Re:Mercedes-Benz will electrify its entire car lineup by 2022
by _up on Monday September 11, 2017 @02:37PM
(#15220937)
If people go from owning a cellphone battery with 4 Wh to a 65.000 Wh car battery and a 20.000 Wh home battery, battery production have to be extremely increased.
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Re:Mercedes-Benz will electrify its entire car lineup by 2022
by epistasis on Monday September 11, 2017 @04:42PM
(#15222105)
Yes, there are massive investments from many companies in expanding the battery production industry.
Gigafactory 1, in Reno, is a $5B capital investment that aims to produce 50GWh of batteries in 2018, and if they get $100/kWh in 2018, far lower than current prices, then yearly revenue is the same as the cost of Gigafactory 1.
So there's tons of room to grow lithium ion manufacturing capacity. That's only one part of the supply chain though... Looking just at lithium, there seems to be somewhat ample supply for the next few years from proven reserves, so I'm sure there are plenty of people scaling up for production from new sites.