As more and more automakers begin the transition to electric vehicles, it is becoming increasingly apparent that Tesla’s intense focus on batteries was right all along. Tesla’s strategies have always been criticized and examined under a microscope, and the company’s decision to build Giga Nevada, a facility dedicated to battery production for the Model 3, was no exception. But as veteran automakers like Jaguar and Mercedes-Benz are now finding out, investing tons of effort and resources on batteries matters a lot. //

A lot of Tesla’s resources are dedicated to its battery improvements. Teslas stand tall among their rivals in the EV marketplace today primarily due to their efficiency and range, and this is made possible by the company’s battery tech. The company is not showing any signs of stopping too. Tesla has acquired several companies that could further improve its batteries, such as Maxwell Technologies and Hibar Systems.

Tesla wants to make more cars, but it can't. //

TESLA IS RUNNING UP AGAINST THE BIGGEST PROBLEM IN ELECTRIC CARS
Tesla wants to make more cars, but it can't.

Tesla’s entire business depends on electric cars, which in turn depend on batteries. A shortage of batteries, a seemingly small bump on the road to electrification, could slow down the otherwise-accelerating leap to the future of cars.

The issue came to the forefront during Tesla’s fourth-quarter 2019 earnings call last week. CEO Elon Musk described battery production as “very fundamental and extremely difficult,” as the company struggles to transition from being a niche premium carmaker to a mass-market juggernaut. The cell-starved firm was previously forced to scale back Solar Roof production to meet car demand, and mass production for the cell-hungry Semi truck has now missed its 2019 start date as Tesla focuses on the Model 3 and Model Y mass-market cars.

So why is this happening? Is Tesla’s dependence on materials like lithium and cobalt holding back production? While lithium production surged from under 40,000 tons of lithium carbonate equivalent in 2016 to over 80,000 tons in 2018, demand for batteries has also skyrocketed during that time.

“At the moment, as far as I know, lithium supplies are not currently affecting production of lithium cells,” Maria Chavez, an energy analyst at Guidehouse, tells Inverse.

Chavez noted that Tesla and other firms have announced plans to develop batteries with less lithium, nickel, and cobalt. Musk announced plans in June 2018 to ditch cobalt entirely, a material mainly sourced from the Democratic Republic of the Congo in terrible conditions. A Battery Day event scheduled for April is expected to detail the company’s plans for future technologies in more detail.

“The industry is moving toward formulations that replace up to 90 percent of that cobalt with other metals like nickel and manganese, both of which are more readily available,” James McKone, assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh’s department of chemical and petroleum engineering, tells Inverse. “As an added benefit, these ‘low-cobalt’ electrodes can also be made to deliver more energy in the same package. The real challenge, though, will be eliminating cobalt entirely, which may require a more significant rethinking of the basic chemical formulations in these batteries.”

But the main reason why Tesla doesn’t have enough batteries may be simpler than access to materials or chemical composition – it could be because they don’t produce enough.

“I think it’s more to do with actual lack of battery manufacturing capacity than an issue with lithium supply,” Calum MacRae, automotive analyst at GlobalData, tells Inverse.

Considering how quickly the company has expanded, that’s perhaps not surprising. Tesla has produced around 900,000 cars since its founding, more than two-thirds of which were produced after the entry-level Model 3 entered production in July 2017. These cars need batteries that can reach up to 100 kilowatt-hours. //

Tesla’s battery production has been gradually increasing. In August 2018, Tesla announced it had reached a production rate of 20 gigawatt-hours per year at the Nevada Gigafactory, more than every other automaker combined. During Tesla’s July 2019 earnings call, Musk revealed that the company was producing around 35 gigawatt-hours worth of batteries annually.

But Tesla wants more, and Musk has spoken of his ambition to reach the terawatt-hour scale. That’s far beyond total global capacity. Wood Mackenzie claims total global manufacturing capacity reached 285 gigawatt-hours by November 2019, and is set to reach 777 gigawatt-hours by 2026.

You probably know batteries last longer in the freezer, but freezing could also make car batteries safer to transport, scientists say. Shipping damaged batteries like those that power electric vehicles is really dangerous, requiring a wildly costly explosion-proof box to contain any volatility caused by stress or temperature. But by dousing batteries in liquid nitrogen, scientists found they reduced volatility to zero and had inert batteries that could be shipped in batches in refrigerated trucks instead of in individual $11,000 explosion boxes. //

Scientists published their findings in the Journal of Energy Storage. They took intact lithium-ion batteries, cycled them a set number of times (the term for fully expending and recharging any chargeable battery, like the one in your laptop or phone), then cryogenically froze some in order to measure how freezing affected the batteries.

Not only was there “very little variation between the energy capacities” of the frozen and never-frozen batteries, but the frozen ones also performed better later: “After approximately 600 cycles, the two groups appear to diverge, with the control group having lower average capacity than the cryogenically frozen one.”

It’s natural to ship damaged batteries the safest possible way, but having the option to freeze new and undamaged batteries could also make shipping safer and cheaper. The Hindenberg was “safe” until something inside it caught fire, and a shipment of flammable batteries is also only as safe as what’s happening around it. If batteries can be frozen to neutralize their volatility during transit, they can be transported more easily and cheaply then thawed at their destinations before being installed in a car or laptop. Testing batteries before and after freezing is a way to prove it’s worth exploring as a practical solution. //

For damaged batteries, shipping them requires special permission and compliance with a complex preparation regime. Cryogenic freezing seems elaborate compared to regular mail or cargo shipping, where things are just stacked in room-temperature boxes, but it’s potentially far simpler than getting pre-approved by following a dozen steps, submitting a U.N. safety report, and emailing (yes, this is real) dangerousgoods@UPS.com.

