It was Samsung, not Tesla, who supplied the actual cells [1]: Tesla’s giant new Powerpack project in Australia will use battery cells made by Samsung
[1] https://electrek.co/2017/08/09/tesla-powerpack-project-austr...
Someone else owning your key competitive advantage sounds like a vulnerability...
OTOH you could similarly say the touchscreen was the key to the first iphone... invented, developed, manufactured and owned by someone else.
LG, Panasonic and Samsung make almost all the lithium ion cells used today so it doesn't seem odd that Tesla would license one of their technologies to start. The r&d savings would be in the billions.
Not sure whether Panasonic does it for them but the way I hear them talk about it they seem to have quite a bit of R&D in house.
Musk has repeatedly mentioned how aware of this he is. That explains his insistence on building the Gigafactory.
> “Musk has been the visionary,” said Steve LeVine, a journalist at Axios who has written a book about the battery industry. “He has been willing to take the plunge all the way along, from the very beginning.” In contrast, he told me in a phone interview, “Detroit has approached this race so cautiously.”
I remember hearing Musk being quite adamant the scale of the factory was for batteries, but you have to understand, he can’t really publicly say that he’s leveraging Panasonic for now, but will drop them as soon as he can.
[1]: https://www.vox.com/new-money/2017/4/17/15293892/tesla-batte...
After all, they are by far the world's largest consumer of batteries. They have leverage.
Hell, back in the 40's even Thomas Watson of IBM claimed there was only enough market for 5 computers in the world.
Many times it is a different style of how standard business operates so someone coming in and changing the market is really hard to look at when your mind is already made up.
If you bring your lipo cell from 80 to 60% and back slowly you can get an order of magnitude more cycles. This lends itself well to solar storage scenarios where you want to level out the production and can plan around how and when it will charge and discharge.
ie by being a fast peaker supply, it stopped spikes in energy prices across the Aust Energy market which is where the savings of $40M come from.
Not that there is anything wrong with that - it still makes total sense for SA to deploy such a system in that case, but it's very different than say saving $40 million in fuel costs due to not spinning up short-term natgas generators or something.
This is direct state interference in a competitive market so the “floor” is still quite high. With more private operators entering the market the ability to game the system will be eroded further since everyone wants to get the easy money.
The savings were mostly due to cutting the fat out of the market gouging practices. No/little change to actual supply occurred.
Socialism would be hitting those guys with a big regulatory stick, or shutting them down for just providing a service. Not all state expenditure is socialist. Were monarchies involving heavy state domination of the economy socialist? No, and neither necessarily are liberal democracies with a state sector, especially if that state sector is exposed to market forces.
It's really annoying that so many mentions of socialism or capitalism on HN get the basics wrong. These terms have perfectly good established meanings that are actually quite specific.
So: Australia is sunny and it's consumption peaks generally follow the temperature due to air conditioning - so build more solar and pair it with more storage (batteries) instead of investing in coal and gas burning.
Thats is such a bizarre comment. No corporation has a right to make money, they have to earn it by providing a valuable service. If that service can be provided more efficiently another way, tough. That's what market forces are all about.
Yes the energy company commissioning the battery is publicly owned. You could squint and see some socialism in that. I've no argument there. However it's doing this because it is exposed to market forces, and overspending on peak power provision. Characterising responding to that market stimulus with capital investment is I think going a step too far.
Look at it another way. Is exposing public companies to market forces and having them react to those stimuli more socialist than protecting them from markets, or less socialist? Is it closer to pure capitalism or further away?
The problems have been interconnects failing, poorly maintained transmission lines failing, the market operator placing restrictions on renewables which meant that renewables were not allowed to try to keep the lights on, and reliance of SA on electricity imported from unreliable interstate supply (aka coal thermal plants that break down or simply fail due to high ambient temperatures).
All of SA’s energy problems are due to poor regulation, poor market operation, poor maintenance, Federal interference, market gaming by fossil fuel operators, and unreliable coal plants.
There will be similar returns possible for other batteries in NSW (a net importer, thus highly vulnerable to gaming of the market) and QLD with a large installed base of unreliable coal which means increasing need for ancillary services.
Coal is not reliable to start with, and the plant currently in use is old and getting to the point of being no longer economically viable. NSW and QLD grids will need significant support services as they transition from unreliable coal to dependable (but intermittent) renewables.
