Volkswagen enters battery business with $20B investment
arenaev.com
arenaev.com
Why can't journalists use units correctly? I'm assuming the above is per year (but who knows?).
Side remark: it's actually kind of cool that you can literally specify the battery output of these factories in Watts.
> Side remark: it's actually kind of cool that you can literally specify the battery output of these factories in Watts.
The unit is Watt hour storage capacity.
I think the confusion is that the unit of their product is not GWh. It’s (GWh of capacity) which is not the simple product of Watt and hour)
You can divide the hours in GWh by the year time span and the time units cross out. The unit is Watt, but the physical quantity it’s describing is arguably not power but energy capacity production rate or something similar.
There’s no 1:1 mapping between units and physical quantities, just think about specific impulse in rocket engines being quantified in seconds.
Take this example:
Unit: second, physical quantity: could be things like “time”, “specific impulse”, “distance” (light-second), etc. Many physical quantities can be measured in seconds.
Wikipedia writes: “Storage capacity is the amount of energy extracted from an energy storage device or system; usually measured in joules or kilowatt-hours and their multiples”
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu... writes: “Storage systems for electricity include battery, flywheel, compressed air, and pumped hydro storage. Any systems are limited in the total amount of energy they can store. Their energy capacity is expressed in megawatt-hours (MWh), and the power, or maximum output at a given time, is expressed in megawatts of electric power (MW or MWe).”
Both of which to my layman reading opposes your claim.
This battery stores X Joules. 1 J = 360 kWh
This battery releases Y Joules per second. 1 J / s = 1 Watt
Most batteries now advertise energy capacity in kWh or thousand Watt hour(s). 1 kWh would be 3,600,000 joules or 3.6 megajoules, which does honestly sound more badass.
In the past batteries would advertise capacity in Amp hours, but you have to know the voltage of the battery to convert Amp hours to energy.
Whether you use Joules or horse power weeks is beside the point as they can easily be converted into each other.
On the other hand, knowing if a factory puts out 240 gigawatt hours worth of battery capacity every year, or only over the entire lifetime of the factory, really is an important distinction to make.
I'd rather keep the freedom to post as I please rather than limit my expression just to chase clout.
It kinda does, it is the (average) cross section of the fuel flowing from tank to engine.
240 GWh = 3 million 80kWh cars.
You're not discharging the battery through a whole year
Watts are an instantaneous measurement, but the factory needs a higher output most of the time to cover downtime. Much like power plants you would say it’s capacity is X watts with an expected capacity factor of Y%.
You could say the output is expected to average X watts over a year, but to then use it for anything would mean converting that to Wh.
Capacity created per time period is a different unit created as a discrete entity with each battery but having no instantaneous value.
It's simple dimensional analysis (https://xkcd.com/687/).
Cool. So my car has a fuel efficiency of 0.000007 square meter :D I love it.
I'm still not sure why you say Wh/y would be a more appropriate unit, given that it would change as the battery degrades.
It's like if you produced gallon-sized plastic water jugs. Let's say you made 1000 a day. Would it be accurate to say you produced 1000 gallons of water a day? No, you produced 1000 empty jugs.
The misconception you're having here is that "GWh of storage" is the volume of the bottle. You're interpreting it as "GWh", which in the bottle example would be like saying "They produce 1000 gallons of water / d".
Besides that, those battery cells are charged as part of the production process (though not completely), so I could argue that actual energy is leaving the factory.
If they could, they would have better paying jobs.
I don't mean to say journalists are stupid. They're generally not at all. But their required talents are verbal and social.
10x increase in world production capacity every five years.
Currently at about 200-300GWh/year. Expect 2-3TWh/year by 2026, and 20-30TWh/year by 2031.
Volkswagen had better pick up the pace quite a bit.
It seems to me equivalent to pc manufacturers making their own chips.
There is no alternative around the corners IMHO car companies are not thinking big enough with their investments.
BRICS nations and friends will make the near future very uncomfortable for Westerners used to affluence.
The US will simply do whatever it always did and, should the need arise, simply putsch away whoever governs these reserves.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_lithium_p...
Or someone will start digging for raw materials in a place that isn't hostile.
