Not being cynical but genuinely curious: Is that rate of price decrease (15%) expected to keep up in the near/medium term? Is there any sort of Moore's law for battery cost?
When the price of computing halved, we consumed more than twice as much, so that the industry still grew. Most other products/industries didn't have that kind of demand curve. Eventually, we had enough textile and we were happy to pay less for more (rather than pay more for way more). The textile industry stopped growing and learning/price reduction slowed too.
When the price of computers dropped, we paid the same for more powerful computers and more people decided to buy computers because the computers were now more useful. When compuers got powerful enough that we started paying less per computer, we still bought more computers in the form of ipods, VR goggles and smart toilets.
More demand, more production, more learning, lower price...question: If the product is cheaper, will you spend more or less in total? If the answer is "yes," rinse and repeat until the anser is no.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
When people learned how to use coal more efficiently in 19th century England, that didn't result in less coal being used. It meant that it became economical to do more things with coal, and overall coal consumption increased.
On top of that come all the new usages for batteries, especially energy storage, be it for individual houses or on the grid scale.
So potential market capacity is for long time no limitation for batteries. The unique thing of the semiconductor market development was though, that the chips grew in capabilities, but very little in size.
(PS: imagine the bold branding experiment if they had called it "50 years anniversary edition" instead of "MAX")
Standard manufacturing and scale improvements should keep things going for several more years, even without a major change to chemistry.
could have been video trickery but I think the demo was legit. Once that technology goes mainstream it's gonna be as revolutionary as the increases in lithium ion energy density. We're on the cusp of some incredible battery breakthroughs in the very near future! The fact that the new tesla roadster (admittedly expensive at $250k) has a 600 mile charge capacity is aboslutely astonishing.
The industrial revolution was all about learning curves. Production grew, got better, leading to lower prices, leading to more demand, more production, more learning, lower prices, more demand... untill everyone had as many forks, socks and radios as they wanted.
But... Moore's law is usually represented as price over time instead of units. Half the unit cost every 18 months.
Early-ish in the tesla days elon went on a sort of rant. I think underlying it is/was this difference between "x as unit volume" or "x as time." "Time" made technologists think of learning curves in semi-supernatural terms. They either exist or they don't.
Moore's law was so consistent for so long, we just viewed it as a constant, but traditional economists would say it was/is a function of all the computers that got produced. Elon would say it's a function of hard work at intel, etc.
The upshot is the same though. As more batteries are made, more people work on battery manufacturing methods & R&D, the price declines.
There's no guarantee that it'll be proportional to volume but... new energy tech (batteries, solar, EVs) is now crossing price-parity thresholds in all sorts of applications (like grid power). That means more demand, more learning, lower prices, more demand.
TLDR: yes, propbably