It is worth noting that this is an ad. It is a law firm that is advertising their expertise in this field. And the product that they want people to buy is revealed in this passage:
Freedom-to-operate (FTO) analysis therefore remains critical for market entrants. Whilst the primary patents have expired, a dense web of secondary patents, covering additives, coatings, and production methods, still poses infringement risks.
Of course Shoosmiths would be happy to do a FTO analysis for your potential product...for a fee.
That doesn't mean that it doesn't contain quality information. Law firms tend to make this kind of ad informative. But it does mean that there is an agenda.
It may be an ad but it has every reason to be perfectly accurate. The law firm is not selling LFP batteries.
Edit: for example, if somebody was selling their AWS course by providing detailed information on some aspect of AWS, that wouldn't be a reason to doubt the information itself. It serves as a sample.
Anyone who needs their help already knows the promise of LFP in at least enough details that they would need the patent search anyway as part of their efforts to learn if it is right for them. All secondary patents are important, the only question is: do you license them, work around them, or not infringe in the first place. (I'm going to ignore the possibility of intentional infringing though that happens)
> It may be an ad but it has every reason to be perfectly accurate. The law firm is not selling LFP batteries.
I think it's essential to always look at motive: The law firm posted this page for a reason. What was the reason?
I'd guess that it is to attract business. I think we can expect that they would include and exaggerate things that will bring more business, and omit and downplay things that don't.
> That doesn't mean that it doesn't contain quality information. Law firms tend to make this kind of ad informative. But it does mean that there is an agenda.
This is the best thing to do for SEO, write good and authoritative content. Which is ironic because the field of SEO started off as gaming the systems with things like hidden keywords.
If you make technology that spies really want the government will claim eminent domain and take your patent from you, with "fair" compensation, of course.
It's funny that never happens for things that actually matter.
Lithium iron phosphate batteries are very practical. Chinese BYD has developed blade batteries using this type of battery and has become the global sales leader in new energy vehicles. However, this battery faces range limitations and the issue of how to improve charging speed. Solid-state batteries should be the next big thing, but mass production may not be feasible yet. At least, it might take 3 more years for commercialization, and that's still an optimistic prediction.
> Lithium iron phosphate batteries are very practical
Unless you want to charge in negative temperatures
> However, this battery faces range limitations
Yes they are less dense but plentiful for typical passenger car (and not so much for full sized trucks or even "mid-sized" US SUVs).
> the issue of how to improve charging speed
I think CATL demonstrated 1MW charging on these already. Definitely shipping 500kW charging (tho best measure is still average km/hr).
> Solid-state batteries should be the next big thing
Sodium will (great cold weather performance and even better charge rates), but it's less (vol) dense and prices won't reach LFPs for another 10-15 years (unless you believe hype, not actual analysts).
Does the heater handle real winters, like they have in Alaska, Mongolia, and parts of Russia north of it? Or just European and American "winters" where -20°C is considered hardcore? Gasoline powered engines handle this well, and you can warm them up with a gasoline torch if they stay outside for too long and refuse to start. The cold does not destroy them.
> Does the heater handle real winters, like they have in Alaska, Mongolia, and parts of Russia north of it? Or just European and American "winters" where -20°C is considered hardcore?
It handles "real winters" [1] where large portions of the human population live. [2][3][4]
I don't see why a built-in heater is worse than aiming a torch at a car to get it to start. Seems like a major oversight for gasoline cars.
Also, a tiny fraction of the population will ever need to start their cars in Alaska, Mongolia, and Northern Russia. The small city worth of people living in these insane environments can stick to their wood-fueled diesel cars while the rest of the world just uses normal vehicles.
Alaska, Mongolia and Russia are extreme edge cases that I don’t believe hold much weight in an argument. It’s like those arguments where folks try to attack solar or wind, “solar won’t work on northern Alaskan winter”. Ok great that’s such a small slice of the population that it’s ok.
You can discharge the battery to power the heaters, at significant cost in energy. The temperature becomes a serious problem when charging (will physically destroy the battery through dentrite formation!), and under very high power draws (battery can’t keep up chemically).
It can be solved, but at a cost, and makes the tech much more dangerous - you could end up in a situation where you freeze to death somewhere more easily in the climates it is a problem.
It’s similar reasons why diesel isn’t a great idea in Alaska and the like too, and people tend towards gasoline even in situations where it is more costly and less efficient (like industrial trucks). It can be mitigated with chemical additives (‘heat’), tank and block heaters, etc. but has similar risks.
Most of the US Midwest sees -20 C for at least a brief period each winter. Having reduced functionality at those temps would be pretty inconvenient for the many car dependent people that live in the region.
Most of the Midwest also has snow and cannot farm the land for 7 months. What are you actually talking about here? That they cannot adapt or that they will refuse to work?
-20C is feasible. Charging will take a bit longer because the heater will need to work a bit longer, but as long as the batteries can reach about freezing temperature, you're good.
Charging being a couple minutes slower a few weeks a year is a minor convenience. If you have a house with a garage, like many people in the US Midwest, I doubt it even poses a problem even on the worst days. It's more in the winter-long -35C areas that (purpose-built) combustion engines have obvious benefits.
Cold climates suffer more from cold batteries having reduced range, but with modern battery ranges the problem isn't even that extreme anymore.
About half of the world is within 3,300 km of a village in Burma, close to the Chinese border and not too far from Laos and Thailand.
China and India both have EVs much cheaper than we get in the EU. Like, "<€10k new" cheap.
What I do wonder about is how much of Africa can get EVs; I've only been once, to Nairobi over a decade ago, so take it with a pinch of anecdote-flavoured salt when I say that what I saw there was a lot of 20-30 year old vehicles.
It entirely depends on the original range of the car.
Realistically you are looking at trimming 20->30% of the range. If you drive 20 miles a day but have a total range of 200 miles, then it's really not inconvenient. It only becomes inconvenient if you need to travel long distances.
Are you a car ad where you're selling the most extreme off-road experience for the person who just wants to go to the grocery store?
Come on man. If you're in an extreme environment, get the tool appropriate for that environment. People in mountain environments tend to have 4WD or AWD cars because it's appropriate. Doesn't mean a non-AWD car is useless.
If you live in the extreme 5%, get something that works there. If you're in the rest of the 95%, other solutions work fine.
So largest battery manufacturer should drop their project, because “come on man”?
Negative temperatures or low temperatures are everywhere. Sodium will displace LFP pretty much everywhere (20 yrs), not just in extreme cold. I get slight coldgating 6months a year in warmest parts of New Zealand. It’s not even a minor issue, but if manufacturers can remove complexity - they will.
I pulled into a Supercharger with my LFP-battery EV last winter. The temperature outside was -15C and I had not set the navigator so there was no pre-warming activated.
By the time I had finished my coffe, SoC had gone from 30-ish to 90-ish percent.
LFP tech anno 2023 is perfectly good enough for road tripping in large cars in severe winter conditions. For almost everyone.
So your battery was preheated. I once did the same with approx 0C battery temperature and whole ordeal took at least 2x longer. Yes there was farmers market in front of charge station so I had a good time with kiddo. That’s not the point.
Let’s not pretend better batteries shouldn’t exist.
Which doesn’t matter if your about to charge either way and just want to optimize time spent?
This can’t be more than single digit days per year? This is the case where people in for example Sweden have 230V engine block and passenger compartment heaters for their car.
It’s -30C and the heat pump doesn’t really work. Is there any advantage to heating the cold side with, say, a resistive heater?
Conservation of energy says no, but what if it’s also being heated by waste heat from charging the batteries?
(Maybe the answer is “if that’s the case, you are actively cooling the batteries with the heat pump!”, but I’d like to think someone more clever than me could make the scheme work.)
Quoting Bender from Futurama: "Great is OK, but amazing would be great."
I'm not against further progress, I'm just stating that using current gen LFP in cold climate for large cars driving long distances is not a problem. It is more than fine. At least Tesla's implementation of LFP, I can't speak to any others on the market.
Because it doesn’t solve the problem, it merely works around it. Solving the problem would mean coming up with a battery chemistry that doesn’t suffer in the cold. Instead the answer is “just don’t have it get cold”.
It’s not to say a hack/workaround isn’t useful, and I would say that it’s perfectly acceptable to simply use a battery heater in the winter. But calling it “solved” confuses solutions and workarounds, and that’s an intellectually dishonest thing to do.
Leave your car with 5% SOC overnight and then try to find energy in morning to preheat battery. People have painted into corner themselves before. It’s perfectly adequate for my very mild climate and even then I get limited regen about 6 morning months per year.
I'm not against better batteries. I'm against people who choose to operate with such a small safety factor for something as serious as operating a giant rolling 2 ton piece of metal and volatile chemistry. Just like I'm against people who don't know how to change a tire or properly drive with etiquette on the interstate; If you can't do it, you kind of deserve some teasing.
In my friend group, if you run out of gas you get made fun of. You forget to flip your kill switch and can't crank your motorcycle, we all laugh and call you a dipshit.
Getting stranded isn't always harmless, and proper adults don't get stranded. Proper adults manage their vehicle safely. That's my point. Yes, exceptions are allowed, but we need to make sure everyone knows they are exceptions. Don't leave 5% on your battery when in the freezing seasons, it's improper.
It's not obvious because you're still making the excuses for baby-adults. No one is saying battery tech should stop being developed, nor should pain points be unaddressed.
After market electric engine heaters and remote starters are typical for ICE vehicles in cold climates (e.g. Alaska). Not sure why you consider this to be a hack for EVs if its builtin to the battery pack design.
The small handful of sodium batteries that are currently available retail all seem to have rather bad roundtrip efficiency compared to LFP and voltage drop starting at a high state of charge.
Also LFP prices dropped enough that shipping cost from China became a significant part of the price. This will be even more of a factor should the less energy dense sodium batteries ever reach the promised $30/kWh.
One thing I hadn't groked about Sodium Ion was the enormous Voltage range leads to a bit of an issue when it comes to current. You have a 4x voltage from top to bottom of the battery and this also means your current is 4x as well for the same power output. This becomes a bit of an issue and it is part of the efficiency equation, not just externally to the battery where wires have to be much larger than LFP or LI but internally due to internal resistance.
Ehhh not really a problem unless you idolize 12/48 V style systems that aren't adequate for these modern chemistries (i.e., non-lead-acid based) that scale down effectively to single digit amp hours per cell.
You can keep the current around a comfortable 20A at any pack size, just by increasing the voltage.
Say 5Ah cells.
At 1.5kV (the highest easily practical with mainstream transistors and sticking to the "simple" circuit designs), that's 7.5kWh per such battery string.
Sodium gravimetric density is same. Volumetric is worse. Shipping containers generally cost by volume, but given how dense batteries are I suspect this won't matter.
I'd agree if you could stick them in the containers discharged, but you can't. This means that even safer chemistry like sodium battery is still hazardous cargo.
Lithium’s curve is nearly flat, which allows for a pretty easy consistent power production (albeit nearly impossible to tell state of charge!) since you only need to target a pretty narrow voltage band.
Overall, that means sodium-ion has to be even cheaper to be competitive, and it makes even less sense in areas where power density matters like electric cars, as you’ll end up with far less power and/or needing much heavier motors and more expensive electronics to compensate when on the lower end of charge.
I don’t want to think of what it would cost to do a 100kw buck-boost power supply that can handle +- 25% (or more!) voltage differences. In reality, I don’t think anyone would try.
If it's suitable for sedans it's actually more suitable for SUVs. SUVs require less power per cubic feet of space. So there is more space available for them, even if they take more energy overall
such strange unit of measurement. cubic feet of space. especially for civilian transport when most of the time no one uses that space. i mean most of the time its one person per car without any baggage. what's important is weight of the car. and i bet suv is heavier than sedans.
There are multiple variables, claiming weight is important is wrong.
Volume is important because the more volume the more space there is for batteries.
Aerodynamics is important because at common highway speeds this is the dominate energy cost. This is a factor that goes up by the square of speed, so at low speeds it doesn't matter but at high speeds it does.
Weight is least important because it has a linear change and is a small factor in efficiency.
There are real safety concerns with SUVs, but their larger size means there is more space for batteries and so they can overall go farther then a Sedan in normal driving despite the other costs.
I've tried to express SUV's as in American SUVs - full sized 7 seat monstrosity. Most EV SUVs right now are crossovers, i.e. Model Y. Cybertruck is closest approximation and it uses nearly 2x more power than Model Y. Even with ~most advanced batteries people still think Cybertruck's range is way too little whereas I'm pretty certain majority of Model Y's sold are LFPs.
What? How does an SUV require less power per cf than a sedan? I would think that aero alone would always be worse for an SUV, making sedans more efficient.
I think he means less power per total overall volume of the vehicle. SUVs are certainly less efficient per mile, but their power requirements don't scale linearly with volume so you have a lot more "extra" room to place batteries, even if it is still entirely within the frame. So you can get away with less space efficient batteries.
Drag scales by frontal area (and the coefficient of drag tends to actually be lower on longer objects), so as long as the SUV is longer than a sedan, it'll tend to have less aerodynamic drag proportionally (rolling resistance scales with weight, though, so you still have to pay that cost).
I think CATL is promoting a hybrid pack of LFP and Sodium that would give you the cheapness and density of LFP, but with maybe 30% Sodium that you could use for a quick partial charge, and could also be used when the car is cold-soaked. Once you drive for a while, the whole pack gets warmed up and you can use the LFP.
Bjorn managed to get couple cars in coldgate condition - so cold and such low SOC that it's just not enough power to heat up battery and now you going highway at 60 km/h. IDK, maybe just a software fix, maybe an edge case, but it can happen.
I think it is fairly likely that sodium catches LFP in the ~5 year timeframe since sodium has a lot more promise for grid scale storage since it has no expensive materials.
It still does have expensive materials (cheaper form of graphite), but a little bit less of it, namely lithium and there's something else I can't remember.
