"Clean Energy Associates’ (CEA) “Energy Storage System Supplier Market Intelligence Report” asserts that the incentives offered by the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) are the catalyst for the surge of the number of North American battery factories."
Most batteries are custom made for their end clients. A Tesla for instance does not have 10mil AAs squeezed into the chaisse, it has model specific weird shapes with proprietary connectors etc. Batteries do not require high tech or high cost manufacturing plants either (like say leading edge microchips). Similarly most applications for batteries (most of manufacturing really) uses Just In Time inventory management. Batteries are (saly still) bulky and quite heavy, so you don't really want to ship them about, especially not as (fast) air freight.
So it makes sense that most regions (or even individual countries) will ultimately end up making their own, locally.
Of course the dream would be something where you could basically pour "molten battery" into whatever shape you wanted, and then use it - removing all the wasted space.
It isn't just a matter of just optimal-packing the material, you have to figure out the thermal runaway problem. That's the big argument between prismatic vs cylindrical cells, anyway. Prisms do a good job of filling a block of space but they don't provide nearly the structural integrity to contain, isolate, and direct the venting of a misbehaving cell.
It's not obviously true that the weight and bulk of the batteries necessarily means that production will be localized. After all, the input materials are just as heavy and bulky if not more so before refinement.
And many of those inputs are mined from only a handful of concentrated places on Earth, and so need to be shipped long distances regardless in order to disperse to where humans actually live and demand the end products.
A better argument for localization might be that the dangerous and explosive nature of battery cells makes shipping the finished product longer distances more risky (and therefore more costly) than shipping the non volatile inputs long distances. So the extra cost of shipping cells drives localization of production.
The question is why your belief is so widespread. The battery pack in a Telsa S or X model was literally 7000 flashlight batteries in a metal box. The newer standard-range pack from the 3 and Y models has thousands of larger cylindrical cells that won't literally fit in standard flashlight but which are nevertheless off-the-shelf Panasonic catalog batteries.
Just the Y. The standard range pack for the 3 is prismatic LFP. And I think the standard range Y may be haded that way. There was also a recent rumor that the newest 3LR is now LFP, but I don't know if that's been confirmed.
This is a little bit of an over-simplification. These particular 21700 and 4680 Panasonic cells are not off-the-shelf or catalog. As far as I know, they were designed specifically with the EV application and Tesla pack in mind. And to my knowledge, the Tesla Panasonic cell variants only exist in Teslas.
We could not take some other 21700s and make a roughly equivalent pack without a good deal of effort. The thermal characteristics, impedance, length, width, diameter, would be different. There may not even be any cells available with equivalent form factor and performance characteristics.
We haven't seen Tesla or anyone else taking "commodity" 21700 cells and mixing and matching them and throwing them into a pack, it's not possible to do that. Usually, we pick one or two cell manufacturers. It's telling that even Tesla, with their massive buying power, doesn't purchase from LG, Sony or Samsung, only Panasonic in the West for NCA and CATL in China for LFP. Why exactly do we think that is?
It's not quite at the level of people saying computer chips are commodities, and you can just plug your device into one interchangeably. But these cells are not easy and simple. We tend to just think something's easy because we don't have good experience with it. For lithium ion, under the hood, there's enough complexity and risk that the details become very important, very quickly.
18650 and 21700 (aka 2170) are standard cylindrical shapes for EV battery cells, so the comparison to AAs falls flat. Tesla has launched the 4680 cell, and the industry may move in that direction. Batteries are custom on a per car basis, in the same way that remote controls are all shaped uniquely, but almost all of them will take either AAs or CR2032 cells.
Pouch and "blade" cells are much less standard, and are also used in a bunch of EVs, like GM's Ultium platform.
Following through the examples in the article, the battery factories are all also including battery cell manufacturing either onsite or nearby. (The BMW example has "an agreement to source next generation lithium-ion battery cells from Envision AESC, which will build a new plant in the state." The others are combo cell+battery factories, like Tesla does.)
Interestingly, the shapes are not standard. The lengths and diameters vary a little from cell to cell, and quite significantly from cell type to cell type (Yes, I'm talking 21700 from one manufacturer vs 21700 from another manufacturer, and different models of 21700 from the same manufacturer). That's just the tip of the iceberg, never mind the actual cell performance. In pack manufacturing, you cannot swap cell types out easily. I could go on...
That's why they are making the cells near the pack assembly facilities. It's because they are planning to use those specific cells.
Shipping high-value items can be an astonishingly small part of the total cost; especially if you're sending it by sea. A few years ago I calculated that an (at the time) maximum sized container vessel carrying a full load of electronics in containers (which is very unlikely, but I picked a high value density item just to get an idea of the general numbers) would be carrying a cargo worth on the order of a billion dollars, and the cost of shipping each electronic good (I picked something around the size of a small PC tower; about 0.05 cubic metres) across an ocean, port to port, was on the order of a dollar. That kind of money.
So I guess if I scale that up to an EV battery, volume about a third of a cubic metre, so about seven or eight times the volume, that's still less than ten dollars per EV battery shipped across an ocean, if you've got a ship full of them.
I don't know what the total parts and labour cost of an EV battery is, but by this admittedly fast, brutal and half-remembered back of envelope calculation the numbers only have to be a few tens of dollars different to make it worth building them on the other side of the planet and shipping them across an ocean.
People significantly overestimate how expensive shipping by sea costs. Much less valuable goods than batteries get shipped across the entire Pacific Ocean. Think of all those cheap junk toys from China, for example. If those can be shipped profitably, then batteries for $30k+ cars absolutely can be!
Sure, but lumber is cheap. Hundred of dollars per cubic metre; literally 1% or less the value of the same volume of quality electronics or high-processed goods. That is the point here; high value density goods are so cheap to ship that making your EV battery plant near your car assembly plant is a false economy if you can save just a few tens of dollars on parts and labour on the other side of the planet.
