5 thoughts on “Better Batteries”

1. The author says that Lithium batteries currently cost $500/KWHr, and that they need to drop below $125 to be competitive with gasoline. The article is mostly about the professor inventing a clever manufacturing process that will lower the cost to $350. That’s a good start, but nowhere what is needed to be price competitive in an electric car.

   1. A 30% drop would be a very big deal all by itself, even if not enough to kill the gasoline car. But possibly more significant is that 24M claims to be able to do it using manufacturing facilities that cost 10% of today’s battery plants. If that’s the case (and these sorts of claims don’t usually pan out), it would make possible development of a wider variety of new battery designs without the need for nearly as much capital. It’s an interesting contrast with Tesla’s plans to bring down costs by scaling up with their Gigafactory.

   2. You take those numbers and stick two zeroes at the end to get the cost of a battery pack for a 200+ mile range electric car.

      There is also the question regarding whether those prices are wholesale or retail. I remember when Exelon CEO John Rowe addressed an audience at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin and claimed, “You could build a nuclear power plant today and produce electricity for 10-cents per kilowatt hour . . . at the bus bar.”

      I groaned but all of the politically correct types were wondering “what’s his problem?” 10-cents per kilowatt hour quoted is “at the bus bar”, meaning, at the security fence at the perimeter of the plant. This means it is 20-cents per kilowatt hour (or more) on the bill of a retail customer. Were all these clueless people at this talk indifferent to a utility executive telling them that nuclear power would double their electric bill?

2. A Tesla S (85 kW-hr) goes 265 miles (at best) on a single charge. Where I live, electricity is $0.1098/kW-hr, so that’s $0.0352/mile. A Toyota Camry gets 25 mpg city, 35 highway, so let’s say it averages 28 mpg. Where I live, gas is $2.65/gallon, so the Toyota costs $0.0946/mile. So one saves $0.0594/mile with the Tesla.

   Unfortunately, the Tesla costs $92,700 and the Camry $27,500. Unless you drive 1,097,843 miles (which would have taken me 30 years in Southern California, but 366 years where I live now), it’s not really a very good trade. A 30% drop in battery prices would mean I’d only have to drive 895,623 miles (298.5 years) to break even. A better trade, but not quite satisfying.

   Also, though the Tesla is phenomenally energy-efficient, when the charge/discharge losses, electricity transmission losses, and thermodynamic losses at the power plant are factored in, the Tesla uses exactly the same amount of energy as the Camry per mile. But the power plant almost certainly runs on coal, which generates twice as much CO2 as gasoline for the same energy yield. I fail to see the advantage.

   1. Unfortunately, the Tesla costs $92,700 and the Camry $27,500.

      Yeah, and unfortunately i cant afford a Lamborghini either. Camry and Model S are not even remotely in the same class of cars, duh.

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