Electric vehicle battery costs rapidly declining, Tesla cited as leading • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by Brakenshire » Tue, Jun 07, 2016, 10:46 PM UTC

narrator wrote: post #96

walrus01 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Worldwide production of lithium-ion batteries in 2013 was around 35GWh I don't think measuring it in terms of GWh is the best way to go about it, because a huge number of lithium ion batteries manufactured are NOT the type Tesla needs to use. Their battery packs are composed of 18650 size cylindrical cells. Vast amounts of LiIon batteries manufactured today are pouch/flat type cells for laptops, tablets, mobile pho…

This ties neatly into another common economic fallacy: That capital is homogenous. Highly productive capital equipment is specialized, and requires long lead times for its production. It cannot quickly be repurposed for other uses. Thus, it's important that demand is genuine and not the result of "stimulus" that will waste a lot of capital equipment when stimulus is withdrawn.

That's why you use stimulus to fill in short periods of slack up to the baseline economic capacity, but not on top. In other words, why you apply stimulus counter-cyclically. It's a good point about stimulus spending within a particular part of the economy, though.

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

#132

Post by shawn-furyan » Tue, Jun 07, 2016, 10:47 PM UTC

honkhonkpants wrote: post #125

shawn-furyan wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is it? You could actually improve the estimate rather than /just/ pointing out that it has flaws. And your original criticism was vague. At least this one moves things forward. After a quick Google search, the number of vehicles Tesla sold in 2015 does in fact seem to be a bit uncertain. It seems they sold over 50,000 vehicles, but I've not found a more precise number, in a few minutes of looking. Sales from pre…

There is no reason to guess at these numbers OR to Google for other people's guesses. The sales figures to 5 significant digits are in Tesla's 10-K report. For example: During 2015, we achieved significant efficiencies in Model S production and produced 14,037 vehicles in the fourth quarter of 2015. We began production of Model X in the third quarter of 2015. We plan to deliver 80,000 to 90,000 new Model S and Model…

So... we're about where we were at with the very first estimate...

Precision isn't particularly helpful for this sort of rough projection. Which highlights that your original criticism wasn't particularly productive.

clarification: In claiming that we're about where we started, I'm saying that a 10-20% correction doesn't significantly impact a rough order of magnitude estimation. The estimate was in the precision bounds of its stated goal. Therefore the estimate wasn't "ridiculous" at all, or at least, you haven't shown that it was.

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

#133

Post by konschubert » Tue, Jun 07, 2016, 10:47 PM UTC

jseliger wrote: post #107

walrus01 wrote: post #76

Earlier 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.

The problem is that current batteries wear down on every charge cycle. This means that by charging and dis-charging a battery, it loses value, which means that there is a cost for each charge cycle.

I am too lazy to put numbers on this, but this cost is currently much too high to make it economically viable to use car batteries for energy storage.

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

#134

Post by walrus01 » Tue, Jun 07, 2016, 10:50 PM UTC

beamatronic wrote: post #130

walrus01 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would like to know more! Is this the incident in question? http://insideevs.com/diy-project-salvaged-tesla-model-s-to-u... "Joe’s “donor” Model S will be brought back to life by Otmar in the form of a stretched Volkswagen Vanagon called Strechla. The Vanagon will exist only on the outside. On the inside, underside and everywhere in between, you’ll find Model S." edit: added more words

it's this guy:

https://www.youtube.com/user/jehugarcia/videos

scroll down a bit into the older videos and you will see the VW.

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

#135

Post by Brakenshire » Tue, Jun 07, 2016, 10:50 PM UTC

outworlder wrote: post #92

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…

> 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. Interestingly (for me), when I leased my leaf the sales guy was talking about how Nissan could make a car with a much better range, but chose not to. It was amusing hearing it from a (otherwise backwards) dealership.…

They do have schemes where you buy the car but lease the battery, you'd hope the cost reductions in manufacturing the batteries, and maintaining the battery fleet, would lead to reduced costs for the consumer. Might be a forlorn hope, though.

But I agree, if I was buying an electric car, a standardized battery would be a huge draw.

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

#136

Post by Brakenshire » Tue, Jun 07, 2016, 10:52 PM UTC

macspoofing wrote: post #123

Can Lithium battery supply even meet the demand if a significant portion of the auto market switches to electric?

We'll find out! The lesson from oil and gas is that people find ways once the price goes up and the demand is there. Lithium is very abundant. Do we know what percentage of the cost of the battery comes from material costs?

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

#137

Post by Brakenshire » Tue, Jun 07, 2016, 10:55 PM UTC

pyoung wrote: post #70

bhauer wrote: post #7

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. 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…

I can't quite tell what you are trying to argue, because you acknowledge that government incentives have helped, yet you seem to be claiming that the success of solar was due to free market economics. Just to set the record straight, the solar industry would not exist without government support. Nearly every company past and present has taken grant money from the DOE, or directly benefited from cash rebates or stimul…

Not to mention that the entire global market was massively supported (you're talking 20-50% of the global shipping volume) by crazily high subsidies from the German government for 5-10 years, over the period when cost went from $5/W to $1/W.

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

#138

Post by nickik » Tue, Jun 07, 2016, 11:00 PM UTC

darawk wrote: post #26

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…

You can absolutely calculate that. There is an entire sub-field of economics devoted to doing just that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_economics And it is pretty obviously the right way to think about the problem, if you spend two seconds considering it: The environment is a public good. Which means that it is owned by all of us. Which means that when it is harmed, we have all lost something of value. T…

> The environment is a public good. Which means that it is owned by all of us.

That not strictly speaking true. We all have a stake in it but we don't own it. Also 'the environment' is not a singular thing, lots of people own lots of different parts.

> Therefore, the people doing the harm owe us money in the same way that Subway owes you money if they accidentally put arsenic in their meatballs.

That might be true, but if their tiny bit of a harmful substance in every single sub, they do not have to pay reparations to each person. The amount of damage done, is so small that it does not it would not be enforced. The same problem exists with environmental economics.

> It's just a matter of choosing the right price.

Prices are never a choice. The need to emerge from human interaction and property rights.

I do however agree with me. The problem is how to slice up the environment in different property rights that can be enforced. This problem can often be solved on a local level, such as forest pollution. It is however far harder to do for things that are far larger, like oceans or the stratosphere.

However, such approaches if possible are to be preferred. Sadly the typical environmentalist (and Nonprofits) are anti-market and that is holding everybody back.

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

#139

Post by kirrent » Tue, Jun 07, 2016, 11:01 PM UTC

konschubert wrote: post #133

jseliger wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem is that current batteries wear down on every charge cycle. This means that by charging and dis-charging a battery, it loses value, which means that there is a cost for each charge cycle. I am too lazy to put numbers on this, but this cost is currently much too high to make it economically viable to use car batteries for energy storage.

If you continue to cycle the batteries as deeply as you were in the car this might be true but if you're willing to charge and discharge slower as well as cycle shallower the gain in life for a Li-ion battery is quite remarkable. Obviously you need more batteries but in general energy storage is just less harsh to batteries than use in cars.

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

#140

Post by nickik » Tue, Jun 07, 2016, 11:01 PM UTC

ethbro wrote: post #94

petra wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To some extent stock pumping PR funds Tesla, which in turn provides them easier capital for funding the GigaFactory, which rationalizes the PR. It's only Theranos if you don't deliver.

That's sort of exactly how it is supposed to work.