Yes. Contrary to popular belief, cells with 18650 and 21700 cylindrical form factors, despite being approximately the same size and shape as other 18650/21700 cells, are not particularly "general purpose" as you or I would think of AA or AAA batteries. Major customers would likely have their own variants and particular specifications on variable parameters associated with these cells. And battery pack makers cannot easily switch between cell types and manufacturers.
Source: I used to work for a major 18650/21700 cell manufacturer. I have torn down many battery packs and cells and know what's inside. And, it's well publicized that only Panasonic cells were in Model 3s for ages. If picking and choosing cells were so easy, and cells are really commodities, then why would Tesla bind themselves to a single cell manufacturer? Answer: They wouldn't. Cells are not generally interchangeable, not by a long shot.
That being said, I would not go so far to say the cells are "custom made". The packs, sure. But cells are close variants of the same technology and process, and many smaller and lower customers may just use the same cells from a single manufacturer.
You are incorrect about batteries not needing high tech and high cost manufacturing plants. In fact, the requirements around cleanliness and process control are very high, for yield, cost and safety reasons. Capital equipment costs and knowledge base requirements are high. I'm not sure how they compare to the requirements around leading edge microchips, but I would imagine that they would want to use similar approaches.
As far as shipping goes, cells are shipped around via air freight all the time. They are going to need to get shipped regardless at some point. And, to the contrary, given my experiences with ground freight in general, I would not want to send cells via ground services.
> why would Tesla bind themselves to a single cell manufacturer?
Pretty clear answer to that one. The battery maker put up 100% of the initial capital to tool up the battery-making facility. Tesla only had to pay for the building.
I don't know about the US but Canada spent an absurd amount of public money to subsidize manufacturers and convince them to come. That is why they're here, and they'll leave the second we stop paying them.
That's my take on it too. Companies aren't abandoning relatively new factories that are still close to cutting edge. What they are abandoning are obsolete ones that they already got a lot of use out of that would require massive capital investment to modernize.
These are automotive factories... I'm not sure that the uplift would take that much compared to silicon wafer fabs. I mean newer machinery/robots, but the infrastructure shouldn't need to change all that much, should it?
A large part of the reason for the Tesla shoddy quality reputation is that their main factory is 40 years old. Nobody else is building cars in a factory with a 40 year old paint shop. Teslas coming out of the new factories in China, Texas & Germany appear to have substantially higher quality.
Interestingly, the largest abandoned factory in the world, the Packard Auto Plant in Detroit, was opened in 1903 and shut down in 1958, long before Detroit's fortunes actually turned. And the factory was in use for five and a half decades, hardly a failure.
There are many reasons automakers abandoned factories in Michigan—union-busting, changing demand, etc. AFAIK no factory that was abandoned had just lost subsidies, and they were all quite old.
While I mostly agree, I think that many corporate leaders are starting to realize there's other reasons to choose to build in a country beyond the bottom line numbers. There's ongoing relations, restrictions and even supported/sanctioned IP/Design theft to consider. For better or worse, making anything is largely going to be global, and a big part is going to come down to not just payments, but other incentives to produce in a given region.
I think that the US and Canada are more incentivized to be competitive. My biggest concern is dealing with runoff/waste from production facilities. I'm also concerned that rapidly expanding EV is too far ahead of grid support, not to mention even recent legislation restricting new car sales to only 3rd party dealers (middlemen taking big cuts), and they don't want to sell EVs that require less maintenance.
At least we’re getting rid of the fiction that the global manufacturing sector is some sort of libertarian free market paradise where capital will always find its way to the ideal geographic location.
This clearly shows that manufacturing basically ends up wherever govts pay them enough to end up. Either through overt subsidies, or implicit subsidies through cheap labor, lack of regulations, etc.
Same for China. All of the amazing productivity of China is basically subsidized by the Chinese state, which really means it is subsidized by the Chinese population. Westerners get cheap products and the Chinese population pays for it and stays poor themselves. Only a fraction of the Chinese population lives at western living standards - the rest are still dirt poor.
This is great, but keep in mind this is like a third derivative metric. North America is way behind China in number of batteries owned, batteries produced, and factories being built. This is just the growth rate of factories being built.
We are also behind in having the minerals necessary to build batteries no matter where the factory is.
“given existing reserves, it is possible for the United States and its key partners to significantly friendshore production. However, given current production in democratic countries, it would require an unprecedented build-out of the mining industry to achieve 2030 clean energy targets.”
It's probably up to whoever replaced Tucker Carlson (who was it? I never heard). The entire right will align with their stance, and the left will rally against whichever stance it is.
There will undoubtedly be a big buildout in mining, the only question is if it will happen in the short term or the longer term, which is dependent on permitting timeframes.
Last I heard, copper mines took 17 years to permit. But in 17 years time, we will need to increase copper production to 150% to 200% of its current value, ie go from 28M tons/year to ~50M tons/year. (And important to note that only 5M ton/year are from energy transition demand).
And the volume of material needed for the energy transition is small compared to existing mining, and in particular to the amount of material that we move around for fossil fuels, which will all drastically decrease.
This is a big project to solve, sure, but it needs to be compared to the scale and scope of what we currently do, and what would happen even without the energy transition. And when we do that comparison, I think we will find that the energy transition will be far less resource intensive than the expansion of our fossil fuel industries that would happen anyway.
>But in 17 years time, we will need to increase copper production to 150% to 200% of its current value, ie go from 28M tons/year to ~50M tons/year.
Demand elasticity is a funny thing. Some applications, like turbines, really need copper. Others, like the wiring of a house, can in principle get away with aluminum just fine. Currently, houses are built with copper wiring because the thermal expansion of aluminum requires some additional engineering complexity to achieve fire safety. But it's hard to project copper 'needs' when we use so much of it out of 'convenience'.
