Mark Abramowitz via EV wrote:
I agree with what you are saying (though the numbers *will* change as people have to pay at charging stations), but by investing in cost reductions, I meant the cost of the battery to produce.
Batteries are much harder to cost reduce than the usual consumer gadgets we are used to.
The cost of the materials in most consumer products is negligible. The price is dominated by advertising, labor, development, and profit. We're used to things like cellphones where the cost of materials is insignificant compared to these other costs.
It's different with batteries. They need a *lot* of material to get the energy storage. The more pounds, the greater the energy storage. The materials they use also tend to be expensive (high cost per pound).
The only hope I see for "cheap" batteries is if we develop an effective recycling infrastructure, so most of the cost can be recovered, and the material reused to make new batteries.
Lead-acid batteries are cheap in part because they are so heavily recycled. There are laws that *require* recycling them. This helps to keep the cost of lead down. But there are no such laws for nimh or lithium. Given our throw-away society, what do you think happens to the vast majority of them? They get thrown out -- NOT recycled. And given our present political climate, what do you think the chances are of any laws to require them to be recycled? I'd say nil. :-(
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