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Comment by xbmcuser | Hacker News Reader

With how solar and wind electricity prices are still falling at similar rate. I think people don't realise how fast the move to electric is going to be as battery production keeps going up. Think about it just like pc gets cheap each year. Vehicles and fuels are also going to get cheaper as battery and electricity prices get cheaper

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It all depends on supply, as well as safety. As long as we have an excess of supply of the materials needed to produce the batteries and the increased production doesn't lead to safety issues with the batteries (remember -- Lithium ion battery packs are essentially incendiary bombs under the right circumstances) then all will be fine. However current trends do not indicate continuing trends. If the switch to battery stored power occurs very quickly, there is potential for a price shock.

> It all depends on supply, as well as safety.

The safety part seems to be completely ignored. I would not want to have around me a 10 year old battery pack.

> Lithium ion battery packs are essentially incendiary bombs under the right circumstances

So is petrol for that matter - a Tesla Model 3 extended range battery pack stores 82kWh of energy, whereas a 60L tank full of unleaded is holding 570kWh of energy

Gasoline is not in itself an incendiary bomb, it has a specific meaning:

— it burns for a long time - it resists suppression

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incendiary_device

If you want gasoline to meet the definition you have to make napalm out of it.

Sure. When was the last time you had to store gasoline in your residence though? Do you have to manage fuel storage on your person to power devices? Does Amazon have to send you a box with petrol in it when you order a laptop? There is infrastructure around petrol and designated places to contain it and dispense it. We don't have that yet with battery power. Most people just ignore the X with the trash can on the device and dump batteries in the garbage. I don't know about you, but people where I live have to go out of their way to find a place to drop off their old batteries responsibly, and I think I am the only person I know who does.

Pretty much everybody stores a massive amount of gasoline energy on their property every day, as gas in the tank in their vehicle.

And disposal of car batteries will never be an issue. Even the smallest and most degraded of Nissan Leaf batteries is worth $2000 or so.

You are not engaging with my point and are trying to work around it. You know that you are doing that and I know that you are doing that.

The real issue is copper.

https://cdn.ihsmarkit.com/www/pdf/0722/The-Future-of-Copper_...

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