• About
    • Which Energy Mix is this?
  • Climate News Network Archive
  • Contact
Celebrating our 1,000th edition. The climate news you need
No Result
View All Result
The Energy Mix
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities
SUBSCRIBE
DONATE
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities
SUBSCRIBE
DONATE
No Result
View All Result
The Energy Mix
No Result
View All Result
  FEATURED
EXCLUSIVE: Hydrogen is Up, Pieridae is Out as German Chancellor Preps for Canada Visit August 15, 2022
Historic Climate Bill Passes U.S. House, Goes to Biden for Signature August 15, 2022
BREAKING: U.S. Senate Passes Historic $369B Climate Package August 7, 2022
Researchers Point To ‘Dangerously Unexplored’ Risk of Global Climate Catastrophe August 2, 2022
Koch Network Pressures Manchin, Sinema as Advocates Praise ‘Game Changing’ Climate Deal August 2, 2022
Next
Prev

Investors Shrug as Tesla Promises $25,000 EV in Three Years

September 25, 2020
Reading time: 5 minutes

Werner Bayer/Flickr

Werner Bayer/Flickr

2
SHARES
 

While Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk promised a US$25,000 electric vehicle within three years, driven by dramatic production cost reductions and performance improvements, for battery cells, his highly-touted Battery Day event earlier this week ended up disappointing investors looking for a bigger announcement and faster results.

Tesla’s plans add up to a 56% reduction in production costs and a 54% increase in battery range, The Driven writes. But the immediate result of company’s big reveal, was an 11% drop in the value of shares that had previously surged 360% so far this year, amounting to a $320-billion increase in market value driven largely by Musk’s grandiose goals, Bloomberg Green reports.

“The challenge with the stock is that everything they are talking about is three years away,” explained Loup Ventures Managing Director Gene Munster. “I think traditional auto is in an even tighter spot, but Tesla investors want this tomorrow.”

Musk, who eventually intends to see Tesla produce 20 million vehicles per year, “described a series of innovations that include using dry-electrode technology and making the battery a structural element of the car,” Bloomberg writes. But “those incremental and longer-term advances belied expectations for a blockbuster leap forward, which Musk himself played up in the weeks leading up to the event.”

In particular, Musk’s past musings about a million-mile battery were nowhere to be found in this week’s messaging.

As a result, “with the Battery Day in the rear view, we think there is a lack of upcoming catalysts and are cautious about demand given the recessionary environment,” said Ben Kallo analyst Robert Baird.

“Given the high expectations into the event, we think the market will initially respond negatively to the relatively long timelines of the innovations and the lack of granularity,” agreed UBS analyst Patrick Hummel.

In contrast to most other automakers, Bloomberg says Tesla is moving toward supplementing its existing battery supply chains by manufacturing its own. “Musk said in a tweet Monday that Tesla will need to start producing its own battery cells to support its various products, even as it ramps up purchases from outside suppliers,” the news agency writes. “He wrote that the company expects significant shortages of cells in 2022 and beyond unless it ramps up output of its own.”

That’s what it would take to increase Tesla’s battery production capacity to 20 or 25 terawatt-hours per year, The Driven says, up from the 150 gigawatt-hours currently available from the company’s gigafactory near Reno, Nevada.

In the course of the Battery Day event, Musk and Drew Baglino, Tesla’s senior VP for powertrain and energy engineering, outlined five factors that will help the company drive down costs: cell design, battery factory size and investment, anode and cathode production processes, and eventually, a plan to integrate EV batteries into the structure of the vehicle. The Driven has details on each of the five elements of the plan.

But while Tesla continues to aim high, the Aborigen Forum in the Russian Arctic is sounding a note of caution. Earlier this month, the group urged Musk not to acquire nickel for its EV batteries from Norilsk Nickel, the company responsible for a 23,000-litre diesel spill into the Ambarnaya River.

“We expect that the river was poisoned for a long period,” Gennady Shchukin, a member of the Dolgan ethnic group, told Grist through a translator. “Maybe for several years there will be no fish in these rivers, and in the lake. This is very difficult, of course, for Indigenous people.”

So “rather than focus on an obscure Arctic mining company, Aborigen Forum is appealing to someone more likely to grab international headlines.” They’re running a social media campaign urging Musk to pay close attention to the supply chain for the nickel he needs for the cathodes in his company’s EV batteries.

“We don’t want the next industrial revolution of electric cars and clean energy developed for the price of Indigenous peoples’ rights and traditional lands,” said Aborigen Forum network member and campaign coordinator Dmitry Berezhkov. “We think if Tesla could elaborate strategy and rules for itself in the field of human rights and Indigenous peoples’ rights with regards to nickel, it could be a good opportunity to influence the general nickel market.”

Last year, the London, UK-based Business and Human Rights Resource Centre (BHRRC) made a similar but wider case connecting six of the essential raw materials behind electric vehicles, solar panels, and wind turbines—cobalt, copper, lithium, manganese, nickel, and zinc—with local land rights infringements, corruption, violence, and death.