Also, essential minerals are alllllll over, only some (cobalt nickel) are concentrated in a few areas and those are actively being minimized and eliminated from future chemistries.
This is vague enough that perhaps you shouldn't take my word, but I unfortunately don't have the 15 minutes this weekend to track it down... if I find it again I will try to email you.
I’m pretty sure the answer is - they took physics in high school, they’ve been (on average) at least ten years out of high school, and it never came up, even once.
Plus, they never liked studying it. It's amazing how much you can cram in short term memory that gets erases within day or weeks.
And no, you cannot use watts, unless you invent a new unit, watts of capacity?
The units used are correct.
That's a very uniquely English thing. Where I'm from(Poland) you always list the salary per month and that's how people talk about it. I've never seen anyone refer to a salary on an annual basis.
(Troubled post-socialism past and, to some extent, present, in which the vast majority is living paycheck to paycheck with little to no ability to save up, is sure contributing to this mode of thinking.)
Depends on the type of contract. I'm also from Poland and unit I use most often is the daily rate because it's the only reliable way for a contractor to calculate earnings.
Job listings indeed still use monthly, but their understanding of a month is usually "20 workdays", which is obviously off by at least 10%.
I'm curious if a prismatic cell solution - especially if they take 'prismatic' literally instead of meaning "rectangular", can be better optimized for heat dissipation. It's easier to tune surface area to internal area when you can make more sophisticated shapes, like truncated cuboids to provide rectangular cooling channels, or concave surfaces to make cylindrical ones.
folding and layers don't mix as well as rolling and layers. swiss rolls, sushi rolls, battery cells are basically the same thing with chemistry differences.
capacitors come in cans for much the same reason. you take sheets of "stuff" and cover them with semi liquid other "stuff" and you roll them up and then cut the long rolls into short segments, put them in cans, attach electrodes and you have a capacitor. Sorry battery. Sorry Swiss roll. Sorry, sashimi. No: we got that order wrong.
Apple hit a trifecta when they started making their own batteries. The MacBook where they introduced them got twice the battery life. The new OSX version had better battery management. The prismatic, unpackaged cells occupied 30% more volume within the case, because they dropped the packaging, the round cells, and used a tiny motherboard. And finally the chemistry of the new cells increased the watt hours per cubic centimeter by 30%.
But the difference between a laptop and a car is that the laptop batteries were maybe 3/8” thick. Plenty of top and bottom surface area to dissipate heat. Or so they thought (lots of swelling batteries in those models).
If you wrapped the battery around a thin trapezoid, or a very thin parallelogram, I think you get that truncated cuboid shape once you have laid up a half dozen layers or so, because of the way the radius of the corners builds up with each wrap.
I suspect pleating would work well with "flow" production methods which start with sheets, and do some kind of printing/overlay process in a shallow bath, and then you have 100m of thing, which you pleat before canning/containerising and its both robust and a BIT flexible in some plain in the 3D space, so you can shape it around things.
If we used plug in hybrids with 10 kWh batteries, this would be enough for four million vehicles.
It depends on your driving profile. For most of the year, I do small trips, below 50 km per day. Then I do maybe 10 200-400 km trips a year.
I could get maybe 80% electric kilometers with a modest plugin hybrid.
Does anyone have numbers for this?
This explains where the data and scores come from: http://www.dashboard-light.com/click-here-first/
No matter where you are in the car market, plug-in hybrids are a weird compromise, delivering all the slowness of a hybrid and the requirement to have access to charging like an EV, for more money than a normal hybrid car.
They do. I have owned an XC60 PHEV for over 2 years now, after 20kk miles the brake pads were 5% worn. And it's a 2.2 tonne, 400bhp SUV. Without regenerative braking the pads would be almost gone now.
Which is what on a modern car?it’s an oil change every 25k km on any new bmw.
Is this North America spec btw? (there's difference in maintenance intervals usually).
I've driven ICE for many many many years and I never want to go back. I don't want to smell gasoline in the gas station... The model 3's maintenance is basically cabin air filter and brake fluid which honestly you can just not touch for 5 years with no problem if you live somewhere with clean air ;) it's essentially zero maintenance.
