15 ms·

This is going to become more and more common. Li-ion battery costs are falling at a constant ~15% per year and there is no real reason why this shouldn't contin

by ricw 8y ago

This is going to become more and more common. Li-ion battery costs are falling at a constant ~15% per year and there is no real reason why this shouldn't continue. Similar to what Moore's law did to semiconductors, this will mean that batteries are poised to have a massive impact and eat any energy application that can't keep up. New tech will have a hard time to keep up simply due to momentum this has already developed, aka it will have to be at least a magnitude better AND keep on scaling. This is why Tesla is valued higher than GM, Daimler or pretty much any other car company. Tesla at it's heart is a battery company with products built around that. From what I've read, from 2025 onwards traditional internal combustion engines will not be able to compete on price with electric cars. Something similar will likely happen to energy storage, though this is of course still a relatively novel industry that has been spurred on by renewable energy's intermittent availability. Interesting times.. Edit: percentage of annual battery price drop after doing some googling

taeric 8y ago
I'm curious on how dominated this is by ability to mine the raw sources. Do they recycle well? Or are they just that ubiquitous that we don't have to worry about it, at all?
- ams6110 8y ago
  Yes, I have similar thoughts, though I guess worst case it's roughly the same as mining coal but without the CO2 (and other unhealthy) emissions of burning it. Downvoted? I was intending to express that even with mining the raw materials, etc. it is probably a net positive environmentally.
- Zenst 8y ago
  Other sources of lithium being exploited, lithium is the new oil. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/538036/quest-to-mine-seawater-for-lithium-advances/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/538036/quest-to-mine-seaw...
  - gkfasdfasdf 8y ago
    This sounds alarming, but one difference I think is that a lithium batteries are not fuel in the sense that they are consumed immediately like gas/diesel. Of course they have a limited lifespan, but I read elsewhere that lithium batteries can be partially recycled for raw materials.
    - Zenst 8y ago
      Yes, a big plus for lithium. However, demand and usage will only increase need for lithium out in the field and that could prove a bumpy curve and with all resources of a finite amount, we hit a plateau. Question is, will demand outstrip supply or will supply manage to maintain a pace that stays at least equal to that demand. It is with this in mind, that I call it the new oil.
      - ericd 8y ago
        You can evaporate sea water to get it. For now, seems functionally infinite.
        ksec 8y ago
        Except we don't have any way to do it economically.
        ericd 8y ago
        What’s expensive about it?
    - usrusr 8y ago
      > lithium batteries are not fuel I really hope that this is not exactly what the desperate end of the disposal chain will look like once it is fully formed.
    - knodi123 8y ago
      Lithium is an element. What happens to lithium batteries over time that makes the lithium no longer lithiumish enough?
- maxerickson 8y ago
  It's probably possible to commercialize sodium-ion batteries with carbon anodes. Not necessarily price competitive with highly developed lithium ion batteries using the cheapest to access minerals, but cheap enough to make the world go round.
- hwillis 8y ago
  The metals recycle well and very cheaply, with no need for human sorting like with plastics. Those make up the bulk of the material cost. Graphite and lithium are the only things that aren't currently recycled. Lithium is too cheap right now- it makes up on the order of 1% the cost of a cell. It's more common than lead. We're very unlikely to have lithium supply problems. Compare the 7 billion tonnes of coal production, or 5 million tonnes of lead, to the 80 million cars sold annually. Mining in general can be scaled to far larger than anything car batteries would need. Graphite is more of an issue. Battery graphite is very high quality spheroidal grains, roughly 55% synthetic and 45% "natural"- even the natural stuff goes through a huge amount of processing. Synthetic graphite can be made from anything, but natural graphite has slightly higher specific energy. Both types take a great deal of energy to manufacture, and natural spheroidal graphite would be a lot more expensive if not for Chinese and American coal. Batteries are burnt as part of the recycling process, and even if they weren't there's no really good way to recover the graphite. So that probably puts a bit of a floor on li ion recycling savings. The elemental metals recovered are also not appropriate to directly turn into batteries, so they will probably get sold on the open market for lower profit. The bottom line is that the only constraint on manufacturing batteries is the cost of energy.
  - nielsbot 8y ago
    Better hook that up to some solar panels then...
  - netcan 8y ago
    What a great reply.
  - taeric 8y ago
    Thanks, just to paraphrase back to make sure I understood: The lithium is not recycled, due to economies of scale. Same for the graphite. There is no foreseeable shortage of either graphite or lithium, with the scale that we use it, and the scale that it can be found in the wild. The majority of the materials in a battery, however, are recycled quite easily. That right? Are there any concerns to the mining of either element? I've seen some scare posts, but don't know enough about them to know if they were worth taking seriously.
- Latteland 8y ago
  And an intermediate step to ultimate recycling is that car batteries still have usefulness after they lose half their capacity (but not as a car battery). They can be used in say a storage system for home power. And this kind of recyling is already happening. Tesla has discussed this, and I believe other ev car companies are doing it already too.