I am not sure honestly about the negative temperature. Sure it can be a problem in extreme colds but most of the world does not live in those climates.
I wouldn't equate solid state batteries with fusion power. Solid state batteries do exist and work well, they are just very expensive. Meanwhile fusion power is still entirely within the experimental stage and there are no fusion plant prototypes that can produce power at any price.
It’s always 20 years away until it isn’t. Self driving cars are…I guess they are here already. AGI? Well, we have to move the goal post on that constantly.
Self driving cars have had many incremental improvements. I think fusion power is actually making progress, not clear about solid state batteries. Seems more companies closing than making solid progress.
Fusion is one of those things that will probably not be done in my lifetime (the hype cycle on that has been forever, remember cold fusion from U of Utah?). I'm much more optimistic about solid state batteries.
But, the real issue seems to be that fusion has a large nuclear waste problem. Ironically, probably more so than fission reactors. It can be fixed, but probably not in first gen reactors. However there are companies pushing designs that solve it already
If by here I meant planet Earth I think it is well qualified. Yes, they aren't using self driving car tech for ice trucking during winter down from Purdhoe Bay yet (another form of goal post moving), but the biggest challenges have already been solved and only capital and societal barriers remain.
I think it depends on what you mean by big challenges. City driving is maybe the easiest 80% of driving. There’s a long tail of odd challenges you run into in less controlled environments, and I’d call that the biggest challenge.
I think city driving is the worst — people popping out from nowhere, roads that shouldn’t be but are because they have always been. Suburban and highways seem easiest.
In the hills of LA you have sharp blind corners where people have installed public fisheye mirrors to help you see around, then you have crazy people in Hollywood throwing furniture in front of your car, and non-stop traffic and people passing on the wrong side of the road between blocks even when there is a median, school kids and crossing guards, emergency vehicles trying to through and people doing otherwise illegal things to help get out of the way…
I'm an avoid motorcyclist and have followed additional safety courses. These placed 90% of all accidents in cities. What do you mean by city driving being the easiest?
In a city, you'll never have to worry about the "road" you're supposed to follow being a dirt track that barely looks different than the muddy fields on either side.
In a city (especially in SoCal and the American Southwest, which is, AIUI, where all the self-driving cars are today), you can be nearly certain that the various mapping companies have accurately plotted the roads and destinations, and if you're trying to get to a popular Finger Lakes winery, you won't be directed down a limited-use seasonal road that's entirely covered in ice.
In a city, you can be pretty well guaranteed that there are speed limit signs anywhere the speed limit actually changes.
Just off the top of my head, as someone who's lived 40 years in the rural Northeast.
Wouldn’t ice trucking be in that long tail? I mean, ya, there are lot of niche cases that companies like Waymo haven’t worked on yet, but…the money is in the cities so that’s where they start. Interstate trucking might come next, ice trucking might be one of the last use cases covered.
Anyways we’ve gone from “this won’t happen in our lifetime!” to “it doesn’t handle X niche use case yet.”
Solid state batteries seem to work, but the price of prototypes is very high. Samsung says they will soon be shipping earbuds and watches with solid state batteries, but the cost is too high even for phones. Xaomi showed an $800 phone battery.
Mercedes has one prototype car with solid state batteries. Honda has one motorcycle. EHang has one flying car. Nobody seems to be past one-off demos.
If your source on that is a Toyota press release, take it with a huge grain of (lithium) salt.
Toyota has been saying similar things for a very long time. But they continue to make extremely poor bets, except for their hybrids. There's something really odd about their management culture that prevents them from finding the common and easy path of lithium ion batteries that everybody has already taken.
Yes it was that plus iirc another by Nissan as well. One site reported Chinese are walking back on some of the more optimistic claims and now it's 2030+ not next 2 years. By then I guess Na ones will be old news.
I too felt Japs were taking EV quite casually pushing all others but I wouldn't underestimate their ability to move once they decide that's what it is. They have the same concept as China, move as one nation but much higher tech depth
Btw anyone ever heard of those fuel cell ones? Toshiba hyped it like you slot in a fuel cartridge and have months of use etc.
Toyota's CEO and upper management seemed to be oddly fixated on hydrogen powered cars for a very long time. I think it was just in the last 2-3 years where they finally gave up and started looking at BEVs.
If it's not like those rare earth ( or watch movement saga with Swatch) that China will simply refuse to supply to other OEM, old car makers like Ford, Toyota with brand image and solid engg in rest of car making can just buy. Maybe that's their thinking?
Bonus if there's leap frog tech that obsolete all the CATL investments..
Those false supply chain concerns really only work within the right wing US political milieu. "Rare earth" with batteries really only works with the Republican set of propaganda.
I'm sure Toyota management has their own set of false beliefs about supply concerns, or perhaps about competitive edges, or perhaps about biases towards fluid fuels.
I still find it borderline criminal that a few nations continue to be ruled by the hegemony of the automobile market. EVs have a place in the world. But there should be ten times fewer of them, because we should have cheap and plentiful public transit for most of our transportation needs. How long will we simply sit and wait for that future, complacent and docile? When will we do what's necessary to progress our society? (if we ever do)
> How long will we simply sit and wait for that future, complacent and docile?
The people who don't want to sit and wait have bought personal vehicles. Mass transit can be great, but when it isn't, there's no sense of agency. At least with a personal vehicle, if it's not working, I can try to fix it or get it to someone who is more likely to be able to fix it.
When transit isn't running, I just have to wait. If it can't get me to where I want to go in a reasonable time, sucks to be me. If my stop is removed from service, I guess I better move.
In the last year, the number of times my car owning friends have not been able to make it to an event because their car is broken is surprisingly high. While I have never not been able to get somewhere because public transport is not working. If the train is down I can take the tram, if somehow both of them are down there will be replacement busses scheduled.
And if somehow everything stops working I can book an uber which is still massively cheaper than owning a car.
> While I have never not been able to get somewhere because public transport is not working.
Oh man, when I first moved to Austin and used the bus as my only method of transport, getting to work was usually straightforward, but whenever I wanted to go somewhere on the weekend, I prepared for the fact that there'd be a detour around downtown, where I normally make my transfer. I'd have to get off the bus somewhere new and try to figure out where to catch the bus for the next leg.
There were also a few occasions where there was over an hour between the "every 30 minutes" bus. Rare, but it happened. Buses naturally tend to clump together, so they need careful, intentional management to prevent this.
Public transit is great, and we need more, but it's not as reliable as I'd like. Cars are far more reliable, at least for moderately wealthy people who can afford to buy new-ish and keep them well-maintained. Bikes, too, if you're able to bike in rain and snow. (I ended up switching to almost 100% bike travel after about three years, and just kept a change of clothes at work, and at least dry socks, shirt, and underwear in my bag. Spare pants added too much bulk to lug around.)
This is all highly dependant on the specific city. In Melbourne, Australia trains to the city during work hours are around every 5 minutes, dropping to around 15 minutes for off peak. Going to work by train is faster than driving.
Buses that share roads with general traffic are always the worst solution and should really only be a temporary option to cover for downtime on rail.
Modern cars tend to be very reliable in the early years. As they get older they get less reliable. I suspect your friends issue was budget, they were not willing (likely able) to spend the money needed to have a reliable car)
My coworkers car is still in its warranty period and just suffered an engine issue that is going to take ~5 weeks to resolve and would have cost $10,000 if it wasn’t otherwise covered.
You know what would solve that sitting and waiting? More public transit. I know the American public isn't the sharpest tool in the shed, but we can introduce them to the concept of better, faster public transit, like other nations have. (And having enough money to buy a car + being impatient/unwilling to schedule your time shouldn't be a license to make society worse)
Public transport is only efficient at scale, requires up front investment, and carries lots of assumptions about population density and other aspects remaining static. Then it doesn't work for whole categories of people (families with small kids, etc) especially because it fundamentally just can't do the "last mile", pretty much ever.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's great for mass transit, but I can't wait to see the future with autonomous vehicles arrive, especially if they can cooperate in centralised networks to optimise traffic flows. I'd love to step off the train into a capsule that then whisks me home.
I take my small kids on public transit often. Why can't kids ride a bus or a train? Don't we even have special forms of mass transit for little kids (school busses?)
How are cars better with little kids? If I'm in the car with my kids and one kid suddenly really wants a snack, there's nothing I can do. They're strapped in the back, I'm in the front driving. On the train, I just grab a snack from my bag and give them a bite. Or if they're bored I can play with them, etc.
> it fundamentally just can't do the "last mile", pretty much ever.
I live in a suburb in North Texas. I walk out my door with the stroller and my kids. There's a bus stop super close by that can easily load a stroller (all busses are wheelchair accessible). I take that to the train station or the bus goes to the library or several other parks and rec centers. The train stops a very short walk to several museums, the convention center, the airport, the zoo has its own train station, the hockey/basketball arena has its own stop, etc. And this is all in an area where the mass transit isn't even that great.
The transit doesn't go everywhere we want to go. I agree that's the biggest pain point. But I truly don't understand the logic that it's bad for kids. My kids ride often, and they love it. What kid hates trains?
It's actually more efficient at scale, because it increases the economy at a lower cost. Poor or rural communities can be connected to more places with jobs, schools, etc. Those people can then grow more capital by not having to pay for expensive personal transportation. Meaning more people working, making money, contributing that money back to the economy, less cost to things like ERs, crime, etc. It lifts up the whole society, so it costs much less in real terms.
The last mile has more options than ever. E-bikes, sit-on scooters, golf carts, or that crazy trend of "walking" that I hear is good for your health. There's even the option for smaller, local mini-buses to serve the elderly and disabled. Those same vehicles could be combined with other services, like postal mail, food delivery (for elderly/disabled/infirm).
Where I live in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, we have the mini-bus to serve vulnerable people. The mail is delivered by local people with Subarus and Jeeps. But there's no other public transit. The closest thing to it is a charter bus, which only runs through a town 45 minutes from here, once a week. There's thousands of people out here, disconnected from the rest of society. And they're poor, so the few vehicles they have are always falling apart, and mechanics shops are always full. There is a taxi service in a nearby town (45mins away), and it has a 1.5 out of 5 star rating, because no alternatives means you have no choice but to deal with how terrible they are.
Autonomous vehicles are a good idea, but it's unlikely they will pan out in the long term, unless via "corporate welfare" or similar funding. The cost to develop, maintain, insure, etc them is just way more expensive than a dude in a driver's seat. They are being floated by SV money in rich cities; they won't scale.
The Scottish Government provides free at the point of use bus service for under-22s. I wish we could have had that 25 years ago when I first moved here. As it is, it's an ideal way for the teens to get around and makes it the sensible option when taking children into the city during the daytime.
Driving is prohibitively expensive for young people, and in the UK you can't drive cars on public roads until you're 17.
> Then it doesn't work for whole categories of people (families with small kids, etc) especially because it fundamentally just can't do the "last mile", pretty much ever.
That's bullshit. My whole childhood I went everywhere by train and bus. You can walk the last mile if the bus stop isn't close enough to where you need to go.
I know some (embarrassingly rich) countries are incapable of designing a halfway decent public transit system, but the problem isn't with public transit itself.
America used to have fairly everpresent public transport. Every city, including tiny ones, had public transport because the very concept of industrialization requires cities with lots of people in a small area that can easily get to work.
This absurd notion that it "doesn't make sense" for america is propaganda. Not only does it make plenty of sense in America, it was essential to the development of America!
We had robust, reliable, used by everyone public transport before we had trains! Our local agricultural fair shows off horse drawn busses that used to run in a microscopic but 300 year old agricultural community every single year! They even had instructions about how to behave to not upset the poor woman sitting next to your dirty worker self!
Public transport was essential to the north being industrialized enough to defeat the south in the civil war. Every former mill town in new england had robust public transport to keep the mills full of labor.
It was only with significant lobbying and marketing from GM and Ford that America suddenly decided that all this public transport infrastructure that we had for generations "doesn't make sense here" and they even helped rip it all up!
Read a history book.
It's frankly laughable. If public transport "didn't work" in the US, we would never have been able to industrialize before the car. But we did. We did it before the train
Its laughable to think the cities of America in 2025 still look the same and function the same as the cities of America in 1925. "Cities" weren't nearly as sparsely populated and highly zoned as many suburbs are these days. You didn't have neighborhoods with seemingly fractal patterns of roads ending in cul-de-sacs the size of several city blocks with only a couple entrances and exits like what seems to be common these days. The average American urban household in 1920 didn't live on a quarter acre lot multiple miles away from the nearest food source. So yeah, there were streetcar suburbs as well as the denser city apartments and rowhouses, they were largely grid patterns with a major boulevard. They didn't sprawl anywhere near as far. They weren't nearly as insulated.
> Every city, including tiny ones, had public transport
I can point to dozens of cities around me that never had actual public transportation throughout their entire history, and that's just a small part that I happen to know off-hand. Few places actually had any kind of real public transit.
Rural communities often still had an expectation of some amount of private transportation accessible. What, are you really tiling the soil by hand? No, you've got horses.
Look, I'm not saying public transportation can't happen in the US today. Obviously it can. There are lots of places where it does today. There are even more places that could have it tomorrow if the voters decided to do so. There are also lots of places that require quite a bit of urban redesign to actually make transit make sense for those communities.
I'll give you an example. I used to know someone who worked in Dallas, around I-635 and US-75[0]. They lived someplace like this. [1] How does public transit serve this person effectively? How would you have a bus service with both decent ridership and good service times in a town like Forney here, while not just having the bus snake through the mazes of neighborhoods? How do you convince someone to ride the bus to work when its probably going to have poor service intervals, require multiple changes, and ultimately likely to take considerably more time than the average day in the car?
Then copy and paste that same issue hundreds of times over. How does transit make sense in Seis Lagos or the rest of Lucas for that matter? [2] These people likely work in West Plano or Dallas. How do you convince them to take the bus?
