Will Ultra-Cheap Batteries Drive a New Roaring ’20s?
Humanoid robots everywhere, people wearing VR devices, and an EV boom
Batteries are very near a tipping point sought by entrepreneurs, tinkerers, and investors for a century and longer — a cut in average cost so low that electric vehicles can be profitably priced the same as their gasoline-propelled cousins. The coming price plunge for batteries is behind forecasts that, starting in the second half of the decade, EV sales will leap ahead of today’s levels and eventually surpass internal combustion.
The inflection point is a cost of $100 per kilowatt-hour, the metric for battery capacity. Some Chinese electric public buses are already powered by such batteries, and BloombergNEF forecasts that, at the current rate of improvement, the average price for all lithium-ion batteries will similarly drop below $100 per kWh at the pack level by 2023.
At once, batteries have become a much bigger deal, evidenced by long new takeouts on the subject at the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the Financial Times. Which has made me wonder what would be possible in a world of even cheaper batteries — like $56 per kWh, which Tesla CEO Elon Musk has promised, or $40 per kWh, a potential cost cited to me last year by Gene Berdichevsky, CEO of Sila Nanotechnologies, a…
