I looked into sodium-ion batteries for which factories are coming online in China. The theoretical manufacturing cost of those is very very low, which will make solar + batteries very cheap. I suspect China will reach those costs ahead of schedule.
IMO this is a classic case of underestimating how far manufacturing improvements can get you on the cost scale. You see a promising technology in the lab and it’s hard to imagine a 1 million x reduction in price, yet we see that time and time again as tech gets scaled out.
What’s wild to me is how the US is leaving itself in the dust. How the GOP imagines we’ll be competitive when the rest of the world can produce electricity 10x cheaper than we can is a wonder in itself
Easy: the GOP doesn't care about future competitiveness.
They are currently getting lobbied by oil executives, who are trying to maximize short-term profit while they still can. The wider industry doesn't have the long-term vision to preemptively outlobby them, so the GOP is doing what oil wants.
Dealing with competition in a post-oil world is a problem left for the next generation: the current GOP will be long-dead by then and will have enjoyed the fruits of accepting decades of oil bribes.
Not true, energy is cheap in the US. Politicians rise and fall with energy prices, fossils fuels are still cheaper. America (outside of California which is not governed by the GOP) has some of the cheapest energy costs of competitive countries.
At that point, who really cares? As scale goes down and economies of scale go away, it just becomes an irrelevant novelty. But the actual question is: how much will industrial applications matter.
>What’s wild to me is how the US is leaving itself in the dust. How the GOP imagines we’ll be competitive when the rest of the world can produce electricity 10x cheaper than we can is a wonder in itself
I almost paid < $1USD/gal gas a couple months ago ($1.20 89 octane). My electric is ~ $.12USD/kwh. Gas is just as inexpensive.
I mean where are all the factories making batteries in Europe? It’s not like the US is purposefully preventing battery tech. It’s why all of the government-funded solar companies imploded as well. The manufacturers do not compete
Some people like to say they did, but when you look at the money it was almost all private capital, from big banks and large infrastructure and private pension funds.
That does not make the investment any better. Private capital can be misallocated too.
