Kirill Klip: Lithium Race In Ludicrous Mode: The Rapid Growth Of Electric Cars Worldwide, In 4 Charts.

Monday 20 June 2016

Lithium Race In Ludicrous Mode: The Rapid Growth Of Electric Cars Worldwide, In 4 Charts.

Vox.

Welcome to the fast lane for electric cars everybody. Now even this very impressive chart above has changed dramatically. In our conversations cost of lithium batteries is one of the major tipping points for all cars to become electric in the very near future. The mass media and broader public are still totally missing the point of the recent, maybe, the most important announcement by Elon Musk. Tesla can already make lithium batteries for Model S and X with all-in cost of $190 per kWh. Now we should move our discussion from "If" To "When" all cars will be electric. As you can imagine, this groundbreaking shift will affect all forecasts for lithium demand as well. We will have not 10%, 20% or 40% of EVs - ALL cars will be electric.

As Tony Seba has pointed out: once the cost of rooftop Solar energy generation becomes cheaper than the cost of energy transmission local Solar will make all centralised nuclear, gas and other Energy sources obsolete in general. We have the Energy World just before the INTERNET. We are moving from Data Storage to Energy Storage. The same is happening with electric cars: once you can have an electric car with better performance than ICE, which is cheaper as well, whole industries will be gone. We are witnessing the generational disruption of the world as we know it by lithium technology making cheap and efficient Energy storage reality.

Cheap Lithium Batteries Change Everything: EVs Sales Rising Exponentially And Solar Energy Storage Next.

InsideEVs.

"InsideEVs brings to our attention the major driving force behind the exponential growth of sales for EVs from the very low base. Cheap lithium batteries change everything. Tony Seba is the best to explain why all cars will be electric by 2030.Elon Musk with Tesla Motors is doing this trick and now Tesla Model 3 will ignite the real transition to the best cars which just happen to be electric.

Oil and Auto industry are poisoned by their own toxic cancer hazard emissions from diesel and gas powered ICE engines and still in denial at their own peril about the dramatic shift in technology announced by Elon Musk last month. Now even truly rEVolutionary estimations for the cost of lithium batteries by Tony Seba are not relevant any more.

Elon Musk has announced that Tesla can already produce lithium battery with all-in cost of $190 per kWh. Mass production of batteries at Gigafactory will bring cost even lower, next stage will be Lithium Solid State with prices at $100 per kWh and Tesla Model S and X with over 500 miles range. I believe that Elon Musk is already working on LSS at Gigafactory. Dyson has joined the lithium race as well and bought out Lithium Solid State pioneer Sakti3 with promise to invest $1 Billion to commercialise this technology. Lithium Air is still years away from the field applications, but this lithium technology promises to bring us batteries with cost below $100 per kWh and electric cars with 1,000 miles range. Solar Energy Home and Utility Storage Systems will benefit next from this dramatic decrease in technology cost and will become even larger market for lithium based batteries. We are talking here about disruption of $4 Trillion Transportation and $8 Trillion Energy Industries. Lithium is the magic metal at the very heart of this Energy rEVolution.

International Lithium continues to build vertically integrated lithium business with $4.5 Billion MC giant from China Ganfeng Lithium and now we have 3 Lithium projects in our Upper Canada Pool to secure lithium supply for the West and North American market. Read more."

International Lithium At Wentworth 2016 Presentation.

International Lithium: New Discoveries With Ganfeng Lithium In Ireland and Argentina.

Vox:

The Rapid Growth Of Electric Cars Worldwide, In 4 charts.

Updated by Brad Plumer

One million down, another billion or so to go.

In a new report, the International Energy Agency estimates that 1.26 million electric cars hit the world's roads in 2015, passing a nifty (if symbolic) milestone. Here's a chart showing the very rapid growth of both battery electric vehicles (BEVs) and plug-in hybrids (PHEV):

BEV = battery electric vehicles; PHEV = plug-in hybrid vehicles, which typically have both an electric motor and a conventional engine.

The United States now has 400,000 electric vehicles on the road — a massive increase since 2010, though well short of Obama's goal of 1 million by 2015. Meanwhile, China has become the world's largest market, overtaking the US in annual sales last year.