While the transition to renewables has indeed been rapid and jarring, that's not what has caused problems.
https://www.aemo.com.au/-/media/Files/Electricity/NEM/Market...
Failure of a meshed power system cannot be attributed to the failure of any single sub-system. Rather it must be a combination of factors including those you just mentioned.
The dependence of the power system on renewables (specifically wind farms)contributed in two ways to the blackout:
1. The majority of wind turbines provide little or no system inertia. By displacing synchronous generation with wind generation, system inertia is reduced which results in greater ROCOF during an event where there is a change in active power demand/supply. In the SA blackout, fast ROCOF overwhelmed the system's last line of defence- under frequency load shedding.
2. Some wind turbines contained a fault ride-through setting which AEMO was apparently not aware of prior to the blackout. Specifically, the setting caused the turbines to disconnect after experiencing a sequence of voltage excursions within a set time period. The disconnection caused a loss of active power supply to the grid which contributed to the drop in frequency and eventual collapse.
More peaks doesn't mean worse all things considered, it isn't a critique, it's just saying that battery viability is highly contingent on local power mix.
I don’t know what this system was designed for, but a product that costs $66M and saves $40M in its first year need not be designed for a long lifespan.
It seems scrapping this after 3 years still would net you a nice profit margin.
So, depending on how much designing for a long lifespan costs, that may be a thing of the past.
110% eco.
As opposed to say a synchronous converter which requires annual downtime and continual replacement of parts, and (being limited by inertia) can’t provide the same stability and support that a battery can.
On top of that these systems are still useful well below their original capacity, so they can rather than a sudden huge bill you simply add more capacity as the original battery’s degrade in a fairly predictable fashion. Over time you end up with a much smaller annual investment than your saving every year.
The li-ion externalities is mostly incurred once when mining. Although it's still in it's infancy, recycling li-ion batteries is already possible, and supposedly profitable. Especially when you can get an enormous batch of cells of exactly the same model as you would with this project.
The biggest problem in recycling li-ion batteries is that you may need different processes for different cells, so you need to sort them first.
I agree with your comment, but lithium is not mined. This is a common misconception and should be noted since we're chatting about externalities.
You are adopting implied reductionism around the "cost" side without having done the work (in my opinion) to justify that this concern outweighs the upside benefits of ceasing to use coal.
PS a lot of the minable lithium which isn't in Chile, is in Australia. So, we have low-miles lithium!
Erlich/Simons anyone?
Presumably that is why the same company is trying to kick off in Australia as well, even though we have higher regulatory and labour costs here.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-chile-albemarle-exclusive...
Human ingenuity not going to stop finding extractible sources anytime soon.
[1] https://waste-management-world.com/a/1-the-lithium-battery-r...
Sure, extracting copper has costs too, but I don't see the same handwringing about that.
There are of course a variety of good reasons why exponential cost reduction won't continue, such as the cost of raw materials, shipping, and so on - but most importantly that almost nothing works like that for long.
Li-ion battery manufacturing has seen a good uptick in efficiency due to quickly growing demand and a lot of money poured into squeezing out efficiencies, but there is no reason to assume exponential cost reductions to continue indefinitely. Indeed, it does't work that way for nearly any other industrial product, and (current) batteries aren't special in any way that would make them obviously different.
> Similar to what Moore's law did to semiconductors ...
Actually it is not similar at all. Semiconductors were actually special. There was an exponential reduction in feature size for many years, which led to exponential increases in performance, power efficiency, etc, per dollar.
The massive gains were a direct result of the underlying process being scaled in an exponential manner. Almost nothing else works like this, certainly not batteries. The basic chemistry and efficiency of batteries, including Li-on has been pretty much the same for decades. There are occasional improvements in chemistry or anode construction or whatever, but these are a few % here or a few % there, and many claimed improvements don't pan out at all [1]. That's nothing like the doubling of transistor density that continued for decades. In particular, the total storage of batteries is related to number of atoms of the active ingredient, and that generally puts a fairly hard cap on size and other efficiency factors.
Batteries are becoming cheaper because the production has been scaled up and efficiencies of scale achieved, but this will probably follow a similar curve as for any other popular product like lettuce or vehicles. There is no magic [2] and you'll hit a wall pretty quickly.
---
[1] Just go back five years and look for "big" battery news, e.g., big suggested improvements in any characteristic and see if any of them are being used today. Very few are.
