Lithium is an essential part of lithium-ion batteries that are used in electric vehicles (EVs). The global demand for EVs has risen rapidly over the past few years and is projected to reach more than 30% of annual vehicle sales by . Lithium plays a critical role in much of what we do in our daily lives. In addition to EVs, lithium is an essential part of the technology that powers mobile phones, computers, power tools and battery storage of energy generated from wind and solar power. Also, lithium is used in medical treatment for bipolar disorder and is being considered for treating dementia and Alzheimer&#;s.
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There&#;s a reason why, in , the three chemists behind the initial development of lithium-ion technology won the Nobel Prize in chemistry. LIBs boast incredibly high energy density and specific energy, which is to say, they cram lots of oomph into a small, lightweight package, and they are capable of cycling many more times than their predecessors.
The first LIBs, commercially introduced in the early s, were expensive, but they found a market foothold in small electronic devices &#; phones, laptops, camcorders &#; where energy density is at a premium. They have since all but completely taken over the consumer electronics market.
As manufacturing scale grew, prices fell and more uses opened up: power tools, lawnmowers, scooters. Scale grew more, prices fell more, and LIBs began displacing other chemistries as the top choice for EVs.
Especially in recent years, the growth (and anticipated growth) in the EV market has driven an enormous surge of public and private investment to LIBs, and this has had dramatic effects on prices. According to recent research by BNEF, &#;&#;lithium-ion battery pack prices, which were above $1,100 per kilowatt-hour in , have fallen 89% in real terms to $137/&#;kWh in . By , average prices will be close to $100/&#;kWh.&#; (It wasn&#;t that long ago that most experts agreed $100/&#;kWh was an impossible target.)
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And so the cycle continues. Prices fall and more new uses open up: big trucks, buses, airplanes, data centers, distributed energy storage and large-scale grid-storage installations. From BNEF:
BNEF
&#;s analysis suggests that cheaper batteries can be used in more and more applications. These include energy shifting (moving in time the dispatch of electricity to the grid, often from times of excess solar and wind generation), peaking in the bulk power system (to deal with demand spikes), as well as for customers looking to save on their energy bills by buying electricity at cheap hours and using it later.
Experts generally agree that LIBs are going to hit limits, even if it&#;s just the base price of raw materials, before they become economical for long-duration grid storage. They are being installed for 4- to 6-hour storage applications, sometimes 8 hours, and someday may even aspire to 12 hours. But beyond that &#; for the weekly or even seasonal storage a renewables-based grid will need &#; some other technology or technologies will have to step in. (I&#;ll likely do a separate post on long-duration storage.)
Nonetheless, continued scaling will ensure that LIBs get even cheaper. Some analysts believe that, with foreseeable improvements in LIB chemistry, prices could hit $40 or even $30/&#;kWh in coming decades. We simply don&#;t know yet what can be done with storage that cheap.
To take one example, if energy storage gets cheap enough to become an economically trivial addition to building construction/&#;renovations, it will eventually be ubiquitous at the local level, and the benefits of ubiquitous, networked local energy are&#; well, hard to predict. We know it would protect vulnerable populations through blackouts like those in Texas or California over the last year. But it could do much more.
Cheap batteries could open up uses we haven&#;t even envisioned yet. What sorts of urban mobility vehicles, drones, planes or research outposts could we power? What kinds of ships or trains could we electrify? How could increasingly cheap, ubiquitous storage be coupled with increasingly cheap, ubiquitous solar energy?
We don&#;t know yet. But we&#;re going to see some cool things over the next few years. Batteries have the potential to change our ordinary lived experience in myriad ways. It&#;s worth taking the time to understand what&#;s driving their development and where they might go.
So here&#;s the question that is driving this battery series: Are LIBs going to be to energy storage what solar PV panels are to solar electricity?
By way of concluding, let me briefly explain what I mean by that.
By &#;&#;solar panels,&#; I&#;m referring to the standard kind: boring old crystalline silicon photovoltaic panels, the kind you see on roofs these days, which I will henceforth call &#;&#;PV.&#;
Thanks to key early U.S. research and development, German feed-in tariffs (which subsidized homeowners to put panels on their roofs), and a massive Chinese manufacturing boom, PV has received an enormous, extended push in the last several decades. As the scale has grown, the price has dropped &#; by a whopping 99 percent over the last 40 years.
PV got so cheap that it has simply steamrolled all competitors. Back in the &#;&#;00s, even after Obama won and was putting together his stimulus bill, multiple solar technologies were under development: thin-film solar, concentrated solar power, building-integrated solar, multijunction solar, all sorts of exotic stuff. There was even this one cool company called Solyndra that made cylindrical solar PV tubes.
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There were boosters of all these niche technologies who could tell you chapter and verse about their advantages over plain old PV. They pulled in a lot of venture capital (and some government loan guarantees) making those pitches. But in the end, they and their funders underestimated PV&#;s one great advantage: It is dirt cheap and getting cheaper all the time. It&#;s virtually impossible for anything else to catch up.
PV&#;s domination of the solar market has some energy analysts concerned, thinking that government ought to step in and encourage innovation and tech diversity in this area, in preparation for the day that PV reaches its limits and plateaus. (Varun Sivaram, a researcher at Columbia University&#;s Center on Global Energy Policy who was recently made senior adviser to presidential climate envoy John Kerry, has written a whole book on this subject.)
Some researchers disagree and think super-cheap PV will be good enough to get us where we need to go. Either way, it&#;s clear that without concerted government intervention, PV is going to dominate for the foreseeable future.
Is the same true of LIBs? Are they going to dominate in storage markets the way PV has dominated in solar electricity?
They already largely own both the EV and storage markets and have a substantial head start in manufacturing capacity and industry know-how. That head start is only going to get more daunting over the next decade. This is from a brief on the future of LIBs by a company called Sila Nanotechnologies:
Before Tesla was founded, Li-ion batteries were almost exclusively used in consumer electronics &#; mainly laptops and cell phones. At the time of the launch of the Tesla Roadster in , the total global Li-ion manufacturing capacity was approximately20
GWh per year. By , we expect over2
,000
GWh of annual production capacity based on already announced plans by cell manufacturers.
That would be 100× growth in 22 years &#; and a hell of a head of steam for any competitor to take on.
&#;It would be unwise to assume &#;&#;conventional&#; LIBs are approaching the end of their era,&#; concluded a recent comprehensive review in Nature Communications. &#;[M]any engineering and chemistry approaches are still available to improve their performance.&#;
Nonetheless, LIBs do face restraining pressures, especially materials and safety concerns, which we&#;ll get into later. They could hit speed bumps. And when you&#;re talking about trillion-plus-dollar markets, even a niche could be worth billions. Will competitors be able to gain a foothold? It&#;s an enormous prize with more researchers and entrepreneurs chasing it every day.
That&#;s what we&#;ll be exploring in this battery series. Next up: a primer on how lithium-ion batteries work!
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This article was originally published at Volts.
(Article image courtesy of Yo-Co-Man)
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