Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean the alternative that would exist today, absent coal.
As in, if coal had never been used for energy in human history? How is that relevant?
You misunderstand.
Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining, Tesla cited as leading
101–110 of 257 posts
Re: Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining, Tesla cited as leading
#102I 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…
Fortune 500 are all sitting on record amounts cash right now, they apparently see no place to invest it profitably. The thinking behind trying to pump up demand is that if people are buying more, the Fortune 500 will put that money to work selling things. Traditional supply-side economics is basically "shove money into those companies however possible".. but they're already sitting on piles of cash and doing nothing…
> Fortune 500 are all sitting on record amounts cash right now
Are you trying to tell me that the money isn't trickling down to the underpaid employees working for those companies? LIES.
Re: Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining, Tesla cited as leading
#1034x drop in battery prices, (or) 5x increase in density in only 8 years. Pretty damn good for batteries that "aren't following Moore's Law", something most battery-related articles are quick to remind us. Hopefully, this continues for at least another decade, which should make EVs more than competitive with ICE cars.
Batteries are the secret to most of the cool "sci-fi" tech we all want but currently can't have.
Not so much batteries, but "energy storage" in general. Batteries being one very important type of energy storage.
If photovoltaics and/or wind become extremely cheap, to the point where the cost is 1 cent/kilowatt-hour, it would even be economical to crack hydrogen from seawater via electrolysis (a process that consumes vast amounts of electricity) and use hydrogen as storage.
Re: Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining, Tesla cited as leading
#104I 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…
Energy STORAGE is a huge bottleneck issue for anyone that follows renewable energy news as well... Solar power itself has been cheap enough to be viable for a long time, 330W 72-cell panels for roofs have been $0.64/watt for several years now. You can quite economically cover the roof of a building in enough high-efficiency 60 or 72-cell panels to generate far more kWh in a year than the building will consume in the…
Roughly the same dynamics that relate cloud apps vs self hosted apps to reliability relates solar power and grid power to reliability. The grid is - for now - the cheapest battery there is, and it gives you immediate redundancy. It will be far more reliable than anything you install on your roof and in your basement on a per-case basis, even if a grid outage takes down your whole neighborhood, town, or even country.
Batteries, at whatever price you pay for them are a really in-efficient way to store and retrieve energy compared to the grid.
Re: Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining, Tesla cited as leading
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
How much do you think the industry has grown since 2013? How much do you think it will grow by 2018? Even if each one is a doubling, Tesla's part is pretty significant.
It's tough to get hard data but a 20-30% CAGR from 2013 to the present time seems like a reasonable guess.
Sounds reasonable to me as well. I won't claim to have great numbers, just trying to compare the rough magnitudes.
Re: Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining, Tesla cited as leading
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Energy STORAGE is a huge bottleneck issue for anyone that follows renewable energy news as well... Solar power itself has been cheap enough to be viable for a long time, 330W 72-cell panels for roofs have been $0.64/watt for several years now. You can quite economically cover the roof of a building in enough high-efficiency 60 or 72-cell panels to generate far more kWh in a year than the building will consume in the…
How do the LiFePo batteries used in current electric cars change the equation? Not so great energy density, but can withstand an immense number of cycles.
Conversion losses and cost / KWh are the problem nowadays, not the number of cycles, that's getting to the point where it is still a factor but not the factor.
Re: Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining, Tesla cited as leading
#107I 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…
Energy STORAGE is a huge bottleneck issue for anyone that follows renewable energy news as well... Solar power itself has been cheap enough to be viable for a long time, 330W 72-cell panels for roofs have been $0.64/watt for several years now. You can quite economically cover the roof of a building in enough high-efficiency 60 or 72-cell panels to generate far more kWh in a year than the building will consume in the…
Energy STORAGE is a huge bottleneck issue for anyone that follows renewable energy news as well
Very true, but, interestingly, large-scale electric vehicle adoption may help this: http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2016/05/09/3775606/used-sec... as lightly used car batteries may cease being attractive for use in cars but be very attractive in terms of base-load storage.
Re: Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining, Tesla cited as leading
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Energy STORAGE is a huge bottleneck issue for anyone that follows renewable energy news as well... Solar power itself has been cheap enough to be viable for a long time, 330W 72-cell panels for roofs have been $0.64/watt for several years now. You can quite economically cover the roof of a building in enough high-efficiency 60 or 72-cell panels to generate far more kWh in a year than the building will consume in the…
Roughly the same dynamics that relate cloud apps vs self hosted apps to reliability relates solar power and grid power to reliability. The grid is - for now - the cheapest battery there is, and it gives you immediate redundancy. It will be far more reliable than anything you install on your roof and in your basement on a per-case basis, even if a grid outage takes down your whole neighborhood, town, or even country.…
The thing is, the grid from the perspective of an average residential user is actually not that reliable. In many places in the Pacific Northwest where trees fall on power lines in winter storms the grid does not meet five nines reliability (52 minutes or less outage per year). A properly implemented whole-building off grid battery system and a few inverters running in parallel can be much more reliable than this. The grid is subject to all sorts of failure modes from trees, landslides, flooded vaults and things involving the environment, while a PV system has no moving parts (perhaps except from a ventilation fan in an inverter), and a larger set up can be run with several inverters in parallel providing AC for a building.
Re: Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining, Tesla cited as leading
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
As in, if coal had never been used for energy in human history? How is that relevant?
You misunderstand.
You could, I dunno... explain?
I guess you mean a world just like today, but coal power instantly evaporated? There would be mass chaos and death, but again I don't see the relevance.
Re: Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining, Tesla cited as leading
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Energy STORAGE is a huge bottleneck issue for anyone that follows renewable energy news as well... Solar power itself has been cheap enough to be viable for a long time, 330W 72-cell panels for roofs have been $0.64/watt for several years now. You can quite economically cover the roof of a building in enough high-efficiency 60 or 72-cell panels to generate far more kWh in a year than the building will consume in the…
Energy STORAGE is a huge bottleneck issue for anyone that follows renewable energy news as well Very true, but, interestingly, large-scale electric vehicle adoption may help this: http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2016/05/09/3775606/used-sec... as lightly used car batteries may cease being attractive for use in cars but be very attractive in terms of base-load storage.
Absolutely. It's all about the $/kWh stored. A "worn out" electric car battery might have only 70% of its cycle depth/capacity remaining compared to when it was new, but if the battery packs can be acquired for very cheap, that doesn't matter so much.
There is a guy with videos on youtube who has purchased battery packs from crashed Tesla Model S and retrofitted an old volkswagon bus for 100+ mile EV range.