October 1, 2020: If the world is to achieve 100% renewable energy it’s going to need at least 135 gigafactories to make 20 terawatt-hours’ of lithium batteries, and with a host of new technologies this is what Tesla is aiming to achieve, said the co-founder Elon Musk at the firm’s Battery Day held in Fremont, California, on September 22.
Standing on stage at the event, to which a couple of hundred Teslas drove in to watch in a kind of drive-in show, Elon Musk unveiled battery cell adaptions, factory processes and the acquisition of new rights to lithium mining, all aiming to massively increase production but at a lower cost and energy footprint than ever before.
He said EVs alone would need 150TWh of batteries, and when it came to grid storage the world needed another 1,600 times that being made if energy were ever to become 100% renewable.
“As the world economy matures, we could see this number be even more — something like 20-25 terawatt-hours per year for 15-20 years — to transition the world to renewable,” he told a horn-hooting audience. “This is a lot of batteries.”
The carmaker has already made clear its intentions to be a serious player in the grid storage industry as well as electric vehicles, already supplying Australia with the world’s largest lithium battery at Hornsdale and marketing its Powerpack batteries all over the world.
“Essentially Tesla announced that it is going to be a battery company, not a car company,” said Jim Greenberger, executive director and co-founder of NAATBatt.
“I found that to be an exciting and important announcement. But execution will be daunting. It begs the question: just how much did Tesla learn from Panasonic over the course of its joint venture? I always thought that Panasonic would go out of its way to make sure that Tesla did not learn too much.
“Tesla’s move upstream will be a master stroke if Tesla can pull it off. The announcement will put considerable pressure on other automotive OEMs — and the fear of God into LG Chem.”
The major key was cutting costs, and Musk revealed a range of new technologies — such as new cell tabs and dry-coat electrodes — that while still in the development stage, could result in huge reductions in footprint, investment and energy use, he said.
Among other methods were a high-speed continuous assembly line that will increase capacity by seven times; changes to both anode and cathode for far greater energy density; and cobalt to be replaced with much cheaper and more energy dense nickel.
Musk also revealed the company had secured its own lithium mining rights across a 10,000-acre area in Nevada, where its gigafactory is sited, and it was working on a technology using sodium chloride that had never been used before to extract the metal from mined clay.
“There’s enough lithium in the whole of the US to convert the entire US fleet of vehicles to electric,” he said. “And people haven’t even been looking for it.
“To extract it in an environmentally friendly way we use salt — dig out a chunk of dirt, extract the lithium and put the dirt back. There’s enough lithium in Nevada alone to electrify the entire US fleet.”
Musk also said the company could recycle 100% of its batteries, and that it made much more sense to do this than use raw materials.
