Just started listening to TeslaCharts interview of Trevor Milton, Executive Chairman and founder of Nikola Motors. You can find links to the podcast here:
https://twitter.com/icapulet/status/1284881956509974529
Here's what I've got so far:
- Milton admits Fuel Cells are "many times" less efficient than BEVs.
- He's focused on costs, not efficiency.
- Problem has been that hydrogen produced via electrolysis (the only way to create it with renewable energy) is expensive, like $16/kg. He claims Nikola has that cost down to $3/kg and that $4/kg is cost parity with diesel.
- First claim is that by working with Nel ASA they have standardized hydrogen creation such that the cost of the station is now $15 Million. They are not transporting the hydrogen - they intend to make it at the refueling stations.
- Second claim is that since the main contributor to the cost per kilogram is the cost of electricity, Milton has done deals with the main producers, like TVA, to buy energy off of the big federal transmission lines, bypassing utilities. AND, since they structure the deal so they only take electricity when the generator has excess energy and don't take any when the generator sees a surge in demand, Nikola is essentially acting as a generation buffer, which has great value to the generator. Thus, the electricity they get is very cheap, sometimes free. Overall he says their cost will be $0.02 to $0.04 per kWh.
- He claims they can do this since they're not in the urban areas dealing with utilities. No demand charges, for instance.
- He claims "the majority is all clean," but a few minutes earlier he was bashing BEV charging as having a dirty source.
- He also claims that if Tesla were to try to do this electricity arbitrage with battery storage instead of hydrogen storage it'd cost them too much. He points to needing the equivalent of each truck's battery in the charging station, and then replacing the truck battery every 3 years and the stationary battery every 5-6 years since capacity would be reduced by 30% after 2K-3K cycles for the truck and 4k-6k cycles for stationary. He says he's using Tesla's own battery life numbers for this. He talked about 10 trucks fast charging in a hour needing 20mW of power, which would result in big demand charges. Again, this can only be in rural environments, which is great for trucking anyway.
- Tesla's superchargers today charge about $0.26/kWh. They have to do that because of demand and other charges, even though the cost of electricity is less than half that. He did note that Tesla claimed $0.07/kWh to Semitruck owners.
The one advantage for hydrogen that IS real is the weight savings. Batteries are heavy and take away from the carrying capacity of the Semi trucks.
BTW, the first routes appear to be for Anheuser-Busch for hundreds of trucks on the same routes. He wouldn't say exactly what routes, but he did say close to HQ (Phoenix) and later did mention Los Angeles to Phoenix. He mentioned 18 months away from having stations on 2 routes.
And again, Nikola is not just selling trucks. They're selling usage of the trucks at a per mile cost. So, Milton says they will make money not just on the trucks, but on the hydrogen they're selling to Anheuser-Busch, who is nonetheless happy since the cost to them is less than what they pay for diesel trucks and fuel.
Nikola needs a ton of money to build this hydrogen generation/refueling infrastructure in addition to building the trucks. Beyond that, though, someone needs to work the numbers here. My instinct says the "multiple times" efficiency penalty of hydrogen is not overcome by the cost savings of electricity used to produce hydrogen, especially at the cost of those hydrogen generation stations, which is far less than any electrolysis generation station today costs.
The podcast is getting into the financials, the SPAC, him being forced to step down as CEO, etc.