[2] Of course there might be magic in terms of a very different battery chemistry, or some totally new way of storing energy that replaces batteries. There have been a lot of contenders over the years, but very few winners. A look at the periodic table also indicates that when it comes to batteries you can do better than Li-ion batteries, but not that much better.
Those Lithium Ion batteries that haven't changed in decades? They were only commercially released in 1991, less than three decades ago.
I feel like people have a hard time seeing that a curve is still exponential when it moves at ~4% a year, as batteries have for the past century or so. But that still means that the technology could effectively double in ~15 years. How many ICE applications become irrelevant at that point? And which ones become irrelevant at various points in between?
The battery revolution is in full swing.
I mean the basic chemistries haven't changed in decades. Li-ion batteries were understood and experimented on long before they became commercially viable.
The basic chemistry is the same as it was back then. There have been various improvements in packaging and chemistry/anode tweaks that have maybe resulted in a doubling of capacity in that time.
> I feel like people have a hard time seeing that a curve is still exponential when it moves at ~4% a year, as batteries have for the past century or so
It is actually a hard problem to see if something is exponential at very low growth rates. Like the economy used to grow at 5%, then 4%, then 3%, now 2% - is it really growing "exponentially" or are we trying to fit an exponential curve to something sub-exponential?
After all, if you take the measurement of anything at times T0 and T1, you can calculate the rate of growth in % terms, which by its very units implies exponential growth, but it may not be.
So if Li-ion batteries keep dropping in price by say 15% +/- 5% for the next five years, you won't really have enough info to say who was right. You can fit other curves to that data. Only when you have many years with a high enough growth rate, like Moore's law, can you really be sure exponential is the only curve that fits.
> The battery revolution is in full swing.
I don't disagree - batteries are everywhere and becoming cheaper and better in many respects. It just won't look anything like Moore's law long term.
Basically, predictions are hard. :)
That being the case, the relevant question is not whether the prices will continue to drop forever at the present rate. Rather, the question is whether they will drop low enough to make the transition possible.
Well, they are already low enough to do that for some uses, and a good deal more price reduction is expected in the coming decade, so it seems the answer is yes, they will drop low enough.
And what then? In term of energy contained in atoms, current batteries are many, many orders of magnitude away from the theoretical maximum energy density of matter. (And so is liquid hydrocarbon fuel.)
Not at all. Existing cathode materials have a theoretical coulombic capacity of about 200 mAh/g (mostly less than this value, a few more have more). So for a 45g cell like an 18650, you are looking at 9,000 mAh maximum in the impossible world where your battery is 100% cathode, no anode or electrolyte. Those cells are already > 3000 mAh, so there is no way there are orders of magnitude between current batteries and the hard cap.
On the contrary, for contemplated chemistries the practical hard cap is probably less than 2x current capacity/weight values (since you need a significant amount of anode and electrolyte in practice), and almost certainly less than 3x.
> Current batteries throw away enormous capacity due to the safety constraints in preventing thermal events.
If by "current batteries" you mean current chemistries like Li-ion and existing and contemplated cathode materials, then this is not correct. The batteries have essentially the ideal material ratios within the existing manufacturing capability. That is, if you were willing to have a much less safe battery with the same materials you would gain almost no capacity. The main concession to safety is when a safer cathode material is chosen, like LiFePo over cobalt or whatever.
so to get to /4, you would need a 12x increase.
>since one of the reasons liquid fuel can store so much energy in such a compact and lightweight form is that it doesn't require storage of one of the primary reactants (oxygen).
the main reason is the covalent bond is stronger. using air will only double the energy density for fuel( 1x fuel instead of /2 fuel /2 oxygen.)
The same principally applies to almost anything. In fact, for typical physical products the saying is that double the production will halve the cost. This is no different. Moore's law was much the same, just that it's scaling was much faster than anything seen before, such that every 18 months we were able to halve the costs. And of course semiconductors revolutionized almost everything.
For li-ion batteries, this seems to be every 4-5 years and has been for the past 20 years or so. Rumors have it that Tesla is even beating this...
Call it "Ric's law": every 4-5 years li-ion battery prices will halve ;)
That's not "efficiencies of scale" - that's fundamentally making something much better due improved physics, with the same amount of work. It particular, it would apply even to "small" producers.
