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Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining, Tesla cited as leading

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Re: Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining, Tesla cited as leading

#31

Post by ethbro »

jonathanfoster wrote: post #20
toomuchtodo wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its almost like we're going to fix the climate change issue, slowly (ramping up quickly)....by sheer luck of technological advancement.

This is what happened during the Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1864[0]. Cities like New York and London were drowning in manure from all the horse-drawn carriages, which caused major health issues. No one could find a solution until Henry Ford came up with a process to build affordable cars and made horse-drawn carriages obsolete. [0] http://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Great-...

Thus solving the problem forever.

Interestingly, I read it in a Theodore Roosevelt biography, but dug the numbers back up on the internet. In Boston circa 1870, the density of horses was around 700 per square mile.

Re: Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining, Tesla cited as leading

#32

Post by mikeash »

maratd wrote: post #16
toomuchtodo wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a free market proponent, I assume you support including the externalities of pollution from fossil fuels into their costs? Which would've made the cost of electric cars and renewables cheaper much sooner?

> As a free market proponent, I assume you support including the externalities of pollution from fossil fuels into their costs? How do you even calculate that? For you to calculate externalities, you'd need to be able to assign costs. What's the cost of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere? You can't calculate something like that. So let me answer with a simple NO. We don't need anything like that. Cleaner technologies…

Coal is killing a million people a year right now. Is it really "soon enough"?

You can't precisely calculate the costs of the externalities, but you can estimate it decently. A tax based on a decent estimate would be far better than just saying "zero cost, everybody gets to pollute for free" and then trying to patch it up with regulations as we do now.

Re: Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining, Tesla cited as leading

#33

Post by roninb »

narrator wrote: post #17

I find it amusing to see so many people questioning why Tesla didn't release a cheap Tesla sooner. The answer is: They don't have the batteries to do that. That's why they are building the GigaFactory. People don't get that, on a large industrial scale, you actually have to think about supply. They think you just spend money and supply shows up because they are used to thinking on a household scale where supply is ge…

> We could use more supply side thinking about very large problems that the economy faces

What do you mean by this? I was under the impression that "supply side economics" meant throwing money at your problem to solve it (and removing regulation). That sounds like it's exactly what you're arguing against.

Re: Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining, Tesla cited as leading

#34

Post by ethbro »

Aelinsaar wrote: post #28
kmonsen wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it works it is clearly just luck there there is a cheaper and cleaner energy source available. At some time there will be a threat that will always be cheaper and then we are out of luck.

Eventually we're going to go through some version of the "Great Filter" like wet tofu through a shredder, but this gives me hope that it won't be in our lifetimes.

Unless we already happened to go through that when life magically transitioned from monocellular, simple competitive organisms to multicellular, complex cooperative organisms...

Re: Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining, Tesla cited as leading

#35

Post by skybrian »

narrator wrote: post #17

I find it amusing to see so many people questioning why Tesla didn't release a cheap Tesla sooner. The answer is: They don't have the batteries to do that. That's why they are building the GigaFactory. People don't get that, on a large industrial scale, you actually have to think about supply. They think you just spend money and supply shows up because they are used to thinking on a household scale where supply is ge…

That's proving too much. It's true that factories don't build themselves automatically. But they do require funding. Unless someone predicts demand for a product, they won't write the check, and the people who actually do the work don't get hired.

Better to say that demand is necessary but not always sufficient. Proven demand is a great motivator, but the manufacturers may require a lot of lead time if it's unexpected.

Re: Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining, Tesla cited as leading

#36

Post by alex_hirner »

narrator wrote: post #17

I find it amusing to see so many people questioning why Tesla didn't release a cheap Tesla sooner. The answer is: They don't have the batteries to do that. That's why they are building the GigaFactory. People don't get that, on a large industrial scale, you actually have to think about supply. They think you just spend money and supply shows up because they are used to thinking on a household scale where supply is ge…

> fallacy is that any amount of money can fix anything.

That's exactly why I started http://openbatt.org The problem exists partly because incremental knowledge gains, such as additive formulas, are hard to trade.

