Peak Oil News and Message Boards

dolanbaker wrote:China are playing the long game, they want to ensure there is a supply for the indefinite future, getting rid of petrol & diesel cars leaves plenty of oil for heavy industry & commercial vehicles that don't have a realistic of going electric in the near future.

GASMON wrote:Better change this site's name to Peak Lithium and Rare Earths dot com !!!!!
Gas

KaiserJeep wrote:The UK, France, and some Scandahoovian countries have all announced at least the objective of the phase out of the petroleum fuels.

Volkswagen, the world's biggest carmaker, will offer an electric version of all its 300 models by 2030, becoming the latest manufacturer to move away from petrol and diesel.

baha wrote:As the FF'd economy fades away so will the US...Unless we get on board.

Fossil fuel electricity production for select countries

Country Percent of electricity from fossil fuels
Germany 60%
United States 69%
UK 71%
India 79%
China 81%
Netherlands 83%

baha wrote:Tesla with all its faults is the only hope we have. That is why I am invested...if Tesla fails, we all fail. Do you really think Exxon/Mobil has the vision to take into the future?

baha wrote:This isn't a political issue it's an energy of the future issue. As the FF'd economy fades away so will the US...Unless we get on board.

baha wrote:This is also not a vehicle issue. It is all about energy. Those car companies who start by building battery manufacturing facilities will succeed. Others will just be dependent. I just heard Mercedes is building a battery plant and entering the home storage market...they will be successful. GM will be left behind.

Elon Musk’s Master Plan, Part Deux envisioned a future where Teslas are used for each type of terrestrial transport, from passenger vehicles to buses and trucks, supplemented by a seamless suite of solar-and-storage products. This vision was probably best captured in Tesla’s announcement of its offer to acquire SolarCity: “We would be the world’s only vertically integrated energy company offering end-to-end clean energy products to our customers.” In fact, Tesla would be the second such company. China’s BYD (short for “Build Your Dreams”) has already built Elon’s dream -- and has done so profitably.

BYD versus Tesla
When comparing the two companies head to head, the data shows that in almost every relevant dimension, BYD has gone further and is growing faster.

Passenger vehicle EVs: BYD not only outsold Tesla last year, but its planned growth this year is higher.

Battery use: BYD produced 10 gigawatt-hours of lithium-iron phosphate (LFP) batteries last year in its 10-gigawatt-hour factory, and it is now building a second manufacturing facility. It expects to produce 16 gigawatt-hours in 2016, keeping pace with Tesla’s growth rate. LFP does have substantial advantages, the biggest being its dimensional stability when charged or discharged, heated or cooled. This allows BYD to recharge its buses at 300 kilowatts without a battery cooling system. (It also relegates Tesla’s superchargers to being the world’s second-fastest charging stations.) The advantages carry over to durability; BYD buses come with a 12-year battery warranty, and many of the earliest generations of BYD e6 taxis -- still in use -- have surpassed 500,000 miles per unit on their original battery packs.

Energy storage: BYD claims to dominate the North American energy storage market and had deployed more than 295 megawatts/295 megawatt-hours across 66 countries at the end of Q2.

EV buses: BYD has four electric-bus manufacturing facilities and shipped its 10,000th unit this year, with a further 7,000 units on order. Recently, its winter trial for EV buses successfully concluded in Edmonton, Canada (average daily January high: 17º F). A multi-bus/solar panel/1-megawatt energy storage project (geared toward limiting demand charges) with another city even farther north may soon emerge.

EV trucks: BYD has offered electric delivery vans since 2014 and has expanded into short-haul trucks; it has also entered the construction market with its first electric cement mixer. Though less of a head start than with buses, the lead is large and growing with each purchase and product line extension.

Final thoughts
BYD is ahead -- and in some cases far ahead -- of Tesla in every dimension of Elon Musk’s grand vision. Autonomy is the only category where BYD is not winning. As such, every one of Musk's incisive insights about the transformative power of electric vehicles, solar photovoltaics and battery storage, and the cost advantages enjoyed by the biggest giga-scale producers, now work more in BYD’s favor than in Tesla’s.

Musk is playing catch-up in a game he thought he had just invented.

In a nod of acknowledgement to BYD’s 180,000 worldwide employees -- and to correct our overly Silicon Valley-centric perspective here in North America -- we would be well served to give BYD's CEO Wang Chuanfu his due. He clearly won round one.

CHINA LEADING THE CHARGE
We talked to Simon Moores, Managing Director at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, who explained that Tesla isn’t alone or unique in its ambitions to build lithium-ion batteries at scale: While the Tesla Gigafactory is vitally important from an EV vertical integration perspective, the majority of new lithium-ion battery capacity is being built in China. Some of these plants are expected to be huge such as the CATL facility at 50GWh – there is little doubt that China’s lithium-ion industry has come of age.

Contemporary Amperex Technology Ltd (CATL) has plans to build the largest lithium-ion megafactory of all – but the company is little known in North America. It’s already worth $11.5 billion, and could be a dominant force globally in the battery sector if it successfully increases its lithium-ion production capacity six-fold to 50GWh by the year 2020.

Other Chinese manufacturers are on a similar trajectory. Panasonic, LG Chem, and Boston Power are building new megafactory plants in China, while companies such as Samsung and BYD are expanding existing ones. All lithium-ion plants in China currently have a capacity of 16.4GWh – but by 2020, they will combine for a total of 107.5GWh.

CAPACITY BY COUNTRY
This ramp up in China means that the country will have 62% of the world’s lithium-ion battery production capacity by 2020.