Now don't get me wrong, CPU manufacture was also subject to traditional efficiencies of scale: the biggest fabs got bigger, and a few large players squeezed out the rest and were able to sell more and average our their R&D costs over more sales, but that effect is small compared to the million-fold improvement in the underlying physical design.
Batteries have no such scaling. The power stored is basically related to number of lithium ions and the capacity of the anode to accommodate them all. There are some small efficiencies: you can increase efficiency from 80% to 90%, but never to 2000%. You can make materials thinner or cheaper. You can change form factors to use materials more efficiently. You can standardize on battery sizes to make more use of a single production line. You can secure long term lithium contracts and open more mines.
These are all the traditional "efficiency of scale" things and they all hit a wall pretty quickly. You could probably easily sustain a 15% reduction for a while longer, but certainly not 40 years like Moore's law.
> The same principally applies to almost anything.
It doesn't, just look around.
What else has decreased in cost by a factor of a million over the past few decades? Cars have increased in popularity by many-fold since the 40s , and after an initial period of traditional "efficiencies of scale", costs have remained relatively fixed.
Look at any random food product that suddenly increases a surge in popularity, perhaps reaching a 10x sales multiplier: final cost and production costs don't drop 10x.
If all of a sudden we start eating 2 avocados every meal they aren't going to start costing 10 cents.
> In fact, for typical physical products the saying is that double the production will halve the cost.
I can imagine this rule is true... up to a point!
That's the "traditional efficiencies of scale" at work: it's usually an S-curve [2]. If you want some custom widget, you are probably going to have to pay $100 for the first one, and $1 each or whatever for your run of 100. When you order one million, maybe it drops to 1 cent. When you order a billion, they don't cost 0.001 cents though.
You don't have to take my word for it though: just look at any two big companies, but where one is bigger than the other, and look at their costs of production. Let's say Coke sells 5x as much as Pepsi: does Pepsi cost 5x as much to produce? Not all, they are virtually identical.
Many models of vehicles sell 10x or 100x of some unpopular rivals, but the production cost is about the same.
---
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle
[2] Approximately, at least - although it depends heavily on the product. For example, the initial part of the curve might not be very flat for some things (e.g., with large fixed one-off costs) - but they almost all share the "rightmost" flat part of the S-curve.
Li-ion batteries are typically spooled in layers [1] (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery#/media/Fil...). The thinner the layers, the higher the capacity as you have a smaller distance between positive and negative layers. From my discussion with battery chemists, this is what is primarily driving the annual ~15% reduction, economies of scale also obviously playing a role.
Unsure what the theoretical limit of battery size layers is, and how far off we are from that, but the thinner we get those layers, the higher capacity the batteries per weight and also presumably price.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery#Shapes
I'm arguing it's not at all all similar. The capacity of a lithium ion battery is fundamentally limited by the amount cathode material it contains, along with sufficient electrolyte to support it, just like any other battery. Making other materials thinner, allows you to stuff in more of this stuff, and other changes in the arrangement may make the process more efficient, but up to a limit. There is hard cap to usefulness of all of these processes, at the "theoretical efficiency" and in principle softer caps before that point long before you approach the theoretical caps.
If you have a chance, ask the battery chemists you know what the best-case storage is for a particular chemistry and cathode material, compared to what is available today. I don't think it is more than 10x aware and is probably much less.
That's very different than CPU scaling where you started out many billions of times away from the physical limits of the computational capacity of the material, and many trillions away from the theoretical physical limits of computation.
So no, thinner stuff isn't going to sustain a 15% annual increase in efficiency [1]. In fact, I don't think think it will even sustain a single 15% increase from today until the end of time.
Of course, there are many other vectors along which battery efficiency can increase when the denominator is "cost", even if the storage/size doesn't increase much. You can increase manufacturing efficiency. You can introduce new form factors. You can tweak the chemistry. You can carefully match the required discharge characteristics to the application. Outside of the battery itself, you can improve charging and discharging algorithms, you can use finer-grained control over smaller groups of batteries, you can improve thermal management. However, these are just in the range of normal industrial optimizations that apply to any product. You can replace "batteries" with "lettuce" in the above and come with a similar list.
---
[1] To be clear, there is no 15% increase in battery efficiency per year, when measured by volume, weight or other physical characteristics: that stat must involve "price". Panasonic, the best and biggest Li-on player out there, has barely budged in efficiency on their headline battery, the 18650.
