of copper (an EV uses 4 times as much as a petrol car, mostly for wiring) is beginning a phase of secular growth.  As it happens, the price of copper has fallen since then!  Never mind, it happens to the best of us.

My take: as demand driven by the energy transition pushes up prices of certain commodities, advances in technology will create alternative ways to achieve the same goals.  An obvious example: after the price of lithium soared, research on sodium-ion batteries took off.  Now, sodium-ion batteries are commercially available and have been installed in EVs.   They're not yet as energy dense as lithium-ion batteries, but they're much cheaper.  And research continues.

If somebody had told you 70 years ago that we would use sunlight to produce electricity, they would have replied, had they even known about it, that it was so expensive that it could only be used for spacecraft.  And anyway, where were we going to get all that silicon?  Yet here we are.  I'm typing this on a laptop with the power several orders of magnitude more than the first IBM computer, using sunlight to power not just it, but also my internet connection.  Inconceivable 70 years ago.  Routine, now.

The aluminium-ion battery

 The lithium price has soared as EVs have gained market share and demand for stationary storage (to "firm" renewable) has grown.  So the search for alternatives is heating up.   BYD is rumoured to be putting sodium-ion batteries in their cheaper cars, starting in Q2 next year.

But aluminium-ion batteries, which may solve the lithium problem, are close to commercialisation.  They have several advantages:

• They don't require rare-earth metals
• Can exchange up to 3 electrons per ion, compared to lithium's 1, meaning a higher energy density and volumetric capacity (about 4 times lithium's)
• Much cheaper, especially at current lithium prices
• Safer, because it's less likely to catch fire
• 70 times faster charging rate---the limiting factor isn't how much power the battery can take, but the cable charging the battery
• the heating induced by fast-charging isn't an issue, which means we won't need complicated cooling and battery management systems. 
• Aluminium-ion performance is now as good as lithium-ion with 300 Wh (watt-hours)/kilogram achieved in the laboratory.
• Aluminium is the most abundant metal in the Earth's crust, far more abundant than lithium

Of course, all is not plain sailing.  But, as so often with technological advances, necessity will drive innovation. 

Here's a nice video from "Undecided" by Matt Ferrell explaining about this Ozzie battery advance, with a tag-on short section on similar research at MIT.

BYD to begin Sodium-ion battery production in a few months?

 From CleanTechnica

Rumors are flying about in China that claim BYD plans to be producing sodium-ion battery cells in the second quarter of 2023 and use them to power some of its own electric vehicles. The company claims those rumors are false, but they come to us via CnEVPost, which is widely viewed as a reliable source of information about what is going on in the automobile business in China. CnEVPost attributes its news to a report by local Chinese news source LatePost.

BYD battery division FinDreams is said to be responsible for the development and mass production of the sodium-ion batteries, which are currently in the sample validation stage. According to the report, they could be used in the BYD Qin, Dolphin, and new Seagull models. The Qin and Dolphin range in price from $14,000 to $21,000. The Seagull will be priced between $11,000 and $14,000. EVs priced at less than $14,000 have accounted for over 36% of all battery-electric cars sold in China this year.


The reason for doing this — assuming the report is accurate — is that the price of lithium has soared in the past 18 months from $5,700 a ton in June of 2020 to $84,000 a ton today. Since lithium is the primary ingredient in lithium-ion batteries, the search for less expensive alternatives is understandable. The price of sodium is around $3,000 a ton today.

Sodium batteries have one important drawback, however. They have a lower energy density than lithium batteries, so you need more of them to have an equivalent amount of energy available to power an electric car.

Guosen Securities analyst Tang Xuxia and his team said in a research report last July that lithium-ion batteries have an energy density of up to 300Wh/kg, while lead acid batteries have an energy density of around 50Wh/kg. Sodium-ion batteries are somewhere in between the two.

CATL is also pursuing sodium-ion batteries for production vehicles and claims its sodium battery cells have an energy density of 160 Wh/kg. But CATL does not manufacture vehicles, so it is likely BYD will be the first car maker to bring sodium-ion batteries to market. The lower power density will probably be less of a factor at the lower end of the market where the primary factor in the decision to purchase an electric car is price rather than performance.