My house, from the 1970s, has 100% aluminum wiring. I bought special connectors to connect copper wires to aluminum wires for extra safety when I put new outlets and switches in, as there is a fire concern when the connections are not done properly.
Aluminium is crazy for wiring... You can wire up a whole house in aluminium, and it be fine for decades, and then suddenly catch fire.
The cause is that over time, aluminium joints become higher and higher resistance, and get hotter and hotter till one day they fail.
There is some special gunge stuff you can get to put in each joint which supposedly stops this happening. But personally I don't trust the gunge to keep working for the 100+ years the wiring might remain in use.
Particularly if there is a water leak and the gunge is washed away - and then your 10 year timer starts ticking till a deadly fire.
Notably, China seems to make use of aluminium wires which are copper plated.
They're cheaper than pure copper, and the plating means they don't have the fire problem - since it is always the copper surface that makes contact in any joint.
I don't know why we don't use them - they would make electrical jobs cheaper, and mean we can afford to upgrade in other ways - like for example having every circuit powerful enough for a dryer rather than needing a special dryer circuit.
I am not an electrician, but wouldn't all US wiring already be 240v-compatible (at currently rated amperages) if the connectors were upgraded?
US residential has 240v at the home fuse box from the upstream 3-phase.
But I imagine it'd require a big adjustment at the utility level if everyone started drawing from +120v & -120v, instead of the current balance around the neutral.
I would think so, but I am also not an electrician. I'm guessing the biggest issues would be the chicken-and-egg problem of upgrading receptacles and devices, as well as the question of whether 240v is actually a prudent choice to begin with.
Yes, it's the amps that matter for wire gauge (at typical voltages). Regular 12/2 or 14/2 NM cable (Romex) is used for US 240v circuits all the time. The only requirement is to color the white wire at the ends black or red to signify that it is a hot conductor with reference to ground.
The vast majority of US homes use NM cable (romex) which is rated for 600v.
NEC 2020 edition, Article 334 Non-Metallic Sheathed Cable
334.104 Conductors.
The 600-volt insulated power conductors shall be sizes 14 AWG through 2 AWG copper conductors or sizes 12 AWG through 2 AWG aluminum or copper-clad aluminum conductors.
Correct, a residential NEMA 5-15 receptacle is only rated for 125v. There are some dual amp/dual voltage (15a/20a, 125v/250v) receptacles out there, but you almost certainly won’t see them in a house. NEMA 6-20 is rated for 20a at 250v.
One would imagine so, but it seems it isn't a problem. Not sure why. Perhaps the elasticity of the metals is sufficient to absorb that change over typical temperature variations? Maybe they would fail if you poured liquid nitrogen over them?
I built a boat partially with CCA (copper clad aluminum) wire, disregarding the recommendations to not use it. I didn't give it much thought and naively figured that as copper and aluminum are two of the most "rust-proof" materials that it would be fine. Within two years of using it - and before the boat even made it into the water - it had begun to seriously corrode to the point that resistance was significantly increased. I had to replace all the CCA wiring and terminals connected to it.
Basically, both copper and aluminum are "rust-proof" because they develop a thin, hard layer of oxide immediately upon exposure to air. However, this also means that when a new crack forms (by vibration of the wiring or thermal expansion for example) that crack will be immediately coated by an oxide layer. At the same time, moisture in the air will create a galvanic cell with the copper as cathode and aluminum as anode (because aluminum is more active, more willing to give up electrons, which is because its bond with its electrons is weaker than copper's.) As the electrons leave the aluminum it develops a positive charge, which attracts negatively charged oxygen.
It is this last effect, galvanic corrosion, which I believe to be the chief issue with CCA wiring. Copper and stainless steel, for example, are much closer in the galvanic series than copper and aluminum, so copper and aluminum corrodes significantly faster.
Unfortunately, galvanic corrosion is a tough one, because lots of modern American houses are built with poor ventilation - as you can see by the large number of homes with mold issues. That moisture is exactly what enables galvanic corrosion. I think if we used CCA wiring across America we'd see a number of house fires caused by moisture -> corrosion -> higher resistance -> heat -> fire.
Actually as one who lives in all aluminum wiring residential unit, that is true about a fire.
but they can be caught early using a cheap $45 IR camera from E-Bay/Amazon. I caught one early and a retightened of a wirenut is all that is needed.
But to go up to 2020 NEC code, you must replace all wirenuts with the purple Alumniconn lug strip.
Purple wirenut is now not to code for permanent jobs; only temporary. For that, all future wiring jobs must be redone with Alumniconn lug strip and tightened to 15 lb/ft
I prefer a standalone 32x32 resolution system and not the cheap (nor expensive) USB/smartphone because this is something that I want to use years later (and when the app stops upgrading).
Raw materials. The mining industry in Peru and Chile is huge. I think drugs were ever really exported from Colombia and maybe Bolivia? But Bolivia also has a huge trove of raw materials.
I don't know if Brazil is eager to "team up" with the USA. Famously, places in South America have not been treated very well by the USA gov. I also believe Brazil is very focused on being self-sufficient and not reliant on others, as evidenced by the large taxes imposed on foreign goods and, for example, their use of Ethanol grown and processed in-country. I believe they could take advantage of the mining opportunities, but I don't think the USA will have any special place in line to buy the mined minerals.
heh. the high tafifs were explicitly asked for apple in the early 80s.
brazil had 68k and 8080 clones that were sometimes better than the originals. mostly sold to Soviet bloc countries and yoguslavia.
until they decided to also ship full mac clones instead of only the 68k cpus. the lore says jobs pushed for demands to dept of state, and got that brazil both closed the two cpu clone factories and also added a high eletronics tarif to further make inroads into a viable competition harder. the leverage state dpto used was cutting imports of oranges, from brazil, which was provided by most of the farms from corrupt military-politicians in power at the time.
