energy density hasn't really changed for 15 years, price dropped a lot though, but price drop has also paused recently. There is no telling if any progress will be made or not. Maybe! Maybe not.
That doesn't sound right, so since nobody else has piped up I decided to actually try to find the answer myself.
Volumetric numbers from the DOE suggest it went from 55 Wh/l in 2008 to 450 in 2020, which a compound interest calculator tells me is about 20% per year. Which is an awful lot.
Physics world says 80Wh/kg when Sony introduced them in 1991, and 300 today (although someone above said 270 is what ships), which looks like about 5.1%. But the lab experiment numbers are substantially more than that https://physicsworld.com/a/lithium-ion-batteries-break-energ... and shows that the exponential curve was visible back in about 2014. These of course have little to do with production numbers. The bigger the breakthrough the longer it takes to commercialize (or the more watered down it becomes to be commercialized). That was the wisdom when Wall Street was interested in new battery companies.
5% means every 14 years power doubles. We've been flirting with electric vehicles at least that long.
This is because batteries are, of course, magical devices produced by chemE’s and only begrudgingly handed over to the EE’s, along with instructions like “do not puncture the pouch, or the magic spirits will get free and erupt into a vile flame which burns water.”
I am quite certain they are just doing alchemy and have tricked us all (it is of course well known that chemE’s are actually the cleverest type of engineer).
Actually, when demand for EVs goes up, lithium mining won't be able to keep up, so in the next decade or so we'll see steep increase in battery prices.
In the next decade you will see more reliance on technology that becomes cheaper than simply throwing lithium at the problem.
It's the same thing with many techs. In the 70's we thought we would run out of oil by 2000, and a lot of asshats in the 80's and 90's crowed about how stupid those so-called experts were.
What happened in the 80's and 90's was ground sensing radar found more oil, horizontal drilling found ways to access more of what was there, and zeolites saw widespread use as a catalyst to increase the amount of gas and diesel recovered from a barrel of oil. And over time production of zeolites made that process work better and better. It's very much like when Apple went to non-replaceable batteries. Battery life doubled in that model because 3 different parts of the problem got improvements. Density, volume, and power management all contributed almost 30% each.
Between "Oh Shit" and "Told Ya", we could produce twice as much fossil fuel as we knew how to do at the time. The same will happen with Lithium. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and Replace.
That's not what Peak Oil means, but I think you know this. The cost of oil will never return to pre-2000s levels because meeting demand necessitates more expensive extraction technologies like shale and offshore. In that sense (the correct one), the prediction of peak oil by 2000 was remarkably accurate.
Some chinese car manufacturers have already moved to sodium ion for car batteries. It is quite funny to me when people bring arguments of how electric cars won't work they are unaware the rate at which things are changing in the space. And that their arguments have been invalid in 2-3 years but they read the article from 5 years back and then never bothered to update themselves. The same is the case for solar tech.
