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CellBioGuy comments on Open Thread April 16 - April 22, 2014 - Less Wrong
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Solar energy used to halve in price every 7 years. in the last 7 it more than halved. Battery performance also has a nice exponential improvement curve.
Various forms of solar are probably one of our better bets, though I'm not convinced that large chunks of the recent gains don't come from massive effective subsidy from China and eventually the cost of the materials themselves could become insignificant compared to complexity and maintenance and end-of-life-recycling cost which are not likely to decrease much. Though battery performance... I haven't seen anything about it that even looks vaguely exponential.
I get the impression that most of the "recent gains" consist of forcing the utilities to take it and either subsidizing the price difference or passing the cost on to the customer. At least, the parties involved act like they believe this while attempting to deny it.
See http://qr.ae/rbMLh for the batteries.
To spell out a few things: the price of lithium batteries is decreasing. Since they are the most energy-dense batteries, this is great for the cost of electric cars, and maybe for the introduction of new portable devices, but it isn't relevant to much else. In particular, performance is not improving. Moreover, there is no reason to expect them to ever be cheaper than existing less dense batteries. In particular, there is no reason to expect that the cost of storing electricity in batteries will ever be cheaper than the cost of the electricity, so they are worthless for smoothing out erratic sources of power, like wind.
But even if some of the cost is subsidies and the real speed is only halving in price every 7 years that's still good enough.
I don't see why there shouldn't be any way to optimise end of life costs and maintenance.