It's entirely possible that with an exponential increase in production volume (i.e., funding) we could see some new chemistries appear.
Compare to Silicon Carbide (blue LEDs) and Gallium Nitride (power transistors).
The question is how much it will buy us.
Unlike other domains where theories or algorithms or medicines or whatever appear almost "out of thin air", the periodic table is limited and the mechanism of battery operation is well understood, so I think there is already a pretty good grasp on the possible materials that can be used, even in theory.
For example, Lithium is used for a reason, something like it's electron carrying capacity per unit weight. There are no other elements waiting to be discovered that are going to be better. Cathode materials are more complicated, but I don't think there is any order of magnitude improvement hidden out there.
I could certainly be wrong.
[1] https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/tracking-reside...
What is "it" that happened? If you are talking about sustained exponential cost reductions over a period of decades, like Moore's law, then maybe it did happen from a very high starting cost, but it won't continue.
Any market can undergo a rapid reduction in prices over a short period of time, as a product increases in adoption by one or more orders of magnitude.
You could fit an exponential curve to that growth, but ... it will almost never be sustained. The future is what we are talking about here.
Let's take solar modules as an example. From something like [1] prices have dropped from about $4.00/watt to $0.30/watt in 10 years. So that's a price drop of about 23% per year (each year is 0.77 the price of the previous). So today, at 30 cents/watt a 300W panel (the big ones you see on houses) is about $90.
If that is really a sustained exponential drop, those same panels will be $6.75 in 10 years. Possible? Yes. That said, I don't think you can find almost anything that big and heavy almost anywhere for $6.75. Maybe bricks or gravel or something, I'm not sure.
10 years later, those same panels will cost 50 cents. Possible? No way. You aren't going to ship a 300W panel anywhere for 50 cents. You aren't going to have space in your warehouse for something that big for 50 cents. You aren't going to be able to buy even the basic raw materials like glass and aluminum for 50 cents.
There's a common theme here: for something to scale exponentially, at a fixed size, every part of the process has to scale exponentially. The cost of shipping was irrelevant when the panels were $1,000, but it becomes pretty important when you are trying to ship something that weighs 100 lbs across the world or even a country and sell it for less than a dollar. The basic raw materials are a pittance with $500 panels, but they dominate the cost if you are trying to sell them for 50 cents.
The only way this exponential scaling works is if you can make something roughly the same size exponentially more efficient. That's that happened with CPUs. The CPU itself was more or less the same size for decades. They made them in similar fabs. There were some "traditional" efficiencies of scales thrown in, like moving from 200mm wafers to 300mm wafers, but the only thing that allowed exponential improvement was that the chips themselves became a million times more efficient without increasing in size or (mostly) the consumption of any raw material.
CPUs didn't scale up a million times by building a giant fab the size of a country, and using wafers miles across and mining silicon from the moon, which would be how a traditional process would scale up: they scaled up by becoming internally a million times more efficient.
Solar cells don't have that type of scaling available to them. There are hard limits on the efficiency (which is already above 20%) based on the physics involved - but even without any reference to cell physics there is a hard limit at 100% which means the efficiency upside is at most a one time 4x gain from here.
---
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Price_history_of_sil...
Batteries are in a similar position as solar was a decade or two ago. The grid operators desperately need storage capabilities, and li-ion is one of the more promising solutions, but it's still too expensive. But another decade of cost reductions can change that. No one knows for certain if it's possible, but like I said in my original post, no dramatic technology changes are really needed, just better logistics and scaling could be enough.
The OP did, which is what I was responding to. He mentioned the current exponential decrease in battery costs, and said "I see no reason for that not to continue".
They then drew a direct analogy to Moore's law to explain how such exponential gains can be sustained. I disagree.
Of course, even the GP probably agrees they won't continue "indefinitely" but my claim is that they can't even continue for very long (the higher the rate of cost reduction, the shorter it can be sustained).
> But it is a fact, that solar experienced that type of cost reduction for a period of 2-3 decades.
Kind of, there were certainly long periods of stagnation in solar panel costs, but also periods of large drops. It also depends how your pick your starting point.
One has to ask (as you did) whether today's batteries are more like the low-volume niche product of 70s solar panels, or more like today's solar panels. I'm willing to bet the latter, both because batteries have seen substantial investment to date (I'd wager much more than solar panels), and because the existing scale of battery manufacturing is already massive (c.f., gigafactory). Furthermore, there are no apparent revolutions in battery technology on the horizon.