In addition to being less expensive, sodium batteries also avoid the potential risk of fire associated with lithium-ion batteries, which means manufacturers can use less elaborate and less expensive battery cooling systems, which will help to further lower the cost of entry level EVs.

Once again, this is all rumor and conjecture at the moment, but it does suggest that less expensive electric cars are not far away, even if they won’t be able to do the Kessel run in less than 12 par-secs. There are plenty of people who would forfeit dominance in the stoplight grand prix in order to own an affordable electric car.

In an informal poll among those in attendance in CleanTechnica’s graphene and beryllium conference room recently, none would bet against BYD mounting a serious challenge to other top EV manufacturers in the very near future.

Lithium price in US$.  N.B. Log scale!!!

 Note how cheap EVs are in China.  China produces 1/3rd of the world's cars, and plug-ins now make up ±30% of its market.  Domestic demand has been so strong that exports have been relatively small.  But when they start, they will take a big chunk of market share, not from other EVs but from petrol/disel cars (ICEVs).  BYD is the world's largest EV manufacturer, and has just started to sell its cars in Australia, as a test run for entering the US market.

The BYD 'Dolphin'

Will we run out of lithium

 An interesting video from Cool Worlds.  

The short answer is, no, not if we recycle batteries.

The electrobus in 1906

For a brief period, electric cars and buses were popular.  But the lead-acid batteries at the time had a low energy density, and it wasn't until the commercialisation of the lithium-ion battery in 1991 that EVs were enabled.

 

 

Tesla's 4680 battery to drive down EV prices

 From Tesmanian 

Tesla's 4680 battery cell will have a “considerable impact” by helping drive down the cost of electric vehicles and enabling them to become more widespread, says Kazuo Tadanobu, chief executive officer of Panasonic's energy division. The development of these new batteries has “taken an immense amount of stamina,” but it's worth it because Panasonic sees them as “a new way forward.”

Panasonic Corp. is preparing to become a major manufacturer of a new, more powerful battery introduced by Tesla in 2020. For the past year and a half, the Japanese company has been working on the larger 4680 battery, which it intends to supply to the American electric vehicle manufacturer. The development of new batteries has “taken an immense amount of stamina” in recent months, said Kazuo Tadanobu, chief executive officer of Panasonic's energy division, in a recent interview with Bloomberg.

Changing the whole shape of the battery required “considerable nerve,” Tadanobu said, adding that “we didn't know how they would be received.” Nevertheless, the work of the Japanese company was appreciated and Tesla recognized that the new Panasonic batteries are viable and meet the required level of performance.

Panasonic is scheduled to start mass production of 4680 batteries in the fiscal year starting April 2023. To this end, two additional production lines will be set up, at the Wakayama plant in western Japan, and at other new facilities. Last week it was reported that Panasonic is considering building a new factory in the US to supply Tesla with 4680 cells (probably). However, Tadanobu said that nothing has been decided yet. The location of potential new factories will be evaluated based on partnerships and the economics of certain areas, he said, and for now, production of the 4680 battery cells is planned in Japan.

After leading the development of the cells, Panasonic will work to retain its top spot, Tadanobu said. “We don't want to lose,” he continued. Ultimately, behind Panasonic's efforts with new batteries is a firm belief that the elements can change the world of transportation. According to Tadanobu, the 4680 battery will have a “considerable impact,” helping to reduce the cost of electric vehicles, allowing them to be more widely adopted. This, in turn, promises to help reduce global carbon emissions, the CEO said.

From an environmental perspective, “electrifying vehicles is the most impactful revolution that’s happening within our society,” Tadanobu said. Panasonic is working on 4680 batteries “because we see them as a new path forward,” he said.

100% EVs by 2025?

From a Twitter thread by Professor Ray Wills, who along with Tony Seba, has been consistently right with his forecasts for the growth in EV sales.  He has been even more optimistic than me, and I was very optimistic.  In mid-2016, when EV/PHEV sales were just 1% of global car sales, I forecast that they would reach 16% in 2022.  They reached 10% in 2021, and at current growth rates should hit ±16% in 2022.  The problem with most forecasters is that they extend lines linearly instead of exponentially.  If something is growing by 50% per annum,  it goes up 10-fold every 5 and a half years.  EV sales are growing by 70% per annum, while total car and commercial vehicle sales are falling.  Wills's forecast of an end to ICEV sales by 2025 seems perfectly plausible.  

