BATTERIES HAVE come a long way in 30 years. In the early 1990s the storage capacity needed to power a house for a day would have cost about $75,000. The cells themselves would have weighed 113kg and taken up as much space as a beer keg. Today the same amount of power can be delivered at a cost of less than $2,000, from a 40kg package roughly the size of a small backpack.
Such technological progress is crucial for decarbonising the global economy. One of the shortcomings of renewable energy sources is their inconsistency: the sun does not always shine and the wind does not always blow. Batteries can help solve this problem by storing up surplus power when supply is high, for use when it is low.
Better batteries are also vital for the continued growth of the electric-car market. Since the Tesla Roadster became the first production vehicle to use lithium-ion cells in 2008, the number of electric vehicles on the road has grown to more than 7m. Since batteries currently account for about a third of the price of an electric car, reducing their cost is vital for ensuring that EVs become competitive with conventional ones.
Battery improvements are likely to keep coming. At the moment the average cost of a lithium-ion battery pack is about $140 per kilowatt hour. The holy grail is $100 per kilowatt hour: at that point EVs will become cost-competitive with combustion ones, according to BloombergNEF, a consultancy. Battery-makers could reach this goal within the next couple of years. Battery storage is also expanding: America installed a record 1.2 gigawatts-worth of storage in 2020.
Funny how battery prices fall when the people mining the minerals are paid slave wages.
incredible
But still electric vehicles cost is high
這個時候不說環保了 不說氣候變化了 為啥 利益 ——經濟人