We don’t really need a special place in line, right? We’re right here and our economy is biased toward high-value-add applications so we should be a natural partner.
I mean, they might (honestly, reasonably) be inclined to give us an artificially bad place in line, given the fuckery we’ve gotten up to on their continent, but it would probably be a decision to prioritize history and politics over economics. Or they might want to own battery manufacturing as a whole, I’m which case… fine, whatever, it would be nice to manufacture them in the US, but we should be happy with buying from in our general neighborhood.
I would guess it would be something like "X% of minerals must go to battery manufacturing locally" and the target would be to produce at least enough batteries to support any electrification needed in Brazil.
If I were in charge, I would want to keep nearly all of that manufacturing and minerals in-country and export battery cells initially, and later full systems that integrate the battery cells, and as the manufacturing capabilities expand I would start to add tarriffs to battery cell exports but ensure the systems that integrate the cells are able to be exported pretty easily. I would ensure to define the "system" as something more than a few battery cells wired together, it would have to be a fully integrated battery pack for a home or commercial building or a car maybe, or some other product that is similar. I would want to focus on vehicular and grid based energy systems, not consumer products because those batteries should eventually get replaced with supercapacitors and battery tech that is less unstable. I would never export minerals for batteries, though, I would just force companies to invest in manufacturing in Brazil.
Why Brazil? Australia is the world's biggest producer of lithium minerals and has the second biggest proven reserves. They're also probably the US's closest ally.
Lithium ion batteries don't use rare earth minerals (which are the lanthanides plus yttrium and scandium [1]). Nickel metal hydride batteries contain some light lanthanides, but these new battery factories are all for lithium ion batteries.
Looks like 2024, at the earliest.[0] The relative speed to production is largely due to the fact that they're just refining the waste stream from already established geothermal power plants. As the old saying goes, "one power plant's trash is another refiner's treasure".
I'm guessing that will never happen. This is not the first time people have proposed mining it.
One problem is that, even without mining, it's on track to poising the air of something like 33% of the Los Angelos metropolitan area in the next few decades. So, anyone that touches it will now own that environmental disaster.
This can, and should, be fixed by spending huge amounts of federal money on environmental remediation, and I can imagine using lithium revenues to offset it, but none of that will be politically easy.
I'm not sure if this comment is sarcasm or not? But it would get saltier as time goes on. Seawater goes in, water evaporates out. There is more salt at that point . But that is fine. Hypersaline lakes are everywhere. As long as they are kept wet it isn't a big deal.
The lake is currently more saline than seawater, so adding more seawater would dilute it. True, over time it would get saltier as the water in the seawater evaporates out. But then just add more seawater to dilute more haha...
Is lithium even the most problematic raw material the batteries need in high volume?
I thought the actual problematic ingredient was in the anode/cathode, not the electrolyte, Cobalt rings a bell.
Edit:
"Lithium is one of the most common elements in the universe, we've got lithium pretty much everywhere" ... "you could get lithium from sea water" ... "it's called lithium ion but that's like the salt in the salad, do you like salt in your salad? sure, but it's not made of salt" - elon musk on jre #1609
Cobalt isn't used any more in mass-market, cheap EVs. Carmakers have begun to switch to lithium iron phosphate rather than lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxides.
Yes but this is more of a corner being cut. LFP batteries have lower energy densities and lower operating voltage. Also it's being spearheaded by only a handful of companies. Tesla and BYD alone account for 68% of LFP battery usage
That's not a corner being cut. I said it's being targeted at mass-market cheap EVs. It's just market differentiation. People who don't want to pay for "long range" EVs get cheaper batteries; what's wrong with that?
Fair enough. My point is that it's still an untested technology. Tesla drivers are reporting stuff like as much as 10% less range due to these batteries
It's old, pretty well tested technology with a much better lifespan and lower deterioration in capacity over time than normal lithium ion - it was just a little niche until recently because it had lower energy density than more common lithium ion technologies and was more expensive than lead acid. Mostly got used in electric buses and stationary (or sometimes boat) applications before, I think.
That's a really silly take. It's like asking why nitrogen is such a limiting growth factor in almost every plant despite being so common in the air.
We're a long ways off from being able to harvest lithium from, e.g., saltwater in a way that doesn't require more energy put into it the energy that's saved by the technologies made with the mineral. There's only a few places where it makes even economic sense to mine lithium and the environmental effects are pretty devastating. Chemicals like hydrochloric acid nearly always contaminate nearby groundwater used by people and more-than-humans alike. Even in Australia where it's mined with more traditional methods from a rock, toxic chemicals are still required to process it into a usable form
The impression I have is that since lithium is everywhere, this is just a matter of the extraction industries scaling up and maturing for that specific mineral. There will be a lot of players, the price is destined to plummet as long as it continues being the mass-market electrolyte of choice.
Unlike with something like a rare earth metal, which no amount of extraction optimization can put within your borders if your continent is geologically unlucky.
It seems like wealthy nations often leave resources in the ground until they really need them.
Mining, refining, logging, chemical processing...these are dirty businesses. Why muddy up your local communities and reduce your future reserves, if one of your trading partners is willing to do it on their turf?
It does mean short-term pain if capacity and expertise need to be built out quickly, but that's the price of admission.
Can you offer any examples? When I think of the wealthy nations like the USA or UK, they mined and extracted much of their resources earlier than anyone. They just often did it in the less wealthy parts.
Mines in the US are frequently delayed or prevented from opening entirely due to environmental lobbying pushback. We've got plenty of resources we could be tapping into, but cheap overseas competition plus strict pollution controls and environmental lobbying red tape on top of that makes it a very long, expensive investment to see a return on.
