On Tuesday, electric vehicle and battery manufacturer Tesla held its ‘Battery Day’, announcing its intention to halve the price of battery energy storage.
The company, which began in electric vehicle manufacturing, has become a leader in utility-scale energy storage supply. The company announced plans to build a new battery production plant in the US and to scale up cell production to produce 100GWh in 2022.
On an outdoor stage in California, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and senior vice-president of energy engineering Drew Baglino told shareholders about five technology innovations the company has moved into production to halve production costs.
Materials and components in batteries change to allow greater capacity
One of these measures involves the company ending its use of cobalt in batteries. Tesla joined the Fair Cobalt Alliance in September, and Musk said the company has had difficulty in finding ethical and responsible sources for the metal. However, it did not give an estimated timescale for the change.
Cobalt is a suitable metal for stabilising energy flows in mid-tier batteries. However, a paper in the Journal of the Electrochemical Society suggests that cobalt has a negligible effect in higher energy, high-nickel batteries.
Baglino told shareholders: “Using novel coatings and dopants, we can get a 15% reduction in cathode cost per kilowatt-hour. We are also looking at the processing costs for cathodes. About 35% of the cost per unit of storage comes from transforming the battery metals into their final form.
“We’re proposing a process that requires 66% less capital investment and a 76% reduction in processing cost.”
A ‘three-tier system’ for Tesla battery vehicles
Musk continued: “In order to scale, we need to make sure we are not constrained by total nickel availability. I think we need a three-tiered approach to batteries, starting with iron as a medium-range battery, then nickel-manganese above that, then high-nickel for long-range applications.
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