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Tesla is a Battery Company

blog.jeremyrwelch.com

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Re: Tesla is a Battery Company

#31

Post by pdonis »

thrownaway2424 wrote: post #23

I don't get this article. The battery in a Tesla Model S is literally a huge array of Panasonic flashlight batteries. It is an off-the-shelf catalog item you can order from Panasonic. Admittedly, you should probably have prior arrangements before ordering millions. The central insight of the Tesla founders was that people really will pay $85000 for an electric car. The other auto makers didn't believe that.

> The battery in a Tesla Model S is literally a huge array of Panasonic flashlight batteries. It is an off-the-shelf catalog item you can order from Panasonic.

Um, no. Viewing the battery of a Tesla Model S as just a big flashlight battery misses the whole point of what Tesla is doing.

A flashlight battery does one thing: it discharges energy until it's empty. Even an ordinary rechargeable household battery only does two things: it recharges, and then it discharges.

The battery in a Tesla Model S, OTOH, is continuously computing whether to charge or discharge, how much to charge or discharge, what its current state of charge is, how to manage charging and discharging to maximize its life, etc. And it has to do this in a constantly changing environment--a car that is traveling at varying speeds over varying types of roads. (Doing it for a home battery is actually easier, in a way, because there is less variability in the load.)

This sort of technology is absolutely critical if batteries are going to become significant in our energy budget on a large scale. The energy storage medium of the battery is only a tiny piece of the whole picture.

Re: Tesla is a Battery Company

#32

Post by vonklaus »

jeremyrwelch wrote: post #15
iamcurious wrote: post #3

Also, wasn't Musk going to do a phd studying batteries before deciding that the internet was a better move for him at the time?

Didn't know about this. Source?

Most of his talks he mentions this. He was doing a PHD to study ultra-capacitors, or at least, was accepted to UPENN with that intention. He left to start zip2. He has also mentioned that a part of the reason he didn't proceed was that his research was very theoretical and it would've been able to find (or disprove) of a method after years pf study. He mentions some of the other breakthroughs on iltra-capacitors having the efficiency of a lead battery, but, while extremely efficient, the prototype used an extremely rare material that only was mined in a few tonnes a year. Thus the solution could never scale.

Re: Tesla is a Battery Company

#35

Post by vonklaus »

pdonis wrote: post #31
thrownaway2424 wrote: post #23

I don't get this article. The battery in a Tesla Model S is literally a huge array of Panasonic flashlight batteries. It is an off-the-shelf catalog item you can order from Panasonic. Admittedly, you should probably have prior arrangements before ordering millions. The central insight of the Tesla founders was that people really will pay $85000 for an electric car. The other auto makers didn't believe that.

> The battery in a Tesla Model S is literally a huge array of Panasonic flashlight batteries. It is an off-the-shelf catalog item you can order from Panasonic. Um, no. Viewing the battery of a Tesla Model S as just a big flashlight battery misses the whole point of what Tesla is doing. A flashlight battery does one thing: it discharges energy until it's empty. Even an ordinary rechargeable household battery only does…

> The battery in a Tesla Model S, OTOH, is continuously computing whether to charge or discharge

Is it? I would imagine the software does that. The battery really is a large array of commodity batteries made by panosonic. Tesla is doing the gigafactory for vertical integration and to bolster it's own supply. Obviously, they have done a lot of innovation around the pack in terms of heat distribution and cell construction, as well as the management system. The innovation is really about the macro-cell construction and the software to manage the array. On a micro-level it is just a bunch of commodity batteries wites into small cells, that make up a large cell array.

Re: Tesla is a Battery Company

#37

Post by vidarh »

ethanbond wrote: post #2

I don't think this is a revelation to anyone who has been paying attention? This seems to have been the dominant hypothesis for a long, long time, and is always what justified Tesla's early (very) red activities. They were a battery company using luxury automobiles to fund battery R&D.

Especially given that they have been selling batteries to Solar City for use by their customers for a while already, and have publicly talked about larger scale production of that. E.g. here's an article from MIT Technology Review from 2013 that touches on Tesla's battery sales to Solar City:

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/522226/solarcity-using-...

Re: Tesla is a Battery Company

#39

Post by jeremyrwelch »

iamcurious wrote: post #30
jeremyrwelch wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't know about this. Source?

https://www.iop.org/careers/working-life/profiles/page_57723... How did your career progress from there? I was offered a place at Stanford University to do postgraduate research into high-energy-density capacitors. But then the Internet came along, and I wanted a piece of the action.

thanks! added it to the post

Re: Tesla is a Battery Company

#40

Post by ams6110 »

bs_bishop wrote: post #33

Interesting to consider --- is there enough lithium in the world to support this stuff? http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2010/ph240/eason2/

Sounds like between using lithium in car batteries as well as for household and industrial energy storage, "peak lithium" might be a real possibility.
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