A friend of mine works on solid state batteries as a researcher, so I am probably biased. Also good to note is that I distrust USD as a reliable pricing gauge.
That said, I think that [1] solar is an excellent (co-)producer of electricity, and really good batteries would really help with more independence from ever more expensive and worse QoS centrally provided power. So there's an incentive, the market for which mostly sits in Asia, Europe (and AUS/NZ if I'm not mistaken) where there are sizable deployments already.
I think that right now, for tested, fully certified, higher end battery packs, the price is still too high to be useful for the upper middle class household. E.g. my cousin has a decent salary but couldn't make it happen responsibly at todays cost basis. So the TCO of a full solar set with batteries must come down. If it does, there is a huge market. I think it's inevitable, and I agree that solid state may help with this long-term. Don't just think of that as a B2B business with big companies (or government subsidized entities.) There's a huge market in the private consumer sphere.
A 50% drop may be too little though, but on the other hands, if a dozen eggs in 2035 (or its protein equiv in bugz) cost $60, then it would be a very nice outcome.
despite being a believer in at least picking up nuclear development again and instead of letting something like Vogtle kill all motivation, instead doing it harder and smarter ↩
Thanks for the fwd!
A friend of mine works on solid state batteries as a researcher, so I am probably biased. Also good to note is that I distrust USD as a reliable pricing gauge.
That said, I think that [1] solar is an excellent (co-)producer of electricity, and really good batteries would really help with more independence from ever more expensive and worse QoS centrally provided power. So there's an incentive, the market for which mostly sits in Asia, Europe (and AUS/NZ if I'm not mistaken) where there are sizable deployments already.
I think that right now, for tested, fully certified, higher end battery packs, the price is still too high to be useful for the upper middle class household. E.g. my cousin has a decent salary but couldn't make it happen responsibly at todays cost basis. So the TCO of a full solar set with batteries must come down. If it does, there is a huge market. I think it's inevitable, and I agree that solid state may help with this long-term. Don't just think of that as a B2B business with big companies (or government subsidized entities.) There's a huge market in the private consumer sphere.
A 50% drop may be too little though, but on the other hands, if a dozen eggs in 2035 (or its protein equiv in bugz) cost $60, then it would be a very nice outcome.
despite being a believer in at least picking up nuclear development again and instead of letting something like Vogtle kill all motivation, instead doing it harder and smarter ↩