alt Hacker NewsAFAIK cost here counts only the manufacturing side. While your conclusion that in the long run economies of scale will prevail, the lifetime costs are probably more than 30%. For example I expect recycling costs to be significantly worse for the Li-Ion.
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namibj • yesterday at 9:39 PM
Grid scale LFP with once daily cycling lasts 30 years before the cells are degraded enough to think about recycling.
And those are very low maintenance over that time.
You're probably mostly going to swap voltage regulators and their fans, perhaps bypass the occasional bad cell by turning the current to zero, unscrewing the links from the adjacent cells to the bad cell, and screwing in a fresh link with the connect length to bridge across.
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> For example I expect recycling costs to be significantly worse for the Li-Ion.
I think there's a good argument for the opposite.
Recycling costs for Li-Ion once we are doing it at scale should be significantly negative. There are valuable materials you get to extract, they aren't in that complex a blend to extract them from, and there's a lot of basically the same blend. The biggest risk in this claim is, I think, the implicit claim that we won't figure out how to extract the same materials from the earth much cheaper in the meantime cratering the end of life value of batteries - but in that event the CO2 battery technology is underwater anyways and the chemical batteries win on not wasting R&D costs.
By contrast while there's some value in the steel that goes into building tanks and pumps and so on, the material cost if a much lower fraction of the cost of the device. Most of the cost went into shaping it into those complex shapes. I don't know for sure what the cost breakdown of the CO2 plant looks like but if a lot of the cost is something else it's probably something like concrete or white paint that actually costs money to dispose of.