In hybrids, the battery is very tiny, so lasts for a day or two instead of a week or more. This means having a home charger is an absolute necessity. Small batteries don't support rapid charging, so you won't be able to use many public chargers, even if you were patient enough to wait hours instead of minutes.
Horesepower of hybrid cars is advertised as a sum of EV+ICE engines together, but that's a rare scenario. You'll be mostly using underpowered EV-only half when you can, and then the underpowered ICE-only half when you run out of juice.
When you're on electricity, you're lugging an ICE engine, and when you're road tripping, you have worse fuel economy due to lugging a useless battery and an EV motor (regen doesn't do much even when it works, and highway cruising is the worst-case scenario for it).
In many hybrids transmission/clutch adds a lag, so you don't get the sweet instant torque BEVs are known for.
You have worst-case maintenance costs. On top of all the moving parts of an ICE engine and a complex gearbox, your battery will wear out sooner. A small battery will tend to be cycled 100% to 0%, instead of kept in the 80%-50% range that is much gentler for lithium batteries.
I’m an automotive EE, I’ve had almost all types of vehicles to drive. I really like the Wrangler plug in hybrid. My week to week saw almost zero gas being used, it was like having a full electric and I could still drive wherever I wanted. With 4Low and diff lockers. Loved it!
I drive ~12mi a day, works great for me, but I know it’s not for people with commutes.
Personally I'd just ride my bike for that and if I was unwilling or unfit to cycle 12 miles a day[1] I'd go with an electric bike.
(That would actually save me time I would otherwise spend training but I realise I am an odd outlier).
1. Not judging here, everyone has their own fitness levels and goals.
Some can blend power from electric and gas motors and give you the combined power output for modest durations almost any time--and then will use excess ICE capacity or regenerative breaking to recharge the battery.
Yes, of course you plug in any time you're home. Not an issue if you have off-street parking, any outlet works.
Transmission/clutch lag--which car have you driven? Does not exist at all in mine (GM Volt), have not heard anyone mention it in reviews of RAV4 Prime or other recent PHEVs.
It is in fact the best-case scenario for some driving profiles.
I have many modest-distance trips around town, and ~30 long drives a year, at least 10 of which would require a midway additional hour of charging in a BEV, with half the drive through an area that has no fast chargers and will not get any in the next 3 years.
It was about half the price of a comparable used all electric car.
But it was still too expensive, so I ended up buying a used diesel, less than half the price of the hybrid.
Charging at home will probably be possible in a few years so then it's even more desirable to get a fully or partially electric car.
Electric cars can become mainstream but it requires still some problem solving, both technical and nontechnical.
I have an XC60 T8 PHEV, it's the best car I have ever owned, hands down.
>>a crappy low-end EV experience with worst-case charging, and a poor ICE car with even less cabin/cargo space than a pure ICE (and much less than a pure BEV).
Don't see it at all. It charges in 3 hours - what's the problem? That I can't rapid charge it on the motorway? Ok, fair. The space inside it is the same as in a petrol XC60. There is no compromise.
>>You'll be mostly using underpowered EV-only half when you can, and then the underpowered ICE-only half when you run out of juice.
The EV motor isn't super powerful, but it's absolutely sufficient for driving around. And the ICE is 320bhp in this model, it's far far far far from "underpowered". It's a rocketship, and I owned an actual Mercedes-AMG before. In the mode where both ICE and EV motors work together this car will outaccelerate anything due to the instant torque.
>>you have worse fuel economy due to lugging a useless battery and an EV motor (regen doesn't do much even when it works, and highway cruising is the worst-case scenario for it).
Maybe, but this car averages 50mpg(imperial) on long journeys anyway, so I really don't see a downside here. Regular Petrol XC60 struggles to keep 40. Diesel XC60 would beat it, but who wants a diesel. And my long term(2 years+) average overal is 120mpg, so really......whatever?
>>In many hybrids transmission/clutch adds a lag, so you don't get the sweet instant torque BEVs are known for.
Many, but not all - in the XC60 the EV motor is mounted directly on the rear axle so it doesn't go through the transmission at all. It accelerates instantly like any EV.
