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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

#161

Post by Cyph0n »

walrus01 wrote: post #153
ceejayoz wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Car applications care about kilograms per kWh stored, and cubic volume per kWh stored. Stationary batteries, not so much.

Not as much, yes, but it's still important. Space is quite valuable even in a normal household.

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

#162

Post by tn13 »

macspoofing wrote: post #127
tn13 wrote: post #89

I don't see how cars will have any impact on battery life. How many cars do we sell each year? Even if we assume 10% of cars are electric it is nothing but a drop in an ocean in terms of number of batteries being sold. I am unable to see how Tesla car could have any impact on battery industry in terms of economy of scale. Any battery based solution for homes etc. could possibly bring economy of scale into picture.

Your comment would be more interesting if you put some numbers around your conclusions. I personally don't know the current and projected relative demand for Lithium batteries in electric cars and non-electric cars.

The numbers are one search away. In fact even without the numbers intuition should be sufficient to see that it makes sense. Auto industry accounts for 20% of total Li batteries. Where as consumer electronics (which is probably growing way faster than electric Auto) accounts for around 37%.

Most of the reports I have seen tend to estimate that Auto's share would increase upto 30% by 2020 while renewable energy storage would grow to 60%.

It is not really hard to see that real breakthroughs in mass production and lowered prices for Li batteries will come not from auto applications but from power generation sector. I do not know of any sustainably profitable power company that is operating in that area. It also probably explains why Musk is thinking of things like Solarcity and Powerwall.

hint: Search "Global Demand for Li batteries" in Google images to see various charts.

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

#163

Post by coredog64 »

rahelzer wrote: post #52
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.

What if the spare capacity is for factory building factories (FactoryImplFactory for the Java programmers in the audience)?

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

#164

Post by mikeash »

honkhonkpants wrote: post #146
shawn-furyan wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think 5% is right. You seemed to think that 30% year-over-year growth in the industry was a reasonable estimate. If it was 35GWh/year in 2013 then that puts it at about 77GWh today and 130GWh in 2018. That puts Tesla at around 10% of total production now, and 23% in 2018.

I can't figure out which part of this you object to. You seem to accept all the numbers, but continue to argue about the shape of the box they're presented in.

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

#165

Post by mikeash »

maratd wrote: post #159
mikeash wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're being purposefully daft. A tax on coal would increase the price of coal. An increase in the price of coal would result in more DEATH. Not in the US, obviously, but in some 3rd world country where the price of energy used for heating delineates life and death. So he's asking, quite simply, how many people your good intentions will kill?

No, I don't understand what the guy is asking, for serious. If he wanted to talk about the consequences of a tax on coal, then he wouldn't have stated his hypothetical as "absent coal."

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

#166

Post by snowwindwaves »

OliverJones wrote: post #150

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.…

The real time electricity price for several states is published.[1] Sounds like you need a smart device not a smart grid.

Lots of utilities have adopted smart meters, Ontario and British Columbia certainly have. I don't know as much about the states.

1: http://www.nyiso.com/public/markets_operations/market_data/p...

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

#167

Post by outworlder »

Retric wrote: post #160
outworlder wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a true statement. However, you should not compare car batteries (usually LiFePo, LiMn or whatever it is Tesla uses) with standard laptop batteries. Electric car batteries can endure thousands of full cycles before their useful capacity drops down to 80%. That figure can be as high as tens of thousands, depending on who you ask. Suprisingly, for LiMn, temperature and age have a much greater effect on lifetime…

2,000 cycles sounds great, but at just once per day that's only 5.5 years. Grid storage needs to be really cheap AND last for 20-50 years. Which is why capacitors and pumped hydro are both used. Capacitors can discharge 1,000's of times a day to maintain the proper wave form and hydro can discharge 1-3 times a day to handle changing demand. PS: The real advantage of hydro is you can invest in capacity or peak load as…

Controlling for state of charge, temperature and less deep cycles, it is likely that we can achieve your figures given current tech. The question is the price. If you are not fully using them, then you need more batteries. At which point it becomes economical requires some guesses and heavy number crunching.

I agree with you on hydro, gravitational storage is relatively simple to do. But it takes space. Batteries could make more sense for microgrids.

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

#168

Post by maratd »

mikeash wrote: post #165
maratd wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're being purposefully daft. A tax on coal would increase the price of coal. An increase in the price of coal would result in more DEATH. Not in the US, obviously, but in some 3rd world country where the price of energy used for heating delineates life and death. So he's asking, quite simply, how many people your good intentions will kill?

No, I don't understand what the guy is asking, for serious. If he wanted to talk about the consequences of a tax on coal, then he wouldn't have stated his hypothetical as "absent coal."

If you tax coal and make it expensive, people won't use it. They'll use X, whatever that is. Hence his comment "absent coal". Now that they're using X, which is more expensive than untaxed coal, some people won't be able to afford heating their hut/yurt/cave/whatever and will die.

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

#169

Post by cma »

walrus01 wrote: post #108
jacquesm wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Th…

Isn't it really cloudy in the Pacific Northwest during winter?

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

#170

Post by randyrand »

aramadia wrote: post #122
randyrand wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They say that battery tech has been improving at 2% a year. That would mean we should see a ~37% improvement between 2008 and 2016. Seems about right.

1.02^8=1.17, or ~17% improvement

errr, oops. I did ^16 by accident. Damn you human error!
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