A battery design breakthrough has opened up the possibility of developing zinc-ion rather than lithium-ion batteries for use in everything from smartphones to electric cars, making them safer, cheaper and more environmentally sustainable.
“There is still much to explore,” the researchers note, “but our findings open a way to low-cost and non-flammable organic electrolytes for practical Zn batteries with enhanced sustainability.”
Translation: Not happening anytime in the next decade, if ever.
The biggest problem facing the U.S. electric grid isn’t demand. It’s climate change
NPR
The power grid in the U.S. is aging and already struggling to meet current demand. It faces a future with more people — people who drive more electric cars and heat homes with more electric furnaces.
Alice Hill says that’s not even the biggest problem the country’s electricity infrastructure faces.
“Everything that we’ve built, including the electric grid, assumed a stable climate,” she says. “It looked to the extremes of the past — how high the seas got, how high the winds got, the heat.”
Hill is an energy and environment expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. She served on the National Security Council staff during the Obama administration, where she led the effort to develop climate resilience. She says past weather extremes can no longer safely guide future electricity planning.
“It’s a little like we’re building the plane as we’re flying because the climate is changing right now, and it’s picking up speed as it changes,” Hill says.
Another myth collides with ugly reality. EVs aren’t the problem.
Local residents protest against deforestation for Tesla plant
RBB24 (German language news site)
The planned Tesla plant in Grünheide does not meet with enthusiasm everywhere. Above all, the planned clearing of a piece of forest provokes criticism. Local residents have therefore protested on Sunday and want to take action – possibly also legally – against logging.
Around 50 people protested on Sunday against the planned construction of a factory for the US electric car manufacturer Tesla in Grünheide (Oder-Spree). According to rbb information, they gathered at noon near the planned factory site.
The demonstrators, wearing yellow safety vests based on the French yellow vest movement, criticized insufficient public participation and called for the preservation of the forest. There are also concerns that the drinking water supply may be at risk.
Tesla now has permit to sell in China
Our friend Nikki over at Transport Evolved has a great suggestion about a smaller, more versatile pickup for folks with no bullets to deflect, or Mad Max marauders to intimidate. I used to drive a Mitsubishi Might Max, and have fond memories of the El Camino.
In a recent story in MIT Technology Review, we were surprised to read that we should not expect EVs to compete with gasoline cars on price any time before 2030.
The findings sharply contradict those of other research groups, which have concluded that electric vehicles could achieve price parity with gas-powered ones in the next five years. The lingering price difference predicted by the MIT report could stunt the transition to lower-emission vehicles, requiring governments to extend subsides or enact stricter mandates to achieve the same adoption of EVs and cuts in climate pollution.
The most quoted number for lithium-ion battery packs to reach price parity with ICE is $100/kWh, a price that has been predicted to happen by 2022 for the industry based on prices declines over the last decade (the price was about $1200/kWh in 2009).
MIT researchers contested the 2022 price was accurate, claiming they couldn’t be sustained.
The problem is that the steady decline in the cost of lithium-ion batteries, which power electric vehicles and account for about a third of their total cost, is likely to slow in the next few years as they approach limits set by the cost of raw materials.
“If you follow some of these other projections, you basically end up with the cost of batteries being less than the ingredients required to make it,” says Randall Field, executive director of the Mobility of the Future group at MIT. “We see that as a flaw.”
Well, that would be a flaw, but it flies in the face of decades of actual real world experience with high tech commodities. Computer memory for example, went through numerous boom/bust price cycles over the last 50 years, then has become so cheap that you can almost get a flash drive in your corn flakes. Hell, even oil prices have defied this thinking (in the U.S.), with gasoline currently costing about the same as it did in the 70s (adjusted for inflation).
The article then goes on to state that the adoption of EVs is going to be much slower than economists and advocates have predicted, so we are going to have gasoline cars around for at least another decade.
