He's had an amazing life and was amazingly productive right until the end and had his hand in quite a few recent battery innovations. Quite a life to celebrate.
Battery production scaling up is something that is a bit under appreciated by many. Basically where we are now is hundreds of ghw of batteries produced every year. Probably closing in on a twh soon. You can do the math and it adds up to a a million cars requiring basically whatever battery capacity they have in kwh times a million. Which means 1m model 3s with 60kwh batteries require 60gwh of batteries to be produced. Tesla is closing in on 2million vehicles produced per year right now and their share of the market is actually dropping because other manufacturers are catching up.
When the market hits 15 million vehicles per year, we'll cross the twh mark. There are of course other uses of batteries on the grid, in buses, trucks, in homes, etc. So, we're likely close to that already or past that point even.
The world produces about 23pwh of electricity per year. If you cycle 1 twh of batteries every day (which you wouldn't, typically) that adds up to 0.365 pwh. So, tripling the battery production gets us to 1phw of power cycled in a year. That's a lot of power to have on standby. And that is the main point because the average state of most batteries will be close to fully charged. You could drive your EV and drain the battery but on average not many people are going to do that at the same time. That's a lot of battery. And this man was key to inventing and developing them.
Trends are towards more batteries being produced cheaper using less and less expensive/rare materials. Sodium ion basically uses no lithium, cobalt, etc. There's not going to be a battery shortage long term.
Battery production scaling up is something that is a bit under appreciated by many. Basically where we are now is hundreds of ghw of batteries produced every year. Probably closing in on a twh soon. You can do the math and it adds up to a a million cars requiring basically whatever battery capacity they have in kwh times a million. Which means 1m model 3s with 60kwh batteries require 60gwh of batteries to be produced. Tesla is closing in on 2million vehicles produced per year right now and their share of the market is actually dropping because other manufacturers are catching up.
When the market hits 15 million vehicles per year, we'll cross the twh mark. There are of course other uses of batteries on the grid, in buses, trucks, in homes, etc. So, we're likely close to that already or past that point even.
The world produces about 23pwh of electricity per year. If you cycle 1 twh of batteries every day (which you wouldn't, typically) that adds up to 0.365 pwh. So, tripling the battery production gets us to 1phw of power cycled in a year. That's a lot of power to have on standby. And that is the main point because the average state of most batteries will be close to fully charged. You could drive your EV and drain the battery but on average not many people are going to do that at the same time. That's a lot of battery. And this man was key to inventing and developing them.
Trends are towards more batteries being produced cheaper using less and less expensive/rare materials. Sodium ion basically uses no lithium, cobalt, etc. There's not going to be a battery shortage long term.