Atmosphere of Hope by Tim Flannery

Atmosphere of Hope by Tim Flannery

Author:Tim Flannery
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2015-06-25T04:00:00+00:00


CHAPTER THIRTEEN

At Last, EVs

In 2003, no one was doing lithium-ion batteries for consumer cars.

J.B. STRAUBEL, TESLA CTO1

I AM embarrassed to say that EVs (electric vehicles) got short shrift in The Weather Makers, receiving less than a paragraph. By 2005 electric cars had been around for over a century—and had gone nowhere in the marketplace. Hydrogen fuel cells, or even compressed-air cars, were looking more promising. What a change a decade has made!

In 2014, 30 models of electric car were available. The current market leader is the Renault–Nissan Alliance, which had sold 176,000 units by August 2014. Tesla is in second place with about 50,000 units sold. Mitsubishi, BMW, BYD (a Chinese company), Ford and Volkswagen, to name a few, also have models in the market.

Tesla is at the forefront of EV innovation. In September 2014, it announced its biggest investment to date. Partnering with Panasonic, Tesla will build a ‘Gigafactory’ in Nevada that is capable of producing half a million electric-vehicle batteries per year. It will be the largest factory in North America. Construction is due to commence in 2016, and by 2020 it will be producing more EV batteries annually than were produced worldwide in 2013. As a result, vehicle battery costs are expected to drop by 30 per cent.2

The Tesla Gigafactory batteries could prove to be a game changer, not only for transport but also for stationary electricity supply. They would do this by feeding electricity into the grid from their batteries at times of high grid demand, and then charging up when demand is low. As energy expert Chris Nelder puts it:

If Tesla’s new ‘Giga factory’ can achieve its goal and slash the cost of lithium ion batteries…it would probably put the cost of owning an electric vehicle (EV) below that of a cheap, average gasoline-burner. Then, EVs could pick up real market share (they currently have less than one per cent of the US market). That would enable vehicle-to-grid (V2G) and vehicle-to-building (V2B) technology to become a real player in grid power, after years of languishing for lack of enough EVs on the road to make it effective. Just 100 electric cars parked at a 150,000-square-foot office building during the day could meet most of that building’s peak demand, shaving off the most expensive hours of the building’s power consumption. With widespread deployment, technologies like this could reduce the amount of expensive peak generation capacity that utilities need to build, and reduce electricity prices across the board.3

Battery technology has not been waiting for the Gigafactory. Already, enormous strides have been made in improving battery performance, as well as lowering costs. In 2014, J. B. Straubel, the chief technical officer at Tesla, said that ‘battery energy density [a measure of energy stored relative to battery mass] has doubled over the last ten years and the curve is not starting to plateau’.4 And the cost of



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