So rather than being at the start of a precipitous drop in battery prices, I think we are somewhere near the middle, and the drops from here will mostly slow down not speed up.
Are they using significantly different technologies for the individual cells? I always found it weird that the large battery in a Tesla, for example, was just made up of thousands of 18650 cells that are probably smaller than the battery in your phone. Is the Powerwall is the same?
Does it get any different at larger sizes? Obviously stuff must be different outside of the cells, even if the cells are the same.
Of course this is also why I think there are some cost reductions on the horizon, as current EV and grid tied batteries are basically just a bunch of laptop batteries thrown into a fancy box.
I also read something like that. I suspect it is more of a tweak than anything major. No doubt it is the same basic chemistry but perhaps with minor tweaks to the various ratios and material thicknesses and so on. The Tesla batteries are a single-application cell, so you know exactly the maximum discharge current, the maximum charge current, the temperature parameters, and so on, whereas a generic 18650 has to balance those for a "typical application" or whatever. See for example the Samsung high-discharge INR18650 cells which trade off capacity for higher max discharge current.
OTOH the other hand I also heard the early Teslas were using exactly the Panasonic 18650B cell. They could both be true: maybe it was a stock cell in the early days and they tweaked the formula later in concert with Panasonic as their volumes rose. There was no big evident spike in capacity vs weight though...
/aside With world human population forecast to decline, efficiences and economies of scale will be less in the future.
The real reason we need strong AI - as consumers.
Why would that continue? Surely materials costs become more significant as other costs go down, which must be harder to reduce?
More importantly, a ton of lithium mined will be used for decades; when all of the Model S/X/3 battery packs are end of life (10-15 years from now), those modules are going to be remanufactured into stationary storage (or recycled entirely through a destructive extraction process, depending on degradation and next use case). This is similar to how your recycled pop can might end up in the aluminum used in a new light truck or an aircraft fuselage (edit: poor example; a better example would be automotive parts that are remanufactured and put back into service).
The smartest thing Tesla ever did was finance battery manufacturing using luxury vehicle margins (stoking demand with a sexy, desirable brand), and have those customers (including myself) finance the depreciation and capital carrying costs of those battery sleds they'll use again in the future. I am not a Model S owner; I am the temporary user of 100kw of energy storage, which will eventually make it's way into stationary storage where mobile energy density (ie pack degradation) isn't as much of a concern.
Panasonic and Samsung make Tesla's battery cells; Tesla simply assembles them together. For now they're the big kahuna because they've locked up output through contracts but when they don't control the primary input to their "biggest product" they're at the mercy of their suppliers and the market.
I think we also disagree on Tesla's execution. Tesla has just barely managed to avoid death many times. That's not successful execution unless you define success as not failing.
I don't know enough to say the true impact is different than the stated impact or anything like that. But I have my suspicions that something isn't what it seems with lithium production.
I have heard a different theory from a friend working in finance. He said that most of a GM/Toyota car is made by suppliers, but Tesla does almost all the components of its cars by itself, capturing all the profits. He said that most car manufacturers are actually only car assemblers.
Similarly, there are many PC brands like Lenovo or Dell, but they have to share their profits with suppliers like Intel/Nvidia/Samsung/Microsoft. Apple, also captures a lot of profits because they do not only assemble, they also make software and hardware.
https://www.tesla.com/blog/teslas-closed-loop-battery-recycl...
> Working with Umicore has allowed us to completely recycle the Roadster battery packs profitably, without special financial incentives necessary to promote recycling
If you have a mass quantity of the same type of good, you can avoid most of these costs.
But suppose we never figure out a good way to recycle these batteries, and we just have to throw them all in a landfill and keep making new ones. Is that actually so terrible? There's nothing toxic in a typical li-ion battery, so basically we just have inert materials that were taken from the ground being put back in the ground. Mining for nickel/cobalt/lithium is not great for the environment, but the effect is pretty localized, so a "disposable battery future" is probably still highly preferable over the fossil fuel status quo where the entire planet is fucked.
I mean... yea?
I don't know but I look back to the 2006 Jeep Wrangler being almost entirely recyclable steel and had an effective life of 40+ years if taken care of. Then I look to new cars using composites and lithium that WILL go into a landfill 20 years or less because they're just not fixable in the same way, it's cheaper to write off of an insurance claim than to fix.