For example, the Interior Department instated a 20-year moratorium on renewing any leases for mining operations near the boundary waters in northern Minnesota. Understandably, the consequences of copper sulfide ore polluting the waters is severe, but the 20 year ban is nonsensical. The dangers won't be any less in 20 years. We aren't exactly 20 years away from magical technology that will make it safe. It's a purely arbitrary number meant to appease environmental groups without having to pay out to buy the land and permanently ban resource extraction.
For what it's worth, I'm not really in favor of the mines, per se, just irked that we keep playing games. Either do environmental reviews and let miners mine when they have leases to do so and appropriate safeguards in place, or don't. A 20 year moratorium just sets up political groups (mining and environmental lobbies) to suck up more cash donations and sets up another political fight down the road.
> Mines in the US are frequently delayed or prevented from opening entirely due to environmental lobbying pushback.
They are now, yes. I believe the point is, that's a relatively recent development. (And surely, from an environmental perspective, having all the damage in one area is good? Baotau isn't getting any better. By the same token, it's not getting worse.)
Side note but, with politeness, one enormously frustrating part of arguing with Americans is you really don't realise just how many problems are trivial to solve when you have US-level natural resources at your disposal. The social elements are still there, I'm not claiming every US problem is trivial, but the resource access element just isn't. You go to an electronics conference, you're researching some new PV tech, so are your US colleagues, but they've got hundreds of hectares of land that's perfect for the application and worthless to everyone else. And that happens in almost every field. Good for you, but JFC, that's not a universal experience.
If you'd seen my comment history, I have actually advocated for more mining in the US in the past. The particular potential mine I mentioned happens to be next to a geographically massive and pristine watershed, which is also connected to lake Superior. So, a massive source of copper and nickel is available to us, if only we want to risk permanently polluting one of the world's largest freshwater lakes and pristine habitats.
This is in the same state with suburban areas that have water poisoned by water gremlin and 3M, so you might understand that people are a little sensitive to the prospect of a foreign-owned mining company (twin metals) wanting to set up a mine.
We do need to stop relying on cheap, unethical foreign resource extraction, and that means the environmental lobby needs to become more realistic about not trying to stop every single project. By the same token, resource extraction isn't going to get investment if doing it right means nobody will buy the results at a massively inflated price point, so we need to be wary of new operations claiming to do something obviously very hard while competing with cheap overseas stuff.
Unfortunately, as I mentioned at the end of my first post, there is a TON of money flowing into lobbying groups on this topic. So long as the fight exists, they keep getting money. Actually solving the problem in a reasonable way means the money stops flowing to these people.
The only actually easy methods of solving this would violate our government's constitution, so we're left with muddling through.
Well, uranium could be an example. The US doesn't mine much of it anymore - instead, they buy most of what they need from Russia. There's still plenty of it out there, but if you ever stumble across an old mine out West, there'll (hopefully) be a lot of signs warning you not to drink the water or spend much time in the area.
There has been a lot of coal and oil extraction, clear-cutting, etc. all around the world. Sometimes because the materials weren't commodities yet, sometimes because it's cheaper to produce locally. But as land and labor get more expensive, so does local production.
it's not just the US that is behind in having the minerals necessary: it's the entire world! In order to electrify every car in the world, it would take half the world's known supply of lithium.
"known reserves" not "known supply". Lithium is a very common element on Earth, so the known supply is many orders of magnitude more than we need. "Known reserves" is defined as those that are currently economically viable to extract. Which is why the amount of known reserves can grow drastically when the price increases slightly or extraction methods get cheaper.
And China had ... no? large-scale battery factories 10-15 years ago? What's the point? people forget that China was not a manufacturing powerhouse 25 years ago. Building factories at ridiculous speed & scales is something that humans are, apparently, really great at — it's the whole point of the Industrial Revolution.
I think this is what folks forget that our ability to produce is mind boggling. Onshoring and friend shoring is starting to become a national security issue, especially as China has a stated Taiwan “unification” date on the calendar and they’re cozying up to Russia, Iran, and North Korea while becoming increasingly hostile to US interests globally but especially in their neighborhood. Environmental concerns are typically the primary bottleneck in production state side, and national defense trumps such reviews. (For better or worse, no qualitative view meant or implied)
We can probably build capabilities in the order of a decade and we are already starting. In fact the pandemic showed that simply relying on globalized trade is a national security risk, let alone the other factors at play. I expect China will become increasingly marginalized on the global factory floor - which sadly I think will destabilize the situation. As their economic future hinges less on trade, their militaristic and exceedingly strident nationalist wing will demand growth through expansion and conquest.
It’s a race against time to see if we get there. Then it’s a race against rationality to see if we survive.
China was a manufacturing powerhouse 25 years ago. Not quite as much as now, but even in the 1990s they were clearly a powerhouse. They have done more automation, but they have been a powerhouse since the 1990s.
Things really picked up for China with Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s. When people say America can't do X like China can, they don't mean it will take a lot of time, they just mean that we don't have the will to do it. And given the huge environmental costs China incurred in its rapid development, they might be right.
Well we have to start somewhere. When you first put your foot on the gas the acceleration comes first, then the velocity, then position. Poo-pooing the initial acceleration because you haven't moved very far yet is rather short-sighted.
Heavy industry isn't a freaking SAAS startup with an indoor playground and free beer where profit isn't expected because you're just going for a buyout. It takes many years if not decades to build out brand new physical supply chains on any meaningful scale. Yes we're just getting started, but without this metric we'd be going nowhere.
The point of the comment you're responding to is that the US isn't leading in acceleration (second derivative), but instead in change of rate of acceleration (third derivative) of approving new plants.
So, while it is better than nothing, the situation is still much worse than other classes of terrible news would be.
For example, if our expansion of lithium production was being outpaced by China at a constant 2:1 ratio, that would mean we had solved the second derivative, and (if you count growth rate by percentage of current footprint) also the first derivative problem.
