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Tesla’s Dream of Battery Domination Has Major Competition
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602321/teslas-dream-of-battery-domination-has-major-competition/[font face=Serif][font size=5]Tesla’s Dream of Battery Domination Has Major Competition[/font]
[font size=4]A coming surge in global battery production will drive costs down, a key factor in determining whether electric vehicles will take off.[/font]
by Jamie Condliffe | September 7, 2016
[font size=3]If you build enough batteries, electric cars will come—or so the thinking goes. Turns out, Tesla isn’t alone in this line of thought.
Tesla’s Gigafactory is planned to churn out 35 gigawatt-hours of cells every year by 2020. That’s a lot of watt-hours, and something Elon Musk is very proud of.
But as Bloomberg points out, Chinese electric carmaker BYD plans to produce 34 gigawatt-hours of cells by the same year. Another Chinese firm, Contemporary Amperex Technology, intends to produce 26 gigawatt-hours by that stage, too. And there will be other manufacturers joining in, as well as refurbished batteries being reused—meaning that there could be upwards of 130 gigawatt-hours of batteries produced per year by 2020.
All of a sudden, Tesla’s battery output will look like a slice of a much larger pie—a significant slice, but a slice nonetheless. The volume means that prices should drop big time. In fact, an analysis by Bloomberg New Energy Finance suggests that prices could fall to $262 per kilowatt-hour by 2020, and as little as $126 per kilowatt-hour by 2030.
…[/font][/font]
[font size=4]A coming surge in global battery production will drive costs down, a key factor in determining whether electric vehicles will take off.[/font]
by Jamie Condliffe | September 7, 2016
[font size=3]If you build enough batteries, electric cars will come—or so the thinking goes. Turns out, Tesla isn’t alone in this line of thought.
Tesla’s Gigafactory is planned to churn out 35 gigawatt-hours of cells every year by 2020. That’s a lot of watt-hours, and something Elon Musk is very proud of.
But as Bloomberg points out, Chinese electric carmaker BYD plans to produce 34 gigawatt-hours of cells by the same year. Another Chinese firm, Contemporary Amperex Technology, intends to produce 26 gigawatt-hours by that stage, too. And there will be other manufacturers joining in, as well as refurbished batteries being reused—meaning that there could be upwards of 130 gigawatt-hours of batteries produced per year by 2020.
All of a sudden, Tesla’s battery output will look like a slice of a much larger pie—a significant slice, but a slice nonetheless. The volume means that prices should drop big time. In fact, an analysis by Bloomberg New Energy Finance suggests that prices could fall to $262 per kilowatt-hour by 2020, and as little as $126 per kilowatt-hour by 2030.
…[/font][/font]