One of our readers, Peter Egan, recently passed along this automotive lithium-ion battery supply chain report. It’s an interesting report that goes a bit deeper into the lithium-ion battery market than we normally dive. I pulled out 7–10 charts (depending on how you count) that I found quite interesting, and I’ve added notes about some of them in the captions.
It’s interesting to see here how much of global automotive lithium-ion battery production occurs in Asia, and it’s also interesting to see the big green circle over there indicating under-construction manufacturing capacity, but the most interesting thing on the chart is certainly the giant yellow circle, which represented the planned (now under-construction) Tesla/Panasonic Gigafactory.There are several interesting things to highlight here. It’s interesting to see how much global demand for automotive and grid lithium-ion batteries is expected to grow, but it’s also interesting to see how much more lithium-ion batteries for consumer electronics are expected to grow in demand, which will help to further bring down battery costs — for all sectors. Naturally, it’s interesting to look at this projection for how much the automotive and grid markets are projected to cut into the overall lithium-ion battery market.This is a shocking one to me. I had no idea there was so much overcapacity in this market. I guess it’s good to see (assuming this information is correct) that the capacity for battery production could handle a significant ramping up of demand (though, note that these data come from the beginning of 2014, and demand has increased a great deal since then).The interesting thing here is that GM indicated it would be getting lithium-ion battery cells from LG Chem for $145/kWh, and it’s widely assumed Tesla’s battery cells from Panasonic are coming in for a similar or even lower price. Either something is off here, or battery prices have dropped a lot in a couple of years — I’m assuming the latter.
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Zach is tryin' to help society help itself one word at a time. He spends most of his time here on CleanTechnica as its director, chief editor, and CEO. Zach is recognized globally as an electric vehicle, solar energy, and energy storage expert. He has presented about cleantech at conferences in India, the UAE, Ukraine, Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, the USA, Canada, and Curaçao.
Zach has long-term investments in Tesla [TSLA], NIO [NIO], Xpeng [XPEV], Ford [F], ChargePoint [CHPT], Amazon [AMZN], Piedmont Lithium [PLL], Lithium Americas [LAC], Albemarle Corporation [ALB], Nouveau Monde Graphite [NMGRF], Talon Metals [TLOFF], Arclight Clean Transition Corp [ACTC], and Starbucks [SBUX]. But he does not offer (explicitly or implicitly) investment advice of any sort.
