71–80 of 257 posts
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Batteries are the secret to most of the cool "sci-fi" tech we all want but currently can't have.
Hmm. I think fusion is more important, but I'll take what I can get.
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As a free market proponent, I assume you support including the externalities of pollution from fossil fuels into their costs? Which would've made the cost of electric cars and renewables cheaper much sooner?
> As a free market proponent, I assume you support including the externalities of pollution from fossil fuels into their costs? How do you even calculate that? For you to calculate externalities, you'd need to be able to assign costs. What's the cost of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere? You can't calculate something like that. So let me answer with a simple NO. We don't need anything like that. Cleaner technologies…
From the article: "Since 2008, estimates of battery costs were cut by a factor four and battery energy density had a fivefold increase. " We're not seeing that kind of improvement in mobile devices.
Yeah we are. But phones are more powerful, with bigger screens and power hungry electronics. Plus consumers want smaller, lighter phones, so with the higher density they make the batteries smaller. It's a balance.
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…
> fallacy is that any amount of money can fix anything. That's exactly why I started http://openbatt.org The problem exists partly because incremental knowledge gains, such as additive formulas, are hard to trade.
I think we need an independent UL/CE for evaluating and lifecycle testing and certifying cells are less likely to short out or die prematurely by digging deep into how a battery is made against its specifications, conducting MTTF tests and many other tests and approaches for holistic grading and improvements. Otherwise, fake and shoddy cells will continue to flood the market with phony and dangerous goods. It can't be leveraged as a bureaucratic industry or incumbent protectionism, but to keep standards high as are for all other wall-powered devices. This will knock players whom can't or won't make good products out of the supply-chain, but they deserve it.
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> Its almost like we're going to fix the climate change issue, slowly (ramping up quickly)....by sheer luck of technological advancement. Which is an argument made by those on the free-market side of the political spectrum—that technology will help us solve this problem more quickly and efficiently than central planning and energy austerity. As someone who favors free markets, I have gone out of my way to be an early…
I can't quite tell what you are trying to argue, because you acknowledge that government incentives have helped, yet you seem to be claiming that the success of solar was due to free market economics. Just to set the record straight, the solar industry would not exist without government support. Nearly every company past and present has taken grant money from the DOE, or directly benefited from cash rebates or stimul…
Small quibble: Wind and solar are already cheaper than utility power in ~20 states (unsubsidized), and cheap wind drove Exelon to close two nuclear power plants in the last week.
While wind and solar can now "stand on their own" as it were, we should be doing nothing but increasing subsidies to deploy them faster.
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…
Off grid energy storage has been severely hampered by the lifecycle cost of $ per kWh stored. Lead acid batteries suck, lithium ion/liPo has until very recently been very expensive in $/kWh. Other energy storage systems have been limited in scale or are only feasible at very specific places, such as large scale pumped-storage hydroelectricity.
If the cost of $$$/kWh stored comes down far enough, it will be entirely possible to build a home that has no connection to the electrical grid at all. Assume this prototypical home is in an American city where electricity from the grid costs 8 cents per kWh. If you make a refrigerator sized battery low enough cost it may be possible with TODAY's cost of solar panels to have a lifecycle cost of 6 cents per kWh consumed. While simultaneously having the effect of making that home energy-independent from the grid and the whole thing being its own immense UPS.
The powerwall is the first step towards this.
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Its almost like we're going to fix the climate change issue, slowly (ramping up quickly)....by sheer luck of technological advancement.
Don't worry, we'll find some way to fuck it up.
caution. 1. a tesla accessory site. 2. the report is full of projections and hard to understand what is wishful and what is not. 3. GM: $145/kw Oct 2015 - Tesla $100/kw in 2020, how is Tesla killing it?
1. Aggressive cash-negative growth. Tesla is not going to make profits with Model 3. Currently Tesla needs more capital to finance future losses instead of than future returns. Musk has wooed many investors that may not be as patient as they should. Musk estimates that Tesla will make profit in 2020, but it's not looking good.
2. No sustainable competitive advantage in technology. Most of the important intellectual property is owned by Panasonic. Cars are nice and different, but they have suffered from reliability problems. Tesla's warranty costs are also higher than its competitors ($2,000 in warranty accruals and $1,000 on repairs per vehicle in last year).
3. Tesla is small manufacturer and it has fragile and stretched supply chain (Tesla manufactures tens of thousands of cars, competitors manufacture millions). Subcontractors are not going to squeeze their profit margins for Tesla.
Even if his dream "all cars will be electric" will become true, Tesla as a company is not necessarily the winning bet.
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> As a free market proponent, I assume you support including the externalities of pollution from fossil fuels into their costs? How do you even calculate that? For you to calculate externalities, you'd need to be able to assign costs. What's the cost of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere? You can't calculate something like that. So let me answer with a simple NO. We don't need anything like that. Cleaner technologies…
You can absolutely calculate that. There is an entire sub-field of economics devoted to doing just that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_economics And it is pretty obviously the right way to think about the problem, if you spend two seconds considering it: The environment is a public good. Which means that it is owned by all of us. Which means that when it is harmed, we have all lost something of value. T…
Personally, I would install transparent tariffs for the whole world - they would be based on the estimated cost of externalities depending on the laws in the country of origin, and go down as soon as said countries adopt (and credibly enforce) better environment protection laws.
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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…