Wall Street Journal: “The Battery Is Ready to Power the World”
February 7th, 2021While everyone has heard of Elon Musk, relatively few have heard of Tesla co-founder, J. B. Straubel, who, to put it bluntly, was the “brains” behind the operation. In 2017, Straubel founded Redwood Materials. The company is going to recycle automotive battery packs on a large scale.
I thought that it was very interesting and illuminating to see Straubel mostly step back from Tesla in order to focus on battery recycling. It indicates that the issues and opportunities with battery recycling are extremely difficult, but potentially rewarding.
Although Tesla’s lead over the rest of the energy storage industry may be insurmountable, even Tesla has been unable to scale battery production to meet demand. Several products are on hold due to unavailability of cells.
Keep an eye on Straubel and Redwood Materials. That’s a huge and mostly ignored story.
Of course, The Wall Street Journal piece below doesn’t mention them.
Via: Wall Street Journal:
After a decade of rapidly falling costs, the battery has reached a tipping point. No longer just for consumer products, it is poised to transform the way the world uses power.
In the energy sector, affordable batteries are making it possible for companies to store electricity and harvest renewable power. In the auto industry, they are set to challenge the gas-powered engine’s centurylong domination. Costs have come down so far and so fast that most car makers expect that electric vehicles, which are currently more expensive than their gas-powered counterparts, will cost the same amount to build within the next five years.
The gains are likely to continue. Electric vehicles are currently the main source of demand for battery cells. As demand grows and costs fall further, batteries will become even more disruptive across industries. Batteries recently scored a win at General Motors Co., which said it hoped to phase out gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles from its showrooms world-wide by 2035.
The battery boom could erode demand for crude oil and byproducts such as gasoline—as well as for natural gas, which is primarily used in power plants.
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The rise of rechargeable batteries is now a matter of national security and industrial policy. Control of the minerals and manufacturing processes needed to make lithium-ion batteries is the 21st-century version of oil security.
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In recent years, prices have fallen more quickly than expected due to demand from auto makers. Electric vehicle battery packs and motors currently cost about $4,000 more to manufacture than a comparable fossil fuel-burning midsize sedan engine. By 2022, the difference will be $1,900—and will disappear by mid-decade, according to investment bank UBS Group AG.
Ken Morris, the head of electric vehicles at GM, said in September he expects cost parity in five years. Auto makers such as Volkswagen AG, Tesla Inc. and GM are pushing battery prices down further as they race to lock up the giant capacity needed to power millions of EVs. The rise of electric transportation is also drawing in some of the biggest tech companies, including Apple and Amazon.com Inc.
