But the issue is that, _even at the time of the statement_, the price has been decreasing over time! It's falsifiable at the time of the statement! You don't need to see the future to dismantle that argument.
Inversely, costs have gone down over time for a long time. You could make the inference that there's a floor, of course, and it's reasonable to do so! But it's hard to disprove the claim that prices will keep on going down.
The former is just on its face wrong based on the current facts, the latter is a judgement call about the future. Totally different beasts, and driven from different things.
I agree that it's generally more likely that a 15-year trend will continue than change. If we're talking about a year, that is. But 5 years? 15 years? 100 years? 1000 years? At some point, the general assumption changes.
But without trend data, I also agree that assuming price stability a better general assumption than assuming a major price drop. Historically, very few things keep getting cheaper. It requires a) large society willing to keep making R&D investments, and b) a technological domain with a lot of possible ways to keep lowering costs.
And what I mostly agree with is the proverb, "It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future."
At some point, there's going to be a price floor that the research, materials supply and competition simply won't break through.
Guessing when that is going to happen is more luck than anything. I do not see it continuing to get exponentially cheaper for long, though.
LiFePho has removed most of the precious metals out of the equation, and the demand for electric cars will continue to compete against the growth in demand for battery storage for renewables. For an analogy, lumber prices have shot through the roof over the past few years where I live due to construction booms. Nothing about the technology has changed, and supply hasn't fluctuated greatly. These same pressures are going to be pushing against lithium batteries getting exponentially cheaper over the next few years. I don't doubt that they will find room to bring prices down, but there is a floor out there somewhere close by.
Electric airplanes could carry these for takeoff and maybe jettison at a preplanned location for recycling.
Regardless, 1 year isn't the correct duration for a bet. People average owning a car for ~6 years, and the average lifespan is something like 12 years.
But depending on terms, I might take a year-over-year bet for battery prices. Demand is high and the pandemic has caused significant supply chain problems. They could well have gone up this year. And indeed, a quick look at news reports suggests key components, including lithium and cobalt, are surging in price. Fine examples of why assuming a historical average has future meaning can get you into trouble.
Meanwhile LiFePO4 batteries, which are currently the most popular chemistry(at least in China), contain no cobalt whatsoever.
Lithium prices have gone down in the last few years, and Cobalt isn’t a necessary component.
A first-order approximation leaves a lot to be desired, but it's better than a zeroth-order approximation.
If you're coming up to the end of a logistic ("S") curve, then assuming a linear growth (or worse, a fixed rate of increase each year, ie exponential growth) is much worse of an assumption than assuming zero change, if you extrapolate too far.
On the other hand, if you are not interested in making long run predictions but only short run predictions, then first order approximations will tend to be more accurate in a small region around the base, but that region might be quite small.
Technology follows an S curve. First it increases slowly, then faster, then more slowly again. It's silly to assume mature technologies will keep getting better at the same rate and silly to assume immature technologies won't get better. Without specifying the technology, one assumption isn't really sillier than the other - physical limits are unintuitive.
Put nearly any electrical device in a box, anything from a television to a cement mixer, and it will raise the temperature of the air in that box by exactly the same amount as the watts it draws from the power source. A 500w television puts out exactly as much heat as a 500w heater.
Analogously, if electricity is carried with the flow of charge - electrons - around a circuit[1], when you extract 100% of the energy as heat, the electrons stop moving and build up in the heater. So you can take the rest of the wiring away because it's doing nothing and save 50% of your costs. Then, a buildup of charge makes a voltage, and a voltage potential difference can drive a current. Therefore you can get 100% of the power out as heat, save half your money on wiring, and use the growing potential difference to power something else. Electricity makes no sense whatsoever.
OK, so that's troll-physics nonsense, but does extracting all the "energy" stop the electrons moving? If not, why not, what energy isn't being extracted? If so, why doesn't that stop current flowing - isn't "free electrons" part of what makes something a conductor of electricity?
[1] though the energy is carried in the e/m field around the surface, somehow
When factoring in the shape of the exponential decreases in costs, and that penetration of most of these technologies is at or before the inflection point (between 5%-15% market penetration), it is more likely that the cost declines will ACCELERATE moving forward rather than slow down.
Why has it felt that laptops and PCs haven’t progressed as much in the 2010s as in the 1990s or 2000s? Because in 1995, there was not a computer on every desk in every home. But now not only is the market saturated with laptops and PCs, people are walking around with mini internet connected “super computers” everywhere they go.
Unfortunately, even a very small amount of noise in the data makes is basically impossible to know where you are in an S-curve.
Much safer to make predictions based on the far more limited good news that PV+battery is already cheaper than coal for electricity or ICE for cars.
Hmm… question for anyone who knows: with current tech, how much would it cost to develop a significant PV-powered electrolysis-and-Sabatier-process plant in any of the big coastal deserts, for exporting methane?
What are you thinking about as the carbon source? If coal, then this has been commercially viable for decades. In North Dakota there is a 1.5 gigawatt installation running since 1984. That one uses electricity from coal power IIUC, but today PV is cheaper than coal for electricity.
If you are talking about CO2 from direct air capture, the optimistic cost estimates of your CO2 feedstock are around $600/tonne. 1 tonne of CO2 gives ~137 kg of methane at 100% reaction yield, due to the molar weight ratio of CO2 to CH4.
