Exponential battery growth is underway and RMI reports this in their 2023 report X-Change: Batteries: The Battery Domino Effect. The remarkable, exponential growth of battery sales is driven by a Wrights Law. This domino effect of battery technology adoption cascades from country to country and sector to sector. This battery domino effect will assist phase-out of over half of global fossil fuel demand by 2040. This is much faster than RMI forecast 6 months ago. Batteries will abate transport and power emissions. Batteries enable to over 60% toward a zero-carbon energy system.
Estimates for total batteries needed to decarbonise globally is between 250 and 300TWh. Tesla Masterplan v3 has a 250TW figure. This will primarily be for electrifying transport (400m battery electric cars, down from 1.44 billion ICE cars.)
Price Plummetting
Tony Seba’s 2014 book, Clean Disruption, was a prediction that by 2027 Li-ion batteries would reach $50/kWh. At the time, that was insane to the straight-liine thinking mainstream. In a CNEV article the China price for VDA-sized LFPcells was less than RMB 0.5/Wh ($US69.53/kWh]. Leapmotor’s vice president Cao Li recently said in an interview that the company’s procurement cost for LFP cells has dropped to RMB 0.4/Wh ($55.62/kWh) in a battery price war with CATL and BYD. Wright’s Law says for a doubling of units, prices halve. Tony Seba was wrong – 3 years too conservative!
Power batteries have gone from being in tight supply to being in oversupply in a year’s time, and prices are now gradually dropping towards RMB 0.3/Wh, says a report from SNE Research from Sth Korea. VDA is a size specification for square cells, with length, width and height of 148 mm, 26.5 mm and 91 mm, respectively. C refers to the charging multiplier of the battery, and 2C means that the battery can theoretically be fully charged in one-half hour.
Batteries Provide Aysnchronous Electricity
Batteries are currently going through a massive domino effect of adoption certain to phaseout 50% of global fossil fuel demand by 2040 at the latest. Because: economics. We are witnessing, live, the end of the age of oil (that’s why Big Oil hijacked the UN climate talks)
Assard Rassouk https://x.com/AssaadRazzouk/status/1735838120611131819?s=20
Scope of Exponential Battery Growth
It’s hard to conceptualize the sheer scale of what’s going on.
- Annual commissions of new factories are 18 times those of just 5 years ago
- Building 400 gigafactories
- Capacity to make 9 TWh of batteries/ year by 2030
- 1 kWh for every person on the planet
- Sufficient mineral resources need to scale-up batteries
- Reaching net zero will only take one quarter of today’s lithium, one-third of nickel and a quarter of known cobalt resources.
- Higher battery energy densities = fewer minerals needed per battery
- Battery-recycling is alleviating demand for new mining
- New battery chemistries such as sodium-ion, iron, LFP cathodes, and silicon anodes diversifying demand for minerals
- Total missions from RE for next 30 years = emissions for just 1 year of fossil fuels
From January to September 2023, the amount of energy held by batteries for electric vehicles (EV, PHEV, HEV) registered worldwide was approximately 624.4GWh, a 41.8% YoY growth. For 2024, over 1TWh was installed for EVs and grid storage.,
Enough Minerals
Not Enough some say? More than enough
- Copper 42x
- Lithium 257 x
- Cobalt 45x
- Nickel 35x
- Silver 22x
- Manganese 75 x
- Molybdenum 53
- Silicon unlimited
- Zinc 20x
- Graphite 320 x
Decrease in Fossil Fuel Demand
Previously RMI had this projection for collapse by 2050. The rise in batteries has brought their projections forward by a decade.
Why Will Battery Growth Be Exponential
Many do not realise that 50% of all energy used today is wasted. Wasted in mining. Wasted in processing, and wasted at end use. Petrol requires 30% of the energy of oil in the bedrock to be drilled, recovered, refined, and shipped around the world. Then is used for motion. These 2 Sankey diagrams show the inefficiencies in the current system. Batteries or stored energy are a substantial efficiency solution. Do more with less. For a more detailed analysis see this article.
More Reading
- X-Change: Batteries: The Battery Domino Effect 2023. Daan Walter, Kingsmill Bond, Sam Butler-Sloss, Laurens Speelman, Yuki Numata, Will Atkinson. RMI Institute. https://rmi.org/insight/x-change-batteries/
- Tesla Masterplan IR.tesla.com or Change Discussion Tesla Master Plans