A rapidly-growing renewable energy sector “has a chance to change the standards and practices of the industry,” BHRRC Deputy Director Marti Flacks said at the time. “This is a unique chance to send the sector a message to say: ‘You have to do your due diligence, you have to have a human rights policy, and you have to be engaging in multistakeholder initiatives, doing site visits, and most importantly talking to communities and NGOs to get accurate reporting of what’s going on.’”

On The Guardian, meanwhile, essayist and activist George Monbiot says pollution problems in the UK, in particular, will be solved by a “total transportation rethink”, not by electric cars.

“Cars are an environmental hazard long before they leave the showroom,” he writes, in an opinion piece responding to the UK government’s plan to end all sales of gasoline and diesel cars by 2030. “One estimate suggests that the carbon emissions produced in building each one equate to driving it for 150,000 kilometres,” and “the rise in electric vehicle sales has created a rush for minerals such as lithium and copper, with devastating impacts on beautiful places.”

To some degree, Monbiot says, the outcome depends on the plan. “If the aim is greatly to reduce the number of vehicles on the road, and replace those that remain with battery-operated models, then they will be part of the solution. But if, as a forecast by the National Grid proposes, the current fleet is replaced by 35 million electric cars, we’ll simply create another environmental disaster.”

Either way, Monbiot adds that “switching power sources does nothing to address the vast amount of space the car demands, which could otherwise be used for greens, parks, playgrounds, and homes. It doesn’t stop cars from carving up community and turning streets into thoroughfares and outdoor life into a mortal hazard. Electric vehicles don’t solve congestion, or the extreme lack of physical activity that contributes to our poor health.”

There’s a lot more to Monbiot’s argument. Read the whole post here.



in Auto & Alternative Vehicles, Batteries / Storage, Cities & Communities, Climate & Society, Climate Impacts & Adaptation, Community Climate Finance, Demand & Distribution, Ending Emissions, Environmental Justice, Health & Safety, Supply Chains & Consumption, Walking & Biking

The latest climate news and analysis, direct to your inbox

Subscribe

Related Posts

Jay Cross/flickr
Auto & Alternative Vehicles

New Fee Model Would Turn Licence Bureaus into ‘Climate Champions’

August 17, 2022
0
U.S. Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement/flickr
Oil & Gas

Alaska Fossils Announce New Extraction Project on North Slope

August 17, 2022
0
TGEGASENGINEERING/Wikimedia Commons
Energy Politics

EXCLUSIVE: Hydrogen is Up, Pieridae is Out as German Chancellor Preps for Canada Visit

August 15, 2022
748

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

I agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy.

Trending Stories

TGEGASENGINEERING/Wikimedia Commons

EXCLUSIVE: Hydrogen is Up, Pieridae is Out as German Chancellor Preps for Canada Visit

August 15, 2022
748
Brocken Inaglory/wikimedia commons

State-Wide Megastorm Driven by Global Heating Could Drench California for a Month

August 15, 2022
437
/Pikist

Historic Climate Bill Passes U.S. House, Goes to Biden for Signature

August 15, 2022
221
Vinaykumar8687/WikimediaCommons

Solar On Track for ‘Staggering’ 30% Growth This Year

August 15, 2022
157
UK Black Tech/wikimedia commons

U.S. Tech Workers Leaving High-Paying Jobs to Focus on Climate Crisis

August 15, 2022
122
United States Marine Core/Wikimedia Commons

Distributed Energy Gains Ground With Mobile Microgrids, Vehicle-to-Grid Technology

August 15, 2022
114

Recent Posts

Steve Jurvetson/flickr

The Other Kind of Climate Change: Even a ‘Limited’ Nuclear War Would Trigger Starvation, Kill Billions

August 15, 2022
2
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Arctic Warms 4 Times Faster than Global Average, Surpassing Estimates 

August 15, 2022
116
rawpixel

Common Medications Foil Body’s Ability to Cope with Hot Weather

August 15, 2022
92
Max Pixel

Slashing Nitrogen Dioxide Pollution Can Improve Crop Yields, Study Finds

August 15, 2022
50
David Hawgood/Geograph

E-Bikes a ‘Faster and Fairer’ Emissions Solution than Electric Cars

August 15, 2022
103
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Northeast Region/wikimedia commons

Researchers Study Carbon Loss, Forest Impacts of Northwest Territories ‘Zombie Fires’

August 15, 2022
23
Next Post
Neuhausengroup/Wikimedia Commons

Beware ‘Climate Delay’ Tactics Meant to Undermine Effective Action, Hastings-Simon Warns

The Energy Mix

Copyright 2022 © Smarter Shift Inc. and Energy Mix Productions Inc. All rights reserved.

Navigate Site

  • About
  • Contact
  • Privacy Policy and Copyright
  • Cookie Policy

Follow Us

No Result
View All Result
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities

Copyright 2022 © Smarter Shift Inc. and Energy Mix Productions Inc. All rights reserved.

Manage Cookie Consent
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behaviour or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
Manage options Manage services Manage vendors Read more about these purposes
View preferences
{title} {title} {title}