Who Will Supply the Batteries for Plug-In Cars? 25 comments
an article to
-
Font Size:
-
Print
- TweetThis
During the last few years of the Bush administration, the EPA was directed to ignore California’s pleas to grant it a waiver of the Clean Air Act. Why? The grant would effectively have permitted California to enforce stricter emission rules its legislature had enacted a number of years before.
The EPA dragged its feet because as many as 16 other states were considering legislation modeled after California’s - with one notable difference: emission rules even more stringent than California’s.
The automakers lobbied Bush administration officials to oppose California’s request. And it’s not hard to understand why: They’re struggling just to stay in business.
But now, automakers are between Barack and a hard place, as the President told the EPA to “reconsider” its Bush-era denial. If it does, car manufacturers could find themselves having to make cars that get 43 mpg by 2016. It’s why PHEVs have generated so much interest lately.
Not that that’s a bad thing - but it’s far more aggressive than the current goal of 35 mpg by 2020. The problem is that the new requirement would nearly double today’s fleet-wide average of 25 mpg.
Automakers Scramble To Get Into Plug-In Electric Vehicles
All this has had the automakers scrambling to get into the Plug-In Electric Vehicle (PHEV) business. Most already have an active PHEV development program underway, with GM being the closest to production with its Chevy Volt.
Unfortunately, GM is also teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.
Necessity is the mother of invention, and we’re seeing that in spades with PHEV development. One of the more intriguing schemes is the “Vehicle-to-Grid” (V2G) concept, and it’s been strongly endorsed by the head of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).
It works like this:
- When your V2G car is plugged in to recharge its batteries, the utility regulates the rate at which it is charged.
- More importantly, it can reverse the flow and use the V2G’s battery pack as a power source during peak use periods on the grid.
- Similar to the way cloud computing works - where many PCs are combined to create a huge supercomputer - all the V2G vehicles taken as a whole would equate to a giant, nationwide power storage battery.
In return, the vehicle’s owner would receive a credit towards his or her electric bill. It’s been estimated that - utilizing this concept - the entire premium cost for owning a V2G vehicle could be recouped in as little as three years.
The benefits go way beyond recouping the added expense of owning an electric car, however.
- By reducing our demand for oil and gas, it would make the process of weaning ourselves off of fossil fuels much less painful.
- Greenhouse gases would significantly decrease, an impact that would be most notable in densely populated urban areas.
- The additional revenue that the power companies would reap from PHEV charging could finance the additional solar, geothermal or wind power installations necessary to provide the additional charging power.
- It also solves one of the biggest problems with solar and wind power: That they can’t be used as baseload supplies.
- This giant nationwide, distributed storage system would allow utilities everywhere to store power from solar and wind sources and redistribute it whenever it’s needed.
For the moment, neither GM nor Toyota (TM) - the two leading PHEV contenders - have announced any plans to produce this type of vehicle.
Clearly what’s needed is legislative regulation or an incentive (or both) from the FERC that will coax the utility companies into embracing the V2G concept. This will create the need for the vehicles, and the incentive for car companies to build them.
The Fly In the Ointment - Improving Battery Technology
The only fly in the ointment - and regular readers have heard me say this before - is an improvement in battery technology.
Right now, the most promising technology that seems like it can provide the power densities required for the 100 to 200 mile target commuting range is Lithium-Ion.
And those few companies in the lithium battery business are destined to be the big winners, as the technological challenges are met. So who’s in the battery business?
EnerSys (Nasdaq: ENS) is one of the largest manufacturers, marketers and distributors of industrial batteries. From submarines to spaceships - and everything in between - EnerSys has a battery technology to fit the application. It also makes the charging and power equipment as well.
Last fall, the company launched its EcoSafe line of batteries designed for renewable energy storage applications. Targeted towards the wind and solar energy generation markets, this product line should see significant growth under President Obama’s EPA initiatives.
Of more interest to us, EnerSys is working with a number of niche players to develop a lithium-ion line of batteries specifically targeted to the PHEV transportation market.
Where Will All the Lithium Come From?