If it's just the free market then why do we need to regulate single family zoning across the United States? And why can't the suburbs pay for their own infrastructure?
Suburbs do pay for their infrastructure. Strongtowns keeps spreading the myth that they can't, but the numbers they use don't add up. They choose not to pay for transit because they don't need it.
A lot of people prefer living in financially affordable environments, and in a functioning market, dense towns/cities will always be more affordable unless you literally work on a farm.
Everyone prefers to live in a giant sprawling mansion (with personal private forest) in the middle of the CBD. But preference is useless data unless it includes their pricetag preference too.
> dense towns/cities will always be more affordable
In my experience, that isn't true. At the very least, it depends on what your preferences are. If I moved my home from outside Austin to inside the city, I couldn't afford it.
Densifying a city will make it cheaper than if we don't densify, but we usually densify because of high prices, so high density correlates with high prices despite being a counter-force against it.
And, yeah, living in a dense city definitely tends to cost more than the suburbs, especially per-square-foot. There might be exceptions (high crime urban areas with wealthy suburbs), but you're usually getting a pretty nice house in that suburb.
Density is more expensive. Not just because of demand for the area (though that doesn't help), but because density requires different building methods. Your single family house can be built so cheaply because it doesn't have to support the weight of many floors above; nor does it need to be fireproof because in the rare fire you can evacuate. (density means more people are displaced, fires are more likely, and longer distances to get away)
Density is also more expensive because higher costs are worth it. A rural area cannot afford things like library in walking distance of every farmer (every farmer would have to pay for a personal librarian), but in a dense area it is only a couple bucks for each one - but that all adds up to hundreds of dollars in extra costs that less dense areas do without. (you decide if it is worth the cost)
Speaking as a big fan and avid user of public transit, I say: not gonna happen in many places.
Public transit works in densely populated areas, like in NYC where I live. Digging and operating a tunnel costs a lot, and only pays for itself if you can run many trains with many passengers, who live close enough to their nearest station. Buses are less expensive (though still are expensive), and require a driver per 50-100 passengers, not per 2000.
As long as many people prefer to live in suburbia (which may technically be considered a part of a city, like in Houston), they are going to use cars (or technically trucks), because it's the most economical way to get around. As long as the destination of their travel is not an utterly dense area that does not require a car (like commuting from NJ to lower Manhattan), people won't leave their cars mid-way and change for a train or a bus.
It's not the car lobby. It's people wanting to live quite separately from their neighbors, in detached houses that they fully own. Or maybe cities that enforce low density for a number of reasons (mostly NIMBYs who want to keep the price of their house and land high).
Suburbs are dense enough to support transit as proven in a small number of cities around the world (mostly not English speaking). However suburbs can only support great transit, since anything less and driving is enough better as to be worth it.
NYC has a real cost problem. Digging a tunnel costs a lot - not anywhere near what it costs in NYC. You can also build bridges over the top for a lot less than digging a tunnel. Modern subways should be 100% automated saving the cost of a driver. (I keep hoping we see self driving buses since drivers are the large share of the costs)
NYC tunnels have outsized cost, but even tunnels that cost 10% of that would not be cheap. Most of the NYC subway was built quickly and relatively cheaply by digging trenches and covering them later, not by boring tunnels. NYC used to use elevated trains a lot, and still has plenty of those outside Manhattan, but they have other downsides, such as noise.
NYC subway has two drivers per train due to the trade union resistance. Very understandable, even though not really necessary.
Self-driving buses could be also remotely driven in situations that require special handling, by a smaller number of drivers.
As usual, it mostly takes a political will, the technology is not rocket science; one of the poster kids of that is Curitiba in Brazil.
BloombergNEF has over the years proven to have pretty solid forecasts. The current one about NEVs [1] has a few interesting points. Adoption of EVs is slowing down in the US due to policy changes but going to explode in countries like Vietnam because they are cheeper to buy an run. It is not BMWs and Mercs but Chinese brands.
In Europe and the US the Chinese EVs are kept outside with the help of tariffs but that is just closing the eyes to avoid facing the inevitability. Battery technology, production and raw materials is all China.
Last not least Europe is driving up KWh costs by an ideologically driven push for renewables which also doesn't help.
Renewables (especially wind) are now just about the cheapest way to generate electricity, and new battery technologies do much to help with their intermittency, so where’s the problem?
(Plus, the ‘ideology’ in question would seem to be: it’s bad to fry the planet, and also bad to run even a small risk of radioactively contaminating one’s landmass, and IMHO neither of these positions deserves to be called an ideology).
> Renewables (especially wind) are now just about the cheapest way to generate electricity, and new battery technologies do much to help with their intermittency, so where’s the problem?
The basics of economics are:
- market price is a function of supply and demand
- storage costs money
- distribution costs money.
- perishable goods a finicky in highly volatile markets
- CAPEX costs money
- businesses will try to maximise the difference between price and costs
Yet you know all this as you are a professor of economics in the UK. So how comes that the UK has the highest industry KWh prices in Europe? There must be an absolutely fantastic opportunity to make money and investors should be like vultures grabbing new projects for renewables.
Just the other day I read news that in Germany perfectly well functioning wind turbines are being turned down because they have reached the end of the phase of guaranteed KWh prices. So are the owners crazy and throwing money away? No, they simply do the business calculations and if the math doesn't play out, they simply remove them and build new ones with new subsidies.
The latest auction from the German gov for a new field in the baltic sea didn't even find one bidder.
China is doing lots of renewables but they calculate it down to the penny.
So yes, as you say "Renewables (especially wind) are now just about the cheapest way to generate electricity". To generate yes. But you need lots of CAPEX to store it and to distribute it. And you can not work with a 95%ile. You need 100% in any developed economy.
Despite marginal cost pricing it not interesting for investors without subsidies.
Old wind turbines might be perfectly fine but they are also no longer competitive with modern replacements. Usually it does make sense to replace them with more modern alternatives. Subsidies have gotten very low because carbon credits are now a much more important way for renewables to boost their income (most negative prices reflect that).
Offshore wind is facing the challenge that it is more expensive than onshore wind and also that solar is having a day with ever decreasing prices. Governments are trying hard to minimize the cost of the energy transition, offshore is primarily hurting because of this.
> Old wind turbines might be perfectly fine but they are also no longer competitive with modern replacements. Usually it does make sense to replace them with more modern alternatives.
I would just for once love to see a calculation for this. There have been no advancements in generator technology nor in blade technology. Generators in power stations have a life time of many decades. A third of the 31000 German wind turbines will be put down because of the end of subsidies.
Also subsidising solar power in the north of Germany makes no sense - for months there is no solar in winter but in summer solar adds to the already massive surplus of energy from offshore wind. It is a waste of money. If you believe that global warming is a problem (which I agree with) then the money should be put to efficient use.
There's a thriving second hand market for wind turbines.
Similar to EV discussions a lot of motivated reasoning seems to assume that these items are disposed of in a black hole or set on fire in a school playground after a few years to try to equalize the damage done by combustion alternatives.
In reality people are spending tens or hundreds of thousands to buy these used turbines because they have value.
I've not seen full calculations for wind but I assume they exist. I've read ones for solar which calculate replacing panels in a farm after 17 years and landfilling the old ones is still ecologically positive because the extra generation of the new panels would pay off.
Obviously this only gets better if you resell or recycle the old panels instead.
Sounds like you think renewables aren't cheaper. It is hard to tell, but we have a natural experiment going on in Australia that may shed some light.
The state of South Australia (SA) has no coal or gas, and is a long way from anywhere so importing those fuels are expensive. The eastern states live on a sea of coal and gas, exporting a huge amounts of it overseas.
Historically the price of electricity SA has always been more expensive than elsewhere. When renewables became an option, SA enthusiastically adopted them. Prices went up even more for a while presumable because of the CAPEX in building the renewable infrastructure. For a while SA, had the largest grid battery on the planet (others are now bigger), which is a little surprising for a place with a population of just 1.8M. Right over a year they average about 80% of renewable. From what I can tell the balance is supplied by gas peakers. They say they will be 100% renewable by 2027. SA is now paying about £0.20 / kWh retail.
SA transition happened over 2 decades. For the most of those two decades the eastern Australian states governments did mostly nothing, which is to say their coal fired power stations just kept chugging along. They couldn't do exactly nothing because the population is growing and they needed new supply. The cheapest way to add that was with renewables, filling in any gaps with more expensive gas peakers. The Federal government helped by subsidising solar. For the most of those 2 decades SA was transitioning impact of renewables in the eastern states was small, so their electricity prices remained stable while SA's went up. But it didn't stay that way.
Renewables contribution kept growing. Solar in particular accelerated. The Federal subsidies were designed to gradually reduce to 0 by 2030, but the impact of those reducing subsidies were more than offset by solar panel prices reducing. What those subsidies did do is train a generation of tradesmen on how to install them efficiently, and so Australia despite its high wages now has one of the cheapest installation costs for household solar. The end result of all that is now Australia has the highest penetration of household solar in the world, supplying well over 50% of demand when the sun is shining.
It turns out the renewables are free market poison for coal fired power plants. The coal plants were designed to make a profit by operating for 24 hours a day. Solar now reduces the wholesale price of electricity to $0 for 8 hours a day. Those wind installs intermittently rob them of income overnight. Compounding the problem is governments privatised the coal fired power plants while they were at mid life, priced on the basis of selling power for 24 hours. Presumably the logic was to sell them off while they were still making money, so the public purse could avoid shoulder the huge CAPEX of replacing them when the time came. But the introduction of renewables means they now aren't making money, so their private operators are shutting them down before their anticipated EOL has been reached, which has caused a mad scramble to replace the lost generation.
As the eastern states still have a low'ish penetration of renewables, the cheapest option to replace those coal fired generators is yet more renewables, supplemented with yet more gas peakers. The CAPEX needed to do that has created it's own crisis of sorts, so now the price of electricity in eastern states has reached parity with SA for the first time in history. Meanwhile the electricity produced by gas peakers is comparatively expensive, so expensive that with a little nudge it's cheaper for a household to buy a battery so they don't have to purchase gas electricity. The Federal government has just stepped in to provide that nudge, with a 30% subsidy (also gradually sun setting by 2030, I think). I'm not sure it was needed a wholesale battery prices dropped by 30% last year, but the publicity sure focused a lot of household owners minds on how to reduce their electricity bill. That has lead to an explosion of new battery installs and yet more solar, and a chronic shortage of installers which is amazing given the size of the solar industry in Australia.
If the price of solar and batteries keep dropping then the outcome looks to me that household solar + batteries will replace coal as the major supplier of electricity in Australia. Gas peakers will continue on for a while, but their high price means eventually renewables plus over provisioning plus storage will wipe them out. We've yet to figure out what we can do with all the excess but unreliable power that over provisioning will produce, but there are any number of entrepreneurs trying to figure out how they can make money out of it by producing ammonia, hydrogen and metallurgical refining.
SA will get there well before anyone else. If their own estimates are accurate, by 2028. Their continuing CAPEX will be mostly done at that point, and I guess their inflation adjusted electricity prices will start dropping. They may well have the lowest prices for electricity in mainland Australia for a while.
Frying the planet is bad. That said i don't see the reliance argument for uranium. There's a variety of existing sources on the planet and some we stopped mining. It's proportionally a super small financial element of the energy production process unlike with fossil fuels.
So in the case of let's say Putin's Russia you can avoid using their or let's say Kazakhstan's fuel and if you don't but don't take it's gas directly or via intermediaries like armenia then Russia still ends up in the financial shitter because their income from Rosatom/uranium one/... doesn't even compare.
It's almost inviting anti renewables arguments based on things like aluminium mostly being produced in china and russia or based on where the vast majority of panels are produced, etc.
Include it and it's still cheaper than, say, nuclear.
Also ... even when storage is included, you still gain freedom from opex spending for fuel (that is, lining oily pockets). Once there, renewables are "pure payoff".
Chiming in as Australian with no context on European situation. AFAICT the key drivers of cost inflation are to do with reconfiguring the electric grid to transfer power efficiently and reliably from plants that produce renewable energy. However, the grid is set up to do so from non-renewable sources. And you want to do it while smoothly operating the network. This is extremely hard. Doing so quickly therefore elevates prices. That’s the rationale I could imagine being the case in EU markets.
It's not that simple. For example, in the The Netherlands, the use of electricity was stable for a long time. Mostly because all kinds of equipment (light bulbs, etc) got more efficient.
Grid operators predicted that with the energy transition, demand would rise, but politics wanted to keep prices low and limited investments.
So now, there is a big problem in the entire country connecting companies or new residential areas to the grid independent of how electricity is generated.
At the same time, the government is extremely forward looking and builds massive interconnection points on the North-Sea. Not a bad idea in the long run, but in the short run it does make electricity from wind on sea more expensive.
That said, the biggest hit to EU countries is that cheap natural gas disappeared. Coal is not cheap and extremely polluting. Natural gas was cheap for a while. Until it wasn't.
The European situation is a bit more complicated. It was very well known for a long time that Russia is a ticking time bomb in our backyard yet we made ourselves nearly dependent on their energy supplies and now combined with the push for renewables (which in my opinion is the right thing to do) we have a crisis.
Now there are also lot of countries in the EU with different priorities, so while in theory we could build long-range HVDC connections across borders, it is very hard to do.
more like "it's bad to fry the planet so we will destroy our economy for 0.001% impact while the real impacters continue to advance and leave us in the dust"
It's not just Vietnam. It's almost any country anywhere in the world that is seeing healthy growth in EVs. Especially the ones that barely have a road network or a petrol distribution network.
This is an effect that is still underappreciated in western markets but developing markets embracing renewables and EVs means they are enabling some serious economic growth. They are eliminating chunks of fossil fuel imports from their balance sheet while enabling economic activity in areas that have poor grid coverage and limited access to fuel.