>>You have worst-case maintenance costs. On top of all the moving parts of an ICE engine and a complex gearbox
I'm seeing the opposite after couple years of ownership - the ICE almost never runs, so it doesn't suffer any wear. At every oil change the oil is completely clear - the motor is practically brand new. After 20kk miles the brake pads are 5% worn, because you do most breaking by regenerative breaking. So far this car is saving me a fortune in running costs and maintenance, and I don't see why this shouldn't continue. If anything, this car and its drivetrain will far outlast any regular ICE car out there.
>>your battery will wear out sooner.
If this was an actual concern, the manufacturer wouldn't give it 8 years warranty. It's longer warranty than on my actual real proper BEV that I also have.
PHEVs can be charged at home and should have enough battery range for those short daily errands across town, while having the range of a normal ICE car for long trips where the lack of fast chargers is most critical. Plus they'll break down more due to higher complexity and the repair shops will love and lobby for them so win-win-win.
https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1129728_plug-in-hybrids...
You're maintaining both an EV and an ICE at the same time in one car with both needing to interface with each other in complex ways. There's bound to be in the range of 4x as much that can go wrong compared to just one or the other. You'll have the mechanical issues of the ICE coupled with the software problems of an EV.
It's an absolutely stupid idea to even consider doing these sort of overcomplicated hybrids, but unfortunately it's also the only way to get around the abysmal battery capacity we currently have.
Having driven a PHEV for over 2 years now, I can easily believe them - the main ICE runs so rarely, it's practically brand new. I cover like 90% of my journeys in EV mode alone. I've just done my second service and the brake pads are like 5% worn - after 20kk miles, in a 2.2 tonne SUV. All because of regenerative breaking - it's absolutely remarkable. So yes, I imagine repairs of this car will be cheaper long term, not more expensive - the ICE drive train is going to have fewer problem if you just don't use it half as much.
The interface does not need to be complex. Hooking them directly together is simple enough. Some designs replace parts of the gearbox with the motors, making the combination simpler than the sum of its parts. And if you have a fully electric drivetrain then you can vastly simplify the ICE.
(Also I don't know how you could possibly reach 4x even if it was as complex as you're saying!)
So would the folks I know who only have street parking.
For many of us, electric or plugin just strait-up aren't an option. We get forgotten about all the time, but lots of us exist!
Or build densely and pedestrian-friendly enough you don't need any car.
Do old school parking meters (one per parking space) still exist, and if so, why?
One ticket machine can sell paper parking tickets for 10s or 100s of parking spaces.
Some modern machines even avoid the printed ticket entirely and allocate the payment to the number plate of your vehicle.
Sure downtown there is parking meters, but not in the suburbs where free parking is the norm and most parking spaces go weeks between seeing anyone park in them.
[1] https://www.best-selling-cars.com/brands/2020-full-year-glob...
I suppose the investment goes not just to civil engineering and land.
It definitely does not say that BEVs have higher emissions over the course of a car's life. It pretty clearly shows that BEVs have the largest decrease in CO2 emissions, as you would expect.
There is a strong assumption that battery costs will come down, and raw material extraction will ramp up.
It is important to remember that we are currently extracting megatons of fossil fuels and just burning them to ash and carbon dioxide yearly.
There is also a strong assumption that batteries will be very recyclable in the future (recycling batteries will make economic sense)
Consider that a plug in hybrid needs two full propulsion systems. Both of those systems need to be engineered, tested, integrated, built, warrantee-ed, and serviced.
If battery prices do come down, the cost of the extra battery pack will soon be lower than the added cost of the ICE propulsion system.
It is my understanding that these factors led GM's leadership team to stop producing the Volt (plug in hybrid) system and transition to all EV.
If, however, battery prices stay high or go up for an extended period of time, this bet will look worse.
Fortunately for consumers, there is choice.
GM does have a >> “strategic investment and commercial collaboration” with Controlled Thermal Resources (CTR) to procure lithium from Southern California’s Salton Sea
https://www.hagerty.com/media/news/gm-ctr-lithium-partnershi...
>If, however, battery prices stay high or go up for an extended period of time, this bet will look worse.
It's interesting to me that GM was really a pioneer in PHEVs with the Volt. They decided to transition their strategy at the same time as it seems like most other manufacturers debuted their first PHEVs. I have several friends that had Volts who went to other manufacturers because their use case still required a PHEV.
