I am curious of this study as it goes against the common idea that fast charging is bad for battery health. I'm a little sad they used Tesla for the data source as their range values are alleged to be flawed, but understandable due to the high sample size.
I get the impression that Tesla has some of the best in the business battery management. That impression is from following Tesla users a bit, including the stories of some of the taxi/limo fleet users, but only passingly. It seems like users were seeing evidence that the batteries would last a million miles with 20% degredation, that was back in 2017/2018, not sure if the battery chemistry has changed that at all.
But, it makes me wonder if the other car companies will have similar levels of battery management or suffer from early death. Considering how large a proportion the battery is of the total cost, it makes sense to have some great management.
I was curious too, but it sort of makes sense. What batteries dislike is not charging per se, but heat. When you use fast charging in a Tesla, it actively runs a liquid cooling system, so the battery is probably heating up a lot less than the one in your phone and damage is correspondingly less. Also, phone batteries only have a couple cells, Teslas have several thousand: the wear of charge/discharge cycles can be spread out over all of them.
Had no clue Tesla had liquid cooling system, but makes sense. Do that also have a way to heat batteries or other components for cold weather environments?
Practically that isn't a problem for the majority of people though. Yes, you lose 9% of range after 1,000 days. Go into the purchase expecting that, the same way you'd expect that you aren't going to get the EPA rated gas mileage you see on the sticker in the window.
In a model Y with 340 miles of rated range, you'd be down to ~310 miles of range. And what happens from there? This study shows the same effect that others do - range loss pretty much levels off at a certain point. 300 miles of range is more than sufficient for 90% of people, especially when they can wake up with a fully charged vehicle every morning if they are charging at home.
Why? Obviously less degradation is better, but I have done a couple Northern Oregon to Central California trips in an EV. The total charge time for the trip was ~2 hours (on top of ~10 hours of driving), and I have a relatively low end, slower charging vehicle (<100 kW). If I lose 10% of my range, I'll add about about 15 minutes of charging time to the trip. That's doesn't really seem like that big a deal. And slightly higher end cars (and likely all cars sold a few years from now), will have even less.
average ice car life-cycle is 12 years. EV lifespan is comparable.
It's a weird attack angle for the anti-EV rhetoric. People talk about the longevity of an EV and somehow either don't realize or acknowledge its comparable to an ICE vehicle and then put this worried look on their face.
You get a better Model Y today for $50k than the Model S I bought in 2018 for $90k. These batteries will outlast the chassis. There is no material battery waste stream for recycling because the batteries last so much longer than expected. Auto consumers will ride the battery and EV learning curve where the price continues to decline and the power train improves over time.
(Have supercharged my model s almost exclusively over 5 years and 110k miles and still only have 8% degradation, 100kw pack, n=1)
Woof. An EV battery produces between 2.5 and 16 metric tons of CO2. About 9% of emissions for a combustion engine vehicle is in the initial manufacturing alone (compared to ~35% for an EV). An EV's battery is by far the most polluting in the process and manufacturing of the battery alone produces more emissions than the entire manufacturing process of an average combustible engine vehicle.
If people are replacing their batteries every 8 years, we _REALLY_ need to optimize our grid and figure out a real solution to recycling EV batteries ASAP
2. The grid mostly doesn’t care how far the battery is from the panel.
3. Lithium ion is an incredibly inefficient means of storing power that doesn’t have to be portable. Grid storage doesn’t use Li ion because it isn’t cost effective.
In summary the major misallocation of resources is using lithium batteries to store grid power at all. At home solar is the next Great Leap Forward for humanity. It's about as logical as making steel at home.
I’m with you on the inefficiency of wide-scale at home solar and your three list items but don’t understand the connection to the Great Leap Forward unless you’re just saying they’re both bad and involved (or would likely involve) ill-calculated intervention and mis-allocation. If anything I think the right analogy is that home solar is to small scale private farming as large solar farms are to large scale agriculture. I think a modern Great Leap Forward more worthy of the name would be an aggressive failed attempt to build massive solar farms and dismantle home solar systems through forced labor after home solar had already achieved ubiquity.
