November 24th, 2020 by Johnna Crider
At the European Conference on Batteries, Elon Musk just shared a Tesla battery update. When asked about his emphasis on battery innovation, why he’s putting Tesla’s emphasis there, what he saw as the most critical areas where improvement is needed, and the chances of seeing this type of improvement, Elon dove right in.
Range — 1,000 Kilometer Vehicles Under Development
“As far as range is concerned, I think we’ve shown that the range can be very long. In fact, we could make it even longer than it is today. But our longest range vehicles have a range of over 600 kilometers and we could actually do more than that, and you’ll see some improved versions of our vehicles come out with over 600 kilometers range, starting to approach 700 kilometers. And, ” Elon added, “we even have some under development long term that can do a thousand kilometers.” For those of us in America, that translates to around 621 miles of range.
15-Year Batteries
“What we see is really the fundamental impediment to progress with batteries is the cost. If you’ve got range, if you’ve got rapid recharge, and then all of those can be achieved and a high calendar and high cycle life, your batteries can last like 15 years — which we believe ours currently can — then what it comes down to most of all is improving the cost so that the affordability of batteries, of battery-powered cars — electric vehicles — is improved, so that everyone can afford to buy an electric car. That’s really what we see as the fundamental thing that needs to be improved,” Elon said. This echoes comments he made earlier this year. See: Elon Musk: “The thing that bugs me the most is that our cars are not affordable enough. We need to fix that.”
Improvements & Innovation
“Along the way, there will also be improvements in energy density, which really translates to improvements in range. In pursuit of lower-cost batteries, you actually end up — in a lot of cases — with improved energy density, which also gets more range. The long-term goal would be to try to get to a cost per kilowatt-hour of around 50 cents or 35 cents at the cell level for a long-range battery cell. In order to get there, there are a lot of innovations that are necessary both in the cell design and in the design of the factory that produces them.
“There’s quite a bit more work in building the machine that builds the machine than in the cell itself. One needs to design the cell in the right way and then the very difficult part — and I can’t emphasize this enough — the very difficult part is then scaling up that production and actually achieving extremely high reliability and safety with the cells.
“At Tesla, we’ve put a lot of effort into this over many years. Mostly internally, but there have also been some key acquisitions that have been instrumental in achieving a low cost per kilowatt-hour, and that’s what we intend to build at the prospective Gigafactory in the Berlin Brandenberg area,” Elon said.
Biggest Hurdles To Mass Production
The next question Elon was asked was what were the biggest hurdles he saw in regards to mass production. “There’s the very element of scale itself. It’s important to achieve economies of scale to make the batteries affordable, so things have to be done at extremely high volume. That means a very big factory, and not just one that is big, but also one where the cycle time through the factory is very low. A fast cycle time with a big factory is what yields a high output.
Example Of Innovation: Dry Electrode Processing
“In order to achieve a fast cycle time and a high precision, you need to develop advanced machinery for every aspect of the production system. This is really everything from how the cell can is made to how the electrode precursors, the cathode, and the anode precursors are made — making the anode and cathode materials to applying them to the conductive conductor — for this we have, for example, a very special process called the dry electrode deposition, which is much better for the environment. It’s basically allowing one to put on — to apply the electrode to the conductive ribbon in a way that does not require solvent or require bake.”
Elon then explained that the normal way this is done is to create a slurry of the electrode materials and then put the wet slurry on with a lot of solvents that is baked away in the ovens. “This is obviously self-optimal from an environmental point of view because you have the gases coming from the solvent that you have to then get rid of, but with dry electrode processing, you don’t need the solvent. You don’t need the drying ovens and you can apply it directly. This may sound simple, but it’s really very difficult. In fact, a lot of the specialized equipment we use for this comes from Germany and elsewhere in Europe.
“It doesn’t exist — it’s being made. It’s really under design, and we’ve made it now at kind of a benchtop level, and we’re aiming soon to have it done at a pilot client level and then the intent for Brandenburgh would be to have it done at scale … and that in itself comes with a lot of design challenges.”
Elon’s Plans For The Battery Cell Plant In Giga Berlin
“We want to go from where we have a small pilot plant, which is basically proof of concept in California, to something that will actually be, I think, possibly the largest battery cell plant in the world — I think it will be the largest. It would be capable of over 100 gigawatt-hours per year of production, and then possibly over time going to 200 or 250 gigawatt-hours a year. Pretty confident at that point it would be the largest battery cell plant in the world.
