2010 Will Not Be the Year of the Electric Car, Consultants Say
The first electric cars are expected to hit U.S. showrooms by the end of 2010, a major step in the reinvention of the automobile. But hopes for a fast transition away from oil are looking premature.
Two new reports — one from the National Resource Council (NRC) and a second from consulting firm Pike Research — question whether the high costs of lithium-ion batteries, which power most plug-in electric hybrids (PHEVs), such as the Chevy Volt, and all-electric cars, such as the new Nissan LEAF, can drop fast enough to achieve mass-market adoption.
The industry will know by 2012 what is possible, Pike Research suggests.
By then, the "passionate early adopters" will have purchased their first electric cars, thanks in part to the federal government's current electric-car tax credit of up to $7,500. But after 2012, the consumer incentive could disappear — along with at least some of the billions in government grants now being dished out to automakers and battery manufacturers.
"Whether or not a broad audience of consumers would be willing to pay 50% or more for a vehicle than can drive most of its miles on battery power is unknown," the report said.
According to Pike Research, the costs of lithium-ion batteries will have to drop to $300 per kilowatt hour (kWh), or less, for plug-ins and all-electric cars to be appealing enough for mass purchasing.
In 2010, batteries are expected to cost around $940 per kWh, down from $1,070 in 2009. By 2015, those costs should be cut in half to $470 per kWh, the study predicts.
That should help spur the industry, but not by enough to move electric cars beyond niche-market status. Less than 2.5 percent of the world's fleet in 2015 will be run on battery power, the firm said.
The NRC, a Congress-chartered organization run under the National Academy of Sciences, took an even even less optimistic view of the electric car's future:
"A fundamental breakthrough in [lithium-ion] battery technology, unforeseen at present, would be needed to make plug-ins widely affordable in the near future."
By the near future, it means two decades.
According to the NRC, PHEVs in the U.S. will account for just 4 percent of the expected fleet of 300 million vehicles by 2030. The reason: batteries.
Production of the first generation of power packs will cost between $3,300 and $14,000, depending on how many miles they can handle in pure electric mode, according to the NRC.
In 2010, it will cost $18,000 more to manufacture a PHEV than to churn out an equivalent fuel-sipping vehicle, the council said. Come 2030, that gap will shrink, but not by enough. The Chevy Volt, a PHEV-40 — sized for 40 miles of electric-only driving — will still be priced more than $10,000 higher than a non-PHEV.
"PHEV-40s are unlikely to achieve cost-effectiveness before 2040 at gasoline prices below $4 per gallon, but PHEV-10s may get there before 2030," the authors wrote.
NRC's glum findings set off a firestorm among electric-car makers.
"The NRC study significantly overestimates current battery costs," said the Electrification Coalition, a group of industry CEOs that includes the heads of Nissan, Fedex and electric utility PG&E, in a response to the study.
"Fully assembled battery costs for the GM Volt, a series format PHEV-40 with a 16 kWh nameplate capacity (identical to the specifications of the PHEV-40 in the NRC report), have been reported at between $500 and $625 per kWh — significantly less than the NRC's estimate of $875/kWh," the group wrote.
Robbie Diamond, president and chief executive of Electrification Coalition, said NRC ignores economies of scale — that as battery technology continues to improve, prices will plummet.
According to NRC, upfront costs won't decline without "subsidies in the tens to hundreds of billions of dollars."
The Electrification Coalition disagreed:
"Based on current and expected industry costs, a PHEV-40 will be cost effective for consumers in 2015 — without any government subsidy whatsoever."
The reason being that "fuel savings over the life of a PHEV-40 in 2015 will more than compensate for the vehicle’s cost premium," the group said.
Government Subsidies
Still, the Electrification Coalition said that if a huge electric-car scale-up is to take place, then government assistance is needed.
In November, the group published a 180-page roadmap for how to get 14 million PHEVs on the roads by 2020 and another 100 million by 2030. According to its estimates, such a ramp-up would require a massive $120 billion over an eight-year period in tax credits and loan guarantees.
The U.S. is a very small fraction of the way there.
During the presidential election, President Obama pledged to put 1 million PHEVs on America's roads by 2015, as part of his platform to curb global warming emissions.
