| ▲ | epistasis 3 hours ago | |
Getting to 10x production capacity doesn't require improving battery tech, it just requires building more factories. The equivalent here isn't Moore's Law, it's fab capacity. If battery tech stalled out today at the same pricing (it won't), we could still 10x the battery production capacity every 5 years just on this pace. The learning rate for batteries has not been as steep as Moore's Law for ICs. But the value of being able to store mass quantities of electricity at low cost is so incredibly valuable that it's going to blow up into a huuuuge number of factories. You look at the 6TWh of all time and see that as a limitation. I haven't seen that stat before but I trust you, because with the growth rate of battery production it has to be a tiny number, because it's exponential growth. In 2024, 1.2 TWh of batteries were produced, 20% of all storage capacity ever. That was a single year! What if, in 2024, we produced 20% of all CPU capacity every produced? That's obviously a hugely growing market. > The nature of resource extraction is that the easiest-to-exploit reserves are exhausted first, and continued production is contingent on accessing the progressively more and more inconvenient reserves. Maybe in 2030 annual global production will be 30 TWh - we'll know in 4 years. But there's a lot of people who probably don't want to make trillion-dollar investments gambling on that possibility panning out. If you spend a small amount of time diving into the industry, you'll see that there's a massive number of very smart people solving all these resource constraint problems, securing supply chains years in advance, and building like fucking mad. Sure, there's a lot of people that don't want to get involved, but they will be left in the dust. We are witnessing a massive energy interchange. This is like when the PC came along, but much bigger in terms of quantity and speed. Sure, there are those who are still skeptical of energy storage, 5-10 years after it became blazingly obvious that batteries are cheap and getting cheaper and will take over the enery world. But they are the same people who saw the iPhone and said "it will never catch up to my BlackBerry." Electricity storage in batteries is a swiss-army knife for the grid that never existed until recently. We couldn't do time arbitrage, always had to match supply and demand instantaneously, across grids spanning hundreds and thousands of miles. No more, that's all gone. We can do tiny microgrids, we can do single houses, we can do 10 TWh installs across grids, because batteries scale small, scale big, are cheap, getting cheaper, and are being produced on a growing scale that most people do not understand. | ||