creato 8y ago
> Li-ion battery costs are falling at a constant ~15% per year and there is no real reason why this shouldn't continue. Why would that continue? Surely materials costs become more significant as other costs go down, which must be harder to reduce?
- cal5k 8y ago
  I guess the implication is that the manufactured cost is still significantly higher than the cost of the raw materials, which implies lots of room for improvement.
  - SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
    I wish more people understood that lithium and aluminum are transported almost entirely around the world on tanker fuel before they're made into a product - and then it's STILL cheaper to make new batteries than to recycle them. I don't know enough to say the true impact is different than the stated impact or anything like that. But I have my suspicions that something isn't what it seems with lithium production.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  Manufacturing is rapidly scaling up. There is so much lithium available in the world (even commercially reasonable to extract from the ocean), that there is much room for per unit costs to decrease before you encounter lower COGS bounds (evaporation + transportation costs). More importantly, a ton of lithium mined will be used for decades; when all of the Model S/X/3 battery packs are end of life (10-15 years from now), those modules are going to be remanufactured into stationary storage (or recycled entirely through a destructive extraction process, depending on degradation and next use case). This is similar to how your recycled pop can might end up in the aluminum used in a new light truck or an aircraft fuselage (edit: poor example; a better example would be automotive parts that are remanufactured and put back into service). The smartest thing Tesla ever did was finance battery manufacturing using luxury vehicle margins (stoking demand with a sexy, desirable brand), and have those customers (including myself) finance the depreciation and capital carrying costs of those battery sleds they'll use again in the future. I am not a Model S owner; I am the temporary user of 100kw of energy storage, which will eventually make it's way into stationary storage where mobile energy density (ie pack degradation) isn't as much of a concern.
karpodiem 8y ago
Panasonic makes Tesla's batteries. If someone paid Panasonic a little bit more money, what's to prevent them from using the same batteries? I would love to see the engineering details around the 'moat' that Tesla has with batteries.
- aerovistae 8y ago
  those batteries are coming from the gigafactory, which is a joint-venture with tesla. the batteries produced there aren't about to start going to other companies. if other companies wanted to build a new factory with panasonic, perhaps they could do that....and then we'll start to see their results sometime in the 2020s....
  - gamblor956 8y ago
    Panasonic's solar roofing products from its joint venture with Tesla in NY are already being mostly sold to Tesla's competitors...
    - jsight 8y ago
      AFAIK, Panasonic doesn't make solar roofing? Source on their panels from Buffalo mostly going to non-Tesla installers?
      - gamblor956 8y ago
        https://electrek.co/2018/08/08/tesla-solar-roofs-delays-panasonic-new-buyers-cells-gigafactory-2/ https://electrek.co/2018/08/08/tesla-solar-roofs-delays-pana... And that is a pro-Tesla source. I had a WSJ link before that I don't have time to look up.
- mschuster91 8y ago
  > Panasonic makes Tesla's batteries. If someone paid Panasonic a little bit more money, what's to prevent them from using the same batteries? Panasonic makes the cells, which is easy to do, to scale and to copy. Tesla's added value is the charging control for each cell in the battery pack.
agumonkey 8y ago
Interesting is there a moore law for energy density ? I've been looking for this since years but couldn't formulate it as clearly
- ricw 8y ago
  I'll call it Rick's law: Roughly every 4-5 years, Li-ion battery prices will halve
  - agumonkey 8y ago
    Let's see if it sticks
- castratikron 8y ago
  Permanent magnet strength also follows a similar pattern, the strength doubling roughly every decade or two.
  - agumonkey 8y ago
    Even more interesting
- usrusr 8y ago
  Energy density has a fixed upper bound for any given battery chemistry: the amount of energy that would be bound/released if all of the material in the battery would participate in a cycle by turning from one state to the other and back. The amount of energy per reacting molecule/mol/kilogram is fixed and well known. Someone who is not as terrible at chemistry as me won't find or hard to come up with concrete numbers. And those numbers are hard constants, you can only come closer to them (within a given battery chemistry), they are impossible to exceed. And another angle: our perception of energy density increase is heavily disturbed by the much faster reduction in cost, we are just not very good at telling those two apart.
  - agumonkey 8y ago
    true but how far are we from chemical theoretic optimum ? manufacturing of cells is very suboptimal at the atomic level.
ckastner 8y ago
> This is why Tesla is valued higher than GM, Daimler or pretty much any other car company. Tesla at it's heart is a battery company with products built around that. It was Samsung, not Tesla, who supplied the actual cells [1]: Tesla’s giant new Powerpack project in Australia will use battery cells made by Samsung [1] https://electrek.co/2017/08/09/tesla-powerpack-project-australia-battery-cell-samsung/ https://electrek.co/2017/08/09/tesla-powerpack-project-austr...
- robotresearcher 8y ago
  Batteries are systems, not just cells.
  - agumonkey 8y ago
    Do you know how long these cells can last in such a scenario ?
    - acct1771 8y ago
      As long as they save more than their cost during their lifetime, who cares?
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - zachberger 8y ago