Not to be that guy but I think this is a second derivative metric for growth. Acceleration is the second derivative. Position is owned, producing is velocity, and increase in production is acceleration. Jerk would be rate of acceleration growth, which is probably also positive.
Fantastic to see the immediate success of state capitalism. It wasn't so long ago that it was heretical to even suggest government intervention in the economy. Hopefully this will be beginning of further self reflection of the ideological commitments we've been beholden too for so long
I will wait until the plants are built, operating, and running profitably, without ongoing per kWh subsidies, paid back the debts to taxpayers, and the cells have been operating for a few years without major recalls, fires, etc. Then I hope to be able to declare success.
Well, with Canada giving billions of dollars to whoever asks (or threatens to stop construction, after finishing 10% of a project) for it, it's not much of a surprise.
Since EPA has neglected to track down the illegal dumping of the California solar industry's cadmium-tainted wastewater by unscrupulous tanker trucks at across the nation's roadsides and culverts, we have little faith that EPA will track the sulfuric acid (and other toxic metals) wastewater dumping as well.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 242 ms ] threadMore info about the factory: https://pressroom.toyota.com/facility/toyota-battery-manufac...
Thanks Biden!
So it makes sense that most regions (or even individual countries) will ultimately end up making their own, locally.
No. The shape is cylinder. They're not model specific. https://cleantechnica.com/2020/09/22/everything-you-need-to-...
Of course the dream would be something where you could basically pour "molten battery" into whatever shape you wanted, and then use it - removing all the wasted space.
And many of those inputs are mined from only a handful of concentrated places on Earth, and so need to be shipped long distances regardless in order to disperse to where humans actually live and demand the end products.
A better argument for localization might be that the dangerous and explosive nature of battery cells makes shipping the finished product longer distances more risky (and therefore more costly) than shipping the non volatile inputs long distances. So the extra cost of shipping cells drives localization of production.
Just the Y. The standard range pack for the 3 is prismatic LFP. And I think the standard range Y may be haded that way. There was also a recent rumor that the newest 3LR is now LFP, but I don't know if that's been confirmed.
We could not take some other 21700s and make a roughly equivalent pack without a good deal of effort. The thermal characteristics, impedance, length, width, diameter, would be different. There may not even be any cells available with equivalent form factor and performance characteristics.
We haven't seen Tesla or anyone else taking "commodity" 21700 cells and mixing and matching them and throwing them into a pack, it's not possible to do that. Usually, we pick one or two cell manufacturers. It's telling that even Tesla, with their massive buying power, doesn't purchase from LG, Sony or Samsung, only Panasonic in the West for NCA and CATL in China for LFP. Why exactly do we think that is?
It's not quite at the level of people saying computer chips are commodities, and you can just plug your device into one interchangeably. But these cells are not easy and simple. We tend to just think something's easy because we don't have good experience with it. For lithium ion, under the hood, there's enough complexity and risk that the details become very important, very quickly.
Pouch and "blade" cells are much less standard, and are also used in a bunch of EVs, like GM's Ultium platform.
Following through the examples in the article, the battery factories are all also including battery cell manufacturing either onsite or nearby. (The BMW example has "an agreement to source next generation lithium-ion battery cells from Envision AESC, which will build a new plant in the state." The others are combo cell+battery factories, like Tesla does.)
That's why they are making the cells near the pack assembly facilities. It's because they are planning to use those specific cells.
So I guess if I scale that up to an EV battery, volume about a third of a cubic metre, so about seven or eight times the volume, that's still less than ten dollars per EV battery shipped across an ocean, if you've got a ship full of them.
I don't know what the total parts and labour cost of an EV battery is, but by this admittedly fast, brutal and half-remembered back of envelope calculation the numbers only have to be a few tens of dollars different to make it worth building them on the other side of the planet and shipping them across an ocean.
Source: I used to work for a major 18650/21700 cell manufacturer. I have torn down many battery packs and cells and know what's inside. And, it's well publicized that only Panasonic cells were in Model 3s for ages. If picking and choosing cells were so easy, and cells are really commodities, then why would Tesla bind themselves to a single cell manufacturer? Answer: They wouldn't. Cells are not generally interchangeable, not by a long shot.
That being said, I would not go so far to say the cells are "custom made". The packs, sure. But cells are close variants of the same technology and process, and many smaller and lower customers may just use the same cells from a single manufacturer.
You are incorrect about batteries not needing high tech and high cost manufacturing plants. In fact, the requirements around cleanliness and process control are very high, for yield, cost and safety reasons. Capital equipment costs and knowledge base requirements are high. I'm not sure how they compare to the requirements around leading edge microchips, but I would imagine that they would want to use similar approaches.
As far as shipping goes, cells are shipped around via air freight all the time. They are going to need to get shipped regardless at some point. And, to the contrary, given my experiences with ground freight in general, I would not want to send cells via ground services.
Pretty clear answer to that one. The battery maker put up 100% of the initial capital to tool up the battery-making facility. Tesla only had to pay for the building.
I think that the US and Canada are more incentivized to be competitive. My biggest concern is dealing with runoff/waste from production facilities. I'm also concerned that rapidly expanding EV is too far ahead of grid support, not to mention even recent legislation restricting new car sales to only 3rd party dealers (middlemen taking big cuts), and they don't want to sell EVs that require less maintenance.
At least we’re getting rid of the fiction that the global manufacturing sector is some sort of libertarian free market paradise where capital will always find its way to the ideal geographic location.
This clearly shows that manufacturing basically ends up wherever govts pay them enough to end up. Either through overt subsidies, or implicit subsidies through cheap labor, lack of regulations, etc.
“given existing reserves, it is possible for the United States and its key partners to significantly friendshore production. However, given current production in democratic countries, it would require an unprecedented build-out of the mining industry to achieve 2030 clean energy targets.”
https://carnegieendowment.org/2023/05/03/friendshoring-criti...
