The price of lithium-ion storage batteries is down almost 90% in 10 years. We are in the age of the battery, and today's prices, volumes, and applications are just the start. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-17/this-is-the-dawning-of-the-age-of-the-battery?sref=JMv1OWqN

To answer an energy transition-related question that I’m asked perhaps more than any other: there’s significant price variation by application. e-bus battery < electric passenger car battery <stationary energy storage on the power grid https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-17/this-is-the-dawning-of-the-age-of-the-battery?sref=JMv1OWqN

Storage volumes, needless to say, are up a bit. Cumulative vehicle+stationary storage:
2010: 480 megawatt-hours
2020: 526 gigawatt-hours (1,100x)
2030e: 9,000GWh (not worth calculating) https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-17/this-is-the-dawning-of-the-age-of-the-battery?sref=JMv1OWqN

There's a magic number for lithium-ion batteries: $100 per kilowatt-hour. At that point, the upfront cost for an electric passenger vehicle will be the same as—or less than—a similar internal combustion model.

We aren’t at the $100/kWh moment of self-fulfillment, but we’re not far off, either ( @JamesTFrith says just a few years). In advance of that, I propose a question to frame what’s to come. Are batteries just a product? Or do they create their own markets? https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-17/this-is-the-dawning-of-the-age-of-the-battery?sref=JMv1OWqN

Exxon Mobil began working on lithium-ion batteries in the 1970s, at a time when even oil majors were searching for alternatives to the internal combustion engine. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-17/this-is-the-dawning-of-the-age-of-the-battery?sref=JMv1OWqN

At that point, batteries were a product in search of a use—and yet the consumer electronics that emerged later couldn’t have existed without it. In that case, batteries created the market. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-17/this-is-the-dawning-of-the-age-of-the-battery?sref=JMv1OWqN

For electric cars, the battery is fundamentally a product. Cars (even electric ones!) have existed for 100+ years; they weren’t waiting on economical lithium-ion batteries to bring a market into existence. Electricity is a new way to energize cars, but the car is still the car.

Energy storage for the power grid is different. Fuel is stored energy, after all, and inexpensive lithium-ion batteries have created a new market for stored electrons at significant scale. They’ve also enabled new markets for services that battery operators can offer to the grid.

So, what comes next as batteries become cheaper, with a higher energy density and produced in much greater volume? I imagine that more batteries will create new markets that we haven’t yet thought of. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-17/this-is-the-dawning-of-the-age-of-the-battery?sref=JMv1OWqN

I’m reminded of a tale from the birth of the iPod: Toshiba had invented a 1.8-inch hard drive, but had no idea what to do with it. Apple executives knew —and created a new market with it. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-17/this-is-the-dawning-of-the-age-of-the-battery?sref=JMv1OWqN