“As I’ve said, a lot of processes where we have to quite radically improve the cycle time and we have to redesign machinery for continuous flow operation — I’ve said this publicly on many, many occasions — that designing the prototype of really any advanced technology is, I think, relatively easy, and then scaling up to high volume production is very hard.
“In fact, there’s an old saying, ‘It’s like it’s 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration’ — it might be 99.9% in the case of battery cells. You’ll see a lot of announcements — this cell breakthrough, that cell breakthrough, this technology breakthrough, and say, ‘Okay, well, why can’t they just make a lot of them?’ It’s because the scaling up of the production process is much harder than moving something out on a lab bench.
“In fact, it might be helpful to provide everyone with just a walk-through of the Tesla pilot plant, and if you see how intense it is even at the very small pilot plant level, you can imagine how much more it would be at something that is perhaps a hundred times more throughput.”
The Environmental Impact Of Battery Production & What He’s Doing At Tesla To Take It Toward A More Sustainable Direction
“I think the dry electrode production process is in and of itself quite a game changer. It’s a fundamental improvement compared to using solvent and then having to dry up the solvent and deal with the off-gassing from the solvent — that’s for sure is a big one.
“There are some proprietary methods by which the cathode is produced in the first place where we avoid a lot of the steps that are difficult to deal with environmentally. One of the things we are doing is we are reducing the, for example, cobalt content. So that avoids cobalt mining issues, so it would be pure nickel or almost pure nickel anode.
“And then — eliminating a bunch of the steps of processing of the nickel electrode, which then obviously is good for the environment. We’re moving to a high-silicon anode, but it’s a silicon anode where the silicon does not require a lot of — it’s not energy intense to create the silicon. It’s using silicon that is comparable to [that used in solar photovoltaics].
“We also come up with a means of creating lithium hydroxide without the use of sulfuric acid. It actually uses sodium chloride — essentially table salt — to extract the lithium from lithium clay deposits. And that table salt is able to be reused. There’s really a whole series of steps that are employed to ensure that the environmental impact of the cell production is very clean, and you could be living right next to the battery cell plant and you wouldn’t even have detectable amounts of any toxins in the air. So, if you had an air tester, you would not notice anything, literally.
“It’s notable that our pilot program — you know, sort of basic group of concept — is located in the San Francisco Bay Area, which is renowned for extreme environmental requirements, so if there was anything that was bad, it’s really not possible to do it in the San Francisco Bay Area.”
True Viability Of Electric Trucks
“Well, I think this is really just a fundamental calculation of … what’s the energy density of the battery — of the cell and then of the battery pack, and then of the integrated battery pack and truck chassis. So, it’s a total mass of the of the semi truck before including the trailer or anything, and can you get that mass down to something which is comparable to existing diesel trucks. I think the answer is absolutely yes, and we demonstrated that with a prototype truck and getting a range of, let’s say, 500 kilometers is quite easy but trivial, to be frank, for a semi truck. And this is assuming this is a truck that’s pulling a load of something on the order of 40 metric tonnes.
“So, just a heavy truck — and then you can take the range, if you want, for long-range trucking up to, we think, easily 800 kilometers, and we see a path over time to get to a thousand-kilometer range with a heavy-duty truck. This is, like, a truck on the order of 40 metric tonnes of total mass, and we think this is going to be extremely competitive and compelling to the trucking companies, and we actually have a few prototype semi trucks that are in operation — have been in operation for over a year.
“Some keys to that are having like sort of a high energy density cell and then integrating that cell into the pack with a minimum of extra mass, and then using a structural battery pack where the cells and the battery pack actually form part of the core structure. This is also something that we talked about at Battery Day and that we will be, of course, implementing with the semi truck.
“The net result is that you’re able to carry basically the same cargo as a regular diesel truck like this. We think maybe there’s a one-ton penalty — maybe. At this point, we think possibly you can have even less than a one-ton payload reduction, but it could long term be, I think, zero payload reduction for four electric trucks.”
Tesla Hatchback?
“I think there’s a lot of talented designers, engineers in Europe, of course, and it would, I think, for a lot of the best people, they really want to work somewhere where they’re doing original design work. They don’t want to just be doing, say, the European version of something that was designed in California. I think it’s important for, in order to attract the best talent, to do original design. Possibly, in Europe, it would make sense to do a compact car — perhaps a hatchback or something like that.”
You can watch the full video of Elon’s interview here.
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About the Author
Johnna Crider is a Baton Rouge artist, gem, and mineral collector, member of the International Gem Society, and a Tesla shareholder who believes in Elon Musk and Tesla. Elon Musk advised her in 2018 to “Believe in Good.” Tesla is one of many good things to believe in. You can find Johnna on Twitter
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