Re: Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining, Tesla cited as leading

#37

Post by mikeash »

honkhonkpants wrote: post #30
narrator wrote: post #17

I find it amusing to see so many people questioning why Tesla didn't release a cheap Tesla sooner. The answer is: They don't have the batteries to do that. That's why they are building the GigaFactory. People don't get that, on a large industrial scale, you actually have to think about supply. They think you just spend money and supply shows up because they are used to thinking on a household scale where supply is ge…

Tesla consumes a small fraction of global lithium-ion battery production. When the overall market is much larger than the marginal consumption, the assumption that offering more money increases local supply holds perfectly well. Even if you assume that Tesla is demanding 5% of the battery market which would be an outside estimate that's still well within the region where paying more will get you more.

Worldwide production of lithium-ion batteries in 2013 was around 35GWh. The current rate is somewhat higher, I can't quite find how much.

Tesla is currently producing around 100,000 cars/year. Each car has about 80kWh of battery on average (the options right now are 75 or 90), so that's about 8GWh. If they meet their goal of 400,000 Model 3s produced in 2018, assuming 55kWh of battery for those cars, that's 22GWh, not counting what goes into continuing Model S and Model X production. I'm not sure it's as small a fraction of global production as you say.

One of the statistics they like to quote about their Gigafactory is that its final production will equal the total global production by the industry when construction started in 2013.

Re: Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining, Tesla cited as leading

#38

Post by kbenson »

kmonsen wrote: post #23
toomuchtodo wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zero sarcasm. We've (worldwide government policy) worked against renewables and storage through limited subsidies compared to legacy fuels. That's not to denigrate the efforts of Tesla and solar/wind developers/technology companies; they just haven't received the support they should've compared to the impetus of climate change. EDIT: Innovation is saving us from ourselves! Yay?

If it works it is clearly just luck there there is a cheaper and cleaner energy source available. At some time there will be a threat that will always be cheaper and then we are out of luck.

Well, going by history, it's not luck, it's gambling based on historical precedence. Time and again a new technology has come along, often spurred by the problem it solved, just in time to prevent a larger problem.

The issue is that people take this for granted, and don't see it for what it is, gambling, and in this case with immensely large negatives on failure, to the point where the mental model of the world many people keep is unable to accurately assess the consequences. That's a dangerous combination.

Re: Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining, Tesla cited as leading

#39

Post by petra »

ethbro wrote: post #25
sremani wrote: post #18

caution. 1. a tesla accessory site. 2. the report is full of projections and hard to understand what is wishful and what is not. 3. GM: $145/kw Oct 2015 - Tesla $100/kw in 2020, how is Tesla killing it?

Agree it's a puff piece, but the full quote you took that from is "General Motors announced that battery costs for its 2016 Chevrolet Bolt had fallen to USD 145/kWh by October 2015, and that it hopes to reduce costs below the USD 100/kWh mark by 2022 (GM, 2015, EV Obsession, 2015). The electric car manufacturer Tesla aims to break the USD 100/kWh mark by 2020 (HybridCARS, 2015)." Also, in reading some of the backgrou…

Musk isn't that great at predicting when will the future happen(he's better at predicting general trends), probably partially because stock pumping PR is critical to his biz.

Re: Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining, Tesla cited as leading

#40

Post by back_beyond »

mikeash wrote: post #32
maratd wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a free market proponent, I assume you support including the externalities of pollution from fossil fuels into their costs? How do you even calculate that? For you to calculate externalities, you'd need to be able to assign costs. What's the cost of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere? You can't calculate something like that. So let me answer with a simple NO. We don't need anything like that. Cleaner technologies…

Coal is killing a million people a year right now. Is it really "soon enough"? You can't precisely calculate the costs of the externalities, but you can estimate it decently. A tax based on a decent estimate would be far better than just saying "zero cost, everybody gets to pollute for free" and then trying to patch it up with regulations as we do now.

Without cheap energy in the form of coal, how many would die each year?
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