Battery superfactory will change lithium-ion production forever
Tesla, headed up by its enigmatic CEO Elon Musk, really want you to drive electric cars, and they’re sick and tired of waiting for the manufacturing industry to catch up with their business plan. Plans are now afoot for something called, a Gigafactory,a vast base set up in New Mexico and Nevada that by 2020 will produce more lithium ion batteries annually than were produced in the entire of 2013.
These batteries will, of course, then go into their electric cars, which Tesla is betting on selling over 500,000 of per year by the next decade, but also potentially for grid storage of renewable power. The Gigafactory project will cost about 5 billion dollars, with Tesla stumping up 1.6 billion through the sale of company bonds. And the rest? Well, recent high profile meetings between the company and Apple may mean you’ll be driving an i-car sooner you think, well, an i-battery anyway…
In its press release, Tesla says:
As we at Tesla reach for our goal of producing a mass market electric car in approximately three years, we have an opportunity to leverage our projected demand for lithium ion batteries to reduce their cost faster than previously thought possible. In cooperation with strategic battery manufacturing partners, we’re planning to build a large scale factory that will allow us to achieve economies of scale and minimize costs through innovative manufacturing, reduction of logistics waste, optimization of co-located processes and reduced overhead.
The Gigafactory is designed to reduce cell costs much faster than the status quo and, by 2020, produce more lithium ion batteries annually than were produced worldwide in 2013. By the end of the first year of volume production of our mass market vehicle, we expect the Gigafactory will have driven down the per kWh cost of our battery pack by more than 30 percent.
Source: http://cleantechnica.com/
More info: http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/gigafactory
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