Pakistan is a good example. They have a very under developed grid. Solar and battery storage are enabling the locals to work around that and they have installed a lot of that in recent years. This is enabling local businesses that previously had very poor access to reliably power to now have reliable power and grow. The Pakistan government is also putting in place incentives to stimulate EV imports.
Ethiopia is going a lot further and has actually banned ICE car imports last year. They want to reduce the amount of fossil fuel imports on their balance sheets.
> Ethiopia is going a lot further and has actually banned ICE car imports last year. They want to reduce the amount of fossil fuel imports on their balance sheets.
My understanding is that they are more concerned about oil shipping as they are landlocked and the situation in the gulf of aden is less than ideal.
So you buy a battery for your tiny grid island and pay a little more so that you can also use for a drive? Or perhaps not even more, because the standalone battery is less mass market item.
Truly an interesting change, considering how much of the ICE market used to be hand-me-downs from more industrialized countries. I guess proximity to those is now a hindrance to the renewable revolution, because places with less access to hand-me-downs have a market (and mindset!) for low-priced new cars that never existed in places flooded with second hand cars? Will the upmarket-first kind of BEV ever work in that way?
Electricity costs in the UK (which I believe is still in Europe) are cheaper now than they've ever been if you have the right tariff and that's all due to renewables. Granted, that's primarily at night, but for EVs that's perfect.
One can get a tariff at <7p/kWh for 6 hours in the night. That's cheaper than gas (actual gas, not gasoline).
If that’s Octopus Intelligent Go, then it will also give you the 7p rate outside the normal nighttime slot if the car is charging and their algo calculates they can do it.
Renewables definitely help and I think the UK is doing quite well there but it's a little disingenuous to not even mention the price cap that the government has imposed!
The price applies to default tariff so it is a price that is always available to customers. This means other non-default tariffs like the one you linked have to compete with the flat rate of 26p/kWh.
The tariff you linked is much more expensive than the price cap for most people because most people don't have huge batteries for energy storage. Battery energy storage is worth money so essentially you are getting cheaper energy by selling that storage value to Good Energy. Overall the total value you get from Good Energy (taking into account the value of having storage) is going to be about the same as the value with the price cap and no storage.
Because the tariffs are competing, if all energy retailers were able to raise their prices to their true cost, then it would be all tariffs that increase in price; not just the ones that the cap applies to.
This is similar to why electricity prices went up when there was a gas shortage due to the Ukraine war. Everyone was like "but it's a gas shortage not an electricity shortage!". But of course electricity and gas are in competition in many cases (e.g. for heating), so their prices are linked by shared demand.
If you still aren't convinced, imagine the energy price cap was 1p/kWh. What do you think would happen to the price of EV tariffs then? (For a few weeks until the entire energy retail sector collapsed anyway!)
There's always going to be excess supply at night, because demand is lower. At the moment the difference is large because battery capacity is low, but even as more batteries come online, it will stay lower because battery capacity will respond to the differential (since that's where the profit is). What's interesting is domestic battery installation is so cheap that you can capture almost all the benefits as a private buyer.
FWIW Good Energy are outside the price cap on their standard tariff as well. You don't have to do that many miles for the EV tariff to pay off without any additional storage.
It is not an ideological push, but one driven by the necessity to fight climate change.
Maybe it is ideology to emphasize renewables over nuclear. But all over the world the energy transition seems to involve primarily renewables and only maybe a dash of nuclear.
For many years (20+?) Vietnam has had huge import tariffs on US/German/etc cars. It varies by origin country and engine displacement, but it's around 75% to 175%. Some trade agreements with other Asian countries result in much more reasonable tariffs for Asian brands, but some rich Vietnamese people have bought BMW or Merc with 150%+ tariff/tax. (I found it a bit mind-blowing.) So, it's pretty obvious why Asian made EVs are expected to "explode" in popularity over there. (I'm pretty sure the trend is already well underway, I know a retired guy there who replaced a Merc with a hybrid Mitsubishi (?) last year.)
But this is 2022? By now the dust must have settled. Anyone that wanted to copy and use likely planned out before they expired and got moving once it did?
Who owned these key LFP patents? It was not clearly laid out in the article which countries owned them, let alone which companies.
If they were owned by Chinese companies, then is there some faint hope that Western companies can finally start making EVs that are no longer embarrassingly inferior to their Chinese counterparts?
A foundational research team in a Canadian university in Quebec, if I recall correctly. They licenced these patents to the Chinese companies royalty free when used the Chinese domestic market. The Chinese spent the time developing LFP to where it's now a bleeding edge of batteries, while practically no-one else was interested.
In a retaliatory fight over the EVs, in October 2025, the CCP issued a ban on transfer of advanced technology for LFP batteries, and battery manufacturing equipment.
I've talked to people from that very lab at the Université de Montréal many years ago, before the parent expired.
The IP was licensed by Hydro-Quebec first, and some of it was also held by UT. A123 was a US company manufacturing LFP batteries in 2005 in infringement of the patents.
A123, Hydro-Quebec, UT spent 15 years suing each other (and also suing BAK technology in China and other companies that used the technology), complete with secondary patents, etc...
Hydro-Quebec actually was producing LFP batteries commercially, along with an EV program. Those ventures were cancelled, in no small part because of the political issues when Canadian SoEs compete with American businesses (but also for other reasons). HQ is restarting the LFP manufacturing program now, though, through a new spinoff.
Anyways, this is not like Nortel at all - we had two decades of a headstart and we didn't give the license to Chinese companies until quite a few years later. A big part of the issue is because an American company violated the IP, then filed secondary pattents and tried to get the originals invalidated, which led to a huge legal battle strongly discouraging investment. There was really no mistake done in licensing it to Chinese companies.
I really wish we could get Chinese EVs in the US. They’re very aesthetically appealing, have great performance and specs, and cost only $20-30k. I think there should be a modest tariff on them that doesn’t kill US manufacturers but makes it so they have to actually compete.
They have the same problem the U.S. EV's have: sketchy spyware software. Make everyone honest and open up the code / let people write their own code, and then let the true market rule.
U.S. don't want the Chinese cars collecting data, but they're content with U.S. ones doing it.
LFP is a nice chemistry but I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-titanate_battery is the future. There is still the power density issue but that's improving steadily. The thing that really sells me on this is the speed with which you can charge the cells.
There was some kind of patent shenanigans about a decade ago around LFP.
I'm not sure if China invalidated dodgy patents or threatened to and got a good deal (or some combination) but I think LFP in China escaped a lot of patent fees as long as they were sold in China. This probably partly explains the regional nature of LFP success so further expiries might help the rest of the world catch up on LFP prices and adoption.
> EU regulations requiring lithium-ion batteries to contain at least 6% recycled lithium by 2031, rising to 12% by 2036.
Seriously?
The EU should aim for massive growth in battery deployment in transportation and grid storage. If they hope for, say, 10x growth in deployed battery capacity within a time frame comparable to the lifespan of a battery, then even a 100% recycling rate would not produce enough lithium.
I suppose people could recycle batteries just to produce new batteries and acquire recycling credits, but this is absurd.
It will probably amount to recycling credit schemes I am sure. But that would definitely boost lithium recycling efforts.
From memory over 1million disposable vapes are thrown away each day, from 500 of the bigger cell vapes a Youtuber was able build a home battery to power his house. I don't think 100% recycled makes sense but there sure is a lot of lithium getting thrown into the bin. Incentives to recapture that are good.
That's 730k households in a year. Cool but since these batteries will probably die within a year, then you are only able to cover 1.5 million people or so. I am not against it, but 1.5m in 8b is a drop in the ocean.
The idea was just to illustrate how much lithium there is getting thrown away, I think the better option is recycling the lithium in the cells into re-usable raw material.
this would be a tragedy if it leads to recycling batteries that could be repurposed, say 100kwh car batteries with decreased range that could have become 60kwh residential batteries.
I say as an electrician that car batteries have limited use. Chinese residential batteries can be installed by me alone. Even 40-60 kWh modular ones. Car battery needs forklift and every model has different interface. Economically sourcing used cells to build batteries also makes no sense. So either recycling or repair to continue using it as car battery.
Imagine a world without patents and tariffs. Imagine a world where companies can freely compete (no patents) and, most importantly, *have* to (no tariffs).
What? Patents have been a non-issue for LFP batteries, and the original LFP patents are almost useless today. All the new advances that made LFPs competitive are still well-protected by patents, for at least another decade.
Sorry we handicapped ourselves and are now complaining about a competitor? Seems silly. The west made this tech unusable. I was building ebikes in 2006/7 and A123 was entirely unavailable unless you went and salvaged power tool packs.
They never became available at a competitive price, and then China bought the rights....
Now I can buy them in bulk as a consumer for 1/15th the price.
Our system is not meant for innovation by small players or consumers. We want tech easily locked away behind a contract.
The total lithium battery patent licensing market is estimated at less than 600 million USD a year. This is approximately nothing, given that the overall battery market is estimated at about $200B.
The pace of innovation is furious, and companies are treating patents more as a way to ensure MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) rather than as a tool to get income.
I think we'll start seeing the first large lawsuits once the losers start realizing that they lost the innovation race.
> The total lithium battery patent licensing market is estimated at less than 600 million USD a year.
This is often because someone holds an important patent but either isn't licensing it to others because they're actually manufacturing it (implying they're holding back everyone else in the market), or they're asking too much and then almost everyone uses the existing technology instead of licensing the patent, again holding things back. As soon as the patent expires everyone starts using it.
> The pace of innovation is furious, and companies are treating patents more as a way to ensure MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) rather than as a tool to get income.
This is often even worse, because then you have a hundred companies with patents and as soon as one of them goes out of business the patents go to a troll who starts shaking everyone down because MAD doesn't apply to trolls who don't make anything. And then companies wary of being subjected to that will be avoiding doing anything under patent until the patents expire.
Companies in industries like this should probably start using some kind of patent GPL where you have to permanently license all your patents to everyone else who does the same, the purpose of which is to thwart trolls because everyone has to put their patents in while they're still in business or they'll be sued, and then the patents are already in by the time a failing company gets liquidated.
Except that they charge fees, which retains the perverse incentive to accumulate low-quality patents and for smaller companies to avoid the pool's patents instead of joining it. And then when one that didn't join goes out of business everybody's got troll problems again.
Doesn't that indicate that patents are being used to suppress competitors rather than as a direct revenue source? I don't see how that indicates patents aren't an issue.
It is worth noting that this is an ad. It is a law firm that is advertising their expertise in this field. And the product that they want people to buy is revealed in this passage:
Freedom-to-operate (FTO) analysis therefore remains critical for market entrants. Whilst the primary patents have expired, a dense web of secondary patents, covering additives, coatings, and production methods, still poses infringement risks.
Of course Shoosmiths would be happy to do a FTO analysis for your potential product...for a fee.
That doesn't mean that it doesn't contain quality information. Law firms tend to make this kind of ad informative. But it does mean that there is an agenda.
It may be an ad but it has every reason to be perfectly accurate. The law firm is not selling LFP batteries.
Edit: for example, if somebody was selling their AWS course by providing detailed information on some aspect of AWS, that wouldn't be a reason to doubt the information itself. It serves as a sample.
It has plenty of reasons to be inaccurate. They may be exaggerating the promise of LFP or overplaying how many secondary parents there are.
Anyone who needs their help already knows the promise of LFP in at least enough details that they would need the patent search anyway as part of their efforts to learn if it is right for them. All secondary patents are important, the only question is: do you license them, work around them, or not infringe in the first place. (I'm going to ignore the possibility of intentional infringing though that happens)
> It may be an ad but it has every reason to be perfectly accurate. The law firm is not selling LFP batteries.
I think it's essential to always look at motive: The law firm posted this page for a reason. What was the reason?
I'd guess that it is to attract business. I think we can expect that they would include and exaggerate things that will bring more business, and omit and downplay things that don't.
I mean one would take the ad with a grain of salt
If it gets people to pull the trigger on engaging with the firm - it’s likely to embellish how massive the changes are of these patent lapses
> That doesn't mean that it doesn't contain quality information. Law firms tend to make this kind of ad informative. But it does mean that there is an agenda.
This is the best thing to do for SEO, write good and authoritative content. Which is ironic because the field of SEO started off as gaming the systems with things like hidden keywords.
If you make technology that spies really want the government will claim eminent domain and take your patent from you, with "fair" compensation, of course.
It's funny that never happens for things that actually matter.
Lithium iron phosphate batteries are very practical. Chinese BYD has developed blade batteries using this type of battery and has become the global sales leader in new energy vehicles. However, this battery faces range limitations and the issue of how to improve charging speed. Solid-state batteries should be the next big thing, but mass production may not be feasible yet. At least, it might take 3 more years for commercialization, and that's still an optimistic prediction.
> Lithium iron phosphate batteries are very practical
Unless you want to charge in negative temperatures
> However, this battery faces range limitations
Yes they are less dense but plentiful for typical passenger car (and not so much for full sized trucks or even "mid-sized" US SUVs).
> the issue of how to improve charging speed
I think CATL demonstrated 1MW charging on these already. Definitely shipping 500kW charging (tho best measure is still average km/hr).
> Solid-state batteries should be the next big thing
Sodium will (great cold weather performance and even better charge rates), but it's less (vol) dense and prices won't reach LFPs for another 10-15 years (unless you believe hype, not actual analysts).
> Unless you want to charge in negative temperatures
LFP charging in cold has pretty much been solved by adding a heater to battery pack.
> (Sodium-ion) prices won't reach LFPs for another 10-15 years (unless you believe hype, not actual analysts).
Given CATL is scaling sodium-ion production to to GWh scale next year, it sounds like they are betting for a much shorter timeframe.
Does the heater handle real winters, like they have in Alaska, Mongolia, and parts of Russia north of it? Or just European and American "winters" where -20°C is considered hardcore? Gasoline powered engines handle this well, and you can warm them up with a gasoline torch if they stay outside for too long and refuse to start. The cold does not destroy them.