Sales of electric cars hit 6.6m in 2021

> 3X EVs market share from 2019

> 2X 2020

16m #EVs on the road worldwide

More #EVs now sold every week than in the whole of 2012

But overall car sales are still falling

We hit peak car in 2017 

WEForum article.

    

Note that these are sales of EVs only, and do not include PHEVs

Note how hybrids are falling and how (B)EVs are now dominant

China is 1/3rd of the global car/light truck market

Full self driving (level 5) by 2027!  Transport as a service (TaaS) takes off.

Solid state batteries

 A very interesting (as ever) and informative video from Just Have A Think, this time about solid-state batteries.  

Solid-state batteries will charge 6 times faster, will have 3 times the energy density, will weigh less and be safer than standard lithium-ion batteries which have a liquid electrolyte.  The only problem is that producing large solid-state batteries has proved difficult.  But it looks as if, finally, large solid-state batteries might become available, with Marata and Toyota both starting mass production of these batteries later this year.

Do EVs catch fire more often than ICEVs?

There's a common trope that cars with lithium-ion batteries are much more likely to catch fire than cars with petrol or diesel engines.

This doesn't seem to be the case

Tesla's Vehicle Fire Data provided for the period 2012-2020 reveals that there has been about one vehicle fire for every 205 million miles traveled.

That's over 10-times higher than the average distance between fires than in the case of the national average of 19 million miles in the U.S., according to the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) and U.S. Department of Transportation. However, we must remember that because of the growing production and sales, most of the Tesla cars are new, way younger than the U.S. average.

Both numbers include "instances of vehicle fires caused by structure fires, arson, and other things unrelated to the vehicle," which means that the actual average distance between fires caused by the vehicle itself is even better.

Tesla has also revealed the results for the previous periods: 2012-2018 (170 million miles) and 2012-2019 (175 million miles), which indicate that the average is improving over time.

[From InsideEVs]

Source: InsideEVs

However, there doesn't seem to be any prima facie link between vehicle age and fire risk.

Today’s vehicles are older than in the past. In 1983, the average household vehicle was 7.6 years old, compared to 10.3 years old in 2017. Figure 3 shows that the number of vehicle fires per billion miles driven has fallen 81 percent over the same period. The decline has been fairly steady over time.

[From NFPA :Fire Statistics and reports]

Of course, there are other potential factors, such as (perhaps) safer roads or safer cars.  All the same, despite an increase in the average age of vehicles, the incidence of fires has fallen.  It is unlikely therefore that increasing age of a car materially increases its risk of catching fire.  Which means Tesla's younger fleet is prob'ly not a key factor in its 10-times better fire incidence rate.  

The trope is false at best, unproven at worst.

The 2 million kilometre battery

The early Nissan Leafs (the first modern EV) had a short battery life, leading denialists to snigger and carp about the failed EV revolution.  These days, Leaf batteries are fine, and as the technology advances, we are heading towards a super-long battery life.

From the BBC:

A Chinese car battery-maker says it is ready to manufacture a product capable of powering a vehicle for 1.2 million miles (two million kilometres) across the course of a 16-year lifespan.  By contrast, most automakers only offer warranties ranging from 60,000 to 150,000 miles over a three to eight-year period on their cars' batteries.

Contemporary Amperex Technology has not revealed who it intends to supply.  But it was previously reported that the battery was co-developed with Tesla.  The latest news was revealed in an interview Catl's chairman gave to the Bloomberg news agency.

"If someone places an order, we are ready to produce," it quoted Zeng Yuqun as saying.  He added that it was set, however, to cost a 10% premium over the batteries it already supplies.

Demand for electric vehicles is growing.  The European market for EVs and plug-in hybrids grew by 72% in the first three months of the year compared to the same period in 2019, representing 7% of all delivered new cars, according to research firm Canalys.  By contrast, the pandemic weighed on the wider market, which as a whole saw deliveries down by 26% for the quarter.