As a first step, in March, the president announced that $2.4 billion of federal stimulus money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 would go toward battery technology, manufacturing capacity and battery infrastructure demos for PHEVs.
In June, Nissan was awarded $1.6 billion in U.S. loans to retool a plant in Tennessee for electric car production, and in August it won an additional $200 million to help deploy the charging network that will power them.
Pike Research said the government's commitment so far to green cars is "providing a temporary crutch." A reduction in support, which it said is likely, would remove "a vital safety net," and there are no guarantees any more is on the way.
"New or extended government support could depend on the recovery of the global economy and the political efficacy of additional government spending in an election year," the firm said.
See also:
Surprise: Nissan’s Electric Cars to Be Made in the USA
Nissan Scores $200 Million for Biggest-Ever Electric Car Grid Project
A Case for Electric Cars in Carbon-Heavy Canada
Obama's Job Description for GM's Next CEO: You Will Build Clean Cars
500,000 Electric Cars Would Take 10% of World Lithium. Only
1st Greenhouse Gas Emission Rules to Give Detroit a Low-Carbon Makeover
U.S. Postal Service Could Deliver America the Electric Car
(Photo: mulford / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
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IN 5 YEARS ELECTRIC AND HYBRID CARS CAN BECOME POWER PLANTS!
Within five years (without a desirable 24/7 development program that could decrease the time required) electric and hybrid cars will reflect a dramatic revolution.
See the article The Love Affair with Autos Allows a Seductive Alternative - on the website: http://www.aesopinstitute.org
Here is an outline of how future cars might pay for themselves, by employing remarkable new technology that can turn them into power plants when parked.
Imagine electric cars that will need no recharge and hybrid automobiles that will use ordinary water as fuel: A gallon sufficient for 1,000 miles of driving.
Of course, these statements are extremely difficult to believe.
But, as the referenced article indicates, some of this new science has recently begun to be validated by independent laboratory experiments .
And all the rest will be, prior to anyone being expected to accept these remarkable breakthroughs as real.
Imagine the implications! Who will not want to buy such cars and trucks? The auto industry will spring back to life.
The challenge is to accelerate development so that instead of five years, it might take less.
Perhaps, with an all out effort, much less!
Fair Warning
Before anyone fails to laugh at Mark Goldes' fantastic claims (read plea for funding), please do a quick Internet search on his name. In moments you'll find that he's been trolling the Internet with similar nonsense claims looking for investors (read shills)for many many years.
Lithium Recycling
Recovering Lithium from batteries is only economical today because of the cobalt - Sony only recover the cobalt and Toxco do recover Li but it is subsidised by the cobalt. A French company have a new hyped process but their patent shows again, only economic due to cobalt. Car LiIon batteries do not even have cobalt, they are LiFePO4 or LiMnO2.
In addition, all the talk is about how wonderful it will be to use all these expired car LiIon batteries in a second life as mass storage for wind turbines etc.
Plus you still have to FIRST extract enough Li for the 00s of millions of cars, plus trucks which will have 100-300 kWh batteries,10 times a car size. Trucks are even more important than cars if you want food in your Walmart.
So Li prices must go up to make recycling cost effective? That means short supply.
Conflicting constraints every which way except for ZnAir.
Limited lithium versus limited oil
Um...the difference between the effects of a limited lithium supply and the effects of a limited oil supply is that lithium batteries are a reusable part of the car, whereas oil is consumed and lost. An individual battery does have a certain lifespan, but they are recyclable. So, a limited supply of lithium sets a cap on the total number of lithium-battery-powered cars that can run at any given time, but a limited supply of oil sets an end to the history of petrol-powered cars.
2010 "not" the year for EVs
This "report" is actually good luck for those of limited resources who can probably afford an conversion-to-Electric car... Its still not too late to manifest your own destiny and grab EV components off the self and do what Detroit can't do, for yourself. There are plenty of resources on the internet and firms doing conversions and selling complete kits. Something like grandfather building his own radio, it isn't that hard once one makes up their mind!! Building your own EV will bring a smile to your face for sure & you can always upgrade the battery pack later....
DOE screwed the cars
(Please re-post this as a community service)
Less than 20 car companies (The ATVM people say there were tons of applications but only a handful were car companies) applied for $25 BILLION DOLLARS in taxpayer money managed by a certain smug group of people at DOE in order to get loans to make green cars for Americans. This was not all of DOE that did bad things, just a private cadre of men.