Was this purely to push buyers into the Bolt? This seems like an odd strategy since the Bolt, using LGs battery technology, is a transition technology itself for GM because it doesn't utilize the Ultium architecture.
How expensive would it have been to allow the Volt to solider on for a few more years with minor updates until an Ultium vehicle in a similar package with an extended range were available?
It’s just a Chevy car … but electric.
As opposed to, for instance, Mercedes or Volvo - e-initiative i-mobiles that are chaotic dumping grounds for futuristic design concepts that nobody asked for.
We don’t want your "electric car" … we just want your car, electric.
https://www.mercedes-benz.com/en/vehicles/passenger-cars/eqc...
https://www.mercedes-benz.com/en/vehicles/passenger-cars/eqe...
... here's the interior console:
https://media.mercedes-benz.com/article/4faab79f-5c1c-4bcd-b...
https://www.mercedes-benz.com/en/vehicles/passenger-cars/s-c...
The bad news for you is that it's based on release date, not on ICE/EV.
Every car is slowly moving to just screens for controls/gauges.
As in, Houston / 927 / defcon / teeletons friend ?
Just as China will influence steel and aluminum prices through central planning, battery prices are unlikely to remain higher than current peak as long as the government continues its current stance on stable prices.
Regardless of whether the mines are outside of China, the refinement/separation step of mined raw materials is done mostly in China (>80% global capacity). In addition to the 3-5 year lead time of building the capacity through new refineries, there’s a significant process optimization learning curve (non-transferable learnings) to move down the cost curve for new refinery entrants.
On central planning, this is well known that China manages raw material prices according to the 5-year plan: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-commodities-idUSKCN...
Extracting oil doesn't leave the total devastation behind it as extracting cobalt does [1]. A several orders of magnitude increase in that sort of abomination that I linked to doesn't have anything to do with "saving the planet", it's all politics and money. There's also the whole "child labor" thing [2] but let's assume that countries like Congo will sort it out sometimes in the next 10-20 years, they most probably won't, but there's always hope.
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/2013-02...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/dec/16/a...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_Pipeline#Phase_4_(can...
https://www.google.com/maps/place/coalmining/@50.9809314,6.4...
On what bases? Typically bigger demand leads to price increase, do we have new sources of Lithium/Cobalt/Copper that would increase production significantly?
That definitively matter for some cars.
However, the relationship between humans and cars is not like it is between humans and most other products. The same car by features can easily be sold for twice the price, or even higher with minor added conveniences, improved quality, or brand. Add $5000 for a different color.
As long as an ICE is a feature people want to their car to have it won't matter that a battery is cheaper.
The EU has voted a complete ban of the sale of new ICE and hybrid cars by 2035. It doesn't matter if ICE is a feature people want or not: it's not going to be an option.
The EU isn't the whole world. Also, the EU bans new dinosaur-burning cars from 2035. Cars with ICEs running on something else (synthetic) will most likely remain legal.
For ICEs to fully vanish from the market it would take a complete ban or some disruptive technology that works better for all use cases, to make them completely non-desirable for everyone.
We have tax advantages for electric cars, very expensive fuels, very cheap electricity. Still the deal doesn't close yet.
The infrastructure is hopefully developing also, so they would get working chargers and working payment systems by the time the batteries have become cheap enough too. And charging systems that don't cost thousands per post for apartment building parking lots.
In a sense, the system is riddled with so many inefficiencies at every layer. The only way to do it properly is to have a vertically integrated company like Tesla. They have their own chargers and do a lot of their own components instead of using subcontractors. They don't use low quality charging services or apps or payment cards. The experience can be controlled only that way.
A light city car like a Nissan Leaf does pretty well with just 40kwh. The original one shipped with just 20kwh and that was a relatively heavy vehicle. Imagine the same vehicle with twice the energy density. It would have a lot more range. A few kwh go a long way on light vehicles. Electrical motor cycles have somewhere in the range of only 4-8kwh. A lot of electrical bicycles have less than 1 kwh. 10kwh is plenty for a light vehicle.
