Categories: Business

The “domino effect” of batteries is now unstoppable

A woman charges an electric vehicle (Getty Creative). (Cavan Images via Getty Images)

There is no doubt that we are in the midst of a transition between the use of fossil fuels and the use of electricity-powered engines in transportation vehicles. The big questions many people ask are: When will we permanently stop relying on oil? And how will that process be, slow or fast?

Now, a complex predictive study prepared by energy transition think tank RMI attempts to answer both questions and comes to a conclusion: Battery use is increasing and cannot be stopped; Moreover, this boost would halve global demand for fossil fuels.

“The demand for batteries is increasing rapidly, due to which a domino effect adoption process that spread from country to country and sector to sector,” say RMI analysts Dan Walter, Sam Butler-Sloss and Kingsmill Bond, co-authors of the report, which predicts the battery boom will replace fossil fuels. How will it accelerate in a phased manner?

“At the core of battery success is a strong feedback loop between market scale, cost and quality,” the report says, presenting the current situation in six graphs. “As the battery market grows, unit costs go down and quality goes up.”

The “domino effect” of batteries would halve fossil fuel demand. Photo: Getty Images. (Xia Yuan via Getty Images)

Battery sales are increasing rapidly

RMI’s graph of battery sales over 30 years from 1992 to 2022 shows a classic S-curve, which typically “characterizes the growth of new disruptive technologies.” RMI states that this phenomenon is the result of “systemic feedbacks such as learning curves, economies of scale, technological reinforcement and social diffusion” causing sales rates to double every two or three years. In recent years, this increase has increased even more, with the average rate increasing from 33% to almost 40%.

While S-curves are named for their shape, in which a gentle slope gives way to exponential growth before descending back to a plateau, the battery trend line has not yet begun to flatten out and is simply the average “S”. shows, sales continue to increase, says RMI team.

Cost reduced, quality increased

In the second graph for the years 1991 to 2023, data on battery cost versus energy density follows an “x”-shaped pattern over time. The lines intersect at one point in the late 1990s, when costs fell 99% and density increased fivefold, indicating that the value per dollar of battery energy density has increased dramatically over the past decades. That means batteries store more and more energy and are also becoming cheaper.

“For each doubling of deployments, battery costs fall by 19%,” the analysts wrote. “Combine this drop in cost with a 7% increase in density for each doubling of deployment, and batteries become the fastest-improving clean energy technology.”

Domino effect of batteries

The graph below shows how falling costs and improving energy density are opening up new markets for battery technology. That is, rechargeable batteries were first seen in devices like phones and then moved into cameras, MP3 players, tablets, cars, etc.

“We call this the battery domino effect: the fact that one market becomes the electric battery market causes scale and technological improvements to shift the balance to the next,” the authors write. “Battery technology first made its way into consumer electronics, then into two- and three-wheelers and cars. Now trucks and battery storage are taking over. By 2030, batteries are likely to gain market share in maritime transportation and aviation as well. Is.”

Traditional modelers are behind the curve

RMI’s fourth chart compares actual automotive demand for lithium-ion batteries from 2017 to 2030 with the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) previous forecasts. In retrospect, the graph shows that the IEA’s forecasts – all based on linear adoption rates for batteries – fell even further short of reality.

“The caution of this linear thinking may seem reasonable at first glance,” the RMI researchers write. “But, in fact, this is absolutely wrong”: For the authors, the trend is that demand for electric vehicles is going to skyrocket between now and 2030.

The engines of change accelerate

RMI creates three graphs that show a strong feedback loop between battery quality, cost, and market size. As battery quality improves, costs decrease and market size increases, projections are made beyond 2023 for “rapid” and “fast” adoption scenarios.

the author says so “They do not consider the slow adoption scenario credible, Instead, they see two futures: fast or fast. “The reality is probably somewhere in between.”

Facilitating the abandonment of fossil fuels

The final graph shows how the ripple effect in battery adoption could drive the shift away from fossil fuels. By 2050, increased battery use “threatens more than half of today’s fossil fuel demand” and “moves us toward a 60% zero-carbon energy system.”

These results demonstrate that “the best strategy to rapidly phase out fossil fuels is to accelerate the deployment of technologies that reduce their demand.” That is, the greater the number of electric vehicles, the lesser will be the demand for fossil fuels.