Tesla Battery Day
Tera is the new Giga and other interesting tidbits from Tesla Battery day 9/22/2020
Tesla Battey Day, which was originally slated for April 2019, was held on 22 Sep 2020. In the audience were 100+ Tesla owners sitting inside their cars who honked their cars to show their applause.
Key announcements were:
New ‘tabless’ battery design and manufacturing process to reduce $/KWh costs
Tesla set a target of 100GWh for tabless batteries by 2022
3 Gigafactories to come up - Austin Texas, Shanghai & Berlin
Tesla plans to mine lithium from Nevada clays (a process that has never been done at a commercial scale before)
Smart use of nickel and cobalt depending on end-use
Tesla plans to make $25000 affordable EV Car
"It is a little hard to read the room with everyone in cars," - Elon
Here are some highlights from the event.
Here is Elon talking about the Shanghai Gigafactory - the only facility 100% owned by a foreign manufacturer in China (Every other foreign automaker has a local partner in China for its factories). The facility was commissioned in a jaw dropping 357 days and China-produced Model 3s starting selling in Jan 2020. Elon argued that it is incredibly hard (10x-100x) to do volume production as compared to prototype development. “The machine that makes the machine is vastly harder than the machine itself.”
Elon Musk believes it can actually beat other auto-makers on MANUFACTURING. He said while every car company will have long range electric cars and autonomy, not everyone will be great at manufacturing.
Elon announced 3 new incremental factory developments China (Shanghai Phase 2 with a capacity to make 1 million cars per year), Berlin and USA (Texas). He highlighted that with each new generation, the gigafactories get better and more efficient.
Tesla Battery day segment started with a grim reminder of worsening pollution due to ever increasing usage of fossil fuels. He was joined on the stage by Andrew “Drew” Baglino (SVP Power train design and energy engineering).
Tesla has sold over 1 m EVs till date which have traveled 26B EV miles. Tesla acquired Solarcity 4 years back and so retrofitment of roofs/installation of solar roofs is a key part of Tesla’s strategy and future roadmap.
Their stated goal.
Tera is the new Giga. 2019 global EV battery production capacity was 100 GWh (0.1 Twh, top right) and to convert ALL the cars sold globally to electric in 1 year, you would theoretically need 10 TWh per year. To convert ALL the global stock, you’d need 15 years * 10 TWh = 150 TWh. There is additional 10TWh energy requirement to convert all other (electricity generation, coal heating, gas heating) fossil fuel usage to renewable energy.
However current gigafactories cannot scale fast enough to produce batteries at the required rate to ensure transition. A typical gigafactory is 150 GWh and therefore to achieve a stated goal of 20TWh one would need 135 such gigafactories at a combined total investment of $2T.
The second challenge is to reduce the cost of batteries. While battery costs have come down from $1100/KWh in 2010 to $156/KWh in 2019, they are stil a big hindrance when it comes to making cars affordable. At 40% of the cost of the vehicle, making cheaper batteries will go a long way in ensuring mass EV adoption.
Tada! Batteries to be designed and manufactured by Tesla from the ground up.
These are the 5 areas Tesla decided to focus on to reduce the battery cost by 50%.
First is Cell Design.
Andrew explaining the bump in energy storage when they went from 1865 to 2170 batteries in Tesla. While cheaper to make, with the current design its difficult to make them bigger without exponentially increasing the charging time.
New ‘tabless’ design of batteries 4680 that has a 5x jump in energy storage, 16% range enhancement and better power to weigh ratio as compared to 2170 cells. This means more range and more power, acceleration and torque with simpler manufacturing, fewer parts and better thermal management apart from production benefits due to tabless architecture. The Nevada 10GWh pilot plant has started producing this and will take a year to get reach peak capacity.
Second is Cell Factory Design - dry electrode process with faster automation.
Tesla is doing away with the wet electrode process in favor of a dry process which has fewer steps and requires a smaller factory footprint. They acquired Maxwell in Jan 2020 and have nearly commercialized that machine for dry coating electrode.
“Simple is hard.” - Drew
Through better power electronics, better automation and dry electrode process, the investment per gigafactory will be 4x lesser and need 10x smaller footprint because you do away with processes that add no value.
Tesla internal cell production targets over and above production from partners LG Chem, Panasonic and CATL. 100GWh by 2022 and 3TWh by 2030 seem audacious by any means.
Third is the choice of anode material
Current batteries use graphite and materials such as Silicon, which is more readily available have been researched quite a bit. Silicon has a much higher energy carrying capacity than graphite but tends to swell quite a lot due to Lithium being deposited.
Rather than mixing silicon with expensive metals to create silicon structures tha house lithium ions, Tesla is proposing coating the surface of raw silicon with a polymer to build a network that holds shape and doesn’t swell as much.
Fourth is Cathode Design
With only so much Cobalt and Nickel to go around, the need of the hour is getting smarter about our mineral usage. Different chemical compositions are needed for different use cases. LiFePo (LFP) a low cost and low energy density battery is enough for hatchbacks/city cars that don’t drive much and public charging is enough, while NMC (5:3:2) can be used for long range cars and for ultra sensitive use cases NMC (8:1:1) can be used. Or Cobalt can be completed avoided. Interestingly none of the Tesla cars being sold in China today use Cobalt - they are all LFP and designed by CATL
Fifth is Battery - Vehicle integration
This is how fuel tanks are inside wing spans to reduce mass and increase range.
Can it be replicated for cars ? YES
All the five elements come together to bring in 56% savings in $/KWh prices.
The Tesla effect.
This all translates into a $25000 TESLA in the next 2-3 years. This will be Tesla’s first ever mass produced car at this price point.