Anyway, hybrids have all the downsides of owning an ICE car (lots of moving parts, pollution, expensive fuel, maintenance cost, etc.) with only some of the upsides of owning an EV (torque, fuel economy, etc.). Basically, in terms of cost and complexity, they don't make a lot of sense. The cheaper batteries get, the less sense they make. Right now EVs are just really expensive which means not everybody can afford one. However, cheaper, smaller EVs are perfectly feasible and a lot cheaper to make. Once the high end market saturates, smaller, lighter and cheaper EVs are the next obvious growth market. From next to nothing to many millions in volume is going to happen relatively quickly. In such a market, hybrids don't really stand a chance.
Those hundreds of millions of vehicles will be replaced over the course of 2-3 decades. Annual production volume of cars will be mostly EVs by mid next decade; in about 15 years. From then on, another 15 years or so later, most ICE vehicles will have been decommissioned. The value proposition at 2022 cost levels is already pretty great for EVs (with incentives and if you can afford them). Another 3 decades of technical improvements, economies of scale, etc. is going to only improve the economics.
I investigated myself plugin hybrid vs full electric, and full electric won for the simple fact that a plugin needs to be charged every day I will drive somewhere. For the electric, I can recharge it once a week or twice a month and it will cover my needs. I don't have an in-house charger so this is a massive difference.
From my perspective, this is a regulatory issue.
Auto-manufacturers have been pushing products and platforms that streamline, simplify, and reduce cost. That means if their premier work truck, consumer truck, and SUV all share the same underlying platform it's a win. This doesn't incentivize the development of multiple platforms that are right fit but rather marketing manipulation to make the consumer think something is the right fit.
They probably won't be all replaced. A minority of people (I'd put it at around 15-20% max) will afford to own an EV (price + place to charge it), while the great majority of us will be left with old combustion-engine cars, Cuba style (or until the law will prohibit them entirely, most probably).
It's 1.5L with no turbo that's 10 years old (toyota yaris hatchback). I can floor it, it revs noticably, but it's so underpowered that I have zero chance of losing control because while it sounds like it's working hard, there's barely anything behind it.
I get that EVs are the future. They make more sense. But a small childish part of me will miss the "experience" of hammering under-powered petrol engines.
Really wish we could have gotten a decent GT version in the US. But Toyota is what Toyota is.
The Yarris with its little go-kart wheels handled it like a champ, even if I'd bottom out almost every single time. Even climbed up it fine provided you kept it above 25km/h all the way :) Took to a mechanic later and he said the suspension and undercarriage were fine.
It's my lame safe way of having a little bit of fun. Certainly quieter than all the trucks on the road, and slower than a lot of the SUVs.
People often complain about electric (particularly motorcycles) not being “loud enough”. However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t noise, or that there’s not anything to be in tune with.
> But a small childish part of me will miss the "experience" of hammering under-powered petrol engines.
Well they are small, light, and pack about 105hp into a modern efficient engine developed by one of the great auto engineering staffs in history. Why not have a little fun with it?
This isn’t a problem yet because these cars are still a few years out from being affordable by those drivers and they are still in good shape.
Remember what happened to those kids in the 90s that drove souped up M3s or Nissan Skylines?
Many ICE cars already artificially pump in the sound of an older, nosier engine when you put them into sports mode.
My 4 cylinder diesel GTD sounds like a V8 when I floor it (unless I have the windows open of course. In which case I can actually hear the engine and like all diesels it just sounds like a tractor).
You'd just need to add some kind of engine response curve to the EV throttle[1] to simulate hitting the correct rev band/gear change.
1. Even that word is a retro throwback in an EV, as is "driver" when you really think about its etymology.
I’m sure you’re different, though.
Notably, the BMW was also significantly more expensive to service.
2. All cars in Norway are incredibly expensive.
1. If this is to be believed, then the median household income is about $10k: https://news.gallup.com/poll/166211/worldwide-median-househo...
That's enough to get cheap cars that cost $10k or less when new (something like this: https://www.dacia.de/modelle/sandero/konfigurator.html). There are even cheaper Indian and Chinese options.
2. We're 8 billion. At least 2-3 billion have enough income to get Renaults and the other brands I mentioned. Norway is the outlier (middle class Norwegians making $100k+), not this very large group of people probably making $10-15k per year (individually).
