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Batteries Are Advancing According to Their Own Little-Known Moore’s Law
Meet two of the very few bullish observers of ‘Wright’s Law’
Batteries, say deeply frustrated developers, follow no Moore’s Law. Unlike semiconductors, whose performance has doubled roughly every two years for at least a half-century, just as Intel co-founder Gordon Moore posited, batteries have merely trundled along, eking out advances in crawling fits and starts, seemingly lost to any governing master force. All there is to do is keep working on the chemistry, and hope for the best.
But, as slowly cheapening lithium-ion batteries finally seem close to taking electric vehicles down to the same sticker price as combustion, a couple of industry bulls are taking issue with the industry orthodoxy: The cost decline, they say, has been foreseeable. The lens is an industrial principle just as ironclad as Moore’s Law.
Go on Google, punch in T.P. Wright, and you will find a multitude of links to Wright’s Law. Starting in the 1920s, Wright was an aerospace engineer and later an official in the FDR and Truman presidencies. In 1936, he wrote a seven-page paper in the Journal of the Aeronautical Sciences in which he sought answers to a couple of questions: What impact precisely does scale have on the price of an airplane? And, can that impact be…