Is 1 million a lot? It depends how you look at it. It's jaw-dropping growth given that there were only a few hundred electric vehicles on the entire planet back in 2005. And the total number of electric vehicles worldwide has tripled just since 2013.

But to put this in perspective, there are more than 1 billion gasoline- and diesel-powered cars on the world's roads — and demand will keep soaring in the decades ahead as China and India's middle classes expand. So we have a long, long way to go before electric cars take over the world.

In order to avoid more than 2°C of global warming, the IEA calculates, we'd likely need to see about 150 million electric cars on the road by 2030 and 1 billion by 2050 as part of a broader climate strategy. The good news, the agency says, is that this ambitious electric vehicle target seems much more feasible than it did just a few years ago.

Two big reasons for the rapid growth of EVs: public subsidies and falling battery prices

For starters, more and more countries are enacting policies to build up charging infrastructure and incentivize vehicle purchases. The table below details some of those policies, which include everything from tax breaks to tailpipe emission standards (which favor cleaner electric cars) to HOV lane access:

"Ambitious targets and policy support have lowered vehicle costs, extended vehicle range and reduced consumer barriers in a number of countries," the report says.

As a result, electric vehicles now make up more than 1 percent of sales in China, France, Denmark, and Sweden. They make up 9.7 percent of sales in the Netherlands, and 23 percent of sales in Norway, which offers some of the most generous tax incentives around, worth about $13,500 per car.

The other huge driver here is falling battery costs, which have fallen by a factor of four since 2008. Since batteries make up around one-third of the price of electric vehicles, getting this number down even further is crucial for widespread adoption.

The Department of Energy estimates that battery costs need to fall to $125 per kilowatt-hour by 2022 to achieve cost-competitiveness with conventional vehicles. The IEA says this "seems realistic" given current rates of technological improvement, and points out that manufacturers like Tesla and GM have set even more ambitious cost targets.

The amount of energy that batteries can hold (known as energy density) has also improved significantly. The IEA cites various reports that electric cars will soon be able to travel more than 180 miles on a single charge — also critical for boosting consumer adoption and alleviating "range anxiety."

Meanwhile, electric cars get all the attention, but the IEA points out that the electrification of other modes of transport, including motorcycles and buses, is just as important. Particularly in countries where these vehicles are widespread:

The electrification of road transport modes other than cars, namely 2-wheelers, buses and freight delivery vehicles, is currently ongoing in a few localised areas. With an estimated stock exceeding 200 million units, China is the global leader in the electric 2-wheelers market and almost the only relevant player globally, primarily because of the restriction on the use of conventional 2- wheelers in several cities to reduce local pollution. China is also leading the global deployment of electric bus fleets, with more than 170 000 buses already circulating today.

To help solve climate change, electric cars need to do much, much more

Here's one last chart from the IEA, showing what electric car deployment would have to look like to help meet the emissions-reduction promises put forth at the Paris climate talks last year (around 100 million electric cars by 2030). It also shows the even faster deployment that would be needed to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius (about 150 million):

We're on track now, but it's early. In fact, as the IEA points out elsewhere, electric vehicle deployment is basically the only area where the world's nations are on track to hit the targets needed to stay below 2 degrees Celsius.

One final caveat: As David Biello recently explained at Scientific American, electric cars aren't inherently greener than their gasoline-powered counterparts. If you use coal-fired power plants to charge all those electric cars, the climate benefits are minimal (or, worse, negative). The IEA is well aware of this, although it also notes that electric car deployment can help support the rollout of cleaner renewable energy, too:

The climate change-related benefits of EVs can be fully harvested under the condition that their use is coupled with a decarbonised grid, an additional challenge for countries that are largely dependent on fossil fuels for power generation. Investment in EV roll-out can support this transition, e.g. increasing the opportunities available to integrate variable renewable energy.

Cleaning up the grid is a sine qua non for electric cars to help ameliorate climate change, although this hardly seems like a deal breaker for the technology. Think of it this way: If we don't clean up the world's electric grid, we have little chance of stopping global warming either way. The two have to go hand in hand."