In the United States, the current political climate will either support and fast-track or essentially deny/permanently delay all mining permits.
It's probably up to whoever replaced Tucker Carlson (who was it? I never heard). The entire right will align with their stance, and the left will rally against whichever stance it is.
Last I heard, copper mines took 17 years to permit. But in 17 years time, we will need to increase copper production to 150% to 200% of its current value, ie go from 28M tons/year to ~50M tons/year. (And important to note that only 5M ton/year are from energy transition demand).
And the volume of material needed for the energy transition is small compared to existing mining, and in particular to the amount of material that we move around for fossil fuels, which will all drastically decrease.
This is a big project to solve, sure, but it needs to be compared to the scale and scope of what we currently do, and what would happen even without the energy transition. And when we do that comparison, I think we will find that the energy transition will be far less resource intensive than the expansion of our fossil fuel industries that would happen anyway.
Demand elasticity is a funny thing. Some applications, like turbines, really need copper. Others, like the wiring of a house, can in principle get away with aluminum just fine. Currently, houses are built with copper wiring because the thermal expansion of aluminum requires some additional engineering complexity to achieve fire safety. But it's hard to project copper 'needs' when we use so much of it out of 'convenience'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminum_building_wiring
The cause is that over time, aluminium joints become higher and higher resistance, and get hotter and hotter till one day they fail.
There is some special gunge stuff you can get to put in each joint which supposedly stops this happening. But personally I don't trust the gunge to keep working for the 100+ years the wiring might remain in use.
Particularly if there is a water leak and the gunge is washed away - and then your 10 year timer starts ticking till a deadly fire.
They're cheaper than pure copper, and the plating means they don't have the fire problem - since it is always the copper surface that makes contact in any joint.
I don't know why we don't use them - they would make electrical jobs cheaper, and mean we can afford to upgrade in other ways - like for example having every circuit powerful enough for a dryer rather than needing a special dryer circuit.
It seems like if we want to achieve the goal you mention, we could switch over to 240v like much of the rest of the world.
US residential has 240v at the home fuse box from the upstream 3-phase.
But I imagine it'd require a big adjustment at the utility level if everyone started drawing from +120v & -120v, instead of the current balance around the neutral.
NEC 2020 edition, Article 334 Non-Metallic Sheathed Cable
334.104 Conductors.
The 600-volt insulated power conductors shall be sizes 14 AWG through 2 AWG copper conductors or sizes 12 AWG through 2 AWG aluminum or copper-clad aluminum conductors.
More dual amp/dual volt wiring devices: https://www.plugsocketmuseum.nl/NorthAm1combi.html
Wouldn't that eventually cause mechanical adherence issues with dissimilar metal plating?
Basically, both copper and aluminum are "rust-proof" because they develop a thin, hard layer of oxide immediately upon exposure to air. However, this also means that when a new crack forms (by vibration of the wiring or thermal expansion for example) that crack will be immediately coated by an oxide layer. At the same time, moisture in the air will create a galvanic cell with the copper as cathode and aluminum as anode (because aluminum is more active, more willing to give up electrons, which is because its bond with its electrons is weaker than copper's.) As the electrons leave the aluminum it develops a positive charge, which attracts negatively charged oxygen.
It is this last effect, galvanic corrosion, which I believe to be the chief issue with CCA wiring. Copper and stainless steel, for example, are much closer in the galvanic series than copper and aluminum, so copper and aluminum corrodes significantly faster.
Unfortunately, galvanic corrosion is a tough one, because lots of modern American houses are built with poor ventilation - as you can see by the large number of homes with mold issues. That moisture is exactly what enables galvanic corrosion. I think if we used CCA wiring across America we'd see a number of house fires caused by moisture -> corrosion -> higher resistance -> heat -> fire.
but they can be caught early using a cheap $45 IR camera from E-Bay/Amazon. I caught one early and a retightened of a wirenut is all that is needed.
But to go up to 2020 NEC code, you must replace all wirenuts with the purple Alumniconn lug strip.
Purple wirenut is now not to code for permanent jobs; only temporary. For that, all future wiring jobs must be redone with Alumniconn lug strip and tightened to 15 lb/ft
One is $48
https://m.aliexpress.us/item/3256805363165906.html?spm=a2g0n...
https://www.amazon.com/Thermographic-Components-Professional...
https://www.amazon.com/4%C2%B0F-752%C2%B0F-Accuracy-Infrared...
https://www.usgs.gov/centers/national-minerals-information-c...
https://oec.world/en/profile/country/bra
brazil had 68k and 8080 clones that were sometimes better than the originals. mostly sold to Soviet bloc countries and yoguslavia.
until they decided to also ship full mac clones instead of only the 68k cpus. the lore says jobs pushed for demands to dept of state, and got that brazil both closed the two cpu clone factories and also added a high eletronics tarif to further make inroads into a viable competition harder. the leverage state dpto used was cutting imports of oranges, from brazil, which was provided by most of the farms from corrupt military-politicians in power at the time.
not many sources online https://www.cultofmac.com/266710/meet-unitron-mac-512-worlds...
...those same people now own soy farms, which china buys and usa sells. so guess which way they will align.
I mean, they might (honestly, reasonably) be inclined to give us an artificially bad place in line, given the fuckery we’ve gotten up to on their continent, but it would probably be a decision to prioritize history and politics over economics. Or they might want to own battery manufacturing as a whole, I’m which case… fine, whatever, it would be nice to manufacture them in the US, but we should be happy with buying from in our general neighborhood.