        There are externalities to lithium ion battery production. Lithium is a finite resource and the environmental impact needs to be considered as well. Its shortsighted to only consider cost.
        atombender 8y ago
        Lithium can be reclaimed from batteries. It's going to be a challenge for the industry [1], but it's also going to be very important. [1] https://waste-management-world.com/a/1-the-lithium-battery-recycling-challenge https://waste-management-world.com/a/1-the-lithium-battery-r...
usrusr 8y ago
At some point disposal will have to be priced in unless the hope for an economically viable (as in self-funding) recycling process somehow materializes, that so many people seem to conveniently assume to be an inevitable outcome of progressing time. Permanent dump & replace at cheaper and cheaper prices could end quite ugly.
- NickM 8y ago
  The raw materials are certainly valuable enough to be worth recycling, assuming it's not terribly hard to separate them back out from each other. But suppose we never figure out a good way to recycle these batteries, and we just have to throw them all in a landfill and keep making new ones. Is that actually so terrible? There's nothing toxic in a typical li-ion battery, so basically we just have inert materials that were taken from the ground being put back in the ground. Mining for nickel/cobalt/lithium is not great for the environment, but the effect is pretty localized, so a "disposable battery future" is probably still highly preferable over the fossil fuel status quo where the entire planet is fucked.
  - SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
    >But suppose we never figure out a good way to recycle these batteries, and we just have to throw them all in a landfill and keep making new ones. Is that actually so terrible? I mean... yea? I don't know but I look back to the 2006 Jeep Wrangler being almost entirely recyclable steel and had an effective life of 40+ years if taken care of. Then I look to new cars using composites and lithium that WILL go into a landfill 20 years or less because they're just not fixable in the same way, it's cheaper to write off of an insurance claim than to fix. It almost seems to me there is no free lunch, but that people like new and shiny and the company with all the tech is going to be popular with tech people.
    - comicjk 8y ago
      In its lifetime, that Jeep will dump 100+ tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, which spreads over the entire planet and is near-impossible to concentrate again. The impact of disposal of the car itself - a couple of tons of solids in a particular place - is not even close. And if we're going to talk about people's irrational thought patterns about the environment... I nominate the idea that landfills matter more than atmosphere dumping, which seems to be based on the fact that landfills are more visible.
BeeOnRope 8y ago
> Li-ion battery costs are falling at a constant ~15% per year and there is no real reason why this shouldn't continue. There are of course a variety of good reasons why exponential cost reduction won't continue, such as the cost of raw materials, shipping, and so on - but most importantly that almost nothing works like that for long. Li-ion battery manufacturing has seen a good uptick in efficiency due to quickly growing demand and a lot of money poured into squeezing out efficiencies, but there is no reason to assume exponential cost reductions to continue indefinitely. Indeed, it does't work that way for nearly any other industrial product, and (current) batteries aren't special in any way that would make them obviously different. > Similar to what Moore's law did to semiconductors ... Actually it is not similar at all. Semiconductors were actually special. There was an exponential reduction in feature size for many years, which led to exponential increases in performance, power efficiency, etc, per dollar. The massive gains were a direct result of the underlying process being scaled in an exponential manner. Almost nothing else works like this, certainly not batteries. The basic chemistry and efficiency of batteries, including Li-on has been pretty much the same for decades. There are occasional improvements in chemistry or anode construction or whatever, but these are a few % here or a few % there, and many claimed improvements don't pan out at all [1]. That's nothing like the doubling of transistor density that continued for decades. In particular, the total storage of batteries is related to number of atoms of the active ingredient, and that generally puts a fairly hard cap on size and other efficiency factors. Batteries are becoming cheaper because the production has been scaled up and efficiencies of scale achieved, but this will probably follow a similar curve as for any other popular product like lettuce or vehicles. There is no magic [2] and you'll hit a wall pretty quickly. --- [1] Just go back five years and look for "big" battery news, e.g., big suggested improvements in any characteristic and see if any of them are being used today. Very few are. [2] Of course there might be magic in terms of a very different battery chemistry, or some totally new way of storing energy that replaces batteries. There have been a lot of contenders over the years, but very few winners. A look at the periodic table also indicates that when it comes to batteries you can do better than Li-ion batteries, but not that much better.
- ricw 8y ago
  The main reason semiconductors scaled the way the did, was due to economies of scale. The more refined the process, the more R&D money had to be put behind the next node to make it work, the more production you needed to justify the investment. The end result being that we currently only have 3 (?) companies that are actively working on bringing out the next-gen semi-conductor node. The same principally applies to almost anything. In fact, for typical physical products the saying is that double the production will halve the cost. This is no different. Moore's law was much the same, just that it's scaling was much faster than anything seen before, such that every 18 months we were able to halve the costs. And of course semiconductors revolutionized almost everything. For li-ion batteries, this seems to be every 4-5 years and has been for the past 20 years or so. Rumors have it that Tesla is even beating this... Call it "Ric's law": every 4-5 years li-ion battery prices will halve ;)