It almost seems to me there is no free lunch, but that people like new and shiny and the company with all the tech is going to be popular with tech people.
And if we're going to talk about people's irrational thought patterns about the environment... I nominate the idea that landfills matter more than atmosphere dumping, which seems to be based on the fact that landfills are more visible.
I would love to see the engineering details around the 'moat' that Tesla has with batteries.
if other companies wanted to build a new factory with panasonic, perhaps they could do that....and then we'll start to see their results sometime in the 2020s....
Source on their panels from Buffalo mostly going to non-Tesla installers?
And that is a pro-Tesla source. I had a WSJ link before that I don't have time to look up.
The chemistry might also be finely tuned to work with their own battery management units, though I'm less sure of that.
This is the same as Anker; they use the same lithium cells in their products as almost all of their competitors. Their secret sauce is assembly the cells together with other components to make the final products.
On top of those bare cells, third parties may add protection circuits, or maybe Panasonic does it themselves in some cases.
Panasonic makes the cells, which is easy to do, to scale and to copy. Tesla's added value is the charging control for each cell in the battery pack.
For small currents, yes. For the huge current spikes both in draining and charging, or the continuous massive loads of supercharging? No. Same for the actual science: figuring out a way to pull/push hundreds of amps to the pack while taking care that no single cell is overloaded/overheated or that faulty or degraded cells are taken care of.
Graphite and lithium are the only things that aren't currently recycled. Lithium is too cheap right now- it makes up on the order of 1% the cost of a cell. It's more common than lead. We're very unlikely to have lithium supply problems. Compare the 7 billion tonnes of coal production, or 5 million tonnes of lead, to the 80 million cars sold annually. Mining in general can be scaled to far larger than anything car batteries would need.
Graphite is more of an issue. Battery graphite is very high quality spheroidal grains, roughly 55% synthetic and 45% "natural"- even the natural stuff goes through a huge amount of processing. Synthetic graphite can be made from anything, but natural graphite has slightly higher specific energy. Both types take a great deal of energy to manufacture, and natural spheroidal graphite would be a lot more expensive if not for Chinese and American coal.
Batteries are burnt as part of the recycling process, and even if they weren't there's no really good way to recover the graphite. So that probably puts a bit of a floor on li ion recycling savings. The elemental metals recovered are also not appropriate to directly turn into batteries, so they will probably get sold on the open market for lower profit.
The bottom line is that the only constraint on manufacturing batteries is the cost of energy.
The lithium is not recycled, due to economies of scale.
Same for the graphite.
There is no foreseeable shortage of either graphite or lithium, with the scale that we use it, and the scale that it can be found in the wild.
The majority of the materials in a battery, however, are recycled quite easily.
That right?
Are there any concerns to the mining of either element? I've seen some scare posts, but don't know enough about them to know if they were worth taking seriously.
That's part of it, but even if we had very large battery recycling operations it probably still isn't really worth it. It's not hard to get 90%+ recovery but the amount of lithium in a battery is ~3% by weight. Spodumene, one of the important lithium ores, is up to 8% lithium.
> Same for the graphite.
Graphite is more of a technical thing, it's pretty difficult to extract it and it's pretty worn down. The physical structure is very important to performance and manufacturing is virtually all of the cost of creating graphite- so having the actual raw material isn't worth all that much.
More than graphite, I'd actually prefer to see the organic materials in a li ion battery dissolved off and then distilled. That isn't economical though.
> There is no foreseeable shortage of either graphite or lithium, with the scale that we use it, and the scale that it can be found in the wild.
With any scale we could use it, there's no way we would run out. If we mined as much lithium as we do lead, we would have enough to make every car electric with ~200 kWh batteries and no recycling. And as I said, lithium is more common than lead.
> Are there any concerns to the mining of either element? I've seen some scare posts, but don't know enough about them to know if they were worth taking seriously.
Graphite is mined in the same places coal is, but very roughly 5 orders of magnitude less. It can also be created completely synthetically from any organic matter, same way they make charcoal or carbon fiber.