> Does the heater handle real winters, like they have in Alaska, Mongolia, and parts of Russia north of it? Or just European and American "winters" where -20°C is considered hardcore?
It handles "real winters" [1] where large portions of the human population live. [2][3][4]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/staticarchive/e4ff248622e19fa303d72e25...
[3] https://engaging-data.com/population-latitude-longitude/
[4] https://luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen/
I don't see why a built-in heater is worse than aiming a torch at a car to get it to start. Seems like a major oversight for gasoline cars.
Also, a tiny fraction of the population will ever need to start their cars in Alaska, Mongolia, and Northern Russia. The small city worth of people living in these insane environments can stick to their wood-fueled diesel cars while the rest of the world just uses normal vehicles.
Alaska, Mongolia and Russia are extreme edge cases that I don’t believe hold much weight in an argument. It’s like those arguments where folks try to attack solar or wind, “solar won’t work on northern Alaskan winter”. Ok great that’s such a small slice of the population that it’s ok.
You can discharge the battery to power the heaters, at significant cost in energy. The temperature becomes a serious problem when charging (will physically destroy the battery through dentrite formation!), and under very high power draws (battery can’t keep up chemically).
It can be solved, but at a cost, and makes the tech much more dangerous - you could end up in a situation where you freeze to death somewhere more easily in the climates it is a problem.
It’s similar reasons why diesel isn’t a great idea in Alaska and the like too, and people tend towards gasoline even in situations where it is more costly and less efficient (like industrial trucks). It can be mitigated with chemical additives (‘heat’), tank and block heaters, etc. but has similar risks.
Those are quite niche environments. The success of LFP won't hinge on whether it works below -20C, obviously.
Most of the US Midwest sees -20 C for at least a brief period each winter. Having reduced functionality at those temps would be pretty inconvenient for the many car dependent people that live in the region.
Most of the Midwest also has snow and cannot farm the land for 7 months. What are you actually talking about here? That they cannot adapt or that they will refuse to work?
-20C is feasible. Charging will take a bit longer because the heater will need to work a bit longer, but as long as the batteries can reach about freezing temperature, you're good.
Charging being a couple minutes slower a few weeks a year is a minor convenience. If you have a house with a garage, like many people in the US Midwest, I doubt it even poses a problem even on the worst days. It's more in the winter-long -35C areas that (purpose-built) combustion engines have obvious benefits.
Cold climates suffer more from cold batteries having reduced range, but with modern battery ranges the problem isn't even that extreme anymore.
Inconvenient for those people. About 8 billion other people don’t live in that type of weather.
They also mostly can't afford $25,000 cars.
About half of the world is within 3,300 km of a village in Burma, close to the Chinese border and not too far from Laos and Thailand.
China and India both have EVs much cheaper than we get in the EU. Like, "<€10k new" cheap.
What I do wonder about is how much of Africa can get EVs; I've only been once, to Nairobi over a decade ago, so take it with a pinch of anecdote-flavoured salt when I say that what I saw there was a lot of 20-30 year old vehicles.
Most of the people that can afford $25k cars do not live in places that go below -20C.
It entirely depends on the original range of the car.
Realistically you are looking at trimming 20->30% of the range. If you drive 20 miles a day but have a total range of 200 miles, then it's really not inconvenient. It only becomes inconvenient if you need to travel long distances.
Are you a car ad where you're selling the most extreme off-road experience for the person who just wants to go to the grocery store?
Come on man. If you're in an extreme environment, get the tool appropriate for that environment. People in mountain environments tend to have 4WD or AWD cars because it's appropriate. Doesn't mean a non-AWD car is useless.
If you live in the extreme 5%, get something that works there. If you're in the rest of the 95%, other solutions work fine.
So largest battery manufacturer should drop their project, because “come on man”?
Negative temperatures or low temperatures are everywhere. Sodium will displace LFP pretty much everywhere (20 yrs), not just in extreme cold. I get slight coldgating 6months a year in warmest parts of New Zealand. It’s not even a minor issue, but if manufacturers can remove complexity - they will.
> LFP charging in cold has pretty much been solved by adding a heater to battery pack.
That's a hack, not a solution.
> Given CATL is scaling sodium-ion production to to GWh scale next year, it sounds like they are betting for a much shorter timeframe.
Wanna bet? LFP is ~1,000 GWh scale right now. GWh scale is 0.1%.
I pulled into a Supercharger with my LFP-battery EV last winter. The temperature outside was -15C and I had not set the navigator so there was no pre-warming activated.
By the time I had finished my coffe, SoC had gone from 30-ish to 90-ish percent.
LFP tech anno 2023 is perfectly good enough for road tripping in large cars in severe winter conditions. For almost everyone.
So your battery was preheated. I once did the same with approx 0C battery temperature and whole ordeal took at least 2x longer. Yes there was farmers market in front of charge station so I had a good time with kiddo. That’s not the point.
Let’s not pretend better batteries shouldn’t exist.
Or just press the button to manually preheat the battery?
Heat pump barely works below -30C
Which doesn’t matter if your about to charge either way and just want to optimize time spent?
This can’t be more than single digit days per year? This is the case where people in for example Sweden have 230V engine block and passenger compartment heaters for their car.
It’s like the definition of an edge case.
I’ve often wondered:
It’s -30C and the heat pump doesn’t really work. Is there any advantage to heating the cold side with, say, a resistive heater?
Conservation of energy says no, but what if it’s also being heated by waste heat from charging the batteries?
(Maybe the answer is “if that’s the case, you are actively cooling the batteries with the heat pump!”, but I’d like to think someone more clever than me could make the scheme work.)
> It’s like the definition of an edge case.
Now imagine there's battery technology that solves that + removes equipment required for battery preheat...
Quoting Bender from Futurama: "Great is OK, but amazing would be great."
I'm not against further progress, I'm just stating that using current gen LFP in cold climate for large cars driving long distances is not a problem. It is more than fine. At least Tesla's implementation of LFP, I can't speak to any others on the market.
>That's a hack, not a solution.
Why do you say that? It sounds like a simple solution to me.
Because it doesn’t solve the problem, it merely works around it. Solving the problem would mean coming up with a battery chemistry that doesn’t suffer in the cold. Instead the answer is “just don’t have it get cold”.
It’s not to say a hack/workaround isn’t useful, and I would say that it’s perfectly acceptable to simply use a battery heater in the winter. But calling it “solved” confuses solutions and workarounds, and that’s an intellectually dishonest thing to do.
From the perspective of the user, battery being cold does not matter. How it does not matter i dont care about, for user it is solved.
Now, we can go into the weeds as to what constitutes solved and we might agree or disagree.
It takes hours to heat a cold large pack til it's warm enough to charge. That's a drawback.
All the EV owners in Scandinavia don’t have practical problems charging in winter at will.
Also Scandinavia is not that cold. Their winters are quite warm, actually.
Old article at this point, but it's trivial to prove false - https://insideevs.com/news/550021/cold-lfp-battery-tesla-mod...
Leave your car with 5% SOC overnight and then try to find energy in morning to preheat battery. People have painted into corner themselves before. It’s perfectly adequate for my very mild climate and even then I get limited regen about 6 morning months per year.
This is the EV equivalent of riding your old motorcycle with the reserve valve open the entire time.
You are driving a giant killing machine around... it isn't too much to ask that you have some foresight to avoid the situation you describe.
Yet life happens and weather isn’t always exactly predictable. Why you against better batteries?
I'm not against better batteries. I'm against people who choose to operate with such a small safety factor for something as serious as operating a giant rolling 2 ton piece of metal and volatile chemistry. Just like I'm against people who don't know how to change a tire or properly drive with etiquette on the interstate; If you can't do it, you kind of deserve some teasing.
In my friend group, if you run out of gas you get made fun of. You forget to flip your kill switch and can't crank your motorcycle, we all laugh and call you a dipshit.
Getting stranded isn't always harmless, and proper adults don't get stranded. Proper adults manage their vehicle safely. That's my point. Yes, exceptions are allowed, but we need to make sure everyone knows they are exceptions. Don't leave 5% on your battery when in the freezing seasons, it's improper.
> I'm against people who don't know how to change a tire
TBH that's majority of people. And it's a good thing since tyres got so good.
I get it tho. It's obvious. But it's better when things work better.
It's not obvious because you're still making the excuses for baby-adults. No one is saying battery tech should stop being developed, nor should pain points be unaddressed.
Isn't starting a fire under your engine to get it to start a hack too? I mean they could add a heater to the engine. Wait.
After market electric engine heaters and remote starters are typical for ICE vehicles in cold climates (e.g. Alaska). Not sure why you consider this to be a hack for EVs if its builtin to the battery pack design.
The small handful of sodium batteries that are currently available retail all seem to have rather bad roundtrip efficiency compared to LFP and voltage drop starting at a high state of charge.
Also LFP prices dropped enough that shipping cost from China became a significant part of the price. This will be even more of a factor should the less energy dense sodium batteries ever reach the promised $30/kWh.
One thing I hadn't groked about Sodium Ion was the enormous Voltage range leads to a bit of an issue when it comes to current. You have a 4x voltage from top to bottom of the battery and this also means your current is 4x as well for the same power output. This becomes a bit of an issue and it is part of the efficiency equation, not just externally to the battery where wires have to be much larger than LFP or LI but internally due to internal resistance.
Ehhh not really a problem unless you idolize 12/48 V style systems that aren't adequate for these modern chemistries (i.e., non-lead-acid based) that scale down effectively to single digit amp hours per cell. You can keep the current around a comfortable 20A at any pack size, just by increasing the voltage. Say 5Ah cells. At 1.5kV (the highest easily practical with mainstream transistors and sticking to the "simple" circuit designs), that's 7.5kWh per such battery string.
That's a small home solar setup's entire battery.
Sodium gravimetric density is same. Volumetric is worse. Shipping containers generally cost by volume, but given how dense batteries are I suspect this won't matter.
I'd agree if you could stick them in the containers discharged, but you can't. This means that even safer chemistry like sodium battery is still hazardous cargo.
> Unless you want to charge in negative temperatures
I do all of my charging way above 0K. :-P
The issue I’ve heard with sodium-ion is that the voltage curves make the power electronics much more expensive for a given efficiency/power level.
[https://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/sodium-ion-battery-ev...]
Lithium’s curve is nearly flat, which allows for a pretty easy consistent power production (albeit nearly impossible to tell state of charge!) since you only need to target a pretty narrow voltage band.
Overall, that means sodium-ion has to be even cheaper to be competitive, and it makes even less sense in areas where power density matters like electric cars, as you’ll end up with far less power and/or needing much heavier motors and more expensive electronics to compensate when on the lower end of charge.
I don’t want to think of what it would cost to do a 100kw buck-boost power supply that can handle +- 25% (or more!) voltage differences. In reality, I don’t think anyone would try.
If it's suitable for sedans it's actually more suitable for SUVs. SUVs require less power per cubic feet of space. So there is more space available for them, even if they take more energy overall
such strange unit of measurement. cubic feet of space. especially for civilian transport when most of the time no one uses that space. i mean most of the time its one person per car without any baggage. what's important is weight of the car. and i bet suv is heavier than sedans.
There are multiple variables, claiming weight is important is wrong.
Volume is important because the more volume the more space there is for batteries.
Aerodynamics is important because at common highway speeds this is the dominate energy cost. This is a factor that goes up by the square of speed, so at low speeds it doesn't matter but at high speeds it does.
Weight is least important because it has a linear change and is a small factor in efficiency.
There are real safety concerns with SUVs, but their larger size means there is more space for batteries and so they can overall go farther then a Sedan in normal driving despite the other costs.
I've tried to express SUV's as in American SUVs - full sized 7 seat monstrosity. Most EV SUVs right now are crossovers, i.e. Model Y. Cybertruck is closest approximation and it uses nearly 2x more power than Model Y. Even with ~most advanced batteries people still think Cybertruck's range is way too little whereas I'm pretty certain majority of Model Y's sold are LFPs.
For me in Europe the Y is a huge monstrosity... I'd want something about 16 inches shorter to get to normal crossover size.
There are variants of the Model Y with LFP batteries.
What? How does an SUV require less power per cf than a sedan? I would think that aero alone would always be worse for an SUV, making sedans more efficient.
I think he means less power per total overall volume of the vehicle. SUVs are certainly less efficient per mile, but their power requirements don't scale linearly with volume so you have a lot more "extra" room to place batteries, even if it is still entirely within the frame. So you can get away with less space efficient batteries.
Drag scales by frontal area (and the coefficient of drag tends to actually be lower on longer objects), so as long as the SUV is longer than a sedan, it'll tend to have less aerodynamic drag proportionally (rolling resistance scales with weight, though, so you still have to pay that cost).
An observation is the amount of power needed is proportional to some log of size and weight.
I think CATL is promoting a hybrid pack of LFP and Sodium that would give you the cheapness and density of LFP, but with maybe 30% Sodium that you could use for a quick partial charge, and could also be used when the car is cold-soaked. Once you drive for a while, the whole pack gets warmed up and you can use the LFP.
Using lfp at low temp is not an issue. Charging is the problem.
> Charging is the problem.
Which also occurs while driving, whenever you're decelerating.
> Using lfp at low temp is not an issue
Bjorn managed to get couple cars in coldgate condition - so cold and such low SOC that it's just not enough power to heat up battery and now you going highway at 60 km/h. IDK, maybe just a software fix, maybe an edge case, but it can happen.
> Unless you want to charge in negative temperatures
Doesn’t the thermal management system of the battery packs handle this?
Yes, the largest issue is that they heating isn't enabled unless it's charging or 'knows' it will be soon.
Ps: the heating is increasingly heat pump based instead of resistive.
It does, but it costs is complex, requires power and time.