My comments:

1.  The battery costs just 10% for a ten-fold increase in battery life.  This dramatically cuts the cost of the battery over its lifetime, which ...
2. ... cuts the running costs of EVs, which are already half those of petrol(gasoline)/diesel vehicles.  The batteries will last longer than the cars. And, remember, even when the guarantee runs out, some 60-70% of the battery's capacity will still remain.
3. It will also cut the cost of storage for grid stabilisation.   
4. EV sales up 72% in Q1/2020 in Europe, 7% of all car sales now plug-ins (i.e., it excludes ordinary hybrids)! 

The glass battery

From The Driven:

A patent application for a new battery that uses glass as a key component has been submitted by a team headed by John Goodenough, the part winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work as co-inventor of the now ubiquitous lithium-ion battery that is the go-to power source for electric cars and energy storage.

And the new glass battery promises to accelerate the shift away from internal combustion engines because it will deliver a significant increase in storage capacity.

By “spiking” glass with either sodium or lithium to form an electrode within the battery, the researchers say the new battery technology provides three times the energy storage capacity of comparable lithium-ion batteries.

It is also neither volatile nor flammable, and does not display issues of lithium dendrite growth that plagues li-ion batteries, which can cause short-circuits and present safety hazards.

According to Goodenough,  the glass battery could finally break through the price barrier that hinders the uptake of electric cars.

“I think we have the possibility of doing what we’ve been trying to do for the last 20 years,” Goodenough, who is emeritus professor at the Cockrell School of Engineering at the University of Texas, Austin, told Spectrum.

“That is, to get an electric car that will be competitive in cost and convenience with the internal combustion engine.”

Fellow researcher Maria Helena Braga from the University of Texas, Austin says that early testing also suggests could also have “perhaps thousands” of  charge and discharge cycles, more than the average 1,000-2,000 cycles achievable in typical nickel-manganese-cobalt or lithium iron phosphate batteries.

Addtionally, the glass battery electrode has shown it can withstand a wider range of temperatures – between -20º C and 60º C.

“Rechargeable batteries containing a water-solvated glass/amorphous solid electrolyte described herein can provide a safe, low-cost stationary battery capable of storing a large amount of electrical energy for feeding the grid or charging the battery or capacitor of an electric vehicle since the temperature range of operation of a stationary battery can be kept small through all seasons at little cost,” reads the patent.

“The small activation energy for alkali-ion transport in the electrolyte can also make feasible an electric vehicle powered by a portable rechargeable battery that operates in a wide range of ambient temperatures.”

Technological change is driven by need.  The best minds work and worry at a problem until they find  solution.  This is happening in batteries, with numerous new technologies being researched and patented.   Eventually, the cheapest and best will become the dominant new technology, replacing or dramatically improving lithium-ion. 

10 charts for 2020

The original BNEF article has ten charts, but I think these 5 are the most interesting.

1. Climate change is all most of us have ever known

Climate change is often described as something that is going to happen. Yet the world is changing right now: The global average surface temperature is not only higher now than it was from 1951 to 1980, but it also hadn’t been below average in the years before I was born and is clearly trending up. The global median age is 30. That means that for most of us on Earth, a continually changing (read: warming) climate is all that we have ever known.

2. Big business talks about climate change a lot more now

Publicly listed companies are talking about climate change a lot more than they used to. From 2014 to 2018, there was a 16% increase in the number of public companies mentioning “climate change” in their filings, and an increase of more than 50% in the number of total mentions of “climate change.”

4. Even coal’s growth markets prefer other energy sources

A number of countries, most of them in Southeast Asia, still expect and are planning to build new coal-fired power plants. Those plans are policy decisions as much as they are power-market decisions. A smart poll this year asked residents in these markets what they think is better for the long-term development of their countries. In every one, a majority said that renewable energy is better. In Vietnam, that majority was overwhelming.