The short answer is Bolivia and Chile, and Sociedad de Chile (NYSE: SQM) - based in Santiago, Chile - is a world leader in the production of lithium carbonate and a number of other specialty chemicals.
Right now, the world’s demand for lithium is growing at roughly 7% annually. SQM leads the world in lithium production, too, with over 30% market share.
Lithium is used in greases, glass and portable power tool batteries, but its biggest future growth prospects are large, lithium-ion batteries for hybrid electric vehicles. New HEV battery demand is expected to ramp up sharply in the latter half of 2009, and even more in 2010.
And SQM is getting ready to meet this increasing demand: Its three-year capital expenditures of $1 billion means an across-the-board capacity increase of 25% to 30% for all of its products by the end of 2010.
Changing 100 Year-Old Perceptions
There’s an old rub that goes something like this: “Science only progresses with the death of each scientist.” The idea is that sometimes it takes the passing of a generation in order for fresh ideas and discoveries to rise to the top of the heap.
Let’s hope - at least in this case - it doesn’t take that long for PHEVs. We don’t have that much time to waste.
Next week, I’ll be speaking at the 2009 Investment U Conference at the beautiful Vinoy Resort in St. Petersburg, Florida. Our regular format will take a week off and instead you’ll be getting daily reports from Scott Brown. I look forward to seeing many of you there.
Related Articles
|
-
The Seeking Alpha 100
See allThe top 100 stock
market authors
selected for publication
Seeking Alpha 100 » -
Fastest Climbers
Authors with the largestSee all
increase in followers
in the last 7 days
Fastest Climbers » -
Top Commenters
Top commenters,See all
as ranked by their peers
Top Commenters » -
Top Instabloggers
The 100 most active
Instabloggers.-
1
David Fry
-
2
TraderMark
-
3
Don Dion
-
4
Cliff Wachtel
-
5
Mike Havrilla
Top Instabloggers » -
1
-
Top StockTalkers
TopSee all
StockTalkers.
Top StockTalkers »
See more at: carczarconsulting.com/.../
The Car Czar
Don't waste money and time on them.
EEstor is a scam, or at least a mistake, (un)knowingly or otherwise. The patents are flawed. The technology will not work.
note: this comment is based on Cambridge University, England analysis, as well as many other American universities, Electrical Engineers etc. and my own dd.
Do you have links?
theeestory.com/posts/1...
methane from cowfarts & swamps is also a greenhouse gas.
> jack
On Mar 22 12:11 PM liveoilfree wrote:
> Idiot. The ONLY proven battery technology for Electric cars is Nickel
> Metal Hydride, not Lithium. Auto makers can't use NiMH because GM
> and Chevron colluded to stop their use in plug-in cars.
>
> On Oct 10, 2000, GM sold control of the worldwide patent rights to
> NiMH to Texaco. Six days later, on Oct. 16, 2000, Texaco announced
> it would merge into Chevron. So it wasn't Standard Oil of California
> (Chevron) and GM directly, there was a dummy intermediary.
>
> In Dec., 2002, Toyota reached an agreement with Chevron, and stopped
> prodution of the successful Toyota RAV4-EV; no more batteries can
> be made because Chevron extracted a $30,000,000 settlement from Toyota,
> and reputedly can only use the batteries for hybrids that can't plug
> in.
>
> That's why you are deluded into thinking that Lithium is "the most
> promising". Sure, it's promising, but Toyota RAV4-EV are REAL, not
> merely promising.
>
> We don't need "research", we need PRODUCTION!
Regular readers here are probably sick of me commenting on this, but the statement that solar and wind can't provide base load power is only partly true. The author is leaving out solar thermal with heat storage, which can indeed provide steady base load power, day and night. Electric rates from solar thermal are already half of that from PV solar. Now if only some of these solar thermal companies would go public. Will probably have to wait for better market conditions for that.
Some links about solar thermal or CSP (concentrating solar power)
climateprogress.org/20.../
www.altenergystocks.co...
climateprogress.org/20.../
www.cgdev.org/content/...
www.desertec.org/
www.trec-uk.org.uk/
climateprogress.org/20.../
Trans Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation (TREC) great article on solar thermal and plans to power Europe and the Middle East and North Africa to use solar thermal in the deserts for electricity, combined heat and power, and water desalinization.
www.solarserver.de/sol...
www.nrel.gov/csp/troug...
Thermal heat storage for solar thermal
www.coal-is-dirty.com/...
"Ausra, believes its solar power plants will have the capacity to store energy for 16 hours sometime in the next year or so, and then can be scaled up quickly with the potential to supply 96 percent of America’s power needs at about 8 cents a kilowatt hour - roughly the current cost of fossil fuel-generated electricity. "
peakenergy.blogspot.co...
I really don't give a #*%@ who supplies the batteries for electric cars. Who will supply the raw materials? It will take major changes in the price of lithium to make the less concentrated lithium sources economic for mining, and at that point, it is likely that the cars will also be uneconomic. If you can't grow it, you have to mine it and if you can't mine it, you can't build it.
The pure EV may very well have caps & batteries since the technologies can complement. Surprising that lithium is in short supply. If the price went up a few cents, maybe exploration would turn up more. I'm not partial to any chemistry (although bottles of H2 or spinning flywheels may be too exciting for comfort). I just want an all electric subcompact that will go 80 / 80 MPH / miles between charges. I hear about people building them in their back yards all the time.
Oh, and re V2G: this is the dumbest thing I've heard in a while. The main attraction of EV's is they charge at nite & level the utilities load, allowing more efficient generation utilization. Why don't we let the PHEV's run all night and feed the grid that way?!?
Lithium is recovered from ground water in these dry lake beds (salars) by pumping and drying in evaporation ponds. Rich areas contain about 4000 ppm of lithium in the brine, and the deposits are not consistent across the salar. There are lithium operations in Nevada (one small one) and three in China. North Carolina had a producer that mined spodumene instead of brine that ceased being economic in the 1980's. Australia has a spodumene mine that has a moderate sized deposit of lithium. Other possible reserves are in places like Russia and Zimbabwe. The Great Salt Lake (Utah) and the Salton Sea (California) are two possible reserves, but environmental standards are unlikely to allow these to be exploited.
The brine operators of South America have made the hard rock mine operators uneconomic (except where lithium is a by-product). If lithium prices were to rise an order of magnitude (not a few cents), some hard rock mines might come back. Recoverable reserves of the brine producers are probably no more than 1 million tonnes, while world reserves may be more like 4 million tonnes. You will see wildly larger numbers from some sources, but these are highly inaccurate. Currently to build 90,000 GM Volts, it requires about 2000 tonnes of battery grade lithium carbonate. That is the full annual production of battery grade lithium of one operator, Admiralty Resources (ADY). Lithium is also used in glass, ceramics, lubricants, and in specialty aircraft alloys, so batteries are not the only market.
All that said, for investors, lithium miners are probably a good bet going forward, as demand is going nowhere but up and supply is unlikely to increase dramatically if prices rise. Producers include SQM, FMC, ADY, Chemetalle, CITIC Guon MGL, Talison Minerals, Galaxy Resources, Bikita Minerals, Tanco, Avalon Ventures, and others. Just do your own due diligence, as mileage may vary due to the vagaries of the mining business.
You don't have to call me an idiot to make your point.
As far as pilot plants, while they didn't include heat storage, we have 9 small solar thermal plants in California that have been running since the late 1980 and early 1990s. Combined, they have a 355 MW capacity.
Solar thermal, in itself, is far more proven than many other technologies for energy, like CCS for coal, or new nuclear energy designs.
The heat storage part is fairly simple.
Yes, it's just starting to be implemented, but calling it vaporware is exaggeration.
There are currently 6 GW of solar thermal in the pipeline in the U.S. Some will have heat storage, but not all of them
I guess you should tell NREL, who's information I linked to that solar heat storage is vaporware.
I'm sure you know more about it than United Technologies whose Sunstrand division has developed molten heat storage systems and has started their own solar thermal power plant company called Solar Reserve to take advantage of the technology. And I'm sure this major corporation is gambling on vaporware.
The Energy Blog Jan 2, 08
"Hamilton Sundstrand, a subsidiary of United Technologies Corp. [NYSE: UTX], and US Renewables Group have formed a new entity, SolarReserve, to commercialize the concentrated solar power tower technology and corresponding molten salt storage system developed by Rocketdyne. This renewable technology will enable utility-scale solar power generation. It is designed to meet a utility's needs with a single installation capable of producing up to 500 MW of peak power."
"Due to the unique ability of the product to store the energy it captures, this system will function like a conventional hydroelectric power plant, but with several advantages. We will have the capability to store the sun's energy and release it on demand. This product is more predictable than water reserves, the supply is free and inexhaustible, and the environmental impact is essentially zero."
Lee Bailey, managing director of US Renewables Group (USRG)
"The technology was originally demonstrated in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Energy at the Solar Two facility in Barstow, Calif. The unique component of the HS Rocketdyne power tower is the central receiver. This high heat flux hardware represents a unique combination of liquid rocket engine heat transfer technology and molten salt handling expertise."
"Hamilton Sundstrand's Rocketdyne segment will provide heat-resistant pumps and other equipment, as well as the expertise in handling and storing salt that has been heated to more than 1,050 degrees Fahrenheit. . . ."
Several parabolic trough power plants under development in Spain plan to use molten salt energy storage.
A 400 MW solar tower project, based on LUZ II technology, which uses water rather than salt for energy storage, was announced in November.
Despite the name Rocketdyne, this is not rocket science.
"Solar Millennium, Flagsol, Cobra S.A. and Sener S.A. are finishing work on a 50 MW parabolic trough plant called Andasol 1 in the province of Granada. It is the first commercial CSP plant with molten salt storage and is scheduled to go online later this year."
Abengoa Solar's 280 MW parabolic trough project with 6-hour molten salt storage for the investor-owned utility Arizona Public Service will be designed to supply the late afternoon and evening electric load of the Arizona summer.
Solar Tres, a central receiver design based on the U.S. demonstration plant of the late 1990's, is reported to be close to obtaining financing, making it the first baseload solar power plant with round the clock power generation during the summer.
That's real, not vaporware.
Some think the term "ultracapacitor" would be more appropriate for the NanoSafe ... rather than "battery". You might think they are similar to a lithium-ion battery, but they use lithium nano-titanate (instead of graphite) for their anode. No carbon. No graphite breakdown. No problemo.
True, the NanoSafe takes up more space/weight than an ultracapacitor and is still expensive (while they continue to chop down the cost), but ...
* It can fully charge in 10 minutes (from full discharge) to take a vehicle (like that Phoenix SUT) 130 miles. (Provided you have a 480V triple-phase supply... no big deal at a station.) That's how long it takes to fill your tank. If you charge it at home, it will take you longer (because you just don't have that much power there) but it would only cost you about $3 (on your electric bill) for that "fillup".
* It has 100% charging capacity. (You can safely fully charge and discharge it without any risk or damage. Most other batteries must be kept within a narrow window of charge. No battery-memory problems like NiCads. It's comparatively indestructable.)
* It last virtually forever. (If used in a car like the Phoenix Motorcars' 4-door SUT, you would have to drive that vehicle about a million miles worth of charges/discharges before the NanoSafe batteries would lose a lousy 4% of their charging capacity. I also understand that the rate they "age" at even slows down the older they get. When you car gets old, take the body to the junkyard but keep teh batteries. You could probably go thru several vehicles' lifetimes with that one set of batteries.)
* It gets outrageously more efficient regenerative braking (over 90%?) than other batteries (below 20%?). (The others can't take that much charge that fast so they have to throw most of it away.)
The Navy is studying using the NanoSafe in their subs ... in place of one of the two nuclear power generators the subs normally have. (They need a second one as a backup. With the NanoSafe, they would have enough backup energy to safely get back to wherever they needed to.) The Lightning GT (EV) in G.Britain uses the NanoSafe and goes from 0 to 60 in less than 4 seconds.
They have completed testing them (with flying colors) as huge multi-megawatt power storage ... for the "grid" applications like we're talking about here. The NanoSafe can take sudden surges of charge & discharge that would fry other batteries. The power company can run half-idle most of the time while the NanoSafe round out all the peak demands & supplies. While other batteries can't handle some of the sudden surges a wind-generator may kick up, the NanoSafe can.
altairnano.com
phoenixmotorcars.com
"Good stuff, Maynard."
The silver institute had an article on silver-zinc batteries. Silver is more abundant than lithium, it is less toxic or dangerous than lithium and nearly 100% of the exhausted battery is recyclable. Oh yeah, and the storage capacity is around 40% greater for the same size battery.
If you have no idea how we will solve these problems, then watch California.
On Mar 22 09:38 AM jackh wrote:
> Lots of "pie in the sky" here.
>
> If the utility wants to remove power from your cars battery you would
> have to have an inverter installed to convert DC back to AC at the
> proper voltage and frequency. Who's gonna pay for that?
>
> If you go to use your car at peak periods (morning and evening) and
> you find the utility has been removing power from your battery you'll
> be leaving home with a partially discharged battery. Are you prepared
> to put up with that?
>
> Every battery has a certain number of charge / discharge cycles that
> make up it's life expectancy. Is the utility gonna compensate you
> when the battery has to be replaced early in it's expected life because
> the utility has been using your car to store wind energy?
>
> We are months away from the ultra capacitor which makes batteries
> obsolete. Think fiber compared to copper phone lines. Think digital
> photography and Eastman Kodak. When they become available, expect
> that sort of impact on the industry. Maxwell has a early version
> of a super cap in service overseas right now.
The article made the statement
"It also solves one of the biggest problems with solar and wind power: That they can’t be used as baseload supplies"
This kind of statement is made all the time. I will continue to refute this, as it is simply not true. Yes, I have been touting solar thermal, for a good reason. The vast majority of Americans probaby don't even know it exists. Very few people I talk to have even heard of it. How is the public to know what our alternatives are, when they are that uninformed? That is my motivation. A great many Americans still think solar and wind are hippie enviro-geek pipedreams with no hope of contributing substantially to energy demand.
Without the public support of climate change mitigation efforts, we're screwed. The support isn't going to materialize if they are that uninformed about what can be done.
I confess that my enthusiasm gets the best of me at times. Yes I'm passionate about it.
CSP is already a winner, even without the heat storage, since CSP power prices are already half of that of most photovoltaics.
Your comparison with fuel cells is completely off base however.
The only thing really new in CSP is the heat storage. Again, it's not rocket science.
The engineering issues involved are basically heat and salt resistant plumbing and pumps and heat transfer technology.
Mostly a materials handling issue.
Compared with what needs to be overcome with batteries, fuel cells, electric cars, CCS, advanced geothermal, new nuclear technology, tide or wave power, this is a pretty small problem.
I have found nothing to substantiate that there are any game stopping technology problems with CSP. I think what you are referring to has more to do with gaining experience in building them, a learning curve which the NREL sees as a short one.
The NREL certainly thinks CSP is ready for deployment. The following is from three years ago.
"Parabolic trough systems are considered commercially available for industrial
applications."
They said the first few CSP plants would be expensive, but that costs would fall quickly as experience grows and economy of scale sets in.
Indeed the cost of building some of these early plants is higher than projected, but that should not be seen as any kind of long term problem.
They also don't see any increase in electricity prices due to adding heat storage.
----------
CSP and NREL
NREL’s estimates are that we should see 7 cents per kWh around 2010 and 5 cents per kWh around 2020.
"A comparison of the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) revealed that the LCOE of
$148 per MWh for the first CSP plants installed in 2009 is competitive with the simple
cycle combustion turbine at an LCOE of $168 per MWh, assuming that the temporary
30 percent Investment Tax Credit is extended. The LCOE for the CSP plant is higher
than the $104 per MWh LCOE of the combined cycle combustion turbine plant."
"As shown in Table ES-2, CSP
plants installed in 2015 are projected to exhibit a delivered LCOE of $115/MWh,2
compared with $168/MWh for the simple cycle combustion turbine and $104/MWh for
combined cycle plants. At a natural gas price of about $8 per MMBtu, the LCOE of CSP
and the combined cycle plants at 40 percent capacity factor are equal."
--
Delivered Levelized Energy Cost and Economic Impacts for CSP
and Gas Technologies in 2015 ($2005)
Delivered Energy Cost
Simple Cycle* $187/MWh
Combined Cycle* $119/MWh
CSP with 6 Hours Storage** $115/MWh
*The 2015 MPR natural gas price of $8.00 per MMBtu escalating at 2.5 percent annually was
used.
**CSP assumes permanent 10 percent ITC.
"Investment in CSP power plants delivers greater return to California in
both economic activity and employment than corresponding investment in
natural gas equipment:
- Each dollar spent on CSP contributes approximately $1.40 to
California’s Gross State Product; each dollar spent on natural gas
plants contributes about $0.90 - $1.00 to Gross State Product."
[the NREL was predicting only 4 GW of CSP capacity by 2020. We are likely to see that by 2013.]
"Operations period expenditures on operations and maintenance for CSP
create more permanent jobs than alternative natural gas fueled generation.
For each 100 MW of generating capacity, CSP was estimated to generate
94 permanent jobs compared to 56 jobs and 13 jobs for combined cycle
and simple cycle plants, respectively."
"Trough and tower plants, with their large central turbine generators and balance of plant equipment, can take advantage of economies of scale for cost reduction, as cost per kW goes down with increased size. Additionally, these plants can make use of thermal storage or hybrid fossil systems to achieve greater operating flexibility and dispatchability. This provides the ability to produce electricity when needed by the utility system, rather than only when sufficient solar insolation is available to produce electricity, for example, during short cloudy periods or after sunset. This capability has significantly more value to the utility and potentially allows the owner of the CSP plant to receive additional credit, or payment, for the electric generating capacity of the plant."
9 pilot plants in the Mojave Desert (SEGS)
Solar Energy Generating
Systems (SEGS) I through IX parabolic trough plants in the Mohave Desert in southern
California. The SEGS plants were built between 1985 and 1991 and have a total capacity of 354 MW. These plants have generally performed well over their 15 to 20 years of
operation."
"The table shows that with CSP power generation technology there is the potential to generate many multiples of the current demand for electricity in California. The total generation
capacity as of 2004 for the state was roughly 58,000 MW
DNI for high insolation (low cloud cover) areas of California ranges from
6.75 kWh/m2/day to 8.25 kWh/m2/day.
CSP Potential in California on comparably flat land outside of environmentally sensitive areas
Parabolic Trough, no storage < 1 % slope
Capacity Potential, MW 661,000 Generation Potential, GWh 1,614,000
Parabolic Trough, six hours storage < 1 % slope
Capacity Potential, MW 471,000
Generation Potential, GWh 1,640,000
Power Tower, six hours storage < 1 % slope
Capacity Potential, MW 342,000
Generation Potential, GWh 1,233,000
Note: This is net summer capacity.
"Thermal storage, along with an enlarged solar field, also allows the CSP plant to operate at a higher annual capacity factor, about 40 percent with 6 hours of storage versus 28 percent for no storage. This gives the plant the ability
to generate higher revenues to off-set the additional cost of the storage system. The levelized costs in Table 6-2 reveal this, as the trough plant with 6 hours of storage and
without storage have roughly the same cost of energy ($157/MWh vs. $154/MWh)"
"While early CSP plants are more costly
than their traditional gas counterparts, subsequent plants are estimated to become nearly cost competitive on a levelized cost of energy basis."
"All of the SEGS plants (the 9 pilot plants in the Mojave, built between 1985 & 1991 ) are “hybrids,” using fossil fuel to supplement the solar output during periods of low solar
radiation. Each plant is allowed to generate 25 percent of its energy annually using fossil fuel. With the use of the fossil hybrid capability, the SEGS plants, during Southern
California Edison (SCE) on-peak hours, have exceeded 100 percent capacity factor for more than a decade, with greater than 85 percent from solar operation."