Lithium as it is currently mined is one of the least environmentally impactful extractions. It uses up a lot of groundwater which is a problem in some places, but it's more about it not being replenished properly. There's no runoff like there is with heavy metals in Africa. There's pretty insignificant land use. The chemicals used in purification are super benign- things like lime or acid, in millionths or billionths of global use. Brine mining means you don't need to dump any rock anywhere, there's no hole, there's no significant dust or blasting- it's just a very large water well.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/538036/quest-to-mine-seaw...
I really hope that this is not exactly what the desperate end of the disposal chain will look like once it is fully formed.
Downvoted? I was intending to express that even with mining the raw materials, etc. it is probably a net positive environmentally.
Not necessarily price competitive with highly developed lithium ion batteries using the cheapest to access minerals, but cheap enough to make the world go round.
And another angle: our perception of energy density increase is heavily disturbed by the much faster reduction in cost, we are just not very good at telling those two apart.
Tesla's market cap, rounded to the nearest billion dollars, is $65B. Other large car company market caps:
* Toyota: $195B * GM: $46B * Daimler: $57B * Volkswagen AG: $71B * Ford: $33B * Honda: $49B * Nissan: $36B * BMW: $47B * SAIC Motor: $42B
I disagree. Tesla is a software company with products built around that. A Tesla car is a computer running their software, with certain physical enablements attached.
Batteries based businesses will do well for now but they should keep an eye out for new developments in energy sources for on time strategy changes.
We bought a 2 year old Leaf (30 KWh) recently after I worked out the TCO for it. Here's what I discovered.
We pay a lot of electricity here in Japan (I think it's about 30 cents per KWh where I live). So a full charge would cost us about $9 if we charged at home. Driving carefully we can get between 200-220 km on that -- so about 4.5 cents per km. Gasoline costs about $1.50 per litre and our old car had "mileage" of about 7 l/100km or about 10.5 cents per km (that's a lie because we have a 12 year old car -- it's really about 10 l/100km, but newer versions are near are more efficient, so I'll use that number). We drive about 1200 km a month (I say "we", but really it's only my wife -- I don't really like driving :-) ). So the difference is about $72 a month.
We also have to pay "shaken" here in Japan. This is a bit like the UK MOT. You have to get your car in essentially perfect running order every 2 years. It usually costs about $1000, or $500 per year. Because it's an electric car, the shaken costs are assumed to be small. We "prepaid" our shaken (i.e. bought insurance) for $200 for the next 4 years (or $50 per year). So that's a savings of $450 per year or $37.50 per month.
So rounding up, we're up to about $110 per month saved. On top of that there is almost no maintenance cost (oil changes, air filters, timing belts, etc). Let's say $120 per year saved (to make the math easy ;-)). So that's $120 per month.
But on top of that, we got this crazy deal from Nissan (or the government? or both? I'm not sure) where we get free unlimited recharging for 2 years and $20 per month after that. So that's a savings of $54 per month for the first 2 years and $34 per month after that (as long as we charge at the fast charging stations -- note, there are some negative implications for battery life for using the charging stations and it is a PITA to go and charge it all the time, so I'm not sure how true that savings will be).
Our previous car was a BMW 118i. The Leaf is every bit as good. If you turn the eco mode off, it has similar power (but of course a much nicer torque curve -- flat) so it's easy to pass or get out of trouble. In eco mode, it's a bit sluggish, but not really a problem 95% of the time. The Leaf has slightly better handling, but also slightly larger turning radius. Similar fit and finish. The Leaf seems slightly more spacious and has similar storage space. In actuality very similar cars in almost every respect, however the BWM is quite a bit more expensive.
So apart from range (which isn't a problem for us in any way), it's a pretty clear EV win for that kind of mid-size "nice" car. Probably it would be quite a bit closer if I were to compare to a Toyota Prius (especially in Japan where you can get a rebate), but I was amazed about how cheap EVs are now. It's pretty hard to match. If batteries come down in price, it will be impossible for sure.
Not sure how the numbers would work out in other parts of the world (especially in a cold climate), but it really is getting to the point where ICEs don't make sense any more.
Does somebody have numbers?
This is why Tesla is valued higher than GM, Daimler or pretty much any other car company. Tesla at it's heart is a battery company with products built around that. From what I've read, from 2025 onwards traditional internal combustion engines will not be able to compete on price with electric cars.
Something similar will likely happen to energy storage, though this is of course still a relatively novel industry that has been spurred on by renewable energy's intermittent availability. Interesting times..
Edit: percentage of annual battery price drop after doing some googling