6. Energy stocks are now more boring than utilities

This year, the yield for the oil-dominated S&P 500 Energy Index passed the yield for the S&P 500 Utilities index. It’s happened once before, very briefly, but this inversion has now been going on for months and it seems robust. In September, Liam Denning and I looked at what this rather technical indicator means and its importance for showing what the market thinks of these sectors. For energy companies, an increasing dividend means that the market requires more cash from companies relative to growth in stock price; for utilities, a decreasing dividend means that investors price greater upside into stocks. The inversion of these two sector yields means that what was once priced as growth is now priced as value, and vice versa. [In other words, the market thinks oil and coal have gone ex-growth.]

10. The battery of today (and tomorrow) wins a Nobel Prize

The lithium-ion storage battery was patented by ExxonMobil, commercialized by Sony and improved by a global value chain. This year, its inventors won the Nobel Prize for chemistry. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the three men “created a rechargeable world.” The lithium-ion battery market has always had a prime mover, so to speak — a particular sector that was the bulk of demand for its production. For years, consumer electronics were that prime mover; this year, electric vehicles became that prime mover. By 2025, BloombergNEF expects passenger EV demand for lithium-ion batteries to be more than four times greater than demand from consumer electronics.

To see all the charts in the original article, go here.

6 times denser battery

From Melbourne's The Age newspaper.

Researchers in Australia believe they have solved one of the key problems holding back the battery of the future, a breakthrough that would allow them to develop cells that could run a smartphone for four days.

Lithium-sulphur batteries can theoretically store six times as much energy as the lithium-ion batteries currently used in phones and electric vehicles, but that extra power can cause them to swell and break.  The international research team discovered a simple tweak to the manufacturing process, which they said fixes the problem.

Their patented design was published in Science Advances earlier this week. A stack of battery prototypes have been built in Germany and will be tested in electric cars in the next few months.  The team have already fielded calls from companies around the world, including electric vehicle manufacturers keen to harness the technology.

"This technology is the heir-apparent to current batteries," said Dr Mahdokht Shaibani, the Monash University engineer who led the team. "We have proven prototypes, and that makes us and the whole industry very excited."

Lithium-ion batteries come with inherent problems: they are expensive, can explode and die after a certain number of uses. Scientists have improved their efficiency, but they're starting to reach their limits.  And cobalt, a key ingredient, is mined mostly in the Congo, often by child labourers.  But they remain state of the art because there is nothing better available.

Labs and companies around the world are working on several alternatives, including lithium-sulphur batteries. Sulphur is cheap, abundant and can theoretically hold six times more power at the same weight.  "That’s the irony," said Dr Shaibani. Lithium-sulphur batteries can hold so much power the sulphur swells up to almost twice its original size and breaks. Despite keen interest, that’s prevented commercialisation so far.

The team believe they may have solved the swelling problem with a simple tweak to how the electrode, the end of the battery that holds the charge, is made.  Factories make electrodes by mixing carbon and sulphur together into a wet paste, which then dries. Dr Shaibani’s team found that slowly mixing the ingredients with only a tiny bit of water produced a thick slurry – a bit like mixing detergent powder with a drop of water.

Under the microscope, the team discovered the slurry was filled with microscopic holes, like Swiss cheese. That meant the sulphur particles could swell up without breaking as they fill with charge.  

"It gives the sulphur particles some room to breathe," said Dr Shaibani.

Most research on sulphur batteries tries to solve problems using exotic materials or impractical techniques. That’s why industry is not picking it up, said Dr Shaibani.

"There have been over 8000 papers published in this field since 2010. Most of them are claiming breakthrough after breakthrough," she noted.

"I tried to use a solution that industry would accept: cheap materials, similar design."

A lab in Germany has been manufacturing prototype cells using the new technology. Dr Shaibani’s team has now received $1.1 million from the federal government to test the cells in electric cars this year. They hope to have a commercial product within two to four years.  Dr Shaibani’s research is partially funded by Cleanfuture Energy, a renewable energy company that hopes to use the technology to develop better storage batteries.

One of the reasons I am so confident that battery costs will continue to decline is the extensive research taking place around the world to improve them and to improve their energy density.   And if the lithium-sulphur batteries work, then electric planes will go mainstream.  The sustained yearly fall in battery costs will mean that EVs have the same sticker price as petrol (gasoline) cars, and that storage for the grid will become cheap.

