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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

#141

Post by olivermarks »

nawariata wrote: post #117
mtgx wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I'm afraid of. That China will push a "race to the bottom" not on just prices per se, but on lower prices with poorer quality batteries that hold much fewer charges and degrade faster, making you want to dump your EV battery after 3 years. But everyone will be too focused on their promotion of "cheap long range EVs" to notice.

I would be more concerned about exploding batteries, lithium is no joke. http://www.candlepowerforums.com/vb/showthread.php?262234-TK...

This is why EV's have a horizontal firewall, to protect the occupants from the batteries. Plasma burns are a big concern for the guys building and tuning drag racing and hill climbing EV's. (Electric vehicles are wonderful for acceleration sports but currently hopeless for any sort of sustained high speed/endurance racing).

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

#142

Post by honkhonkpants »

shawn-furyan wrote: post #132
honkhonkpants wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bou…

That's not why I thought it was ridiculous. I said it was ridiculous for using projected 2016 Tesla production and dividing that by actual 2013 battery production, when battery production is rapidly expanding. You either have to use 2016 projected battery production on the denominator, or actual 2013 Tesla production (a number very close to zero) on the numerator.

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

#143

Post by ceejayoz »

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.

That's fine, though. If your car that used to do 300 miles on a charge can only do 200, you'll probably replace it.

That 200 mile charge may still be perfectly usable in a house, particularly given you can fit a couple cars worth into your basement without issues. The resulting battery cluster doesn't have to be particularly compact or light-weight.

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

#144

Post by nickik »

tomp wrote: post #79
darawk wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is why I oppose free trade to some extent. Chine isn't only competing on the price of their labor; they're also competing on the price of their environment - pollution is simply cheaper there than in the US or EU. However, the difference is, their environment is our environment! Personally, I would install transparent tariffs for the whole world - they would be based on the estimated cost of externalities depend…

Your solution will never actually work. Fact is, that so far in human history, if you want to get from poverty to being rich, you need to have significant pollution. But your solution it not really needed in the long run.

Luckily, the amount of pollution generally goes down as countries grow richer. China is doing it cleaner then Britain or the US did it back in the day.

We need Free Trade so that we can grow, growth will lead (on avg) to a cleaner environment. The next society can then maybe do it completely with clean energy.

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

#145

Post by shawn-furyan »

honkhonkpants wrote: post #142
shawn-furyan wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bou…

That's not why I thought it was ridiculous. I said it was ridiculous for using projected 2016 Tesla production and dividing that by actual 2013 battery production, when battery production is rapidly expanding. You either have to use 2016 projected battery production on the denominator, or actual 2013 Tesla production (a number very close to zero) on the numerator.

You've been criticizing the rough order of magnitude estimate for an hour and still haven't offered a significant improvement. I find that more more ridiculous. If the improvement is so obvious that not including it is ridiculous, then why not just produce the improvement you're talking about?

Note: This is rough, back of the envelope projection meant to improve on a 5% figure that someone pulled out of the air.

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

#146

Post by honkhonkpants »

shawn-furyan wrote: post #145
honkhonkpants wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not why I thought it was ridiculous. I said it was ridiculous for using projected 2016 Tesla production and dividing that by actual 2013 battery production, when battery production is rapidly expanding. You either have to use 2016 projected battery production on the denominator, or actual 2013 Tesla production (a number very close to zero) on the numerator.

You've been criticizing the rough order of magnitude estimate for an hour and still haven't offered a significant improvement. I find that more more ridiculous. If the improvement is so obvious that not including it is ridiculous, then why not just produce the improvement you're talking about? Note: This is rough, back of the envelope projection meant to improve on a 5% figure that someone pulled out of the air.

I think you're confused. _I_ am the one who said 5% and I think it's a reasonable working number. mikeash then replied, saying that Tesla will consume 22GWh (2018) and the battery market is only 35GWh/year (2013), implying that Tesla's share is so large it violates normal rules of market liquidity. Then I objected to that implication.

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

#147

Post by nickik »

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…

While that is true, it also goes in the other direction. How much money has been put into keeping fossil fuels cheap?

We simply don't have a free-market price in energy. I would say that in the long run the market would probably, by itself switch to renewable non-polluting energy but the governments investment has probably helped.

Governments can make really drag most markets (with a few exceptions), but they can usually kick it in the butt.

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

#148

Post by jokoon »

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…

Won't the next problem be the geopolitics of lithium?

I guess what drives the price of batteries is the fabrication process?

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

#149

Post by lern_too_spel »

tetraodonpuffer wrote: post #129
niels_olson wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

do you think that if there were 10x as many doctors magically hospitals would charge you any less for your stay? or that pharmaceutical companies would charge you any less for their drugs?

No, for the same reason that I don't think increasing the battery supply will reduce the cost of leather seats. I do, however, think that if there were 10x as many doctors, my checkups would cost less (in both time and money) and my medical procedures would cost less.

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

#150

Post by OliverJones »

US$145 / kWh -- GM's late 2015 price for Volt / Bolt power -- is OK.

But the differential in price, in New England where I live, between peak and offpeak electricity, is US$0.027 (2.7 cents) per kWh. I worked it out: my investment in a battery setup at those rates would take about 17 years to pay off: far too long.

If we want this to work, we need a smart grid: a grid that can announce pricing based on current costs. Then we need baseload electricity costs (hydro, nuclear, gas, coal) to be significantly lower than peakload (fuel oil, Storm-King style pumped gravity storage) costs.

The smarts for a household energy storage system wouldn't be hard to work out IF the grid were smart enough to advertise present costs, and meters were smart enough to bill for present costs. My Power Wall could charge with cheap power and run my lights during a nasty summer brownout.

I understand they're experimenting in Europe with announcing prices using the FM radio sub channels now used to display song names. That's interesting.

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