If I were in charge, I would want to keep nearly all of that manufacturing and minerals in-country and export battery cells initially, and later full systems that integrate the battery cells, and as the manufacturing capabilities expand I would start to add tarriffs to battery cell exports but ensure the systems that integrate the cells are able to be exported pretty easily. I would ensure to define the "system" as something more than a few battery cells wired together, it would have to be a fully integrated battery pack for a home or commercial building or a car maybe, or some other product that is similar. I would want to focus on vehicular and grid based energy systems, not consumer products because those batteries should eventually get replaced with supercapacitors and battery tech that is less unstable. I would never export minerals for batteries, though, I would just force companies to invest in manufacturing in Brazil.
https://natural-resources.canada.ca/our-natural-resources/mi...
Yeah, lithium is much more plentiful.
[1] https://www.usgs.gov/centers/national-minerals-information-c...
[0]https://www.cbsnews.com/news/lithium-extraction-california-e...
[0] https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/2022/05/13/lithium-vall...
One problem is that, even without mining, it's on track to poising the air of something like 33% of the Los Angelos metropolitan area in the next few decades. So, anyone that touches it will now own that environmental disaster.
This can, and should, be fixed by spending huge amounts of federal money on environmental remediation, and I can imagine using lithium revenues to offset it, but none of that will be politically easy.
I thought the actual problematic ingredient was in the anode/cathode, not the electrolyte, Cobalt rings a bell.
Edit:
"Lithium is one of the most common elements in the universe, we've got lithium pretty much everywhere" ... "you could get lithium from sea water" ... "it's called lithium ion but that's like the salt in the salad, do you like salt in your salad? sure, but it's not made of salt" - elon musk on jre #1609
We're a long ways off from being able to harvest lithium from, e.g., saltwater in a way that doesn't require more energy put into it the energy that's saved by the technologies made with the mineral. There's only a few places where it makes even economic sense to mine lithium and the environmental effects are pretty devastating. Chemicals like hydrochloric acid nearly always contaminate nearby groundwater used by people and more-than-humans alike. Even in Australia where it's mined with more traditional methods from a rock, toxic chemicals are still required to process it into a usable form
Unlike with something like a rare earth metal, which no amount of extraction optimization can put within your borders if your continent is geologically unlucky.
Mining, refining, logging, chemical processing...these are dirty businesses. Why muddy up your local communities and reduce your future reserves, if one of your trading partners is willing to do it on their turf?
It does mean short-term pain if capacity and expertise need to be built out quickly, but that's the price of admission.
For example, the Interior Department instated a 20-year moratorium on renewing any leases for mining operations near the boundary waters in northern Minnesota. Understandably, the consequences of copper sulfide ore polluting the waters is severe, but the 20 year ban is nonsensical. The dangers won't be any less in 20 years. We aren't exactly 20 years away from magical technology that will make it safe. It's a purely arbitrary number meant to appease environmental groups without having to pay out to buy the land and permanently ban resource extraction.
For what it's worth, I'm not really in favor of the mines, per se, just irked that we keep playing games. Either do environmental reviews and let miners mine when they have leases to do so and appropriate safeguards in place, or don't. A 20 year moratorium just sets up political groups (mining and environmental lobbies) to suck up more cash donations and sets up another political fight down the road.
They are now, yes. I believe the point is, that's a relatively recent development. (And surely, from an environmental perspective, having all the damage in one area is good? Baotau isn't getting any better. By the same token, it's not getting worse.)
Side note but, with politeness, one enormously frustrating part of arguing with Americans is you really don't realise just how many problems are trivial to solve when you have US-level natural resources at your disposal. The social elements are still there, I'm not claiming every US problem is trivial, but the resource access element just isn't. You go to an electronics conference, you're researching some new PV tech, so are your US colleagues, but they've got hundreds of hectares of land that's perfect for the application and worthless to everyone else. And that happens in almost every field. Good for you, but JFC, that's not a universal experience.
This is in the same state with suburban areas that have water poisoned by water gremlin and 3M, so you might understand that people are a little sensitive to the prospect of a foreign-owned mining company (twin metals) wanting to set up a mine.
We do need to stop relying on cheap, unethical foreign resource extraction, and that means the environmental lobby needs to become more realistic about not trying to stop every single project. By the same token, resource extraction isn't going to get investment if doing it right means nobody will buy the results at a massively inflated price point, so we need to be wary of new operations claiming to do something obviously very hard while competing with cheap overseas stuff.
Unfortunately, as I mentioned at the end of my first post, there is a TON of money flowing into lobbying groups on this topic. So long as the fight exists, they keep getting money. Actually solving the problem in a reasonable way means the money stops flowing to these people.
The only actually easy methods of solving this would violate our government's constitution, so we're left with muddling through.
There has been a lot of coal and oil extraction, clear-cutting, etc. all around the world. Sometimes because the materials weren't commodities yet, sometimes because it's cheaper to produce locally. But as land and labor get more expensive, so does local production.
We can probably build capabilities in the order of a decade and we are already starting. In fact the pandemic showed that simply relying on globalized trade is a national security risk, let alone the other factors at play. I expect China will become increasingly marginalized on the global factory floor - which sadly I think will destabilize the situation. As their economic future hinges less on trade, their militaristic and exceedingly strident nationalist wing will demand growth through expansion and conquest.
It’s a race against time to see if we get there. Then it’s a race against rationality to see if we survive.
Heavy industry isn't a freaking SAAS startup with an indoor playground and free beer where profit isn't expected because you're just going for a buyout. It takes many years if not decades to build out brand new physical supply chains on any meaningful scale. Yes we're just getting started, but without this metric we'd be going nowhere.
So, while it is better than nothing, the situation is still much worse than other classes of terrible news would be.
For example, if our expansion of lithium production was being outpaced by China at a constant 2:1 ratio, that would mean we had solved the second derivative, and (if you count growth rate by percentage of current footprint) also the first derivative problem.
This is a great start, I just wanted to make it clear that there's a long way to go :)
The need to reduce noise from motors, the need to reduce emissions in much denser cities.
https://youtu.be/q4DtOhe2LfQ