Chicago-headquartered NanoGraf Technologies, which claims it has enabled the world’s most energy dense 18650 lithium-ion cell, today announced that it will open the first large-volume silicon oxide factory in the United States. At peak production, NanoGraf will produce 35 tons per year.
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Chicago-headquartered NanoGraf Technologies, which claims it has enabled the highest energy-density cylindrical 18650 Lithium-ion cell in the world, today announced that its battery has achieved a new industry energy-density milestone of 810 Wh/L (4.0Ah capacity).
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A Cambridge University professor’s ultrafast EV battery startup has raised $59 million in Series B funding. Nyobolt aims to develop a battery that can achieve 5-minute EV charging time.
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Finnish startup Polar Night Energy and local Finnish utility Vatajankoski have together built the world’s first commercial sand-based, high-temperature heat storage system that can be powered by solar and wind.
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The cost of electric vehicle battery packs has fallen to $132 per kWh – continuing decades of cost improvements. However, it might go up over the next year as increased material prices are catching up to incremental cost improvements.
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In the UK, two electric vehicle manufacturers, academics, and a battery analytics specialist company are collaborating on an electric vehicle battery research program designed to predict battery life span – and they say they’ve succeeded.
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Nissan and Waseda University in Tokyo have been working together since 2017, and today, they announced that they are starting the testing of a recycling process that recovers high-purity, rare-earth compounds from electric vehicle motor magnets.
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In today’s Electrek Green Energy Brief (EGEB):
EV startup Ample today announced the rollout of its new modular battery swapping technology. A fully autonomous station deploys robots to remove and replace modules from an electric vehicle containing Ample’s modular battery architecture. These swapping stations are currently operational in California’s Bay Area.
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Sonnen has released sonnenCore, a cost-effective, all-in-one home battery solution. Germany-headquartered sonnen, a subsidiary of Shell, is a global market leader in smart residential energy storage and virtual power plants.
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With the rise and fall of battery-swap company Better Place in 2013, the prospect of mass-scale swappable EV battery packs in the US fell by the wayside. Tesla abandoned the idea a few years later. The big problem (among many) was a lack of common battery standards across multiple automakers. Battery packs need to be the same size and shape. That’s an issue that could be solved in China, where strong state control can dictate standards.
The Chinese government claims a new technological breakthrough pushes lithium production prices to a record low, which could have a big effect on electric car battery costs.
A new Li-ion battery technology developed by the US Army has piqued the interest of Jeff Dahn, Tesla’s main battery research partner. Expand
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Profitable production of electric vehicles is highly important. Our capitalist society revolves around profitability and therefore, if electric vehicles are to prevail over gas-powered cars, they need to be profitable to manufacture in mass.
A new study published this month by McKinsey & Company and embedded below looks into how automakers can move past producing EVs as compliance cars and “drive electrified vehicle sales and profitability”. Unsurprisingly, it describes battery economics as an important barrier to profitability and though the research firm sees a path to automakers making a profit selling electric vehicles as battery costs fall, it doesn’t see that happening for “the next two to three product cycles” – or between 2025 and 2030. Expand
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Back in May, we shared a report from German newspaper Handelsblatt, which has often produced reliable insider reports on the German auto industry, citing insider sources saying that Volkswagen was about to present to its board of directors a plan to build a ‘multi-billion euro battery factory’.
In a new interview with the same newspaper this week, VW CEO Matthias Müller denies plans for the giant electric vehicle battery factory. Expand
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As always, a healthy dose of skepticism is important when it comes to an alleged “battery breakthrough”. Those announcements are being made every 2-3 months over the last decade and rarely anything comes to it, but at least we can always rely on the 5-8% annual incremental improvements in li-ion battery capacity. It’s not a “breakthrough” or doubling of capacity, but it adds up.
Now it’s time for another MIT spinout, after the defunct A123 Systems, to claim to have created the next battery breakthrough with an anode-free li-metal battery that could achieve an energy density of up to 500 Wh/kg – about twice the capacity of the current cells found in Tesla’s vehicles for example. Expand
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The Tesla Model 3’s $35,000 price tag will be enabled in part due to a significant reduction in battery cost through the automaker’s partnership with Panasonic on the Gigafactory in Nevada. While Tesla owns and operates the giant battery factory, Panasonic is still in charge of battery cell production at the plant, which Tesla then uses to make battery packs for its vehicles.
With the strong demand for Tesla’s vehicles, Panasonic now says that it expects its battery sales to double within the next 3 years – or after the first full planned year of Model 3 production. Expand
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For the most part, Tesla’s Gigafactory has looked the same from the outside since the beginning of the year. The first phase consists of 4 sections of about 475,000 square feet for a total of 1.9 million square feet. The final version of the building, which should be completed by the end of the decade, is expected to have 13 million square feet of manufacturing and work space. It should be enough to become the biggest building on earth by footprint and Tesla plans for the factory to produce at least as much battery capacity as the entire world production of li-ion cells.
Now we learn that Tesla is planning to add a new section to the plant with an estimated completion date by the end of the year, according a building permit recently issued to Tesla. Expand
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During the 2016 Shareholders Meeting today, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced that the company could triple the total planned battery output of the Gigafactory to ~105 GWh of cells and ~150 GWh of battery packs – or over 3 times the current total li-ion battery production worldwide.
The new potential total capacity would be based on the current planned factory of 13 million sq-ft – with no expansion needed. Musk revealed a few other tidbits of information about the plant during the meeting. Expand
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During the recent conference call with analysts for Tesla’s first quarter 2016, co-founder and CTO JB Straubel said that we shouldn’t focus too much on Tesla’s previously stated goal of 35 GWh of battery cell production at the Gigafactory, and 50 GWh of battery pack output.
Straubel said that Tesla was prepared to adjust the battery factory output according to the higher than anticipated demand for the Model 3 after the company received over 373,000 pre-orders. Tesla’s battery output at the factory depends significantly on Panasonic and now the Japanese battery maker says that it would move up its investment schedule if asked by Tesla. Expand
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Earlier this week, Tesla confirmed that it is introducing its new 75 kWh battery pack to the Model S, like it did for the Model X last month. Now Tesla confirmed that while the option is not available now, it will be by the end of the week, and every updated Model S 70 produced since the ‘facelift’ was equipped with the new 75 kWh battery, but software-limited to 70 kWh. Expand
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Tesla doesn’t like to talk about its battery cost as it complicates an already complex supply chain with several suppliers, including long-time partner Panasonic, and new ones like LG and Samsung. But the company felt the need to comment this week following a new analysis of the Model 3’s cost by Jon Bereisa, CEO of Auto Lectrification and former chief engineer of the Chevy Volt program.
Colin Langan, a UBS analyst covering Tesla for the firm, hosted a call with Bereisa to gain some insights for its financial model of the company. Expand
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Update: Tesla has now reverted the website to the previous version listing again the 70D indicating that it was an error./
Over the weekend Tesla quietly removed the 70 kWh battery pack option from the Model X reservation page on its website. The move comes just after a Tesla OS hacker revealed that the automaker is working on a bigger 100 kWh battery pack.
Now only the P90D and 90D, both equipped with a 90 kWh battery pack, are shown as options on the Model X reservation page. The 70 kWh option is still available on the Model S’ online design studio.
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