3 massive battery storage plants—built by Tesla, AES Corp., and Altagas Ltd.—are all officially going live in southern California at about the same time. Any one of these projects would have been the largest battery storage facility ever built. Combined, they amount to 15% of the battery storage installed planet-wide last year.
Factories planned by Chinese companies could have the battery capacity to produce more than 120 GWh by 2021 – enough to supply 1.5M Tesla Model S vehicles. This will be over 3x initial the battery cell capacity of the Tesla Gigafactory at 35 GWh
2020-08-10: European battery factories are situated in the wrong countries
Out of the 14 projects scheduled in Europe, 10 rely on CO2-intensive electricity production with locations in Germany, Hungary, and Poland. France, which produces 88% CO2-free electricity thanks to its 58 nuclear reactors, has only 1 gigafactory in the pipeline.
A fitting memento on the day when Tesla announces plans to bring 50 GWh / year of li-ion battery online (current world production is 27 GWh): The Tesla induction motor has been called one of the 10 greatest inventions of all time. 2015-03-10: Check out this site visit at the first Gigafactory. When complete, it will be the largest footprint manufacturing building in the world. The scale can be deceiving; this 2-story structure is 24m tall. 2016-10-28: The powerwall is extremely impressive. The difference between wantrepreneurs like “secret” and actual ones is off the scale
Musk didn’t waste anybody’s time. He used that time to present a problem of critical importance (eliminating humanity’s use of fossil fuels), explained how it can be addressed, and offered a plausible solution in the form of a new product — one that’s priced within reach of a lot of people and available to order. Amazingly, all of those things are actually pretty rare to see in one show. Tesla’s presentation was inspiring, and Musk wasn’t selling some fancy scifi trinket that has the benefit of Star Trek nostalgia. Dude was selling a battery.
2019-06-07: Tesla has a big lead for dry batteries
Tesla cars have been able to last for 1.6M km but starting in 2020 the battery packs will be able to last for 1.6M km. Currently, the battery packs last for 500-800K km. Most non-electric cars only can last 160-320K km. Tesla will start using battery domination in 2020 with significantly longer lasting and higher energy density batteries. This will enable Tesla to use a mix of better prices and higher performance to win electric cars, electric trucks and with electric taxis.
2019-10-15: They’re investing in their battery manufacturing
Tesla bought Hibar Systems, a world leader in the development of battery manufacturing technology. Hibar is truly unique in its capability to provide the world’s leading manufacturers with innovative advanced automation solutions that are engineered specifically to suit their production automation requirements ranging from simple single station bottle filling systems to sophisticated high-speed assembly systems running in excess of 1000 parts per minute. This unique capability is made possible through Hibar’s vertically integrated structure.
2019-11-30: Over time, their batteries can get 3x cheaper
Lithium Ion batteries can get 3x cheaper than current average prices of $180 per kwh to $50-60 per kwh.
2020-10-02: By doing all this, they’re speeding up the industry by decades.
If Tesla achieves the goals of Battery Day then they bring forward the electrification of transportation and energy by decades. BloombergNEF projected lithium-ion batteries to halve their cost by 2030. Tesla plans to halve the cost by 2023. Half of what Tesla would do in 2030 and 2031 would surpass the cumulative projection of energy storage installations by 2040.
2020-10-21: They’ve, as of late 2020, achieved 5m km lifespans. This is enough charge cycles to last 25 years, longer than the cars, so the batteries can be reused for other applications, and can do other functions like grid storage.
If batteries become 2x cheaper over 7 years and 120 Gigabattery factories are made then combustion engine cars are replaced and Tesla is worth 50x more than today.
Now, you maybe can argue that there are a lot of necessary changes as the company has grown and scaled. And obviously, transitions are always difficult, even with careful planning. But axing nearly the entire executive staff, letting the world’s foremost EV motor engineer go, trimming down the service organization before the job of opening the first service center is done, ripping through the firmware team – and doing it by random firings on a daily basis – are all hard to explain.
tesla is dead. too bad, this would have been awesome to overcome the fascination with internal combustion that erectionally challenged people have
Gregor J. Rothfuss 