• acchariya@lemmy.world
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    9 hours ago

    Battery prices are collapsing and we are at an inflection point where electric vehicles will soon be more economical to purchase, drive and maintain for a much greater number of people. This is as inevitable as the phaseout of coal.

    • nednobbins@lemm.ee
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      2 hours ago

      I’d broaden that to a whole host of “green” and “alternative energy” sectors.

      All the panic about Chinese “overproduction” of EVs and similar technologies is just China going whole hog on those industries. It’s not an “overproduction” in the traditional sense, where a company produces more than the market will bear and has to sell excess inventory at a loss. China just produces all of this stuff cheaply and at a huge scale.

      About 20 years ago the general perception was that EVs were a joke https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2HX5wsQVEA Now we have cost effective solar and wind, efficient battery storage, good and cheap EVs and drones, modern heat pumps etc.

      I don’t even think all the tariffs will matter in the long run. China is currently adopting all that stuff at a breakneck pace. Their production capacity won’t just go away once they’ve saturated the domestic market and the growing number of countries that have trade agreements with China). At that point, Chinese manufacturers will have no choice but to start actually selling below cost, just so they can clear inventory.

      And this has a snowball effect too. Energy is often the limiting factor in production. An abundance of cheap energy makes it cheaper to produce more cheap energy production.

      • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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        3 hours ago

        Oh it tipped a few years ago. It’s just still being implemented. There may be less startup to ramping up fossil fuel plants still, but solar is cheaper to build and operate

        • Valmond@lemmy.world
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          14 minutes ago

          So I guess what kind of tipping point we’re talking about, I meant we’ll soon be drowning in cheap solar panels, it’s just as you said not yet at capacity.

    • Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world
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      8 hours ago

      Yeah, I was shopping for lithium on phosphatase leisure batteries maybe two years ago and was looking at spending over £1000 per battery. Now those batteries are not much over £100 and prices still seem to be falling.

        • ayyy@sh.itjust.works
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          4 hours ago

          LiFePo (Lithium Iron Phosphate) is heavier than traditional Lithium Ion batteries for the same amount of energy storage, but doesn’t degrade when discharged to zero the way traditional Lithium Ion does.

        • Revan343@lemmy.ca
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          4 hours ago

          That looks like autocorrect or text-to-speech mangled ‘lithium iron phosphate’

        • WoodScientist@lemmy.world
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          2 hours ago

          Well, you know…sometimes you just need a vibrator that can go a continuous month between recharges…