Didn't Elon say 100 Gigafactories would be needed for automobile demand alone? If Tesla Motors, Panasonic, (Apple?), and other companies are going to partner with Tesla to fund these factories, it will make it very difficult for any other competition to emerge. Tesla will become the largest battery supplier in the world, for Electric Vehicles, home and business energy storage, etc. The economies of scale will allow Tesla to produce Electric Vehicles for significantly less than any other company. On top of this, Tesla can sell batteries from old Tesla's to Solar City at a discount, allowing them to be repurposed as energy storage units at a price below what any other company can achieve. Sound about right?
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Tesla Gigafactory Investor Thread
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That sounds about right, except that the big problem I see with re-purposing car batteries for storage purposes, say at 70% capacity, is that batteries already are huge and having 30% of dead weight would be a big problem IMO, except for rare cases where land is not an issue.
Unless there is some cheap way to recycle them (which is what I hope Elon has come up with). I am not an engineer, so I don't know if maybe its as simple as replacing the cathode and anode?
pz1975
Active Member
Going way OT here of course, but does anyone (sleepy?) know how big of a battery (ie. recycled Model S battery packs) would be needed for a regular house to store enough solar energy to run the house for 2ish days (as I imagine that would be reasonable for a house not going fully off-grid)? I am trying to imagine how many Model S battery packs stacked on top of each other this would be in terms of storage space at a house.
Whaa? So now what am I suppozed to do with this $1.8 billion check I just wrote out? Sheesh!
I have not done the calculation but couldn't you get a general feel by looking at a couple of your monthly utility bills (assuming you are on the grid and use it for most of your home energy needs) and take the average of your monthly KW use?
dhrivnak
Active Member
If we assume that at less than 70% capacity the battery should be reused outside of a car it will still have about 56KWh or enough power to power an average home for 2 days. With the battery being a slim 4.5 inches one would just need a wall to attach it and it would take up very little floor space.
JRP3
Hyperactive Member
Tesla is already using a lower energy density cell for their stationary storage products, so I don't think that will be much of an issue. A pack could also be installed vertically if floor space it tight.
No, there are a number of different techniques being developed but it's basically a total shredding of the cells and then sorting and extraction of valuable elements. Electrolytes are burned to power the process, maybe some plastics too, and low value elements such as lithium are sold as slag for other processes. Some companies can extract lithium but at this point it's too cheap to be worthwhile.
Jonathan Hewitt
Active Member
How much electricity does an American home use? - FAQ - U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)
Average US home 10,836 kWh a year, therefore 29.7 kWh a day.
Tesla CTO on Energy Storage: : Greentech Media
From this link if you scroll to the very bottom it looks like Tesla is marking a 10 kWh residential storage unit, aka good enough for 1/3rd of the average household's daily use. The main goal is demand smoothing and not going off grid.
jhm
Well-Known Member
Average use per household is about 30 kWh/day. So 10 kWh storage would be good to round out PV plus grid. Off grid, 20 kWh may be needed. However, if one goes so far as to charge an EV at night from PV during the day, onevery would need additional storage for that. 10 kWh would give you MS 85 about 31 miles of range per day. Proximity to a Supercharger station could become an issue for an off grid EV owner. I could see the off grid, PV plus 2 EV household of the future needing at least 50 kWh of storage.
Tesla has a 10 kWh unit with 5 kW of power. So this seems to be a good building block size.
One thing worth noting here is in a steady state EV world there may be no need for new batteries for residential storage. Rather EVs will cast off more than enough used capacity. For example, 2 EVs may require 100 kWh or more new batteries every 10 years, but may cast off 60 to 80 kWh of used capacity in a 10 cycle. Over the next two decade we will not see this abundance of used EV batteries. So the Gigafactory will address the stationary market with new batteries.
InTheShadows
Active Member
Removing the fact that I charge my car at home. The 85kwh battery in our car, at an 80% depth of discharge (I don't know how deep you can discharge them 80% is from my lead acid calculations) would run our entire house for just over 3 days. That is for our average yearly usage, and we have geothermal so our entire house is electric except for our stove and clothes dryer.
I would not believe that tesla would be able to prohibit Panasonic from partnering with other companies to build battery factories. But, until another auto company breaks ground on their own gigafactory tesla is just building a huge lead.
Don't forget BYD and Samsung can eventually become real competitors
I do not share this view. I think others will build gigafactories and compete. Nissan has already built one. Their Smyrna, Tennessee plant has a nameplate capacity of 200,000 battery packs per year, or roughly 4.8 gigawatt hrs. At the moment, they are actually building about 1/10 of that, or half a gigawatt hrs. They secured a $1.4 billion dollar loan as part of the ATVM program that Tesla borrowed money from which helped to build this factory. This is not the only battery factory that they have built.
The LG Chem plant in Holland, Michigan was built for $300 million and has a nameplate capacity of 60,000 packs which works out to just over 1 gigawatt hr capacity. Again, they aren't selling that many Volts/ELRs/Sparks so its running at far less than 1 gigawatt hr.
Both of these plants are churning out batteries that are significantly behind Tesla's NCA cell based battery packs in terms of specific energy and volumetric density. However, it shows that the problem isn't so much that they can't build gigafactories, it's that they can't build compelling enough EV's to run their existing plants at full capacity.