Here's Smart Energy International's take on the new LI-S batteries:

Monash University researchers are on the brink of commercialising the world’s most efficient lithium-sulphur (Li-S) battery, which could outperform current market leaders by more than four times, and power Australia and other global markets well into the future.

The battery has the potential to power a phone for five continuous days, or enable an electric vehicle to drive more than 1000km without needing to “refuel”.

Dr Mahdokht Shaibani from Monash University’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering led an international research team that developed an ultra-high capacity Li-S battery that has better performance and less environmental impact than current lithium-ion products.

Using the same materials in standard lithium-ion batteries, researchers reconfigured the design of sulphur cathodes so they could accommodate higher stress loads without a drop in overall capacity or performance.

Attractive performance, along with lower manufacturing costs, abundant supply of material, ease of processing and reduced environmental footprint make this new battery design attractive for future real-world applications, according to Associate Professor Matthew Hill.

The researchers have an approved filed patent (PCT/AU 2019/051239) for their manufacturing process, and prototype cells have been successfully fabricated by German R&D partners Fraunhofer Institute for Material and Beam Technology.

Some of the world’s largest manufacturers of lithium batteries in China and Europe have expressed interest in upscaling production, with further testing to take place in Australia in early 2020.

The study was published in Science Advances on Saturday, 4 January 2020 – the first research on Li-S batteries to feature in this prestigious international publication.

And here's an article on Li-S batteries from Wikipedia.

Associate Professor Matthew Hill, Dr. Mahdokht Shaibani and Professor Mainak Majumder (Image: Monash University)

Lithium price turns up

The rapid expansion in demand for lithium-ion batteries caused a near tripling in the price, which called forth an increase in supply, inevitably leading to a big bust.  One of the reasons commodity cycles are so extreme is that in the short term, the elasticities of both demand and supply are low, so that small movements in supply or demand cause big swings in price. 

The technical formation for the lithium price has turned positive, and I suspect that the bear market is over.  This prolly partly reflects the end of the Chinese EV slowdown.

Battery pack prices fall again

BNEF (Bloomberg New Energy Finance) has come out with new data for average battery pack prices.  In 2019, average prices fell again, by 13%.  Since 2010, battery pack prices have fallen by an average of 19.4% per annum, and if we exclude 2015, when Tesla's Powerwall was introduced, when the average battery pack price fell 35.4%, the average decline has been 17.4% per annum.

BNEF forecasts that the pack price will fall below $100/kWh in 2023 (down from 2025 last year), which is more or less a compound rate of decline of 10% per annum.  But if we assume a 15% p.a. rate of decline, which is slower than the rate of decline over the last decade, then the $100/kWh line will be crossed in 2022.

$100/kWh is the point at which most analysts believe EVs will have the same sticker price as ICEVs (petrol/diesel cars).  EVs are already cheaper to run than ICEVs because electric engines are 4 times as efficient as petrol engines and have 100 times fewer moving parts so are easier and cheaper to maintain.  So, in 2022 or 2023 EVs will start to dominate the car/light truck market.

So far, EV manufacturers have chosen to expand range rather than cut car costs, as exemplified by the Nissan Leaf, the first modern EV:

From now on, though, the fall in battery-pack costs will feed through into falling EV sticker prices.  There will probably be a big spread of ranges available with EVs, from those with perhaps 100 miles (160 kms) through to luxury cars with 300 miles (480 kms) range. The implications for the oil price long term are obvious.


Read more here:

The plunge in battery prices

Electric car battery prices dropped 13% in 2019, will reach $100 in 2023

Charge a car 100% in 10 minutes?

Penn State's fast-charging battery.
Source: Cosmos

From Cosmos:

US mechanical engineers say they have developed a lithium ion battery that can be charged sufficiently in 10 minutes to power an electric car to cover more than 350 kilometres.

The secret lies in elevating the temperature to increase reaction rate then cooling it during discharge, the team from Pennsylvania State University reports in the journal Joule.