It would be a complete and utter waste of money which would be a net loss at best over about a 40 year period.
It's not hard to calculate the economics of batteries for residential solar (I've done it repeatedly), but I can save you some time: it's pointless. Because if it was viable, then it would cheaper and more efficient for utility companies to build their own grid batteries (which they do: but not for long-term energy storage, they use it for grid stability).
The price you pay for off-peak power, will always be slightly less the minimum cost of battery ownership. Because if batteries were cheaper to own, then you would get that price via your electricity bill anyway.
In stationary scenarios some aspects really don't matter.
Mass, doesn't really matter unless we are over what single truck can deliver or can be installed at time. Meaning tens of tons.
Volume, some limits, but still I think few cubic meters is in reasonable space. Compare to oil and gas.
Cost per kwh and cycles is the important ones. They should result in less than grid costs.
Also I would consider safety to be important. Is there risk of fire? In event of fire does it keep burning? Does if off gas something toxic that stays also after? Etc.
What about the impact of fast charging on power grids? Where I live there are power outages on hot days because of people running the AC, I can't imagine how it would hold up with a large percentage of houses charging a car. Sure, they could install a secondary battery pack to charge the car and avoid overloading the grid, but batteries would have to be really affordable.
Readit News
https://www.reuters.com/legal/tesla-faces-california-class-a...
But, it makes me wonder if the other car companies will have similar levels of battery management or suffer from early death. Considering how large a proportion the battery is of the total cost, it makes sense to have some great management.
https://electrek.co/2016/11/01/tesla-battery-degradation/
In a model Y with 340 miles of rated range, you'd be down to ~310 miles of range. And what happens from there? This study shows the same effect that others do - range loss pretty much levels off at a certain point. 300 miles of range is more than sufficient for 90% of people, especially when they can wake up with a fully charged vehicle every morning if they are charging at home.
This is my biggest hang up on EVs. They age like paper straws.
Yeah, for a Toyota that's owned by an expert car mechanic, who's hobby is doing full engine rebuilds every Tuesday.
Our BMW was a write-off after 12 years.
It's a weird attack angle for the anti-EV rhetoric. People talk about the longevity of an EV and somehow either don't realize or acknowledge its comparable to an ICE vehicle and then put this worried look on their face.
(Have supercharged my model s almost exclusively over 5 years and 110k miles and still only have 8% degradation, 100kw pack, n=1)
If people are replacing their batteries every 8 years, we _REALLY_ need to optimize our grid and figure out a real solution to recycling EV batteries ASAP
2. The grid mostly doesn’t care how far the battery is from the panel.
3. Lithium ion is an incredibly inefficient means of storing power that doesn’t have to be portable. Grid storage doesn’t use Li ion because it isn’t cost effective.
In summary the major misallocation of resources is using lithium batteries to store grid power at all. At home solar is the next Great Leap Forward for humanity. It's about as logical as making steel at home.
In case you didn't get the reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward
It's not hard to calculate the economics of batteries for residential solar (I've done it repeatedly), but I can save you some time: it's pointless. Because if it was viable, then it would cheaper and more efficient for utility companies to build their own grid batteries (which they do: but not for long-term energy storage, they use it for grid stability).
The price you pay for off-peak power, will always be slightly less the minimum cost of battery ownership. Because if batteries were cheaper to own, then you would get that price via your electricity bill anyway.
Mass, doesn't really matter unless we are over what single truck can deliver or can be installed at time. Meaning tens of tons.
Volume, some limits, but still I think few cubic meters is in reasonable space. Compare to oil and gas.
Cost per kwh and cycles is the important ones. They should result in less than grid costs.
Also I would consider safety to be important. Is there risk of fire? In event of fire does it keep burning? Does if off gas something toxic that stays also after? Etc.