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Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

4x drop in battery prices, (or) 5x increase in density in only 8 years. Pretty damn good for batteries that "aren't following Moore's Law", something most battery-related articles are quick to remind us. Hopefully, this continues for at least another decade, which should make EVs more than competitive with ICE cars.

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Batteries are the secret to most of the cool "sci-fi" tech we all want but currently can't have.

Hmm. I think fusion is more important, but I'll take what I can get.

We have fusion, 1 AU away. Utility PV gives us an EROEI or around 11. That's good enough, such that a focus on storing the output trumps the development of more abundant local production.

The sci-fi I'm most interested is a lot more distant than 1 AU.

Not so much batteries, but "energy storage" in general. Batteries being one very important type of energy storage.

If photovoltaics and/or wind become extremely cheap, to the point where the cost is 1 cent/kilowatt-hour, it would even be economical to crack hydrogen from seawater via electrolysis (a process that consumes vast amounts of electricity) and use hydrogen as storage.

That is indeed very good progress.

Elon Musk mentioned recently that he expects a yearly capacity increase of 5% for the foreseeable future.

I think that's extremely conservative, even if you don't consider the gigafactory. He said years ago that the rate of improvement in density would be 6-8% per year, but clearly it's been much better than that - more like a 20% increase in density or a 15% drop in price per year, for the past 8 years.

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