On the 1st of May this year, Elon Musk announced the PowerWall. The launch event is worth watching if you haven't already done so. Youtube link. Elon Musk made a convincing case for the need to move from fossil fuels to solar power. The problem of course is that the sun shines on us only half the time and we do need electricity to power our homes at night too. To save the power generated during the day, we are going to need battery packs. Lots of them. That is where the Gigafactory comes in.
The Tesla Gigafactory in Nevada is ahead of schedule and the first years production of Powerwalls and Powerpacks is already sold out. Tesla is investing USD 1.25 Bn in the factory and they already have confirmed orders of USD 800 Mn of which, $180 Mn has already been collected, as the PowerWalls have been paid for by customers.
The Gigafactory will produce enough Lithium Ion batteries for all those PowerWalls and PowerPacks and also for 500,000 Tesla cars per year. Elon Musk has started to refer to the factory as Gigafactory1 because it is already becoming clear that its production will not keep up with demand. He also expects other companies to set up their own Gigafactories; discussions have commenced at Panasonic to set up another one in Japan.
A Nissan leaf battery pack needs about 4 kg of Lithium. 20 million cars are going to require about 80 million kg or 80,000 tonnes. The current world production of Lithium is 92000 tonnes, but here is the interesting bit; only 26% of today's Lithium goes into battery production. The rest goes into manufacture of Lubricants (15%), Glass (13%), Ceramics (10%), Pharmaceuticals (7%) and other stuff (the rest).
The world manufactures and sells about 60 Million road going vehicles every year. Of these, passenger cars are about 40 million. If, by 2020, a substantial number of cars produced are EVs and lithium ion batteries continue to power EVs, we have to wonder, where is all that Lithium going to come from?
No comments:
Post a Comment