So per tonne of methane produced, the CO2 cost alone is above $4000. For comparison a tonne of natural gas in the US today costs between $500 and $1000 for the end user.
This means that CO2 capture from air needs to become two orders of magnitude cheaper than today before this scheme works out.
I would say hydrogen electrolysis and then liquefaction for large scale distribution/export is way more realistic. This is what the EU seems to be going for together with Northern Africa.
> 1 tonne of CO2 gives ~137 kg of methane at 100% reaction yield, due to the molar weight ratio of CO2 to CH4.
I think it’s more like 363 kg given the ratio of molar weights: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=co2%20molar%20weight%2F...
(Looks like an extra factor of two, but I can’t figure out why, everything I play with in WolframAlpha is a factor of two in the wrong direction)
While true, my point is that when combined with the fact that we are pre-inflection point, and the economics now stand on their own (renewables, Electric Vehcile TCO and various Energy Storage applications being already cheapest, competitive or very close too) it is not unreasonable when mapping out the 5-15 year future to bet on an acceleration of cost declines over a deceleration. Particularly because the actual driver of unit cost declines (Wrights Law/Moore's Law) is the doubling / magnitude of units manufactured and put through the system, for which with all the factories being ramped up and planned - point to the positive in my view on it.
Regarding your PV-powered and electrolysis-Sabatier (electrofuel) methane, I think there are two important considerations. In order for methane (or other e-fuels like hydrogen or longer chain hydrocarbons) to be made economically, the capital cost of the equipment needs to be utilized as close to 100% of the time as possible. We already know that PV excess will be centered around the daytime peak (5-7 hours per day) meaning that there would also need to be plenty of excess wind to balance this out to get anywhere close to 100% utilization of the excess energy. Until the electricity grids get sufficiently saturated with renewables broadly, most e-fuel applications will continue to not be competitive, particularly as things like energy storage applications (possibly run off an e-fuel) are likely to be economical prior there being an opportunity for the export of excess e-fuels. That's more at the a end of the S-Curve as far as I can tell.
The main argument for hydrogen AFAICT is that it can be exported overseas or stored for inter-seasonal use.
Batteries can't do that, as 1) when compared to literal rocket fuel, they're impractically heavy to put on a cargo ship for bulk transport, and 2) batteries trickle-discharge so after a month or two the battery will be flat.
I barely remember the process from school, something like this rings a bell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalytic_reforming
Because computer development is driven by network upload bandwidth. And maximum network upload bandwidth has been stagnant for almost 15 years.
And vast network upload bandwidth increases are quite technically possible--but has been politically damped rather than adoption curve damped.
The input variable is the cumulative number of units, and of course we can’t be exact about the trajectory of that number, but we can infer from X MWh manufactured -> $/MWh.
And yet we do it every ~18 months with semiconductors.
Imperfect to be sure, but if you don’t skate to where the puck is headed, you will miss opportunity.
So, this is about to stop. Very soon. Quantum tunneling, yield rates, etc are all starting to be cost prohibitive.
<10nm stuff was already delayed. There's plans for 3nm. It's unclear yet whether 2nm will work.
Even if hypothetically it does, there's a very real limit - an atom is only 10x smaller than 2nm.
No improvement trend goes on forever. But why is this the moment lithium ion hits the wall? It’s like trying to call the end of a bull market.
The biggest problem is lithography. ASML managed unexpectedly for many in the industry including Intel to solve technological problems with extreme ultraviolet sources, but shrinking transistors significantly further requires soft x-rays and the perspectives of that now for mass lithography are much more uncertain than for EUV ten years ago.
People have been saying that for over 10 years though. "Very soon" keeps being punted off by another 5 years every 5 years.
And outside of data centers, single-thread performance is still king.
Performance per watt has improved, but that's not a metric the typical end user cares much about.
And performance per watt absolutely is important. People care a lot about battery life of their laptops and phones and that's strongly dependent on performance per watt.
Since that number is purely theoretical, we can construct a theoretical scenario in which its theoretical nature would become absolutely obvious. Take a 7nm process node transistor and stack it 100 times. Such a process would be called a 0.07nm process.
That's certainly a real limit, but what is it a limit on? It is not obvious from first principles that it takes n atoms to implement n transistors.
On the other, yes: continue current trends and single atom transistors become standard in 10-32 years.
A jump from "all past predictions failed" to "and so will all future predictions" seems rather bold to me. In the end it's like a somewhat upended variation of the "x decades to practical fusion" thing where we all hope that the old joke that x might be a natural constant is eventually proven wrong.
Improvements still happen, but not always in the same way. If you implemented an application in 2003 assuming we'd have such a processor you'd be very disappointed. Counting on exponential improvements to continue is risky bet.
Yes this isn't single-threaded performance, but I think we should keep in mind that exponential improvement in price/performance over many decades is possible, if never certain.
Sources - https://www.alternatewars.com/BBOW/Computing/Computing_Power... - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M1
On the other hand using improvement over the same timeline, drawing a line on a graph and saying "look how X Y is gonna be in Z years" is the same exact type of stupid but pointed in a different direction.
In 1991 lithium was highly immature technology and would take about a decade to make it into fragile electronics. It took another decade to make it into power tools. Now it's viable in high end commuter vehicles. If it was easy to predict the future a decade out with any reliability we wouldn't be having this discussion.