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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

#191

Post by will_hughes »

bunkydoo wrote: post #183

The big problem lies still in the fact that most electricity is generated from coal and nuclear. Every Tesla on the road today is effectively a coal powered car with the potential to be converted to green energy. Solar panels likely being the equilibrium. But the decline in battery cost is good, means it won't be long before they stop losing 1k on every car sold

You seem to be repeating the same falsehoods commonly quoted around Tesla stories.

> Every Tesla on the road today is effectively a coal powered car

Assuming that your energy is entirely produced by brown coal power plants, then even powering your electric car is still more efficient (and thus cleaner) than running a petrol car.

Power generation sources varies wildly depending on region - Nuclear, Gas and Hydro are big contributors in many areas. Wind and Solar in others.

> losing 1k on every car sold

you're conflating the profit on selling cars vs company profit. They make a profit on the sale of each Model S/X, they're investing a lot of money into expanding production.

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

#192

Post by kalleboo »

imron wrote: post #172
venomsnake wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Revolutionary idea ... make batteries replaceable. We had it back in the days. You could just remove the old batteries and put the new ones.

Tesla cars can do this in less than 2 minutes - faster than it takes to fill up a tank of gas. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5V0vL3nnHY

Insert the typical disclaimer here about how they only did that demo to get some California ZEV credits and how they're not moving forward with actually implementing it for end users

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

#193

Post by ChuckMcM »

I would love to see $100 kWh batteries. Worst case, my house uses 30kWh a day in electricity so 90kWh would be a 3 day+ UPS for the house. Update the solar on my roof and be off grid for an addition $9K in batteries? That would be totally doable for me.

I think it would be hilarious if houses went back to just having a gas hookup like it was prior to the spread of electricity.

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

#194

Post by hetman »

bunkydoo wrote: post #183

The big problem lies still in the fact that most electricity is generated from coal and nuclear. Every Tesla on the road today is effectively a coal powered car with the potential to be converted to green energy. Solar panels likely being the equilibrium. But the decline in battery cost is good, means it won't be long before they stop losing 1k on every car sold

Power plants are a lot more efficient at extracting energy out of fossil fuels than your internal combustion engine. Even factoring in the efficiency of power generation, power distribution and your EV's electric motor... you're still polluting the environment less with an EV than pouring petrol directly into your traditional car.

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

#195

Post by imron »

kalleboo wrote: post #192
imron wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla cars can do this in less than 2 minutes - faster than it takes to fill up a tank of gas. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5V0vL3nnHY

Insert the typical disclaimer here about how they only did that demo to get some California ZEV credits and how they're not moving forward with actually implementing it for end users

Well, that sucks.

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

#196

Post by walrus01 »

kalleboo wrote: post #192
imron wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla cars can do this in less than 2 minutes - faster than it takes to fill up a tank of gas. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5V0vL3nnHY

Insert the typical disclaimer here about how they only did that demo to get some California ZEV credits and how they're not moving forward with actually implementing it for end users

and the disclaimer about how the only semi-viable battery swap company went bankrupt and shut down:

http://cleantechnica.com/2013/05/27/no-better-place-battery-...

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

#197

Post by nl »

walrus01 wrote: post #76
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…

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…

Flow Batteries[1]!

They work (as in: are being used in Africa & South America to power mobile networks). Also my (office) building is powered by one.

They don't cost much more than lead-acid

They last much, much longer than lead-acid or lithium*

There is no limit to the number of power cycles(!!) and they can be deep-discharged.

They do have disadvantages - they aren't suitable for cars, and are currently fairly noisy when cycling, and have lower power density than lithium* batteries. They also need to be periodically complete discharged (although most have software to make sure each individual cell does this as part of the normal use)

Disclaimer: An investor in Redflow owns my building (hence the power source)[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_battery

[2] http://redflow.com/

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

#198

Post by Animats »

randyrand wrote: post #90
warfangle wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2008: The iPhone had an 1150mAh battery and, according to anandtech [0], 284 minutes of talk time (3G) and 400 minutes of web browsing time (WiFi). It weighed 133 grams. In 2016: The iPhone SE has a 1,624mAh battery and gets 556.2[1] minutes of web browsing time on WiFi. It weighs 113 grams. Of course, I have no idea what percentage of weight made up the battery for either of these phones. I also have no idea what…

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.

That's not a "fivefold improvement". A fivefold improvement is 400% more.

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

#199

Post by ksec »

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…

I had to do some calculation on the numbers. Gigafactory promise roughly 150GWh when in goes full online. I was wonder how could a SINGLE electric car company consumes so much batteries? More then Phones?

It turns out even with 2Billion Phones at 5Wh, a conservative estimate, we are only at 10GWh. Billion Phones!, 10GWh!, 5 times more then the World Capacity in 2013 from 1 Factory!

All these numbers and scales are so mind bogglingly huge that i fail to comprehend.

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

#200

Post by Teeboo »

walrus01 wrote: post #76
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…

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…

This is one of the most optimistic and best things I have read in weeks.

+1

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