Conventional lithium batteries are charged and discharged at the same temperature to avoid lithium plating – the build-up of lithium deposits on the anode surface, which reduces cell capacity and can cause electrical spikes.

However, Chao-Yang Wang and colleagues discovered they could avoid this problem by pushing the temperature as high 60 degrees Celsius for a few minutes.

"The key is to realise rapid heating, otherwise the battery will stay at elevated temperatures for too long, causing severe degradation," Wang says.

To do this, they developed a self-heating nickel structure that preheats in less than 30 seconds. To test it, they charged three graphite pouch cells designed for hybrid electric vehicles at 40, 49 and 60 degrees, as well as a control at 20 degrees.

They found that the batteries preheated to 60 degrees could sustain the extremely fast charging process for 1700 cycles, while the control cell could only keep pace for 60. At an average charge temperature between 49 and 60 degrees, no degradation was observed.

"In the past, it was universally believed that lithium ion batteries should avoid operating at high temperatures due to the concern of accelerated side reactions," says Wang. 

"This study suggests that the benefits of mitigated lithium plating at the elevated temperature with limited exposure time far outweigh the negative impact associated with exacerbated side reactions."

The researchers say the technology is completely scalable because all the cells are based on industrially available electrodes; and they have already demonstrated its use in large-scale cells, modules and battery packs. 

The nickel foil increases the cost of each cell by 0.47%, they add, but because the design eliminates the need for the external heaters used in current models, it actually lowers the cost of producing each pack.

Those cursed dendrites

We all know how our mobile phone or laptop batteries seem to stop holding a charge far too quickly.  Even EV batteries, which are a different chemistry and last much longer, eventually wear out.  And the cause is the growth of dendrites.  Dendrites are little whiskers which grow inside the batteries eventually choking them. (The word comes for the ancient Greek word for a tree: dendron)

From PV magazine:

Lithium metal, and certain other battery concepts, are known to have the potential for far better energy storage performance than today’s lithium-ion technologies. But lithium metal in particular is held back by safety concerns thanks to the frequent occurrence of dendrites and whiskers inside the battery.

These are tiny, needle-like projections that can grow inside a battery, and cause a number of undesirable effects, including, in a worst case scenario, complete battery failure and even fires. Now, scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) have been able to pinpoint one of the root causes of this problem in a lithium-metal battery, which should allow further research into new electrolyte recipes that get around the problem entirely. 

The group’s findings are described in the paper Origin of lithium whisker formation and growth under stress, published in Nature Nanotechnology. Using a combination of atomic force microscopy and environmental transmission electron microscopy, the group was able to observe dendrite growth within the battery, and measure the force of the dendrite as it grew.

The video shows lithium atoms clumping together, similar to how a stalagmite grows from the floor of a cave. Eventually, a whisker shoots forth. video: He et. al., Nature Nanotechnology 

Their findings show that dendrite growth originates in the battery’s solid electrolyte interface – a film where the lithium metal anode meets the liquid electrolyte. A solvent, ethylene carbonate, which is added to the electrolyte to enhance performance, was pinpointed as the main culprit in dendrite growth – the group found that the more of this material was added to the electrolyte, the more the whiskers grew. 

This led the scientists to experiment with alternative electrolyte mixes, finding that the addition of cyclohexane to the mix prevents the growth of dendrites and whiskers (though there was no mention of how this material affected battery performance), and also experimented with other elastic constraints that were shown to cause the whiskers to yield, buckle, kink or simply stop growing.

Australia well-placed to benefit from EVs

Despite the right-wing idiots we've re-elected to Parliament, the truth is that Australia is extremely well-placed to benefit from the world-wide transition to Electric vehicles (EVs).

Lithium could become one of Australia’s economic powerhouses, as the world races towards a future of electric vehicles and renewable energy.

With lithium-ion the most popular battery type worldwide, the element is in huge demand as car makers shift to electric vehicles, and the world seeks solutions for energy storage from renewable sources, such as solar or wind.

And Australia is sitting pretty – at least in terms of deposits of the prized element.

The nation has the globe’s third-largest deposits (18 per cent) of lithium, behind only Chile and China, but is the world’s largest producer (47 per cent), generating about $1 billion in annual revenue.

