Maybe. Maybe not. Electric cars are still a niche market, and it doesn’t seem like any automaker has actually been able to make any money selling them. Tesla hasn’t. General Motors hasn’t. Nissan hasn’t said (as far as I know) but I don’t know of any auto experts who think they make any money on the Leaf.
If Tesla doesn’t manage to become profitable, and evantually folds (or sells out to an established automaker), then I can easily see the electric car market cratering hard for at least a decade.
And they will be available in [del]2017[/del] [del]2018[/del] [del]2019[/del] our engineers are perfecting them now and anyone who says they aren’t just doesn’t appreciate how revolutionary the batteries are.
One of the largest reserve bases[note 2] of lithium is in the Salar de Uyuni area of Bolivia, which has 5.4 million tonnes. The US Geological Survey estimates that in 2010 Chile had the largest reserves by far (7.5 million tonnes)[45] and the highest annual production (8,800 tonnes). Other major suppliers include Australia, Argentina and China.[37][46]
In June 2010, the New York Times reported that American geologists were conducting ground surveys on dry salt lakes in western Afghanistan believing that large deposits of lithium are located there. “Pentagon officials said that their initial analysis at one location in Ghazni Province showed the potential for lithium deposits as large as those of Bolivia, which now has the world’s largest known lithium reserves.”
So Chile has an 852 year supply at their current mining, and there are other, unexploited deposits around the world. If the demand increases, the mining will increase to meet it. Any price issues will be temporary.
Tesla would be profitable if they simply reduced their R&D costs to a level comparable with other automobile companies. If they wanted to simply maintain their current niche, they could make money doing so. But they have bigger ambitions and need the investment.
This is no longer clearly the case. Even back in 2012, lithium-ion was superior in warm climates on a lifetime basis due to the degraded cycle life of lead acid. Since then, lithium-ion cells have gone down significantly in cost (that paper used a $600/kWh price, while current prices are more like $200/kWh). Lead-acid in comparison is mature technology and prices aren’t going anywhere fast.
Furthermore, although volume and weight are less significant than in a car, they aren’t trivial factors in a home installation, either. Heavy systems are more expensive to ship and install, and they take up useful space in your garage. They need a bigger housing, which increases the cost of the rest of the system.
Lithium production is also expected to increase; we have way more lithium than we’ve ever needed. Bolivia’s economy is likely to improve somewhat over the next five years…
[QUOTE=Amateur Barbarian]
I can’t see a house-scale UPS with any reasonable runtime being any more cost-effective than an automatic site generator. A 7-10kw partial-service one is now well under $2k, and a 17-25k whole-house one (including ovens, dryers and AC) is around $5k.
A silent UPS that could deliver even critical-circuits power for more than an hour would be a very costly device.
[/QUOTE]
“Very” only begins to describe it.
GE has “residential” UPS systems, but I really can’t see who would buy them. A system (thelr LP33 series) that can supply 20 kVA (roughly 80 amps at 240 volts) for an oddly precise 71 minutes will cost a cool $39,000, plus installation.
They certainly do, but last I checked they would still be (barely) in the black without those credits. They also don’t seem to be optimizing for short-term profit–they have a long waiting list for the cars at current prices, implying that they could raise their prices if they weren’t concerned with brand image and such.
Fossil-fuel cars would be less attractive if their health costs weren’t massively subsidized. Electric car credits are arguably just a payment for their lower health subsidies.
No reason it has to cost that much, though, except that the demand isn’t there to achieve economies of scale.
In comparison, a Model S 85 is a 280 kVA device which could supply 20 kVA for 250 minutes. It costs ~$70k without incentives. It seems likely that one could get that down to $39k if the battery and inverter didn’t have a car attached to it.
Lithium-ion cells are around $200/kWh at the moment, and a typical American house only uses about 30 kWh/day (the peak is much higher, but lithium-ion cells can do this easily). So the cell price is around $6k for a 1-day unit. 20 kW inverters are a couple of thousand, so it doesn’t seem like such a unit should cost more than about $10k.
Still more than a generator, but at least in the same ballpark. Not all residences can really have a generator, either. I could put a battery backup in my condo garage, but I have no place for a generator.