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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

#151

Post by outworlder »

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 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 than cycles.

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

#152

Post by narrator »

skybrian wrote: post #35
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…

That's proving too much. It's true that factories don't build themselves automatically. But they do require funding. Unless someone predicts demand for a product, they won't write the check, and the people who actually do the work don't get hired. Better to say that demand is necessary but not always sufficient. Proven demand is a great motivator, but the manufacturers may require a lot of lead time if it's unexpecte…

Business is about risk though. The entrepreneur envisions a demand for a product and then builds the capacity to fulfill that demand. If the investment in production capacity were risk free there would be much more capital available for that endeavor. Who would make the investment risk free though? The government? Or in the case of our recent housing bubble catalyzed by the brave new financial world, some thinly capitalized derivatives underwriter?

China has much more intervention in their economy to do this sort of thing, with the banks acting as partially privatized central planning. The role of government in economic planning is certainly an area for policy wonks to carefully consider. In a democracy there's a bit too much incentive for the public to, as Marx noted, vote themselves money from the public treasury.

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

#153

Post by walrus01 »

ceejayoz wrote: post #143
konschubert wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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

#154

Post by xenadu02 »

ethbro wrote: post #94
petra wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Musk isn't that great at predicting when will the future happen(he's better at predicting general trends), probably partially because stock pumping PR is critical to his biz.

To some extent stock pumping PR funds Tesla, which in turn provides them easier capital for funding the GigaFactory, which rationalizes the PR. It's only Theranos if you don't deliver.

> It's only Theranos if you don't deliver.

Indeed; last time I checked, Tesla is shipping working cars and SpaceX is successfully putting satellites into orbit/delivering supplies to the ISS.

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

#155

Post by aianus »

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?

> do you think that if there were 10x as many doctors magically hospitals would charge you any less for your stay?

Eventually, yes.

All those unemployed doctors are more likely to settle for working for a cheap hospital and earn 'only' ~$150k than switch careers or stay home on welfare. This would eventually decrease the cost of basic care.

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

#156

Post by DougN7 »

zanny wrote: post #91
DougN7 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, exactly this. And it applies in many things, such as guaranteed basic income (what would that do to the money supply, to the labor supply, etc). Too many times we think of specific scenarios but those are misleading unless you take the big picture and all its moving pieces into account.

To claim that we do not have the industrial supply to meet a basic income of the poverty level (at least in the US) is to also say we do not have the housing or food to sustain ~300 million people above the poverty level. For the nation that is supposed to be the foremost in the world, and has been supposed to be for a century and a half, if that is true, all our talk of technological innovation and futurism is for n…

Housing, feeding and clothing everyone is one thing. Doing so while telling all of those people that they also do not need to work is quite different. Having just 10% of the current workforce drop out would have huge repercussions. The GDP drop might make it so we can no longer afford it. Or as I've said before, everyone having more money with no increase in goods and services will create serious inflation.

My point is systemic changes have to be looked at as a whole system. An economy and 300 million lives is very complex.

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

#157

Post by shawn-furyan »

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 think you're confused.

How delightfully condescending of you. Yes, I didn't realize that the 5% number came from you, that hardly makes me "confused". Taking that into light, it's not obvious to me how a very rough back of the envelop projection is significantly more ridiculous than a number pulled out of thin air. My whole problem is that you called it ridiculous when it was clearly meant to be a rough order of magnitude projection. You can't really criticize a number pulled out of the air, because it goes without any attempt at justification. But a back of the envelop calculation can be improved in a piece-wise fashion to hone in on a better result. So any attempt to model a phenomenon (as long as it doesn't come with unjustified claims of precision and certainty) is an improvement over a number pulled out of the air. But that process is short circuited when people just dismiss the projection out of hand as you did. This is why I appealed for an improvement in my first comment. It's really easy to shit on someone else's effort, but it is completely unproductive. If you see a problem, then fix it. Then you're adding to the conversation, rather than just shitting on a little bit of effort someone put out there.

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

#158

Post by [deleted] »

mikeash wrote: post #109
back_beyond wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You misunderstand.

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.

[deleted]

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

#159

Post by maratd »

mikeash wrote: post #109
back_beyond wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You misunderstand.

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?

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

#160

Post by Retric »

outworlder wrote: post #151
konschubert wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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 more or less separate things.

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