Soft paywall.
Wright’s Law (more generally) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects
Frith’s group puts the battery cost decline at 18% per production doubling at the pack level. As an example, from 2010 to 2015, lithium-ion battery capacity doubled seven times, from 0.48 gigawatt-hours to 62 GWh. The average price of batteries at the pack level plunged from $1,194 per kilowatt hour to $384. Strictly speaking, the 18% rule should have taken prices down to about $261 ($384 is about what Wright’s Law calls for with six doublings). But it was still a roughly two-thirds plummet.
From 2015 to 2020, battery capacity grew 2.7 times and the price again plunged by two-thirds, to an average of $137/kWh. That overshot the 18% rule, by which the price should have dropped only to about $213/kWh. But if you had strictly tracked the 18% rule from 2010 to 2020, the price ended up right around where it should have been.
Now, BNEF is using the rule to project what happens next. Following Wright, battery prices should drop to $84 per kWh in 2025, well below the holy grail milestone of $100/kWh. In 2030, they should be an astonishing $58/kWh, and $45 in 2035. The price movements in the 2030s seem dramatic, but they are less so than the prior two decades, namely because it will be harder and harder to double total capacity, Frith said.
Assuming no breakthrough in battery materials, there’s still a somewhat predictable price drop. What are the side effects that you see?
I foresee electric airplanes that are much cheaper to maintain and powered by renewables, ably copiloted by AI, and consequently very affordable.
…So, we’ll need better medicine to combat the knock-on effects of everyone in the world simultaneously breathing on each other. Hopefully AI or quantum protein simulation can speed that up.
Energy density will still be an issue for airplanes, assuming no new technology with higher energy density pops up. Electric planes for shorter flight (regionally) is probably safe to assume though.
I’m actually a proponent of methane as hydrocarbon fuel for airplanes, but only if done in a carbon neutral way. In other words, methane made with atmospheric gases and electricity; again assuming the electricity isn’t made from fossil fuels, cause that would defeat the purpose.
Rockets are already moving to methane, largely because of SpaceX and their whole shtick about having to make methane on Mars to use for the return trip. Right now, for their Starship test flights, they’re using methane that came from a gas well, which is not ideal. But on Mars, there’s no gas wells, so to make a chemical rocket, you need to make your fuel. I hope this leads to knock-on technologies here, allowing methane burning to be an option where no other option exists.
The science works, but there’s a lot of wishful thinking that the economics works too.
I think we’re already well on our way to seeing battery ultralights go commercial. www.opener.aero says they’re roughly targeting “SUV” price tags.
Okay, that is very cool. I wonder if it’ll ever pass beyond the novelty stage before regulations squash it. First person to die and the media cycle will be nuts!
It’s different enough to have that effect if/when there’s a media circus around it. But surely everyone already knows that ultralights are the “cheap submarine” of the skies.