A new study looked at 6,300 electric cars, and it was clear what led batteries to degrade quicker. //

Thankfully, new research shows the typical electric car batteries degrade at such a slow rate that they'll outlive the usability of the car they're installed in.

A new study from fleet-management company Geotab looked at 6,300 electric vehicles to understand how quickly EV batteries degrade. On average, an EV saw its battery degrade 2.3% each year, which is so minor it doesn't reflect an outright reduction in usable range. Without going into the wild math and innards of a battery, if the average battery's energy storage declines by 2.3% every year, over five years that's only a loss of 15 miles of driving range in an EV with 150 miles of total range. //

there were two major factors that sped up battery degradation: DC fast charging and how an automaker engineered its cooling solution. //

DC fast charging is the preferred way to juice an electric car up quickly. Otherwise, drivers are stuck with a 240-volt outlet (Level 2 charging) or a standard 120-volt outlet (Level 1 charging), which can take hours to charge. The study showed EVs that exclusively charged on L2 and L1 chargers saw very little degradation, while the more an EV was subjected to DC fast chargers, the more battery degradation occurred. //

Comparing a 2015 model year Nissan Leaf, which uses a passive air-cooling system, to a 2015 Tesla Model S, which uses liquid cooling, the Leaf saw 4.2% degradation in a year versus 2.3% for the Model S. Again, higher temperatures lead to more degradation.

A significant part of Tesla’s business relies heavily on the durability and longevity of its battery packs, and in the spirit of disruptive innovation, the Silicon Valley-based company has continued to make improvements to its battery technology to make them more durable and more efficient. Tesla was able to achieve this through several ways, one […]

For product designers, an understanding of the factors affecting battery life is vitally important for managing both product performance and warranty liabilities particularly with high cost, high power batteries. Offer too low a warranty period and you won't sell any batteries/products. Overestimate the battery lifetime and you could lose a fortune.
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Audi used data from Twitter, messed it up, and inadvertently brings attention to the fact that the Tesla Model 3 charges over two times faster than e-tron //

From these charts, we know for certain that it took 15 minutes to charge from 40 to 200 miles on the third-generation Supercharger. This would translate to roughly 21 minutes when charging the same car at a V2 Supercharger. And the e-tron? Well, if our charge rate estimates are correct, it would take 36 minutes for the e-tron to add 160 miles of range.

Tesla might have left the first quarter of 2019 worse for wear due to delivery difficulties with the Model 3’s international ramp, but the carmaker still stands tall among its rivals in one key metric: battery deployment. In March alone, Tesla’s battery deployment completely left behind competitors, //

It should also be noted that the figures of Tesla’s competitors include batteries that were installed on hybrid vehicles, making the Silicon Valley-based electric car maker’s performance even more notable.

Tesla recently confirmed that it had completed the acquisition of Maxwell Technologies Inc., a California-based company that specializes in ultracapacitors and batteries. In a press release on Thursday, the electric car maker noted that it is transferring stocks worth over $235 million to take over Maxwell. //

Maxwell has previously stated that its dry electrode technology has demonstrated an energy density of 300 Wh/kg, and that it had “identified” a path to path to 500 Wh/kg. A Tesla Model 3 battery pack, on the other hand, has an energy density of 272 Wh/liter, with the 2170 cells producing 207 Wh/kg, according to Extreme Tech.

At the launch of Supercharger V3 earlier this year, Tesla announced that it will also unlock more power in existing Supercharger stations (from 120 kW to 145 kW). Tesla confirms today that it will …

Musk stoked intense interest in Tesla's desire to help South Australia – while generating publicity for its new line of grid-connected batteries – by publicly standing behind his cousin's offer. The real attention-getter was the payoff if their company fails to meet the deadline – Musk promised that the system will be free if it is not operational within 100 days after the contract has been signed.

In South Australia, though, Tesla's giant 100MW/129MWh battery has seen a lot of success—not by selling power to meet general demand but by providing so-called "frequency response services." And a company called Restore has just partnered with Tesla to replicate that success for itself in Belgium.

In South Australia, Tesla Powerpacks are charged by the energy from a nearby wind farm, and the battery installation dispatches electricity to the grid when grid frequency suddenly drops. Grid frequency—a measure of current that must be held constant for the grid to work properly—is vitally important to the functioning of any grid system.
In Europe, for example, a recent power dispute between Serbia and Kosovo led average frequency on the Continental Europe Power System to drop to 49.996Hz instead of the required 50Hz, which resulted in oven and microwave clocks everywhere across Europe being six minutes slow after just a month of these conditions.

Grid operators will generally pay a premium for frequency response services, which are often provided by natural gas plants or other generators that can reliably ramp up and begin sending power to the grid in minutes' time. But in South Australia, Tesla's battery has been valuable in that it's able to nearly instantaneously send power to the grid as soon as frequency fluctuates. Compared to other spinning generators that might compete with the battery, it's very fast.

That has allowed Tesla's battery to take advantage of frequency response pricing, which has piqued the interest of investors. And according to a recent presentation by some McKinsey analysts, the battery has been able to cut South Australia's frequency-maintaining costs by up to 90 percent. In addition, the battery has taken over nearly 55 percent of the Frequency Control Ancillary Services (FCAS) market on that grid, according to McKinsey.

Battery water refill controls