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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

#51

Post by jeromeflipo »

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.

How small a fraction? Tesla is expected to produce between 80,000 and 90,000 Model S and X this year. With 80 Kwh battery pack on average (my guess), Tesla currently consumes 6.4 Gwh of Lithium-ion battery.

Back in 2013, the global production was estimated to be 35 Gwh (cf. Gigafactory announcement presentation).

How much has it grown in the past 3 years?

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

#52

Post by rahelzer »

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…

When stimulus is suggested in a Keynesian context, it is not to create new factories, etc. It is to provide demand to fully utilize the productive capacity which the economy already has, but which is not currently being used because of lack of demand.

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

#53

Post by toomuchtodo »

mikeash wrote: post #37
honkhonkpants wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, no…

JB Straubel just mentioned at the annual Tesla shareholder meeting they're now expecting to produce 150GW of storage capacity a year at the Gigafactory, split between vehicles and energy storage based on demand for both.

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

#55

Post by IkmoIkmo »

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…

Well Musk has often claimed that the cost of batteries doesn't magically go down due to big new innovations like we've seen in some other industries. Rather it's due to constant iterations, making small improvements, and economies of scale. Particularly that latter part is hugely important and hasn't been much of a factor yet in the specialised market that is car batteries. And that's why they're building a gigantic factory, because producing at scale can really do a lot to push the price of batteries down. But the notion that this is somehow unrelated to money is kind of silly, this is exactly the type of thing you could fix by throwing lots of money at it. The very reason they couldn't do it sooner because there was no cashflow to finance such a massive project.

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

#56

Post by sgnelson »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #4
Aelinsaar wrote: post #3

Between this and the projected increase in PV solar efficiency, drop in cost and toxicity of manufacture... I don't think I've felt this kind of cautious optimism for a renewable energy infrastructure before.

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

Don't worry, we'll find some way to fuck it up.

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

#58

Post by brooklyndavs »

bhauer wrote: post #7
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.

> Its almost like we're going to fix the climate change issue, slowly (ramping up quickly)....by sheer luck of technological advancement. Which is an argument made by those on the free-market side of the political spectrum—that technology will help us solve this problem more quickly and efficiently than central planning and energy austerity. As someone who favors free markets, I have gone out of my way to be an early…

Not soon enough and at the scale that we need to address the problem. Keep in mind the ability to adopt electric cars and go home solar is still a very privileged position and will be for quite a while. Think about how many cars that are 10 or 20 years old on the road now. Or how many people live in apartments. And this is just in the developed world.

This is why most climate scientists advocate for at least a tax on all carbon. While the free market might be able to solve this world-wide on a long enough time scale we don't have the time for that to play out. We've been building our current energy and transportation infrastructure out for the past century globally based on fossil fuels.

To get a good idea on the scope of the problem I'd highly recommend start reading through some of the forum below. Some of the brightest (to me anyway :)) experts on the climate post regularly here.

http://forum.arctic-sea-ice.net/index.php

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

#59

Post by elihu »

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…

Calculating harm is difficult (what price do you put on a refugee displaced from some now-unlivable region?), but one could instead calculate the cost of removing that CO2 from the atmosphere by whatever is currently the most economical means (aside from natural processes that happen without human intervention).

Realistically, though, it's more likely that the value of any carbon tax will not be calculated by some formula, but rather by what a handful of democratically-elected leaders deem is reasonable. Which might not be completely satisfying from a fairness point of view, but I think it's greatly preferable to not having a carbon tax at all (which is equivalent to saying, "quantifying harm is hard to determine, so we'll just pretend it's zero").

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

#60

Post by niels_olson »

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…

> Health Care, for example, is one of those things where, if you're not thinking about supply, spending more money just makes everything more expensive.

If you haven't, I highly recommend Paul Starr's Social Transformation of American Medicine. The number of MD medical school seats in the US has remained at about 16k-17k for 100 years.

https://www.nytimes.com/books/98/12/06/specials/starr-medici...

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