It's noticeable even in climates like NZ.
There are coldgating stories about LFP. Some even reduce output and very low SOC and temperature, so you drive 60km/h in highway.
Sodium is vastly superior here and CATL is not going to be giving it away for free.
I think it is fairly likely that sodium catches LFP in the ~5 year timeframe since sodium has a lot more promise for grid scale storage since it has no expensive materials.
It still does have expensive materials (cheaper form of graphite), but a little bit less of it, namely lithium and there's something else I can't remember.
When are the aluminum batteries coming?
I am not sure honestly about the negative temperature. Sure it can be a problem in extreme colds but most of the world does not live in those climates.
Solid state batteries and fusion power, always 3 years away.
I wouldn't equate solid state batteries with fusion power. Solid state batteries do exist and work well, they are just very expensive. Meanwhile fusion power is still entirely within the experimental stage and there are no fusion plant prototypes that can produce power at any price.
It’s always 20 years away until it isn’t. Self driving cars are…I guess they are here already. AGI? Well, we have to move the goal post on that constantly.
Self driving cars have had many incremental improvements. I think fusion power is actually making progress, not clear about solid state batteries. Seems more companies closing than making solid progress.
Fusion is one of those things that will probably not be done in my lifetime (the hype cycle on that has been forever, remember cold fusion from U of Utah?). I'm much more optimistic about solid state batteries.
The obvious fraud from the 90s?
But, the real issue seems to be that fusion has a large nuclear waste problem. Ironically, probably more so than fission reactors. It can be fixed, but probably not in first gen reactors. However there are companies pushing designs that solve it already
>Self driving cars are…I guess they are here already.
They may be where you are, but they aren't generally here.
If by here I meant planet Earth I think it is well qualified. Yes, they aren't using self driving car tech for ice trucking during winter down from Purdhoe Bay yet (another form of goal post moving), but the biggest challenges have already been solved and only capital and societal barriers remain.
I think it depends on what you mean by big challenges. City driving is maybe the easiest 80% of driving. There’s a long tail of odd challenges you run into in less controlled environments, and I’d call that the biggest challenge.
I think city driving is the worst — people popping out from nowhere, roads that shouldn’t be but are because they have always been. Suburban and highways seem easiest.
In the hills of LA you have sharp blind corners where people have installed public fisheye mirrors to help you see around, then you have crazy people in Hollywood throwing furniture in front of your car, and non-stop traffic and people passing on the wrong side of the road between blocks even when there is a median, school kids and crossing guards, emergency vehicles trying to through and people doing otherwise illegal things to help get out of the way…
I'm an avoid motorcyclist and have followed additional safety courses. These placed 90% of all accidents in cities. What do you mean by city driving being the easiest?
In a city, you'll never have to worry about the "road" you're supposed to follow being a dirt track that barely looks different than the muddy fields on either side.
In a city (especially in SoCal and the American Southwest, which is, AIUI, where all the self-driving cars are today), you can be nearly certain that the various mapping companies have accurately plotted the roads and destinations, and if you're trying to get to a popular Finger Lakes winery, you won't be directed down a limited-use seasonal road that's entirely covered in ice.
In a city, you can be pretty well guaranteed that there are speed limit signs anywhere the speed limit actually changes.
Just off the top of my head, as someone who's lived 40 years in the rural Northeast.
Wouldn’t ice trucking be in that long tail? I mean, ya, there are lot of niche cases that companies like Waymo haven’t worked on yet, but…the money is in the cities so that’s where they start. Interstate trucking might come next, ice trucking might be one of the last use cases covered.
Anyways we’ve gone from “this won’t happen in our lifetime!” to “it doesn’t handle X niche use case yet.”
There are self driving trucking companies.
Solid state batteries seem to work, but the price of prototypes is very high. Samsung says they will soon be shipping earbuds and watches with solid state batteries, but the cost is too high even for phones. Xaomi showed an $800 phone battery. Mercedes has one prototype car with solid state batteries. Honda has one motorcycle. EHang has one flying car. Nobody seems to be past one-off demos.
I am happy to pay extra $100 for Solid State Battery on Apple Watch. I am not sure if other brands could get this advantage.
And yet Apple just isn't interested any more.
Solid state batteries and fusion might in the end suffer from a similar economical problem. That they turn out to simply be too expensive.
Add Affordable at the start of that sentence and it's accurate.
Does look as if ssb are close.. Esp Japanese ones.
If your source on that is a Toyota press release, take it with a huge grain of (lithium) salt.
Toyota has been saying similar things for a very long time. But they continue to make extremely poor bets, except for their hybrids. There's something really odd about their management culture that prevents them from finding the common and easy path of lithium ion batteries that everybody has already taken.
Yes it was that plus iirc another by Nissan as well. One site reported Chinese are walking back on some of the more optimistic claims and now it's 2030+ not next 2 years. By then I guess Na ones will be old news.
I too felt Japs were taking EV quite casually pushing all others but I wouldn't underestimate their ability to move once they decide that's what it is. They have the same concept as China, move as one nation but much higher tech depth
Btw anyone ever heard of those fuel cell ones? Toshiba hyped it like you slot in a fuel cartridge and have months of use etc.
Toyota does have a conventional BEV, so they can do it if they want. They just don’t seem to be enthusiastic about it.
Toyota's CEO and upper management seemed to be oddly fixated on hydrogen powered cars for a very long time. I think it was just in the last 2-3 years where they finally gave up and started looking at BEVs.
If it's not like those rare earth ( or watch movement saga with Swatch) that China will simply refuse to supply to other OEM, old car makers like Ford, Toyota with brand image and solid engg in rest of car making can just buy. Maybe that's their thinking?
Bonus if there's leap frog tech that obsolete all the CATL investments..
Those false supply chain concerns really only work within the right wing US political milieu. "Rare earth" with batteries really only works with the Republican set of propaganda.
I'm sure Toyota management has their own set of false beliefs about supply concerns, or perhaps about competitive edges, or perhaps about biases towards fluid fuels.
I still find it borderline criminal that a few nations continue to be ruled by the hegemony of the automobile market. EVs have a place in the world. But there should be ten times fewer of them, because we should have cheap and plentiful public transit for most of our transportation needs. How long will we simply sit and wait for that future, complacent and docile? When will we do what's necessary to progress our society? (if we ever do)
> How long will we simply sit and wait for that future, complacent and docile?
The people who don't want to sit and wait have bought personal vehicles. Mass transit can be great, but when it isn't, there's no sense of agency. At least with a personal vehicle, if it's not working, I can try to fix it or get it to someone who is more likely to be able to fix it.
When transit isn't running, I just have to wait. If it can't get me to where I want to go in a reasonable time, sucks to be me. If my stop is removed from service, I guess I better move.
In the last year, the number of times my car owning friends have not been able to make it to an event because their car is broken is surprisingly high. While I have never not been able to get somewhere because public transport is not working. If the train is down I can take the tram, if somehow both of them are down there will be replacement busses scheduled.
And if somehow everything stops working I can book an uber which is still massively cheaper than owning a car.
> While I have never not been able to get somewhere because public transport is not working.
Oh man, when I first moved to Austin and used the bus as my only method of transport, getting to work was usually straightforward, but whenever I wanted to go somewhere on the weekend, I prepared for the fact that there'd be a detour around downtown, where I normally make my transfer. I'd have to get off the bus somewhere new and try to figure out where to catch the bus for the next leg.
There were also a few occasions where there was over an hour between the "every 30 minutes" bus. Rare, but it happened. Buses naturally tend to clump together, so they need careful, intentional management to prevent this.
Public transit is great, and we need more, but it's not as reliable as I'd like. Cars are far more reliable, at least for moderately wealthy people who can afford to buy new-ish and keep them well-maintained. Bikes, too, if you're able to bike in rain and snow. (I ended up switching to almost 100% bike travel after about three years, and just kept a change of clothes at work, and at least dry socks, shirt, and underwear in my bag. Spare pants added too much bulk to lug around.)
This is all highly dependant on the specific city. In Melbourne, Australia trains to the city during work hours are around every 5 minutes, dropping to around 15 minutes for off peak. Going to work by train is faster than driving.
Buses that share roads with general traffic are always the worst solution and should really only be a temporary option to cover for downtime on rail.
Modern cars tend to be very reliable in the early years. As they get older they get less reliable. I suspect your friends issue was budget, they were not willing (likely able) to spend the money needed to have a reliable car)
My coworkers car is still in its warranty period and just suffered an engine issue that is going to take ~5 weeks to resolve and would have cost $10,000 if it wasn’t otherwise covered.
You know what would solve that sitting and waiting? More public transit. I know the American public isn't the sharpest tool in the shed, but we can introduce them to the concept of better, faster public transit, like other nations have. (And having enough money to buy a car + being impatient/unwilling to schedule your time shouldn't be a license to make society worse)
Public transport is only efficient at scale, requires up front investment, and carries lots of assumptions about population density and other aspects remaining static. Then it doesn't work for whole categories of people (families with small kids, etc) especially because it fundamentally just can't do the "last mile", pretty much ever.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's great for mass transit, but I can't wait to see the future with autonomous vehicles arrive, especially if they can cooperate in centralised networks to optimise traffic flows. I'd love to step off the train into a capsule that then whisks me home.
I take my small kids on public transit often. Why can't kids ride a bus or a train? Don't we even have special forms of mass transit for little kids (school busses?)
How are cars better with little kids? If I'm in the car with my kids and one kid suddenly really wants a snack, there's nothing I can do. They're strapped in the back, I'm in the front driving. On the train, I just grab a snack from my bag and give them a bite. Or if they're bored I can play with them, etc.
> it fundamentally just can't do the "last mile", pretty much ever.
I live in a suburb in North Texas. I walk out my door with the stroller and my kids. There's a bus stop super close by that can easily load a stroller (all busses are wheelchair accessible). I take that to the train station or the bus goes to the library or several other parks and rec centers. The train stops a very short walk to several museums, the convention center, the airport, the zoo has its own train station, the hockey/basketball arena has its own stop, etc. And this is all in an area where the mass transit isn't even that great.
The transit doesn't go everywhere we want to go. I agree that's the biggest pain point. But I truly don't understand the logic that it's bad for kids. My kids ride often, and they love it. What kid hates trains?
It's actually more efficient at scale, because it increases the economy at a lower cost. Poor or rural communities can be connected to more places with jobs, schools, etc. Those people can then grow more capital by not having to pay for expensive personal transportation. Meaning more people working, making money, contributing that money back to the economy, less cost to things like ERs, crime, etc. It lifts up the whole society, so it costs much less in real terms.
The last mile has more options than ever. E-bikes, sit-on scooters, golf carts, or that crazy trend of "walking" that I hear is good for your health. There's even the option for smaller, local mini-buses to serve the elderly and disabled. Those same vehicles could be combined with other services, like postal mail, food delivery (for elderly/disabled/infirm).
Where I live in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, we have the mini-bus to serve vulnerable people. The mail is delivered by local people with Subarus and Jeeps. But there's no other public transit. The closest thing to it is a charter bus, which only runs through a town 45 minutes from here, once a week. There's thousands of people out here, disconnected from the rest of society. And they're poor, so the few vehicles they have are always falling apart, and mechanics shops are always full. There is a taxi service in a nearby town (45mins away), and it has a 1.5 out of 5 star rating, because no alternatives means you have no choice but to deal with how terrible they are.
Autonomous vehicles are a good idea, but it's unlikely they will pan out in the long term, unless via "corporate welfare" or similar funding. The cost to develop, maintain, insure, etc them is just way more expensive than a dude in a driver's seat. They are being floated by SV money in rich cities; they won't scale.
The Scottish Government provides free at the point of use bus service for under-22s. I wish we could have had that 25 years ago when I first moved here. As it is, it's an ideal way for the teens to get around and makes it the sensible option when taking children into the city during the daytime.
Driving is prohibitively expensive for young people, and in the UK you can't drive cars on public roads until you're 17.
> Then it doesn't work for whole categories of people (families with small kids, etc) especially because it fundamentally just can't do the "last mile", pretty much ever.
That's bullshit. My whole childhood I went everywhere by train and bus. You can walk the last mile if the bus stop isn't close enough to where you need to go.
I know some (embarrassingly rich) countries are incapable of designing a halfway decent public transit system, but the problem isn't with public transit itself.
America used to have fairly everpresent public transport. Every city, including tiny ones, had public transport because the very concept of industrialization requires cities with lots of people in a small area that can easily get to work.
This absurd notion that it "doesn't make sense" for america is propaganda. Not only does it make plenty of sense in America, it was essential to the development of America!
We had robust, reliable, used by everyone public transport before we had trains! Our local agricultural fair shows off horse drawn busses that used to run in a microscopic but 300 year old agricultural community every single year! They even had instructions about how to behave to not upset the poor woman sitting next to your dirty worker self!
Public transport was essential to the north being industrialized enough to defeat the south in the civil war. Every former mill town in new england had robust public transport to keep the mills full of labor.
It was only with significant lobbying and marketing from GM and Ford that America suddenly decided that all this public transport infrastructure that we had for generations "doesn't make sense here" and they even helped rip it all up!
Read a history book.
It's frankly laughable. If public transport "didn't work" in the US, we would never have been able to industrialize before the car. But we did. We did it before the train
Its laughable to think the cities of America in 2025 still look the same and function the same as the cities of America in 1925. "Cities" weren't nearly as sparsely populated and highly zoned as many suburbs are these days. You didn't have neighborhoods with seemingly fractal patterns of roads ending in cul-de-sacs the size of several city blocks with only a couple entrances and exits like what seems to be common these days. The average American urban household in 1920 didn't live on a quarter acre lot multiple miles away from the nearest food source. So yeah, there were streetcar suburbs as well as the denser city apartments and rowhouses, they were largely grid patterns with a major boulevard. They didn't sprawl anywhere near as far. They weren't nearly as insulated.