There was enough money to help every single one of the car companies that applied. The administrators applied their interpretations of the law in order to benefit the large lobby group-related firms and avoided every one of the “politically unconnected “independent American companies.
The amount of lobby and influence money spent by each awardee is in direct ratio to the amount of money awarded. Pay-to-play was the process.
The smaller companies, due to lower overhead, could have dramatically more productive results with the money than the large burdened companies yet the money was given out based on political career advantages for the administrators rather than the technology advantages for Americans.
The way the ATVM people set it up (Google “Siry says stifles innovation” for more), the smaller applicants were prevented from getting outside investor funding.
All of the people that reviewed the applications had political and financial connections to GM, Ford, Chrysler and the large Detroit recipients.
Each of those smaller American companies had technology and resources that presented a powerful economic threat, if they got the loans, to the large politically connected companies that did receive funds. The big car companies wanted the small companies cut-out at all costs.
The Section 136 law was written to provide first-come-first serve funding but when the small companies got their applications in first, while the big ones arrogantly felt that they did not even need to apply because it was already pre-staged for them, the ATVM officials changed the rules in order to remove the first-come-first-serve standard of the law in order to cut out the smaller independents.
Some of the companies that have gotten money have backed out of making the electric cars they said they would make. But they still get to keep the money.
The Section 136 Law was created by the lobbyists for GM, Ford & Chrysler when they saw that they were about to go bankrupt and wanted to tap into additional taxpayer dollars by claiming the money was going to be used for electric cars in order to win rapid support for Section 136 by tugging at heartstrings. In retrospect, the money mostly went to gasoline car projects. Multiple public hearings have already shown the sister loan guarantee program to have been a failed program via intentional delays, the head was fired and replaced & massive complaints have been filed by many.
Some of the companies that got the money have already wasted more money than other companies applied for as their total request.
Some of the companies that got taxpayer loan money are not even American companies and/or are doing their manufacturing offshore with non-American employees. Thus, the ATVM process has cost American’s jobs.
Those who got the money had to fill out little, or no, paperwork, went through little, or no, review and were connected to the DOE people who gave them the money and shepherded them through the process. Those who they wanted to keep out were forced to jump through more hoops, were slow-tracked in review and had made no political deals via hired law and lobby firms that the big companies has used to conduit “influence”.
The decision about who would get money was made in 2008 by a private group who then pretended there was a lengthy review throughout 2009 but in fact, the money was pre-wired for a select few.
All of the things that the rejected small companies (who did not pay lobby fees) were rejected for, were the same things that the insider big companies were doing. In at least two cases, big companies who were in violation of Section 136 rules were guided by reviewer-insiders to change their whole business structure in order to become suddenly “compliant “with section 136 while smaller companies received no such “help”.
Our energy future might hang on our different approach.
Once we think of energy fix differently, the coming of EV epoch might never be off in the future.
Under the current capacity of electricity generation in America, it is said to be able to accommodate comfortably 2 millions of EVs during nighttime. Even if the typical power sources are predictable, certain sources are inefficiently forced to produce juice even at off-peak hours.
It reflects EVs are not simply able to take full advantage of the excess juice, but can make a considerable contribution to the forthcoming sustainable yet intermittent energy sources as a precious storage.
As with Nissan and the others, leasing and recycling battery pack is capable of making EVs affordable. Similarly, grasping the energy industry, we could expedite the roll-out of EVs without hesitation.
Our energy future might hang on our different approach.
Thanks A Lot !
Lithium Supply
The notion that lithium-ion batteries will continue to drop in price depends on the availability of lithium. Just as we are nearing the end of "cheap" oil spewing from the ground, we will soon deplete the "cheap" lithium from places like Chile if lithium-ion batteries are the best available technology during a push to go electric. That will make the cost of the batteries skyrocket.
Speaking of skyrocketing prices, doesn't most of our electricity come from coal? I thought the cap and trade market that the EPA will certainly create now that it's armed with more power will make electricity prices "necessarily skyrocket".
Take away any government incentives, and I don't see much economic sense in going electric at all, at least with our current technology.
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