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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

#231

Post by Joeri »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #207
pmarreck wrote: post #181

Tesla is going to be a gigantic company one day. Disclaimer: I own one (Model S P85+, about 2 years old). And everyone I let drive it (yes, I am crazy enough to do that... As a fan who pushes the bleeding edge, it's important to share the experience in order to change minds... Anyway, my insurance covers me even when I'm a passenger!) cannot stop talking about it afterwards. I actually think Tesla's market is limited…

I test drove one. Just driving it normally (as I would any high-performance sports car), I scared the hell out of the sales lady. It's the best-engineered car I've ever driven. The Germans are going to have to up their game because of Tesla.

My favorite demo of the Tesla's impressive engineering is the race of a Tesla X against an Alfa Romeo, with the Tesla pulling a trailer with another Alfa Romeo.

http://electrek.co/2016/03/21/tesla-drag-race-alfa-romeo-vs-...

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

#232

Post by goldenkey »

pjc50 wrote: post #223
goldenkey wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious, how much damage could a domestic terrorist do with a railgun made from consumer parts?

Railguns are terrible and conventional firearms are much more widely available. If you want a futuristic terror weapon powered by batteries, build a multiple-watt laser. Take down planes by blinding the pilots! Fire it at a glass sculpture in a shopping mall to give thousands of people life-ruining sight loss!

I thought railguns could shoot projectiles with speeds faster than almost anything. And since they are all about stored electricity inducing magnetism can't a terrorist just charge up a huge capacitor like battery for a year and then release a shit ton of energy in the form of a uranium or heavy lead slug??

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

#233

Post by misnome »

melling wrote: post #230
simonh wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do their sales in the first 5 months of 2016 somehow not count?

I was looking at the wrong data. At any rate, the point is that Tesla is trying to ramp up production very fast. Going from 50,000 to 100,000 cars sounds difficult in 12 months, while maintaining quality.

Unless they have spent the past couple of years planning and preparing to up their capacity..

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

#234

Post by Retric »

PakG1 wrote: post #185
Retric wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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. 5.5 years is about the lifespan of servers in a datacenter. What's wrong with managing energy storage the way we manage datacenters? We don't expect servers to last 20-50 years. And no doubt, as battery tech improves, the lifespan will improve too. But the infrastructure to get go…

It's just a question of cost. If it's cheap and lasts for 50 years, great. If it's 1/8 the cost and lasts for 5.5 years that also works. But battery's are still a long way from cheap let alone 1/8th of cheap.

Don't forget computer investment has long operated under the assumption of rapidly declining prices. With that slowing data centers may go to a 10+ year cycle.

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

#235

Post by pjc50 »

goldenkey wrote: post #232
pjc50 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Railguns are terrible and conventional firearms are much more widely available. If you want a futuristic terror weapon powered by batteries, build a multiple-watt laser. Take down planes by blinding the pilots! Fire it at a glass sculpture in a shopping mall to give thousands of people life-ruining sight loss!

I thought railguns could shoot projectiles with speeds faster than almost anything. And since they are all about stored electricity inducing magnetism can't a terrorist just charge up a huge capacitor like battery for a year and then release a shit ton of energy in the form of a uranium or heavy lead slug??

Yes, although for terrorism purposes why is this tactially useful given the high cost and complexity? It's not particularly easy to build a 3km/s railgun in your garage, and the power storage ends up being hugely bulky.

Conventional terrorist attacks involving homemade explosives, firearms, mortars, and even rockets have been quite cost-effective enough. I'm more worried about someone combining quadcopters and explosives.

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

#236

Post by mikeash »

honkhonkpants wrote: post #174
mikeash wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I'll spot you 10%, but I think that's still within the realm of linear market behavior. I really don't agree with the original idea (now far upthread) that it required a visionary to lay the path for making all of Tesla's batteries. There are numerous firms around the world totally dedicated to market forecasts for major industries like batteries, car parts, and raw materials.

That's fine, I just objected to the "small fraction" bit, not the rest.

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

#237

Post by Zigurd »

snowwindwaves wrote: post #166
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...

Hear, hear! Be very skeptical when an industry wants to go from dumb to "smart." They want you to remain captive. They want to resist margin pressure as they get ridiculously past merely "mature." They want to resist becoming the transitional backup system for a "smart edge." Newly built grids, and peak capacity will be lighter, cheaper, and local. These trends will be spotted in developing nations first, where the grid providers are unable to keep up with new demand, but they will hit mature grids, too, because they will cost less.

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

#238

Post by mavhc »

nl wrote: post #220
mavhc wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

167 Wh/l = 167kWh per cubic metre, say 16 hours of no sun, 16kW output at night, seems reasonable

Yep. Next time someone claims base load means renewables don't work do that math. Also point to the experience in developing countries where they don't have reliable base load, yet have similar uptime.

Wind provides base load anyway, always windy somewhere

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

#239

Post by mikeash »

ksec wrote: post #199
mikeash wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's pretty cool how much different the scale is with electric cars versus the sorts of batteries we're used to.

I frequently see people discussing range impacts based on a complete misunderstanding of the magnitudes involved. They'll ask about how much range you'd expect to lose from running a dashcam or charging a phone, or recommend turning off headlights to conserve energy.

And of course I can't blame them at all. We're used to battery-powered devices where things like screen brightness are critical to battery life.

But then you run the numbers, and realize that a fully-charged Tesla could run the headlights for over a month before draining the battery, or that it could charge an iPhone 20,000 times....

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

#240

Post by geodel »

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?

I think fundamentally issue is how much expense is okay for healthcare. Current prevailing thought is whatever it takes.

With consolidation of hospitals and other healthcare facilities: less options coupled with desire that even the most expensive healthcare procedures must be available to all irrespective of individual affordability, we are going to have ever increasing healthcare costs.

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