> Every city, including tiny ones, had public transport
I can point to dozens of cities around me that never had actual public transportation throughout their entire history, and that's just a small part that I happen to know off-hand. Few places actually had any kind of real public transit.
Rural communities often still had an expectation of some amount of private transportation accessible. What, are you really tiling the soil by hand? No, you've got horses.
Look, I'm not saying public transportation can't happen in the US today. Obviously it can. There are lots of places where it does today. There are even more places that could have it tomorrow if the voters decided to do so. There are also lots of places that require quite a bit of urban redesign to actually make transit make sense for those communities.
I'll give you an example. I used to know someone who worked in Dallas, around I-635 and US-75[0]. They lived someplace like this. [1] How does public transit serve this person effectively? How would you have a bus service with both decent ridership and good service times in a town like Forney here, while not just having the bus snake through the mazes of neighborhoods? How do you convince someone to ride the bus to work when its probably going to have poor service intervals, require multiple changes, and ultimately likely to take considerably more time than the average day in the car?
Then copy and paste that same issue hundreds of times over. How does transit make sense in Seis Lagos or the rest of Lucas for that matter? [2] These people likely work in West Plano or Dallas. How do you convince them to take the bus?
[0] https://maps.app.goo.gl/ETD6a9XgTFoZCYR78
[1] https://maps.app.goo.gl/WwLYVAuquAs4ecpD8
[2] https://maps.app.goo.gl/TdxZAgjdbiUbYHEE8
A lot of people prefer living in less dense environments and personal vehicles will always be more efficient there than public transport
If it's just the free market then why do we need to regulate single family zoning across the United States? And why can't the suburbs pay for their own infrastructure?
Suburbs do pay for their infrastructure. Strongtowns keeps spreading the myth that they can't, but the numbers they use don't add up. They choose not to pay for transit because they don't need it.
A lot of people prefer living in financially affordable environments, and in a functioning market, dense towns/cities will always be more affordable unless you literally work on a farm.
Everyone prefers to live in a giant sprawling mansion (with personal private forest) in the middle of the CBD. But preference is useless data unless it includes their pricetag preference too.
> dense towns/cities will always be more affordable
In my experience, that isn't true. At the very least, it depends on what your preferences are. If I moved my home from outside Austin to inside the city, I couldn't afford it.
Densifying a city will make it cheaper than if we don't densify, but we usually densify because of high prices, so high density correlates with high prices despite being a counter-force against it.
And, yeah, living in a dense city definitely tends to cost more than the suburbs, especially per-square-foot. There might be exceptions (high crime urban areas with wealthy suburbs), but you're usually getting a pretty nice house in that suburb.
Density is more expensive. Not just because of demand for the area (though that doesn't help), but because density requires different building methods. Your single family house can be built so cheaply because it doesn't have to support the weight of many floors above; nor does it need to be fireproof because in the rare fire you can evacuate. (density means more people are displaced, fires are more likely, and longer distances to get away)
Density is also more expensive because higher costs are worth it. A rural area cannot afford things like library in walking distance of every farmer (every farmer would have to pay for a personal librarian), but in a dense area it is only a couple bucks for each one - but that all adds up to hundreds of dollars in extra costs that less dense areas do without. (you decide if it is worth the cost)
Speaking as a big fan and avid user of public transit, I say: not gonna happen in many places.
Public transit works in densely populated areas, like in NYC where I live. Digging and operating a tunnel costs a lot, and only pays for itself if you can run many trains with many passengers, who live close enough to their nearest station. Buses are less expensive (though still are expensive), and require a driver per 50-100 passengers, not per 2000.
As long as many people prefer to live in suburbia (which may technically be considered a part of a city, like in Houston), they are going to use cars (or technically trucks), because it's the most economical way to get around. As long as the destination of their travel is not an utterly dense area that does not require a car (like commuting from NJ to lower Manhattan), people won't leave their cars mid-way and change for a train or a bus.
It's not the car lobby. It's people wanting to live quite separately from their neighbors, in detached houses that they fully own. Or maybe cities that enforce low density for a number of reasons (mostly NIMBYs who want to keep the price of their house and land high).
Suburbs are dense enough to support transit as proven in a small number of cities around the world (mostly not English speaking). However suburbs can only support great transit, since anything less and driving is enough better as to be worth it.
NYC has a real cost problem. Digging a tunnel costs a lot - not anywhere near what it costs in NYC. You can also build bridges over the top for a lot less than digging a tunnel. Modern subways should be 100% automated saving the cost of a driver. (I keep hoping we see self driving buses since drivers are the large share of the costs)
NYC tunnels have outsized cost, but even tunnels that cost 10% of that would not be cheap. Most of the NYC subway was built quickly and relatively cheaply by digging trenches and covering them later, not by boring tunnels. NYC used to use elevated trains a lot, and still has plenty of those outside Manhattan, but they have other downsides, such as noise.
NYC subway has two drivers per train due to the trade union resistance. Very understandable, even though not really necessary.
Self-driving buses could be also remotely driven in situations that require special handling, by a smaller number of drivers.
As usual, it mostly takes a political will, the technology is not rocket science; one of the poster kids of that is Curitiba in Brazil.
Likely once sufficient numbers of boomers die off - and their property inheriting children don’t take up their parent’s views
BloombergNEF has over the years proven to have pretty solid forecasts. The current one about NEVs [1] has a few interesting points. Adoption of EVs is slowing down in the US due to policy changes but going to explode in countries like Vietnam because they are cheeper to buy an run. It is not BMWs and Mercs but Chinese brands.
In Europe and the US the Chinese EVs are kept outside with the help of tariffs but that is just closing the eyes to avoid facing the inevitability. Battery technology, production and raw materials is all China.
Last not least Europe is driving up KWh costs by an ideologically driven push for renewables which also doesn't help.
[1] https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-transport/electric-veh...
> an ideologically driven push for renewables
Renewables (especially wind) are now just about the cheapest way to generate electricity, and new battery technologies do much to help with their intermittency, so where’s the problem?
(Plus, the ‘ideology’ in question would seem to be: it’s bad to fry the planet, and also bad to run even a small risk of radioactively contaminating one’s landmass, and IMHO neither of these positions deserves to be called an ideology).
>> an ideologically driven push for renewables
> Renewables (especially wind) are now just about the cheapest way to generate electricity, and new battery technologies do much to help with their intermittency, so where’s the problem?
The basics of economics are:
Yet you know all this as you are a professor of economics in the UK. So how comes that the UK has the highest industry KWh prices in Europe? There must be an absolutely fantastic opportunity to make money and investors should be like vultures grabbing new projects for renewables.Just the other day I read news that in Germany perfectly well functioning wind turbines are being turned down because they have reached the end of the phase of guaranteed KWh prices. So are the owners crazy and throwing money away? No, they simply do the business calculations and if the math doesn't play out, they simply remove them and build new ones with new subsidies.
The latest auction from the German gov for a new field in the baltic sea didn't even find one bidder.
China is doing lots of renewables but they calculate it down to the penny.
So yes, as you say "Renewables (especially wind) are now just about the cheapest way to generate electricity". To generate yes. But you need lots of CAPEX to store it and to distribute it. And you can not work with a 95%ile. You need 100% in any developed economy.
Despite marginal cost pricing it not interesting for investors without subsidies.
>There must be an absolutely fantastic opportunity to make money and investors should be like vultures grabbing new projects for renewables.
They are. While the marginal price is being set (most of the time) by expensive gas renewables projects are making money hand over fist.
Old wind turbines might be perfectly fine but they are also no longer competitive with modern replacements. Usually it does make sense to replace them with more modern alternatives. Subsidies have gotten very low because carbon credits are now a much more important way for renewables to boost their income (most negative prices reflect that).
Offshore wind is facing the challenge that it is more expensive than onshore wind and also that solar is having a day with ever decreasing prices. Governments are trying hard to minimize the cost of the energy transition, offshore is primarily hurting because of this.
> Old wind turbines might be perfectly fine but they are also no longer competitive with modern replacements. Usually it does make sense to replace them with more modern alternatives.
I would just for once love to see a calculation for this. There have been no advancements in generator technology nor in blade technology. Generators in power stations have a life time of many decades. A third of the 31000 German wind turbines will be put down because of the end of subsidies.
Also subsidising solar power in the north of Germany makes no sense - for months there is no solar in winter but in summer solar adds to the already massive surplus of energy from offshore wind. It is a waste of money. If you believe that global warming is a problem (which I agree with) then the money should be put to efficient use.
There's a thriving second hand market for wind turbines.
Similar to EV discussions a lot of motivated reasoning seems to assume that these items are disposed of in a black hole or set on fire in a school playground after a few years to try to equalize the damage done by combustion alternatives.
In reality people are spending tens or hundreds of thousands to buy these used turbines because they have value.
I've not seen full calculations for wind but I assume they exist. I've read ones for solar which calculate replacing panels in a farm after 17 years and landfilling the old ones is still ecologically positive because the extra generation of the new panels would pay off.
Obviously this only gets better if you resell or recycle the old panels instead.
Sounds like you think renewables aren't cheaper. It is hard to tell, but we have a natural experiment going on in Australia that may shed some light.
The state of South Australia (SA) has no coal or gas, and is a long way from anywhere so importing those fuels are expensive. The eastern states live on a sea of coal and gas, exporting a huge amounts of it overseas.
Historically the price of electricity SA has always been more expensive than elsewhere. When renewables became an option, SA enthusiastically adopted them. Prices went up even more for a while presumable because of the CAPEX in building the renewable infrastructure. For a while SA, had the largest grid battery on the planet (others are now bigger), which is a little surprising for a place with a population of just 1.8M. Right over a year they average about 80% of renewable. From what I can tell the balance is supplied by gas peakers. They say they will be 100% renewable by 2027. SA is now paying about £0.20 / kWh retail.
SA transition happened over 2 decades. For the most of those two decades the eastern Australian states governments did mostly nothing, which is to say their coal fired power stations just kept chugging along. They couldn't do exactly nothing because the population is growing and they needed new supply. The cheapest way to add that was with renewables, filling in any gaps with more expensive gas peakers. The Federal government helped by subsidising solar. For the most of those 2 decades SA was transitioning impact of renewables in the eastern states was small, so their electricity prices remained stable while SA's went up. But it didn't stay that way.
Renewables contribution kept growing. Solar in particular accelerated. The Federal subsidies were designed to gradually reduce to 0 by 2030, but the impact of those reducing subsidies were more than offset by solar panel prices reducing. What those subsidies did do is train a generation of tradesmen on how to install them efficiently, and so Australia despite its high wages now has one of the cheapest installation costs for household solar. The end result of all that is now Australia has the highest penetration of household solar in the world, supplying well over 50% of demand when the sun is shining.
It turns out the renewables are free market poison for coal fired power plants. The coal plants were designed to make a profit by operating for 24 hours a day. Solar now reduces the wholesale price of electricity to $0 for 8 hours a day. Those wind installs intermittently rob them of income overnight. Compounding the problem is governments privatised the coal fired power plants while they were at mid life, priced on the basis of selling power for 24 hours. Presumably the logic was to sell them off while they were still making money, so the public purse could avoid shoulder the huge CAPEX of replacing them when the time came. But the introduction of renewables means they now aren't making money, so their private operators are shutting them down before their anticipated EOL has been reached, which has caused a mad scramble to replace the lost generation.
As the eastern states still have a low'ish penetration of renewables, the cheapest option to replace those coal fired generators is yet more renewables, supplemented with yet more gas peakers. The CAPEX needed to do that has created it's own crisis of sorts, so now the price of electricity in eastern states has reached parity with SA for the first time in history. Meanwhile the electricity produced by gas peakers is comparatively expensive, so expensive that with a little nudge it's cheaper for a household to buy a battery so they don't have to purchase gas electricity. The Federal government has just stepped in to provide that nudge, with a 30% subsidy (also gradually sun setting by 2030, I think). I'm not sure it was needed a wholesale battery prices dropped by 30% last year, but the publicity sure focused a lot of household owners minds on how to reduce their electricity bill. That has lead to an explosion of new battery installs and yet more solar, and a chronic shortage of installers which is amazing given the size of the solar industry in Australia.
If the price of solar and batteries keep dropping then the outcome looks to me that household solar + batteries will replace coal as the major supplier of electricity in Australia. Gas peakers will continue on for a while, but their high price means eventually renewables plus over provisioning plus storage will wipe them out. We've yet to figure out what we can do with all the excess but unreliable power that over provisioning will produce, but there are any number of entrepreneurs trying to figure out how they can make money out of it by producing ammonia, hydrogen and metallurgical refining.
SA will get there well before anyone else. If their own estimates are accurate, by 2028. Their continuing CAPEX will be mostly done at that point, and I guess their inflation adjusted electricity prices will start dropping. They may well have the lowest prices for electricity in mainland Australia for a while.
Also, to add to the “ideology”: it is bad to rely on other countries for fossil or uranium fuels.
Frying the planet is bad. That said i don't see the reliance argument for uranium. There's a variety of existing sources on the planet and some we stopped mining. It's proportionally a super small financial element of the energy production process unlike with fossil fuels. So in the case of let's say Putin's Russia you can avoid using their or let's say Kazakhstan's fuel and if you don't but don't take it's gas directly or via intermediaries like armenia then Russia still ends up in the financial shitter because their income from Rosatom/uranium one/... doesn't even compare.
It's almost inviting anti renewables arguments based on things like aluminium mostly being produced in china and russia or based on where the vast majority of panels are produced, etc.
>Renewables (especially wind) are now just about the cheapest way to generate electricity
Only if you don't include the huge cost of storage for when it isn't windy.
Include it and it's still cheaper than, say, nuclear.
Also ... even when storage is included, you still gain freedom from opex spending for fuel (that is, lining oily pockets). Once there, renewables are "pure payoff".