Tesla is not having a problem with demanding 2 gigawatt hr's a year last year and will probably need somewhere near 3 gigawatt hr's this year. The new Panasonic supply agreement with Tesla announced in the fall of 2013 was for basically somewhere around 6+ GWh/year. The move to 35 GWh/year by 2020 should not be seen as nearly as stupendously large, but more a natural consequence of increased EV demand.
The big issue in my mind is the battery chemistry and the battery pack costs, not so much the size of the factories. It won't be difficult for any of the major auto manufacturers to scale to these levels once they really choose to do so. But it will be gut wrenching because it means taking money away from ICE development to do so. They would have to truly commit to EV's to take that much capex to do it. Each year they choose to wait is another year that Tesla solidifies its lead.
I thought the Tesla gigafactory was planned at 35 gigawatt hours of battery production. At 4.8 gigawatt hrs the Nissan plant at Smyrna, Tennessee is 1/7 the size. LG Chem at 1 gigawatt hr would be 1/35 the size. That would be quite some scaling up to just match Tesla's planned capacity. Gut wrenching is a good description.
yeah- clearly nobody has done scaling to double the world production from a single factory- that's going to be a wholly different type of scaling. So the question becomes whether it's execution and implementation can in fact bring prices significantly lower to it's output product than previous configurations of integrated segments (and associated profit margins). Elon says it can to a 99% assurance level (because he's talking about 30+% below the current Tesla battery price- not 30% below other current pack prices). I personally think he;s translating that to 3 years from now as well with the already baked in technology elements, although I haven't heard him say that specifically- Regardless- this is clearly something not tried before, so right or wrong going to be an interesting outcome and a template for others.
I remember Elon saying that batteries improve on average at 8% per year. Extrapolation three years from now makes it 24%. Projecting five years out brings us to 40%. That's still using a linear extrapolation. -- I realize that there is a law of diminishing returns, but in this case the evolving chemistry technology implies that the production function gets up-lifted in each cycle. Hence assumption of a linear extrapolation.
Even under this scenario the purpose of the GF becomes a matter of securing supplies, quality control, and on-demand production with practically no inventory overhead.
1) Following this logic would it make sense to take over the mine drilling to secure supply of the raw materials as well?..
2) And if that is the case, then building the (first) GF in Nevada is probably a preferred choice.
3) The projections above are still within the 30% target. I don't see them having any impact on profit margins as Panasonic seems to be alluding. If anything, assuming good execution, cost reduction could actually be even higher due to the economies of scale.
Can someone please make counter-arguments to the three points above or enhance the logic here? Maybe I am ignoring something. Thanks!
Even under this scenario the purpose of the GF becomes a matter of securing supplies, quality control, and on-demand production with practically no inventory overhead.
1) Following this logic would it make sense to take over the mine drilling to secure supply of the raw materials as well?..
2) And if that is the case, then building the (first) GF in Nevada is probably a preferred choice.
3) The projections above are still within the 30% target. I don't see them having any impact on profit margins as Panasonic seems to be alluding. If anything, assuming good execution, cost reduction could actually be even higher due to the economies of scale.
Can someone please make counter-arguments to the three points above or enhance the logic here? Maybe I am ignoring something. Thanks!
InTheShadows
Active Member
It's easy to calculate. Look at your bill. There should be a number for kWh used in past year. Divide that by 365 and you have your average daily kWh usage.
Agree with #2 and #3...Trouble with #1: Can't see it being a huge cost savings AND the 'mining' part is probably the least ecologically friendly part of the equation so not sure it would be 'politically correct' or extremely cost effective to save a couple dollars at that point. Just buy direct.
RobStark
Well-Known Member
Tesla may one day become a battery cell company but it should leave the mining to miners. Trying to acquire that skill on top of auto manufacture and battery manufacture is a bridge too far.
What Tesla should and appears to be doing is bypassing the mercantile exchanges and dealing directly with the mining companies.
No need to deal with the London Metal Exchange when buying this much volume regularly.
I'm guessing that you are intentionally making an extreme case. There's no benefit of integrating mining because it produces common commodities with standardized grades and Tesla has no comparative advantage in production--the same reasons that Tesla hasn't integrated backwards to mining bauxite, smelting aluminum, and rolling sheets. That said, there are good examples of coal-fired power plants co-located with coal mines to minimize shipping costs, so it wouldn't surprise me to learn that the GF will be located near lithium mines in Nevada.
dhanson865
Well-Known Member
My 58 month average electricity usage is ~1067 kwh per month (~35 kwh per day). My 12 month average is down to ~930 kwh per month (~30 kwh per day).
I'd assume I'd be more frugal on electricity usage in a prolonged outage (no need to run the clothes dryer (240v) or kitchen stove/oven (240v), reduced use of heat or air conditioning). My lowest months of the year (Oct, Nov, May, Jun) are usually around 700 kwh (~23 kwh per day)
So looking at the question
pz1975 said:
Does a 60 KW battery pack cover my needs for 120v AC for 2 days? Is it a 1 to 1 need for KW in a battery pack vs kwh used on my electric bill?
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