I started to go dig into the logic and research behind these conclusions, but decided to skip all that work, and instead go straight to the report, Insights Into Future Mobility, skipping to page 8 of the 220 page report where researchers thanked the groups who “sponsored” the “research”.
The MIT Energy Initiative gratefully acknowledges the 10 consortium members whose generous sponsorship made this research possible: Alfa, Aramco, BP, Chevron, Equinor, ExxonMobil, Ferrovial, General Motors, Shell, and the Toyota Mobility Foundation.
Representatives from all of these companies engaged with the MITEI team in extensive discussions, providing valuable critique and perspective that helped us sharpen our analysis and improve this report.
Yeah, I bet they did help “sharpen” your analysis. A study paper that basically says, “Never mind EVs, they won’t really be a thing for another 11 years, so keep burning that gasoline in the cars automakers are currently selling”, sponsored by the largest oil companies and the biggest car maker in the world.
No conflict of interest here.
Now adding MIT to my list of unreliable sources.
Tesla is poised to start deliveries of its crossover SUV, the Model Y, in the first quarter of 2020, according to research out Tuesday from Deutsche Bank.
If Tesla could begin Model Y deliveries in the first-quarter of 2020, that would be a full season ahead of CEO Elon Musk’s promised schedule. Early production and deliveries would be a symbolic win for the company, which has often failed to meet self-imposed delivery deadlines.
This would be a major coup for Tesla and one that was predicted a week ago by Gali on his Hyperchange channe.
Given that 75% of the Model 3 components will be in the Model Y, the ramp up should be much quicker than the M3s. This would catch most of Wall Street and the auto industry sleeping deeper than usual, and would be a particularly nasty surprise for legacy automakers who are years behind Tesla in engineering and design.
Of course, this being CNBC, they had to end on a dig at Tesla:
Musk has promised or is taking pre-orders and deposits for more products than Tesla is able to produce at scale currently, including the Model Y, Semi, the recently unveiled Cybertruck, Solarglass rooftops, an all-electric ATV, and full-self driving software.
I don’t believe that pre-orders for the Y were anywhere near the M3s number (400K), and I don’t know if we will find out what they are anytime soon. I would guess somewhere in the 100K range, but I think there will be a spike in orders as this news filters out. Tesla has no incentive to share the number since, unless it is on par with the M3, the financial press would report it it as a massive failure, and Wall Street shorts would hammer the stock.
This scenario works more in Tesla’s favor since as initial production starts, each model will be snapped up, and the revenue booked. Thus, Tesla is looking at a Q1-2020 with new revenue from the MY in the US and China.
With MY starting at two factories in 2020, Musk’s prediction of 1 million cars sold suddenly looks on the mark.
German Prosecutors Raid Volkswagen Offices in Diesel Probe
Bloomberg News, 12/3/2019
Volkswagen AG offices were raided by German prosecutors as part of a probe into diesel engines, marking a fresh setback for the manufacturer’s efforts to draw a line under an emission-tests cheating scandal that erupted four years ago.
The search was “directed against individual defendants” and related to diesel vehicles with EA288 engines, VW said Tuesday in a statement. VW “proactively disclosed the technical facts underlying the allegations to the responsible investigation authorities and registration authorities at an early stage” and “considers the public prosecutor’s legal opinion and the resulting investigations to be unfounded.”
If true, why have you paid $33 billion in fines over the issue?
Coal power becoming ‘uninsurable’ as firms refuse cover (sic)
The Guardian, 12/2/2020
The number of insurers withdrawing cover for coal projects more than doubled this year and for the first time US companies have taken action, leaving Lloyd’s of London and Asian insurers as the “last resort” for fossil fuels, according to a new report.
The report, which rates the world’s 35 biggest insurers on their actions on fossil fuels, declares that coal – the biggest single contributor to climate change – “is on the way to becoming uninsurable” as most coal projects cannot be financed, built or operated without insurance.
The first insurers to exit coal policies were all European, but since March, two US insurers – Chubb and Axis Capital – and the Australian firms QBE and Suncorp have pledged to stop or restrict insurance for coal projects.
