I agree.

Strangely, all of these issues were conveniently left out of the article.

Not sure everybody knows this, but its not economically feasible to recycle these batteries:

"Recycled lithium is as much as five times the cost of lithium produced from the least costly brine based process. It is not competitive for recycling companies to extract lithium from slag, or competitive for the OEMs to buy at higher price points from recycling companies. "

Add in the fact there are currently very few dedicated LI recycling companies in the world, let alone in the US:

"With lithium recycling in its infancy, there is currently no main recycling infrastructure in the world that treats only automotive Li-ion batteries. A few pilot plants, such as Umicore's Hoboken plant in Belgium that are at a demonstration stage exist. Lack of standardisation in battery chemistries and changing landscape with respect to different elements under research for battery production other than lithium have made evaluation of the recycled value of the components uncertain for the recyclers."

source: http://www.waste-management-world.com/articles/print/volume-...

Call me skeptical, but I'm not sure Tesla has really given consideration to these issues. Their approach to these obvious issues are not addressed at all in their press release.

So I recently needed a special cable to make some old gear work. It was only available from a single source and they charged me an arm and a half for it.

Why am I telling you all of this? Because the price of something has very, very, very, very, very little to do with how feasible something is, how much work is required on a fundamental level.

So what? Recycling lithium isn't profitable right now this very instant? Because the price is too high? Apart from the circular logic here, this means nothing.

(This kind of thinking is disappointingly common here. We will never get anywhere when we do some adhoc "price" analysis on every new technology and obviously deduce it's infeasible and should not be explored. Cars were economically infeasible back when you bought petrol from the pharmacy.)

Yes. Thank you. I wish I could upvote your comment more than once.

Musk has addressed this a few times. If I recall correctly Cobalt production will be more of a constraint than lithium... for example, from the Q1 2014 earnings call:

the lithium, although lithium is sometimes thought of as a bigger thing than it really is for lithium ion cell.

It’s like using maybe a couple percent of the cell mass, but the biggest cost constituent is nickel

There's a great analysis of material constraints here [1].

1. http://seekingalpha.com/article/654441-ev-myths-and-realitie...

I posted the same link in this thread already, in another context, but it's relevant enough: http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/mythbusters-part-3-recycling... "The result from this process is that we are able to recycle about 60% of the ESS materials and reuse a further 10% (by weight). We currently plan to landfill only the benign fluff, which comprises about 25% of the ESS, but we expect to nearly eliminate this in the future when our volumes get higher and we can justify the effort required to separate and reuse the plastic."

This is the recycling system. Ex-car batteries into house batteries.

Lithium mining has relatively little environmental impact: it's mostly evaporation of lithium-rich brines.

But lithium is still not cheap. I suppose that a different battery technology, with lower energy density per unit of weight, could be much cheaper with comparable efficiency. But Tesla only has expertise in lithium batteries, so some other manufacturer could use the momentum with a lower-cost offer.

> But lithium is still not cheap.

Lithium is extremely cheap. The cost of the Lithium has practically no impact on the cost of the batteries. Most of the cost of batteries is work.

This venture makes sense because as lithium batteries are used, they lose capacity, and thus their specific energy gets worse. At this point, they are no longer very useful for cars, yet still can be used for other things. As Tesla recovers the used batteries from their cars, they can resell them as home batteries.

Recycling this way batteries that are not good for cars but fine for less demanding applications would be really smart. Is there any indication that they actually do this?

Seems they alluded to exactly that some years ago (2008!): http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/mythbusters-part-3-recycling... "... at some unfortunate point, the ESS will come to the end of its useful life in the application :(. However, it might be possible to use the ESS in other applications. For example, the ESS could be used as a power source for off-grid backup or load leveling. "

I think they've been doing it in one-off situations with Solar City now for a while. If they are not doing exactly this with this venture, I'd be surprised.

do you have a cost breakdown for a Li ion battery?

The environmental impact shouldn't be significantly more than any other hunk of metal of the same mass. And that has to be weighed against the fact that cost-efficient battery technology can make solar/wind viable and cost-effective relative to fossil fuel plants.

Just as a thought experiment, compare the environmental impact of producing a hunk of steel, nickel, lead, gold, plutonium of the same mass. These are vastly different.

There's about $10,000 worth of work in a battery. It's not just a hunk of metal, it goes through a very complicated and energy intensive creation process.

The cost of the raw lithium is about 1% of the cost of the battery. It's engineering it in a very precise way that's expensive.

The battery costs $3000 - that is likely a cap on the cost of the work involved in producing it.

You'd think, but that depends on how many times you can sell the same battery. As others have said, it's plausible that this is a way for Tesla to make use of used car batteries.

I really doubt that's true, just because it's too early for it. There are approximately zero used Tesla batteries available right now. The fleet is just too new. Maybe in another ten years.

When the used batteries start piling up, it's best for tesla if this system is already in place. Entirely possible that this will be new and subsidized batteries initially. They will need to find a use for the old car batteries.

Could be, but they're jumping the gun a lot if that's the main idea. Tesla sales didn't really ramp up until 2014, and the batteries will probably last at least 10 years in the cars themselves.

In any case, they wouldn't need to subsidize these batteries. $350/kWh is a pretty decent price, and consistent with estimates of what they cost in Tesla's cars.

The large packs are priced at $250/kWh which I think is the real news. That means their cost is very likely under $200. Don't think the other car manuf are close to that.

Is the precision itself so energy-intensive, though?