Game Over! Tesla's Million Mile Battery is a Game Changer

Batteries, for years now, had only a few breakthroughs and major development taking place in the battery-making process. For more than a decade, the human race is stuck with Lithium-ion batteries.

Tesla’s drive units and bodies for their mass-production models, such as the Model 3, were designed to last a million miles. Add the new million-mile battery and you have an EV as the first truly multi-generational auto, one that your grandkids will still be able to drive. EVs have a fraction of the moving parts that an internal combustion engine vehicle has, which makes EV’s orders of magnitude more reliable and longer lasting. EV batteries — for example, the ones used by Tesla’s Model S — currently last only 1,000 to 2,000 discharge cycles, which is roughly 300 to 500 thousand miles. The new million-mile battery is expected to hold more than 90% charge after 4,000 cycles. The average American driver clocks 13 and a half thousand miles a year. That translates to roughly 74 years of EV battery usage to reach a million miles. Also, The most expensive part of an EV is the battery. The threshold for an EV to be price comparable with its non-EV competitors is to get a battery costing under $100 per kilowatt hour. We have now reached that milestone too. Larger batteries allow EV’s to go much further on a single charge, and this new battery should provide EVs with average ranges of 400 to 500 miles or more to start. This takes care of range limitations. Which makes it a big competition for it’s gas-guzzling counterparts.

It has long been a metric for the success of EVs that their battery energy density is on parity with traditional gasoline-powered engines. Such a condition would allow EVs to compete with gasoline vehicles on both weight and range – especially the latter. This means that, if gasoline is 100 times more energy-dense than a battery, that a vehicle would need 100 lbs of battery to go as far as 1-lb of gasoline.

But past studies have shown that system efficiency is another key consideration when comparing EV and gasoline energy densities. The research lab noted that electric powertrains are far more efficient than powertrains powered by gasoline. In many cases, less than 20% of the energy contained in a gallon of gas actually gets converted to forward motion. After that power has been transmitted through transmission and differential to the wheels, it would have suffered significantly more mechanical losses. By contrast, an electric powertrain can be more than 90% efficient. This would suggest that the energy density of an EV battery could be far less than equivalent to a gasoline-powered vehicle and still come out ahead.

What’s more, since batteries take considerable energy to produce, there’s a solid environmental argument for extending their life. In general, companies should be able to claim that million-mile batteries are more climate-friendly than their 200,000-mile counterparts because the carbon emissions, resource consumption, and pollution associated with their production will be spread over many more years of use.

Form energy has been tackling this problem with its innovative proprietary technology that targets a capital cost of less than $10/kWh. Recently the company signed an agreement to demonstrate a 150 hour duration storage project with Great River Energy, which is an important milestone for the energy transition.

Second-life Lithium-ion batteries could be another economic solution for long-duration storage, as their lower cost could meet the necessary threshold. This will require a buildout of the Li-ion ecosystem to include collection, testing, recycling and processing of batteries.

Current Lithium-ion batteries could be difficult to monetize for a large selection of second-life applications due to the variability in battery health and dramatic declines in cycling life and safety. To date, second-life Li-ion batteries have primarily been used for resilience applications on telecommunications towers, but some companies are testing second-life grid applications. As markets for longer duration storage mature, improved battery longevity will be necessary to provide confidence in the remaining energy content of repurposed EV batteries to match remaining value to use case. Additionally, Li-ion market consolidation toward fewer chemistries and shared standards between manufacturers would greatly help the second-life markets to track and work on this problem.

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