I'm not even sure what we're discussing anymore. But sure. If it's whether the majority of the world's population is currently in the market for BMW, Tesla or BYD's executive sedan, the answer is obviously no.
My point was rather that there is a very sizable developed-world middle class that is, and that this family is pretty representative among those. Think North America, UK, Germany, France, Scandinavia, Australia rather than India, Africa and China.
VW is planning to be where Tesla is this year in about five years in terms of GWH per year. Tesla is moving really aggressively in terms of new production capacity, partnerships with Panasonic and others, and strategic investments in supply chains as well as expansion into other applications for batteries (e.g. supporting the grid). I'd say, it will be a while before anybody catches up in terms of volume and economics. It's going to require more than what VW is investing right now. And I think they will invest quite aggressively. This isn't their last move; just the latest one.
Fossil fuel companies have a very big say in government decisions. There is a recent change of government, so they'll have slightly less of a say - but still a large amount.
What we really need to do, if we were forward-thinking enough, is value-add our resources. Instead of sending away lithium and buying back batteries, we should develop the capability locally.
https://northvolt.com/articles/recycled-battery/
I haven’t heard anything about this plant but I’m assuming something similar for this plant.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/volksw...
EV boom will propel the battery manufacturer to be the next manufacturing Behemoth. It's so much a core of any EV that the industry capital has to be consolidated to be able to produce sufficiently good product and iterate rapidly to match the market demand.
My bet is on CTAL though. Not Volkswagen
So in essence whether US/EU thinks of Green Energy or Fossil fuel sustainable way for the companies to thrive is to include Russia or China.
Given the current geo-political turmoil, may be its a good thing less chances of conflict and willingness to resolve through dialogue.
[1] https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/china-d...
People think in either or terms when it comes to battery tech. The reality is that it's a market that is going to keep on doubling in volume every few years for the next few decades. There will be cheap and low density batteries and there will be more expensive high density batteries. The latter won't replace the former and there will be demand for both.
VW will want to be cover the entire market in a decade or so ranging from cheap affordable light cars to expensive, long range luxury vehicles. They'll sell way more of the former than of the latter but make a lot of revenue with a relatively small amount of vehicles. Quantumscape is a great candidate for supplying batteries for those.
There has been ZERO change in the company's corporate culture since Dieselgate and while there is a lot of green washing happening and the enterprise is visibly moving towards electricity powered products this is just a company going where the money is. They are still the same ruthless business as they where a dozen years ago!
As XKCD said: Mission fucking accomplished.
Funding is not a limited resource, it's a continuous choice.
I’d sooner but a VW post dieselgate than a BMW with a seat heater subscription that’s for sure…
Sure, go ahead and throw you money at the company that went criminal lengths to hide their pollution!
I didn't see anything in this announcement about where raw materials will be sourced from. It looks like the idea is to support multiple chemistries, but it's far from clear where the materials for all those batteries will come from.
There is an odd fixation with battery materials due to fossil fuel and nuclear anti-battery propaganda.
Edit: and cobalt is mined in the Democratic Repuplic of the Congo, which seems to be held in opprobrium by Western countries.
Iron and phosphate are much easier to come by.
The DRC has been snubbed by the west for decades. China has made key investments there and control a few of their major mines, as well as the trains and ports along the east coast of Africa in Kenya and Nairobi. Of course the west isn't happy with this arrangement, but they had decades to work out a similar arrangement and didn't.
Whether it's in this factory or Tesla or whomever, there is going to be increasing demand in any case.
The idea that batteries require rare and hard to source materials is a fabrication. This should be self evident by the way battery production has skyrocketed over the last decade while prices keep dropping at the same time. If material sourcing was hard, that wouldn't have happened.
In theory lithium is abundant in the Earth's crust. In practice, although the market is incentivizing more production now, it takes close to 10 years to bring a new mine online (7 years is doable). There was a glut of these materials in 2020, but by 2025 we will see a major bottleneck. Here is an analysis of the situation: https://youtu.be/5v-DTS-ibow
I think it is pretty clear that your position is simply incorrect. If it was so easy to acquire Lithium why has the price increased so dramatically?
> That impression is a deliberate result of the aforementioned propaganda.
No its not. Very much pro EV are saying the same things.