Chiming in as Australian with no context on European situation. AFAICT the key drivers of cost inflation are to do with reconfiguring the electric grid to transfer power efficiently and reliably from plants that produce renewable energy. However, the grid is set up to do so from non-renewable sources. And you want to do it while smoothly operating the network. This is extremely hard. Doing so quickly therefore elevates prices. That’s the rationale I could imagine being the case in EU markets.
It's not that simple. For example, in the The Netherlands, the use of electricity was stable for a long time. Mostly because all kinds of equipment (light bulbs, etc) got more efficient.
Grid operators predicted that with the energy transition, demand would rise, but politics wanted to keep prices low and limited investments.
So now, there is a big problem in the entire country connecting companies or new residential areas to the grid independent of how electricity is generated.
At the same time, the government is extremely forward looking and builds massive interconnection points on the North-Sea. Not a bad idea in the long run, but in the short run it does make electricity from wind on sea more expensive.
That said, the biggest hit to EU countries is that cheap natural gas disappeared. Coal is not cheap and extremely polluting. Natural gas was cheap for a while. Until it wasn't.
The European situation is a bit more complicated. It was very well known for a long time that Russia is a ticking time bomb in our backyard yet we made ourselves nearly dependent on their energy supplies and now combined with the push for renewables (which in my opinion is the right thing to do) we have a crisis. Now there are also lot of countries in the EU with different priorities, so while in theory we could build long-range HVDC connections across borders, it is very hard to do.
more like "it's bad to fry the planet so we will destroy our economy for 0.001% impact while the real impacters continue to advance and leave us in the dust"
It's not just Vietnam. It's almost any country anywhere in the world that is seeing healthy growth in EVs. Especially the ones that barely have a road network or a petrol distribution network.
This is an effect that is still underappreciated in western markets but developing markets embracing renewables and EVs means they are enabling some serious economic growth. They are eliminating chunks of fossil fuel imports from their balance sheet while enabling economic activity in areas that have poor grid coverage and limited access to fuel.
Pakistan is a good example. They have a very under developed grid. Solar and battery storage are enabling the locals to work around that and they have installed a lot of that in recent years. This is enabling local businesses that previously had very poor access to reliably power to now have reliable power and grow. The Pakistan government is also putting in place incentives to stimulate EV imports.
Ethiopia is going a lot further and has actually banned ICE car imports last year. They want to reduce the amount of fossil fuel imports on their balance sheets.
> Ethiopia is going a lot further and has actually banned ICE car imports last year. They want to reduce the amount of fossil fuel imports on their balance sheets.
My understanding is that they are more concerned about oil shipping as they are landlocked and the situation in the gulf of aden is less than ideal.
So you buy a battery for your tiny grid island and pay a little more so that you can also use for a drive? Or perhaps not even more, because the standalone battery is less mass market item.
Truly an interesting change, considering how much of the ICE market used to be hand-me-downs from more industrialized countries. I guess proximity to those is now a hindrance to the renewable revolution, because places with less access to hand-me-downs have a market (and mindset!) for low-priced new cars that never existed in places flooded with second hand cars? Will the upmarket-first kind of BEV ever work in that way?
Electricity costs in the UK (which I believe is still in Europe) are cheaper now than they've ever been if you have the right tariff and that's all due to renewables. Granted, that's primarily at night, but for EVs that's perfect.
One can get a tariff at <7p/kWh for 6 hours in the night. That's cheaper than gas (actual gas, not gasoline).
If that’s Octopus Intelligent Go, then it will also give you the 7p rate outside the normal nighttime slot if the car is charging and their algo calculates they can do it.
Renewables definitely help and I think the UK is doing quite well there but it's a little disingenuous to not even mention the price cap that the government has imposed!
What's the price cap got to do with it? You can get tariffs that are very cheap and outside of the price cap: https://www.goodenergy.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Good...
The price applies to default tariff so it is a price that is always available to customers. This means other non-default tariffs like the one you linked have to compete with the flat rate of 26p/kWh.
The tariff you linked is much more expensive than the price cap for most people because most people don't have huge batteries for energy storage. Battery energy storage is worth money so essentially you are getting cheaper energy by selling that storage value to Good Energy. Overall the total value you get from Good Energy (taking into account the value of having storage) is going to be about the same as the value with the price cap and no storage.
Because the tariffs are competing, if all energy retailers were able to raise their prices to their true cost, then it would be all tariffs that increase in price; not just the ones that the cap applies to.
This is similar to why electricity prices went up when there was a gas shortage due to the Ukraine war. Everyone was like "but it's a gas shortage not an electricity shortage!". But of course electricity and gas are in competition in many cases (e.g. for heating), so their prices are linked by shared demand.
If you still aren't convinced, imagine the energy price cap was 1p/kWh. What do you think would happen to the price of EV tariffs then? (For a few weeks until the entire energy retail sector collapsed anyway!)
There's always going to be excess supply at night, because demand is lower. At the moment the difference is large because battery capacity is low, but even as more batteries come online, it will stay lower because battery capacity will respond to the differential (since that's where the profit is). What's interesting is domestic battery installation is so cheap that you can capture almost all the benefits as a private buyer.
https://www.fogstar.co.uk/collections/solar-battery-storage
FWIW Good Energy are outside the price cap on their standard tariff as well. You don't have to do that many miles for the EV tariff to pay off without any additional storage.
> an ideologically driven push for renewables
It is not an ideological push, but one driven by the necessity to fight climate change.
Maybe it is ideology to emphasize renewables over nuclear. But all over the world the energy transition seems to involve primarily renewables and only maybe a dash of nuclear.
For many years (20+?) Vietnam has had huge import tariffs on US/German/etc cars. It varies by origin country and engine displacement, but it's around 75% to 175%. Some trade agreements with other Asian countries result in much more reasonable tariffs for Asian brands, but some rich Vietnamese people have bought BMW or Merc with 150%+ tariff/tax. (I found it a bit mind-blowing.) So, it's pretty obvious why Asian made EVs are expected to "explode" in popularity over there. (I'm pretty sure the trend is already well underway, I know a retired guy there who replaced a Merc with a hybrid Mitsubishi (?) last year.)
Your reliable BloombergNEF says that onshore wind became the cheapest source of unsubsidized new electricity in Germany and UK in 2015, a decade ago.
Coincidentally that's roughly when the UK government banned the building of onshore wind across England, which was only recently revrsed.
Now that sounds like an Ideologically driven attempt to raise electricity prices.
The European tarriffs on Chinese EVs typically amount to 20%, which doesn't keep them out but does somewhat slow their adoption.
Would we price out cheap Vietnamese EVs (say) in the same way?
The US would just ban them with some regulation like we do with most foreign competitors
But this is 2022? By now the dust must have settled. Anyone that wanted to copy and use likely planned out before they expired and got moving once it did?
Exactly, this is a 3 year old post. That's why you started seeing LFP battery banks showing up on Amazon a few years ago.
Who owned these key LFP patents? It was not clearly laid out in the article which countries owned them, let alone which companies.
If they were owned by Chinese companies, then is there some faint hope that Western companies can finally start making EVs that are no longer embarrassingly inferior to their Chinese counterparts?
A foundational research team in a Canadian university in Quebec, if I recall correctly. They licenced these patents to the Chinese companies royalty free when used the Chinese domestic market. The Chinese spent the time developing LFP to where it's now a bleeding edge of batteries, while practically no-one else was interested.
In a retaliatory fight over the EVs, in October 2025, the CCP issued a ban on transfer of advanced technology for LFP batteries, and battery manufacturing equipment.
>They licenced these patents to the Chinese companies royalty free when used the Chinese domestic market.
Smells like second Nortel. Wonder who made that decision and where are they now.
I've talked to people from that very lab at the Université de Montréal many years ago, before the parent expired.
The IP was licensed by Hydro-Quebec first, and some of it was also held by UT. A123 was a US company manufacturing LFP batteries in 2005 in infringement of the patents.
A123, Hydro-Quebec, UT spent 15 years suing each other (and also suing BAK technology in China and other companies that used the technology), complete with secondary patents, etc...
Hydro-Quebec actually was producing LFP batteries commercially, along with an EV program. Those ventures were cancelled, in no small part because of the political issues when Canadian SoEs compete with American businesses (but also for other reasons). HQ is restarting the LFP manufacturing program now, though, through a new spinoff.
Anyways, this is not like Nortel at all - we had two decades of a headstart and we didn't give the license to Chinese companies until quite a few years later. A big part of the issue is because an American company violated the IP, then filed secondary pattents and tried to get the originals invalidated, which led to a huge legal battle strongly discouraging investment. There was really no mistake done in licensing it to Chinese companies.
I really wish we could get Chinese EVs in the US. They’re very aesthetically appealing, have great performance and specs, and cost only $20-30k. I think there should be a modest tariff on them that doesn’t kill US manufacturers but makes it so they have to actually compete.
They have the same problem the U.S. EV's have: sketchy spyware software. Make everyone honest and open up the code / let people write their own code, and then let the true market rule.
U.S. don't want the Chinese cars collecting data, but they're content with U.S. ones doing it.
LFP is a nice chemistry but I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-titanate_battery is the future. There is still the power density issue but that's improving steadily. The thing that really sells me on this is the speed with which you can charge the cells.
There was some kind of patent shenanigans about a decade ago around LFP.
I'm not sure if China invalidated dodgy patents or threatened to and got a good deal (or some combination) but I think LFP in China escaped a lot of patent fees as long as they were sold in China. This probably partly explains the regional nature of LFP success so further expiries might help the rest of the world catch up on LFP prices and adoption.
This could open the door to cheaper EV batteries and more players entering the market. Should make things move faster.
> EU regulations requiring lithium-ion batteries to contain at least 6% recycled lithium by 2031, rising to 12% by 2036.
Seriously?
The EU should aim for massive growth in battery deployment in transportation and grid storage. If they hope for, say, 10x growth in deployed battery capacity within a time frame comparable to the lifespan of a battery, then even a 100% recycling rate would not produce enough lithium.
I suppose people could recycle batteries just to produce new batteries and acquire recycling credits, but this is absurd.
It will probably amount to recycling credit schemes I am sure. But that would definitely boost lithium recycling efforts.
From memory over 1million disposable vapes are thrown away each day, from 500 of the bigger cell vapes a Youtuber was able build a home battery to power his house. I don't think 100% recycled makes sense but there sure is a lot of lithium getting thrown into the bin. Incentives to recapture that are good.
That's 730k households in a year. Cool but since these batteries will probably die within a year, then you are only able to cover 1.5 million people or so. I am not against it, but 1.5m in 8b is a drop in the ocean.
The idea was just to illustrate how much lithium there is getting thrown away, I think the better option is recycling the lithium in the cells into re-usable raw material.
500? thats just 5x10x10, even the bigger cell vapes would result in a tiny battery to power a house...
It was under 3kWh.
It wasn't huge no, but we are talking about cells we throw away in the millions. Scale up the battery as needed, the cells are basically free.
> recycled lithium
this would be a tragedy if it leads to recycling batteries that could be repurposed, say 100kwh car batteries with decreased range that could have become 60kwh residential batteries.
I say as an electrician that car batteries have limited use. Chinese residential batteries can be installed by me alone. Even 40-60 kWh modular ones. Car battery needs forklift and every model has different interface. Economically sourcing used cells to build batteries also makes no sense. So either recycling or repair to continue using it as car battery.
Imagine a world without patents and tariffs. Imagine a world where companies can freely compete (no patents) and, most importantly, *have* to (no tariffs).
What? Patents have been a non-issue for LFP batteries, and the original LFP patents are almost useless today. All the new advances that made LFPs competitive are still well-protected by patents, for at least another decade.
What makes you say they've been a non-issue?
As far as I'm aware they've been an issue (outside of China) for the last 20 years.
Sorry we handicapped ourselves and are now complaining about a competitor? Seems silly. The west made this tech unusable. I was building ebikes in 2006/7 and A123 was entirely unavailable unless you went and salvaged power tool packs.
They never became available at a competitive price, and then China bought the rights....
Now I can buy them in bulk as a consumer for 1/15th the price.
Our system is not meant for innovation by small players or consumers. We want tech easily locked away behind a contract.
The total lithium battery patent licensing market is estimated at less than 600 million USD a year. This is approximately nothing, given that the overall battery market is estimated at about $200B.
The pace of innovation is furious, and companies are treating patents more as a way to ensure MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) rather than as a tool to get income.
I think we'll start seeing the first large lawsuits once the losers start realizing that they lost the innovation race.
> The total lithium battery patent licensing market is estimated at less than 600 million USD a year.
This is often because someone holds an important patent but either isn't licensing it to others because they're actually manufacturing it (implying they're holding back everyone else in the market), or they're asking too much and then almost everyone uses the existing technology instead of licensing the patent, again holding things back. As soon as the patent expires everyone starts using it.
> The pace of innovation is furious, and companies are treating patents more as a way to ensure MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) rather than as a tool to get income.
This is often even worse, because then you have a hundred companies with patents and as soon as one of them goes out of business the patents go to a troll who starts shaking everyone down because MAD doesn't apply to trolls who don't make anything. And then companies wary of being subjected to that will be avoiding doing anything under patent until the patents expire.
Companies in industries like this should probably start using some kind of patent GPL where you have to permanently license all your patents to everyone else who does the same, the purpose of which is to thwart trolls because everyone has to put their patents in while they're still in business or they'll be sued, and then the patents are already in by the time a failing company gets liquidated.
In your last paragraph you are basically talking about a licensing authority like MPEGLA is.
Except that they charge fees, which retains the perverse incentive to accumulate low-quality patents and for smaller companies to avoid the pool's patents instead of joining it. And then when one that didn't join goes out of business everybody's got troll problems again.
Doesn't that indicate that patents are being used to suppress competitors rather than as a direct revenue source? I don't see how that indicates patents aren't an issue.
So, mass switch-over to electric cars is delayed for a decade or two.