At least 35 insurers with combined assets of $8.9tn, equivalent to 37% of the insurance industry’s global assets, have begun pulling out of coal investments. A year ago, 19 insurers holding more than $6tn in assets were divesting from fossil fuels.
This is definitely the end game for coal. Governments could step in to create insurance pools for coal companies, but 1) these pools would likely cost more and cover less, and 2) the public will not be happy with tax funds being used to prop up coal plants.
The next, more catastrophic insurance industry move will be when these companies and their re-insurers (like SwissRe) refuse to write polices for coastal areas because of escalating flood and hurricane threats. When that happens, governments will either have to underwrite the risk at tax payer expense, or see the entire housing market for those areas collapse.
Here’s a video summary of the parade courtesy of WFMY:
German car industry faces ‘day of reckoning’
Financial Times, 11/25/2020
Days later, Mercedes-Benz owner Daimler and Volkswagen’s Audi brand announced more than 20,000 job losses, in the first real signs of the huge human cost of the sector’s transition from combustion engines to electric vehicles.
“The auto industry is in the midst of a far-reaching upheaval,” said Volkswagen chief executive Herbert Diess, whose company is seeking to reinvent itself as a world leader in battery-powered cars.
“No one will survive in the form they exist today,” predicted Ralf Kalmbach at consultancy Bain & Co, who has spent 32 years advising German carmakers.
It is estimated that the German car industry, which directly employs 830,000 people and supports a further 2m in the wider economy, will be forced to plough some €40bn into battery-powered technologies over the next three years.
“In this industry you can only cut jobs in a crisis,” he added. “Deep down, they all know that. They all know they’re going to have to, they are just trying to postpone the day of reckoning.”
When staid, and pro-auto publications like the FT start talking about massive job cuts in Germany’s auto industry, things are looking dire indeed.
Here is the key point of this article, in my opinion:
The market for petrol and diesel engine components will decline at 7 per cent a year, according to a recent McKinsey study.
If the market for ICE is going to decline by “7% a year”, it follows that gasoline/diesel would likewise decline in the EU market. This is an existential crisis for the oil industry in that market. A crisis I expect they will not take lying down.
CNBC’s Jim Cramer, a longtime Tesla critic, says he might be about to buy a Model X — because his wife says so
MarketWatch.com, 11/26/2020
Back in 2011, with Tesla Inc. shares trading down around $22, CNBC’s “Mad Money” host Jim Cramer told a caller to “cut her losses” and unload her position. “Nothing there. Don’t like that stock,” he said.
Booyah! The stock closed Monday at $336.34.
So, for those of you playing at home, assuming she had 1,000 shares, she walked away from a gain of $314,340 by listening to this chowderhead.
Apparently something funny happened over the past couple of days: “I took a ride in a Tesla this weekend that made Lisa say, that’s it, we are buying one. Enough already,” he tweeted on Monday.
This “investment expert” has been advising people about Tesla stock, and yet he never bother to check out the product?
Cramer has had plenty to say about Tesla and its boss, Elon Musk, along the way. Earlier this year, he said Musk is like P.T. Barnum and it’s “annoying.” Before that, he floated the idea of Musk being removed as CEO. More recently, he panned Tesla’s new Cybertruck as “a bit of a bust.”
Hmmm… It seems that Cramer’s job is to talk about companies he doesn’t understand, and advise gullible people about whether they should invest their money, or short the stock. Talk about “one born every minute”.
He explained in a later tweet directed at Musk that the Model X is the version that he took for a spin and it was a “fantastic ride.”
While I have no doubt the Tesla truck would emerge victorious from a tug of war with a F-150, to be fair the contest should have started with the line taut, not slack. Also, both vehicles should have moved at the same time. In this video, the Cybertruck moves first, giving it an advantage it doesn’t need. This contest must be done over.
but, on the bright side, everyone on the Internet is talking about it.
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