> Lithium is one of the most plentiful resources on earth.
Nobody is denying that. That doesn't mean there is not an imbalance between new projects coming online and demand for lithium.
Lithium is not like an Iron mine. Lithium is more like a specialty chemistry and despite it being very common, its very uncommon to have high grade ore. That means lithium projects have to convert low grade ore to very high quality lithium and unlike with other materials, there are no standards. Your lithium output has to be certified individually by each battery/car maker. This adds a huge amount of difficulty in terms of bringing in new product.
If you follow the lithium industry over the last 5 years you will see how incredibly difficult it is to bring on new projects and almost nobody except the established players have managed it. Pretty much all lithium startups have failed to deliver what they said a couple years ago. Even the lithium majors have not expanded as fast as they said.
So if your analysis is limited to 'there is lots of lithium in the crust' then that's a terrible analysis. What you need to compare is the amount of hungry battery factory being built compared to the amount of new lithium mines.
You can build a giga-factory in 3 years, a new lithium project takes 5 years optimistically, and often 10 years.
I recommend this podcast if you want to learn the details of the lithium market, its both market analysis but also interviews with pretty most lithium majors and minors: https://www.globallithium.net/podcast
> Nickel isn't too hard to come by.
Nickel will not run out and battery makers will be willing to pay a premium compared to stainless steel. Even there is an issue where for batteries you need high grade and it will require quite a bit of investment to build facilities to do that conversion. However, that's likely not a limiting factor.
However when we are talking about environmentally friendly, nickel is a huge issue. Almost 100% of nickel growth comes from incredibly dirty mining in Indonesia.
There are significant nickel projects in North America but developing those takes many, many years and have to battle up-hill.
> The idea that batteries require rare and hard to source materials is a fabrication.
No its not, its a real series problem and industry experts pretty much universally agree on that. But of course there are people who overstate this even more to make anti-EV propaganda.
> This should be self evident by the way battery production has skyrocketed over the last decade while prices keep dropping at the same time. If material sourcing was hard, that wouldn't have happened.
As Musk and others have stated. The constant extreme price drop is over, lots of the easy gains from manufacturing are taken. Currently prices are going down because density is still improving slowly. However now that we have gigafactory style production, the cost of the manufacturing is increasingly small and to make further price drops materials prices need to drop and that is not happening.
Battery materials will be a limiting factor for EV roll out over the next couple of years. That is just the reality of the situation.
Given the amount of new battery factories, compared to the amount of new mines, you will see a shortfall.
That is why its important to actually consider those things.
6% of nickel is used in batteries. 2.7 million tonnes annually are produced, enough for billions of kWh of batteries.
The majority of spheroidal graphite for batteries is synthetically produced because it has better performance. It can be made trivially from virtually any carbon source, including biofuels.
Lithium is more common than lead. Mines are coming. It is set to be wildly oversupplied.
Cobalt use has been dropping by nearly 50% per generation. It's readily mined outside the DRC, which is just the cheapest.
Some people somewhere need to worry about metal production. The same as people need to worry about polypropylene or vinylene carbonate. People did not worry about indium supplies when the iphone took off, or how it would impact tantalum, or whether we'll have enough quartz to make solar panels. It's not important for the PUBLIC to consider these things; they're trivial in comparison to eg charging infrastructure.
However, nickel is the most unlikely to actually cause shortages, but it is still a price risk.
> The majority of spheroidal graphite for batteries is synthetically produced because it has better performance. It can be made trivially from virtually any carbon source, including biofuels.
Natural is usually cheaper and with extreme price pressure you will see that many car makers want to continue to use natural even if its worse in some aspects. The predicted split is about 50/50 this decade. Again, this is price risk.
> Lithium is more common than lead. Mines are coming. It is set to be wildly oversupplied.
You are disagreeing with all expert forecast on the topic. Are you an expert on the field? What is your qualification. If its so easy why are the mines not already here?
There are literally 100+ battery factory in production, all need huge amount of lithium. If you look at all major lithium producers and their expansion plans, its way below that need.
> It's not important for the PUBLIC to consider these things; they're trivial in comparison to eg charging infrastructure.
Of course no supply chain issues are public issues. But that doesn't mean it wont impact the public.