chrido 8y ago
I'm not sure if costs of cells are the dominating factor. My gut feeling would be that the power electronics/inverters and transformers are at least 50% off the cost off such a system. And inverter costs seem to be falling more quickly. Does somebody have numbers?
mikekchar 8y ago
> from 2025 onwards traditional internal combustion engines will not be able to compete on price with electric cars We bought a 2 year old Leaf (30 KWh) recently after I worked out the TCO for it. Here's what I discovered. We pay a lot of electricity here in Japan (I think it's about 30 cents per KWh where I live). So a full charge would cost us about $9 if we charged at home. Driving carefully we can get between 200-220 km on that -- so about 4.5 cents per km. Gasoline costs about $1.50 per litre and our old car had "mileage" of about 7 l/100km or about 10.5 cents per km (that's a lie because we have a 12 year old car -- it's really about 10 l/100km, but newer versions are near are more efficient, so I'll use that number). We drive about 1200 km a month (I say "we", but really it's only my wife -- I don't really like driving :-) ). So the difference is about $72 a month. We also have to pay "shaken" here in Japan. This is a bit like the UK MOT. You have to get your car in essentially perfect running order every 2 years. It usually costs about $1000, or $500 per year. Because it's an electric car, the shaken costs are assumed to be small. We "prepaid" our shaken (i.e. bought insurance) for $200 for the next 4 years (or $50 per year). So that's a savings of $450 per year or $37.50 per month. So rounding up, we're up to about $110 per month saved. On top of that there is almost no maintenance cost (oil changes, air filters, timing belts, etc). Let's say $120 per year saved (to make the math easy ;-)). So that's $120 per month. But on top of that, we got this crazy deal from Nissan (or the government? or both? I'm not sure) where we get free unlimited recharging for 2 years and $20 per month after that. So that's a savings of $54 per month for the first 2 years and $34 per month after that (as long as we charge at the fast charging stations -- note, there are some negative implications for battery life for using the charging stations and it is a PITA to go and charge it all the time, so I'm not sure how true that savings will be). Our previous car was a BMW 118i. The Leaf is every bit as good. If you turn the eco mode off, it has similar power (but of course a much nicer torque curve -- flat) so it's easy to pass or get out of trouble. In eco mode, it's a bit sluggish, but not really a problem 95% of the time. The Leaf has slightly better handling, but also slightly larger turning radius. Similar fit and finish. The Leaf seems slightly more spacious and has similar storage space. In actuality very similar cars in almost every respect, however the BWM is quite a bit more expensive. So apart from range (which isn't a problem for us in any way), it's a pretty clear EV win for that kind of mid-size "nice" car. Probably it would be quite a bit closer if I were to compare to a Toyota Prius (especially in Japan where you can get a rebate), but I was amazed about how cheap EVs are now. It's pretty hard to match. If batteries come down in price, it will be impossible for sure. Not sure how the numbers would work out in other parts of the world (especially in a cold climate), but it really is getting to the point where ICEs don't make sense any more.
new12345 8y ago
I wouldn't get too comfortable owning business based upone Li-ion batteries, especially in long run. Li-ion can replace traditional combustion engines in some niche applications but is far away from completely replacing it. To me batteries feels like an intermediate step b/w engines and next energy source that's capable enough. Batteries based businesses will do well for now but they should keep an eye out for new developments in energy sources for on time strategy changes.
- taneq 8y ago
  False dichotomy. Batteries don't need to completely replace international combustion to have a massive impact. Right now they're superior for probably 60-80% of cases and that number is increasing rapidly.
andrepd 8y ago
Those are some pretty big claims. Care to share some evidence?
dwighttk 8y ago
Need them to get smaller too though.
duchenne 8y ago
> This is why Tesla is valued higher than GM, Daimler or pretty much any other car company. I have heard a different theory from a friend working in finance. He said that most of a GM/Toyota car is made by suppliers, but Tesla does almost all the components of its cars by itself, capturing all the profits. He said that most car manufacturers are actually only car assemblers. Similarly, there are many PC brands like Lenovo or Dell, but they have to share their profits with suppliers like Intel/Nvidia/Samsung/Microsoft. Apple, also captures a lot of profits because they do not only assemble, they also make software and hardware.
TimTheTinker 8y ago
> Tesla at it's heart is a battery company with products built around that. I disagree. Tesla is a software company with products built around that. A Tesla car is a computer running their software, with certain physical enablements attached.
philwelch 8y ago
> This is why Tesla is valued higher than GM, Daimler or pretty much any other car company Tesla's market cap, rounded to the nearest billion dollars, is $65B. Other large car company market caps: * Toyota: $195B * GM: $46B * Daimler: $57B * Volkswagen AG: $71B * Ford: $33B * Honda: $49B * Nissan: $36B * BMW: $47B * SAIC Motor: $42B

by ricw 8y ago

taeric 8y ago

I'm curious on how dominated this is by ability to mine the raw sources. Do they recycle well? Or are they just that ubiquitous that we don't have to worry about it, at all?

ams6110 8y ago
Yes, I have similar thoughts, though I guess worst case it's roughly the same as mining coal but without the CO2 (and other unhealthy) emissions of burning it. Downvoted? I was intending to express that even with mining the raw materials, etc. it is probably a net positive environmentally.
Zenst 8y ago
Other sources of lithium being exploited, lithium is the new oil. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/538036/quest-to-mine-seawater-for-lithium-advances/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/538036/quest-to-mine-seaw...
- gkfasdfasdf 8y ago
  This sounds alarming, but one difference I think is that a lithium batteries are not fuel in the sense that they are consumed immediately like gas/diesel. Of course they have a limited lifespan, but I read elsewhere that lithium batteries can be partially recycled for raw materials.
  - Zenst 8y ago
    Yes, a big plus for lithium. However, demand and usage will only increase need for lithium out in the field and that could prove a bumpy curve and with all resources of a finite amount, we hit a plateau. Question is, will demand outstrip supply or will supply manage to maintain a pace that stays at least equal to that demand. It is with this in mind, that I call it the new oil.
    - ericd 8y ago
      You can evaporate sea water to get it. For now, seems functionally infinite.
      - ksec 8y ago
        Except we don't have any way to do it economically.
        ericd 8y ago
        What’s expensive about it?
  - usrusr 8y ago
    > lithium batteries are not fuel I really hope that this is not exactly what the desperate end of the disposal chain will look like once it is fully formed.
  - knodi123 8y ago
    Lithium is an element. What happens to lithium batteries over time that makes the lithium no longer lithiumish enough?
maxerickson 8y ago
It's probably possible to commercialize sodium-ion batteries with carbon anodes. Not necessarily price competitive with highly developed lithium ion batteries using the cheapest to access minerals, but cheap enough to make the world go round.
hwillis 8y ago
The metals recycle well and very cheaply, with no need for human sorting like with plastics. Those make up the bulk of the material cost. Graphite and lithium are the only things that aren't currently recycled. Lithium is too cheap right now- it makes up on the order of 1% the cost of a cell. It's more common than lead. We're very unlikely to have lithium supply problems. Compare the 7 billion tonnes of coal production, or 5 million tonnes of lead, to the 80 million cars sold annually. Mining in general can be scaled to far larger than anything car batteries would need. Graphite is more of an issue. Battery graphite is very high quality spheroidal grains, roughly 55% synthetic and 45% "natural"- even the natural stuff goes through a huge amount of processing. Synthetic graphite can be made from anything, but natural graphite has slightly higher specific energy. Both types take a great deal of energy to manufacture, and natural spheroidal graphite would be a lot more expensive if not for Chinese and American coal. Batteries are burnt as part of the recycling process, and even if they weren't there's no really good way to recover the graphite. So that probably puts a bit of a floor on li ion recycling savings. The elemental metals recovered are also not appropriate to directly turn into batteries, so they will probably get sold on the open market for lower profit. The bottom line is that the only constraint on manufacturing batteries is the cost of energy.
- nielsbot 8y ago
  Better hook that up to some solar panels then...
- netcan 8y ago
  What a great reply.
- taeric 8y ago
  Thanks, just to paraphrase back to make sure I understood: The lithium is not recycled, due to economies of scale. Same for the graphite. There is no foreseeable shortage of either graphite or lithium, with the scale that we use it, and the scale that it can be found in the wild. The majority of the materials in a battery, however, are recycled quite easily. That right? Are there any concerns to the mining of either element? I've seen some scare posts, but don't know enough about them to know if they were worth taking seriously.
Latteland 8y ago
And an intermediate step to ultimate recycling is that car batteries still have usefulness after they lose half their capacity (but not as a car battery). They can be used in say a storage system for home power. And this kind of recyling is already happening. Tesla has discussed this, and I believe other ev car companies are doing it already too.

creato 8y ago

> Li-ion battery costs are falling at a constant ~15% per year and there is no real reason why this shouldn't continue. Why would that continue? Surely materials costs become more significant as other costs go down, which must be harder to reduce?

cal5k 8y ago
I guess the implication is that the manufactured cost is still significantly higher than the cost of the raw materials, which implies lots of room for improvement.
- SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
  I wish more people understood that lithium and aluminum are transported almost entirely around the world on tanker fuel before they're made into a product - and then it's STILL cheaper to make new batteries than to recycle them. I don't know enough to say the true impact is different than the stated impact or anything like that. But I have my suspicions that something isn't what it seems with lithium production.
toomuchtodo 8y ago
Manufacturing is rapidly scaling up. There is so much lithium available in the world (even commercially reasonable to extract from the ocean), that there is much room for per unit costs to decrease before you encounter lower COGS bounds (evaporation + transportation costs). More importantly, a ton of lithium mined will be used for decades; when all of the Model S/X/3 battery packs are end of life (10-15 years from now), those modules are going to be remanufactured into stationary storage (or recycled entirely through a destructive extraction process, depending on degradation and next use case). This is similar to how your recycled pop can might end up in the aluminum used in a new light truck or an aircraft fuselage (edit: poor example; a better example would be automotive parts that are remanufactured and put back into service). The smartest thing Tesla ever did was finance battery manufacturing using luxury vehicle margins (stoking demand with a sexy, desirable brand), and have those customers (including myself) finance the depreciation and capital carrying costs of those battery sleds they'll use again in the future. I am not a Model S owner; I am the temporary user of 100kw of energy storage, which will eventually make it's way into stationary storage where mobile energy density (ie pack degradation) isn't as much of a concern.

karpodiem 8y ago

Panasonic makes Tesla's batteries. If someone paid Panasonic a little bit more money, what's to prevent them from using the same batteries? I would love to see the engineering details around the 'moat' that Tesla has with batteries.

aerovistae 8y ago
those batteries are coming from the gigafactory, which is a joint-venture with tesla. the batteries produced there aren't about to start going to other companies. if other companies wanted to build a new factory with panasonic, perhaps they could do that....and then we'll start to see their results sometime in the 2020s....
- gamblor956 8y ago
  Panasonic's solar roofing products from its joint venture with Tesla in NY are already being mostly sold to Tesla's competitors...
  - jsight 8y ago
    AFAIK, Panasonic doesn't make solar roofing? Source on their panels from Buffalo mostly going to non-Tesla installers?
    - gamblor956 8y ago
      https://electrek.co/2018/08/08/tesla-solar-roofs-delays-panasonic-new-buyers-cells-gigafactory-2/ https://electrek.co/2018/08/08/tesla-solar-roofs-delays-pana... And that is a pro-Tesla source. I had a WSJ link before that I don't have time to look up.
mschuster91 8y ago
> Panasonic makes Tesla's batteries. If someone paid Panasonic a little bit more money, what's to prevent them from using the same batteries? Panasonic makes the cells, which is easy to do, to scale and to copy. Tesla's added value is the charging control for each cell in the battery pack.

agumonkey 8y ago

Interesting is there a moore law for energy density ? I've been looking for this since years but couldn't formulate it as clearly

ricw 8y ago
I'll call it Rick's law: Roughly every 4-5 years, Li-ion battery prices will halve
- agumonkey 8y ago
  Let's see if it sticks
castratikron 8y ago
Permanent magnet strength also follows a similar pattern, the strength doubling roughly every decade or two.
- agumonkey 8y ago
  Even more interesting
usrusr 8y ago
Energy density has a fixed upper bound for any given battery chemistry: the amount of energy that would be bound/released if all of the material in the battery would participate in a cycle by turning from one state to the other and back. The amount of energy per reacting molecule/mol/kilogram is fixed and well known. Someone who is not as terrible at chemistry as me won't find or hard to come up with concrete numbers. And those numbers are hard constants, you can only come closer to them (within a given battery chemistry), they are impossible to exceed. And another angle: our perception of energy density increase is heavily disturbed by the much faster reduction in cost, we are just not very good at telling those two apart.
- agumonkey 8y ago
  true but how far are we from chemical theoretic optimum ? manufacturing of cells is very suboptimal at the atomic level.

ckastner 8y ago

> This is why Tesla is valued higher than GM, Daimler or pretty much any other car company. Tesla at it's heart is a battery company with products built around that. It was Samsung, not Tesla, who supplied the actual cells [1]: Tesla’s giant new Powerpack project in Australia will use battery cells made by Samsung [1] https://electrek.co/2017/08/09/tesla-powerpack-project-australia-battery-cell-samsung/ https://electrek.co/2017/08/09/tesla-powerpack-project-austr...

robotresearcher 8y ago
Batteries are systems, not just cells.
- agumonkey 8y ago
  Do you know how long these cells can last in such a scenario ?
  - acct1771 8y ago
    As long as they save more than their cost during their lifetime, who cares?
    - deleted 8y ago
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    - zachberger 8y ago
      There are externalities to lithium ion battery production. Lithium is a finite resource and the environmental impact needs to be considered as well. Its shortsighted to only consider cost.
      - atombender 8y ago
        Lithium can be reclaimed from batteries. It's going to be a challenge for the industry [1], but it's also going to be very important. [1] https://waste-management-world.com/a/1-the-lithium-battery-recycling-challenge https://waste-management-world.com/a/1-the-lithium-battery-r...

usrusr 8y ago

At some point disposal will have to be priced in unless the hope for an economically viable (as in self-funding) recycling process somehow materializes, that so many people seem to conveniently assume to be an inevitable outcome of progressing time. Permanent dump & replace at cheaper and cheaper prices could end quite ugly.

NickM 8y ago
The raw materials are certainly valuable enough to be worth recycling, assuming it's not terribly hard to separate them back out from each other. But suppose we never figure out a good way to recycle these batteries, and we just have to throw them all in a landfill and keep making new ones. Is that actually so terrible? There's nothing toxic in a typical li-ion battery, so basically we just have inert materials that were taken from the ground being put back in the ground. Mining for nickel/cobalt/lithium is not great for the environment, but the effect is pretty localized, so a "disposable battery future" is probably still highly preferable over the fossil fuel status quo where the entire planet is fucked.
- SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
  >But suppose we never figure out a good way to recycle these batteries, and we just have to throw them all in a landfill and keep making new ones. Is that actually so terrible? I mean... yea? I don't know but I look back to the 2006 Jeep Wrangler being almost entirely recyclable steel and had an effective life of 40+ years if taken care of. Then I look to new cars using composites and lithium that WILL go into a landfill 20 years or less because they're just not fixable in the same way, it's cheaper to write off of an insurance claim than to fix. It almost seems to me there is no free lunch, but that people like new and shiny and the company with all the tech is going to be popular with tech people.
  - comicjk 8y ago
    In its lifetime, that Jeep will dump 100+ tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, which spreads over the entire planet and is near-impossible to concentrate again. The impact of disposal of the car itself - a couple of tons of solids in a particular place - is not even close. And if we're going to talk about people's irrational thought patterns about the environment... I nominate the idea that landfills matter more than atmosphere dumping, which seems to be based on the fact that landfills are more visible.

BeeOnRope 8y ago

> Li-ion battery costs are falling at a constant ~15% per year and there is no real reason why this shouldn't continue. There are of course a variety of good reasons why exponential cost reduction won't continue, such as the cost of raw materials, shipping, and so on - but most importantly that almost nothing works like that for long. Li-ion battery manufacturing has seen a good uptick in efficiency due to quickly growing demand and a lot of money poured into squeezing out efficiencies, but there is no reason to assume exponential cost reductions to continue indefinitely. Indeed, it does't work that way for nearly any other industrial product, and (current) batteries aren't special in any way that would make them obviously different. > Similar to what Moore's law did to semiconductors ... Actually it is not similar at all. Semiconductors were actually special. There was an exponential reduction in feature size for many years, which led to exponential increases in performance, power efficiency, etc, per dollar. The massive gains were a direct result of the underlying process being scaled in an exponential manner. Almost nothing else works like this, certainly not batteries. The basic chemistry and efficiency of batteries, including Li-on has been pretty much the same for decades. There are occasional improvements in chemistry or anode construction or whatever, but these are a few % here or a few % there, and many claimed improvements don't pan out at all [1]. That's nothing like the doubling of transistor density that continued for decades. In particular, the total storage of batteries is related to number of atoms of the active ingredient, and that generally puts a fairly hard cap on size and other efficiency factors. Batteries are becoming cheaper because the production has been scaled up and efficiencies of scale achieved, but this will probably follow a similar curve as for any other popular product like lettuce or vehicles. There is no magic [2] and you'll hit a wall pretty quickly. --- [1] Just go back five years and look for "big" battery news, e.g., big suggested improvements in any characteristic and see if any of them are being used today. Very few are. [2] Of course there might be magic in terms of a very different battery chemistry, or some totally new way of storing energy that replaces batteries. There have been a lot of contenders over the years, but very few winners. A look at the periodic table also indicates that when it comes to batteries you can do better than Li-ion batteries, but not that much better.

ricw 8y ago
The main reason semiconductors scaled the way the did, was due to economies of scale. The more refined the process, the more R&D money had to be put behind the next node to make it work, the more production you needed to justify the investment. The end result being that we currently only have 3 (?) companies that are actively working on bringing out the next-gen semi-conductor node. The same principally applies to almost anything. In fact, for typical physical products the saying is that double the production will halve the cost. This is no different. Moore's law was much the same, just that it's scaling was much faster than anything seen before, such that every 18 months we were able to halve the costs. And of course semiconductors revolutionized almost everything. For li-ion batteries, this seems to be every 4-5 years and has been for the past 20 years or so. Rumors have it that Tesla is even beating this... Call it "Ric's law": every 4-5 years li-ion battery prices will halve ;)

chrido 8y ago

I'm not sure if costs of cells are the dominating factor. My gut feeling would be that the power electronics/inverters and transformers are at least 50% off the cost off such a system. And inverter costs seem to be falling more quickly. Does somebody have numbers?

mikekchar 8y ago

> from 2025 onwards traditional internal combustion engines will not be able to compete on price with electric cars We bought a 2 year old Leaf (30 KWh) recently after I worked out the TCO for it. Here's what I discovered. We pay a lot of electricity here in Japan (I think it's about 30 cents per KWh where I live). So a full charge would cost us about $9 if we charged at home. Driving carefully we can get between 200-220 km on that -- so about 4.5 cents per km. Gasoline costs about $1.50 per litre and our old car had "mileage" of about 7 l/100km or about 10.5 cents per km (that's a lie because we have a 12 year old car -- it's really about 10 l/100km, but newer versions are near are more efficient, so I'll use that number). We drive about 1200 km a month (I say "we", but really it's only my wife -- I don't really like driving :-) ). So the difference is about $72 a month. We also have to pay "shaken" here in Japan. This is a bit like the UK MOT. You have to get your car in essentially perfect running order every 2 years. It usually costs about $1000, or $500 per year. Because it's an electric car, the shaken costs are assumed to be small. We "prepaid" our shaken (i.e. bought insurance) for $200 for the next 4 years (or $50 per year). So that's a savings of $450 per year or $37.50 per month. So rounding up, we're up to about $110 per month saved. On top of that there is almost no maintenance cost (oil changes, air filters, timing belts, etc). Let's say $120 per year saved (to make the math easy ;-)). So that's $120 per month. But on top of that, we got this crazy deal from Nissan (or the government? or both? I'm not sure) where we get free unlimited recharging for 2 years and $20 per month after that. So that's a savings of $54 per month for the first 2 years and $34 per month after that (as long as we charge at the fast charging stations -- note, there are some negative implications for battery life for using the charging stations and it is a PITA to go and charge it all the time, so I'm not sure how true that savings will be). Our previous car was a BMW 118i. The Leaf is every bit as good. If you turn the eco mode off, it has similar power (but of course a much nicer torque curve -- flat) so it's easy to pass or get out of trouble. In eco mode, it's a bit sluggish, but not really a problem 95% of the time. The Leaf has slightly better handling, but also slightly larger turning radius. Similar fit and finish. The Leaf seems slightly more spacious and has similar storage space. In actuality very similar cars in almost every respect, however the BWM is quite a bit more expensive. So apart from range (which isn't a problem for us in any way), it's a pretty clear EV win for that kind of mid-size "nice" car. Probably it would be quite a bit closer if I were to compare to a Toyota Prius (especially in Japan where you can get a rebate), but I was amazed about how cheap EVs are now. It's pretty hard to match. If batteries come down in price, it will be impossible for sure. Not sure how the numbers would work out in other parts of the world (especially in a cold climate), but it really is getting to the point where ICEs don't make sense any more.

new12345 8y ago

I wouldn't get too comfortable owning business based upone Li-ion batteries, especially in long run. Li-ion can replace traditional combustion engines in some niche applications but is far away from completely replacing it. To me batteries feels like an intermediate step b/w engines and next energy source that's capable enough. Batteries based businesses will do well for now but they should keep an eye out for new developments in energy sources for on time strategy changes.

taneq 8y ago
False dichotomy. Batteries don't need to completely replace international combustion to have a massive impact. Right now they're superior for probably 60-80% of cases and that number is increasing rapidly.

andrepd 8y ago

Those are some pretty big claims. Care to share some evidence?

dwighttk 8y ago

Need them to get smaller too though.

duchenne 8y ago

> This is why Tesla is valued higher than GM, Daimler or pretty much any other car company. I have heard a different theory from a friend working in finance. He said that most of a GM/Toyota car is made by suppliers, but Tesla does almost all the components of its cars by itself, capturing all the profits. He said that most car manufacturers are actually only car assemblers. Similarly, there are many PC brands like Lenovo or Dell, but they have to share their profits with suppliers like Intel/Nvidia/Samsung/Microsoft. Apple, also captures a lot of profits because they do not only assemble, they also make software and hardware.

TimTheTinker 8y ago

> Tesla at it's heart is a battery company with products built around that. I disagree. Tesla is a software company with products built around that. A Tesla car is a computer running their software, with certain physical enablements attached.

philwelch 8y ago

> This is why Tesla is valued higher than GM, Daimler or pretty much any other car company Tesla's market cap, rounded to the nearest billion dollars, is $65B. Other large car company market caps: * Toyota: $195B * GM: $46B * Daimler: $57B * Volkswagen AG: $71B * Ford: $33B * Honda: $49B * Nissan: $36B * BMW: $47B * SAIC Motor: $42B