Since 2016, lithium production in Australia has jumped 50 per cent, according to Geoscience Australia, with the Office of the Chief Economist forecasting production to grow another 54 per cent between 2019 and 2024.

Meanwhile, the price of lithium has also tripled since 2010, with Western Australia alone expecting its royalties cheque to more than double to $200 million by 2022‑23.

One of the best flags of soaring global demand for lithium comes in the projections for electric vehicle sales. JP Morgan Research estimates electric vehicles and hybrid electric vehicles will account for about 30 per cent of all vehicle sales by 2025*, compared with just 1 per cent in 2016.

That, according to JP Morgan, will fuel a growth in global demand for lithium of 8 to 11 per cent each year from 2017. And Australia seems well placed to capitalise, with mineral reserves covering 90 per cent of the elements required for lithium-ion battery production.

[Read more here]

* It will prob'ly be more like 50%

Battery breakthrough

Even as conventional lithium-ion battery prices decline, there are several new technologies being developed.  One of the original inventors of the lithium-ion battery, John Goodenough, who is now a hale 96, is involved in a new lithium-glass battery.

A recently published paper in the Journal of the American Chemical Society titled “Nontraditional, Safe, High Voltage Rechargeable Cells of Long Cycle Life” (April 24, 2018) offers a glimpse into future battery technology. The following are some of the highlights of this new invention (via Axios and the JACS article):

1. It operates at room temperature.

2. It is a safe cell battery since it uses no liquid electrolyte.

3. It has “… double the energy density of existing lithium-ion…” batteries.

4. It can be both fast charged and fast discharged.

5. It is an “…all-solid-state rechargeable battery cell….”

6. It uses lithium.

7. It has a plasticizer able to react to changes in volume and store Lithium ions.

8. It uses a low cost oxide host cathode (meaning no Cobalt is used).

9. It can be charged to 5-volts. “The cell can be charged to a high voltage versus a lithium anode because of the added charge of the EDLCs [electrostatic double-layer capacitors].”

10. It has a long cycle life having achieved over 23,000 cycles. If cycled daily in an electric car, this would imply a usable life of 63-years.

11. Battery cell capacity increases as the number of cycles increases. This happens because the “…Li+- glass is not reduced on contact with metallic lithium, [thus] no passivating interface layer contributes to a capacity fade; instead, the discharge capacity increases with cycle number as a result of dipole polarization in the Li+-glass electrolyte leading to a capacity increase of the Li+-glass/plasticizer EDLC.”

12. It has the ability to retain a charge when unplugged.

In short, this is a low-cost, safe, high-energy-density, long-life, and low-degradation battery. It overcomes every single problem of current battery technology. In my opinion, this happens as a result of overcoming both the lithium-ion SEI (solid electrolyte interphase) battery problem and material degradation due to volume expansion.

Professor Goodenough had this to say regarding current lithium-ion battery technology, “There are three basic problems with the lithium-ion battery. First, you can’t charge it fast enough. Second, you can’t overcharge it without getting oxygen. And third, it’s got a flammable electrolyte with a window that’s not big enough. If you want energy density, you’ve got to have the voltage times the current.”

Several manufacturing companies are interested in the new battery technology, and are currently working in getting it ready for mass production; however, a working product will [only] be ready in a few more years from now.

More specifically in March 2017, Professor Goodenough had this to say, “…we have done many tests with laboratory cells. Manufacturing a marketable battery cell will take about 2 years of development by a competent battery company, but we have over 50 companies showing interest to be able to perform tests of our results. I am optimistic that our tests will be verified and that product development will begin soon.” These “…battery companies have shown interest in validating our findings and marketing products.”

Non-confirmed comments suggest that Tesla is aware of this technology.

[Read more here]

These new batteries will have a much longer life than conventional lithium-ion ("a usable life of 63 years"!!!!) and will therefore, when manufacturing gets up to speed, be much cheaper.

In 10 or 15 years' time, batteries will be ubiquitous: in our houses, in businesses, in out transport, in micro-grids, at substations in conventional grids, and at wind and solar farms.