Our World in Data has some numbers on the decline in price for lithium ion batteries.
Since 1991, prices have fallen by around 97%. Prices fall by an average of 19% for every doubling of capacity. Even more promising is that this rate of reduction does not yet appear to be slowing down.
Our World in Data
Not in the U.S., according to this article in Asia Times (a Hong Kong affair I don’t know a lot about), but maybe in China and Europe. Fuel cells have worked just fine on the space shuttle and on naval ships, but have not been close to competitive even with batteries for everyday vehicles. This article says that may change starting with commercial trucks. Government investment in refueling stations is a key.
Europe and Japan – Germany has declared 2021 the year of hydrogen technology – are running only slightly behind China. For the next decade or so, battery-powered passenger vehicles will dominate the market for low-carbon substitutes for the internal combustion engine. But batteries can’t power long-range freight transportation by truck and rail, and China is making a decisive commitment to hydrogen…
Already the largest market for Plug-in Energy Vehicles (PEV’s) with 3 million on the road, China projects a fleet of 50,000 fuel-cell vehicles (FCV’s) by 2025 and 1 million by 2030, from only 6,000 on the road in 2019.
Asia Times
In my utopian vision, long-range freight would be moved mostly by electrified rail, then delivered locally by small electric vehicles. Fuel cells would make sense for aircraft – much cleaner stuff than that nasty old jet fuel, and could maybe be made onsite at airports rather than shipping or piping all that toxic fuel around. They also seem attractive to me as backup generators for, say, hospitals, or any building/facility that can be solar-powered most of the time but needs a backup power source for cloudy days. Right now that often involves a tank of diesel fuel, which is a maintenance hassle at best and an environmental nightmare at worst. Small nuclear reactors, desalination plants, and fuel cells all seem to go together well to me, because you could use the excess nuclear power during low demand periods to electrolyze water, store the hydrogen in fuel cell form, and use it for peak electric demand or jet fuel or whatever you need.
At first I thought liquid air was a joke, like powdered water. But no, it is an energy storage technology, like compressed air, that allows you to generate energy using intermittent renewables (solar, wind, etc.) and release it when needed.
This wasn’t my most prolific writing (or reading) month ever. In fact, it my have been my worst. But here are a few highlights of what I did get around to.
Most frightening and/or depressing story:
Most hopeful story:
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: