GroovyGeek

Lithium Ion Batteries and GEVs: False Gods for the New Millennium

Hey John, I assume you saw this:
earth2tech.com/2009/11.../

The guy has never been a technology genius, but his long-term trend calls have been what you might call "solid" :-) Do you have any understanding on the underpinnings of his thinking?

Lithium Ion Batteries and GEVs: False Gods for the New Millennium

I don't buy nrgrat's arguments about natural gas. Sure, it has been tried and failed, but it was an idea ahead of its time. Just look at Europe. CNG, while not dominant, has a relatively healthy infrastructure and relatively wide-spread, particularly in the less wealthy members of the EU. Take a cab in most of the former Soviet bloc countries and you will see that 90%+ of them run on CNG. With gas at EUR1/liter and median income at around EUR500-1000/month it makes a lot of sense. You can use this to project what will happen in the US where median income is 3-4x higher. It will take is persistent gas prices above $5-6/gal for people to start thinking about it seriously, and by $8/gal it will be a done deal. Add to that the fact that $5-6/gal prices in the US mean $10 in the most of the rest of the world, and Europe, most of South America, China, and India will be running on natural gas long before the US --- there will be robust proof of how it needs to be done and what the economic and environmental impacts are.

John, you also need to be fair to Sec. Chu. It is not his job to enable the next economically viable technology, but rather to try to peer a couple of decades into the future. You argue eloquently why GEVs make absolutely no sense now, and it is hard to find any fault with your numbers. I view the billions spent more as casting a wide net with the expectation that 90%+ of the money is wasted. Coordinated government spending rarely yields anything productive in research, but it will attract enough brains to the field so that something good is bound to come out of it, even if not even $1 of the original spending achieves its goal.

Rapid Transition to Grid Enabled Vehicles Not Possible or Desirable

I fully share everyone's suspicion of most things nano as pure and unadulterated hype. I work for a large hi-tech company and circa 2003 I jokingly declared in a review meeting that from now on the fairly mundane material I was working on should be referred to as "biologically inspired nano-structured insulator" and spent a few minutes justifying the proposal. The humor was lost on the audience who was seriously invested in nano-hype. What about this:

amprius.com/
www.nature.com/nnano/j...

The "nano" piece here is almost an after-thought and merely a means of enabling the silicon to absorb the tremendous volume expansion upon lithiation. The closest analogy I can come up with is a field of grass. You can run a heavy object over it, it will bend, but a short while later it will be as if nothing ever happened. True, this one is also looks to be mostly a lab concept at this time, but it does have a better feel to it than most other nano-hype.

P.S. For some reason SA will not accept my comment, advance apologies if this shows up 10 times on the thread. Trying one last time :-)

Rapid Transition to Grid Enabled Vehicles Not Possible or Desirable

A comment and a question about EVs and batteries in general:

1) The primary supplier of rare earths is .... China. If the US thinks it is precariously dependent on oil from the Middle East, wait till it becomes dependent on China for both deficit financing and critical commodities.

2) There are plausibly sounding technologies under development to increase storage capacity of Li electrodes by multiples of 2-4, not 10-15%. They all rely in one form or another on "nano-structured" silicon. Any opinion on them?

Battery Investing for Beginners, Part 4

This and other posts started out as reasonable investment evaluations and quickly degraded to techie discussions. While I fully buy into the concept of economic gravity, can someone please explain why not one of these companies ---- NOT A SINGLE ONE ---- has had any commercial success, often over periods spanning multiple decades and the boom/bubble years of the late 90s. I measure commercial success via LONG TERM stock price appreciation. Each and every stock of the pure-play companies listed here has either treaded water or has been decimated over very long periods of time. One would think that a decade is enough for the long-term value and investment thesis to come through.