Battery-making gigafactories are about to arrive in Europe, challenging a lead Tesla Inc is building at a plant in Nevada and opening the way for a quicker shift toward “green” power for both cars and utilities.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel was scheduled to break ground yesterday at a 500 million euro (US$543 million) plant to assemble lithium-ion energy-storage units for Daimler AG, which produces Mercedes-Benz and Maybach luxury cars.
The facility 130km south of Berlin highlights a push by both major automakers and power companies into energy storage.
The technology is crucial to drive the next generation of “green” vehicles and to hold electricity from wind and solar farms for when it is needed most.
With two dominant industries moving in the same direction, the cost of batteries is likely to plunge quickly, Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) said.
“As battery costs fall and their energy density increases, we could see cheaper battery-electric cars than their fuel-burning equivalents by 2030,” said Nikolas Soulopoulos, an analyst with the London-based research arm of Bloomberg LP.
Global battery-making capacity is set to more than double by 2021, reaching 278 gigawatt-hours, up from about 103 gigawatt-hours now, BNEF said, adding that Europe’s market share is expected to almost double over that time from 2.5 percent.
Large-scale factories planned in Sweden, Hungary and Poland, as well as Daimler’s battery assembly plant in Germany, are expected to feed demand from automakers such as Volkswagen AG and Renault SA. That will cut the cost of lithium-ion packs by 43 percent and make electric cars a mainstream reality, the researcher estimates.
For the utilities, cheaper batteries reduce the cost of storage units that smooth the variable flows of electric power to the grid from renewables.
At Enel SpA, Italy’s biggest distributor, pairing a battery with a wind farm helped grid managers improve forecasts for electricity output by as much as 30 percent.
“Batteries are clearly a key enabler for renewables penetration,” Enel director of innovation and sustainability Riccardo Amoroso said.
“We have seen impressive results in our pilot industrial scale projects, especially in terms of increased programming and reduced intermittency,” he added.
Finland’s Fortum Oyj is similarly testing batteries for its gigawatt-sized plan for solar and wind projects, chief financial officer Markus Rauramo said.
Used since the early 1990s in consumer electronics such as computers and phones, lithium-ion batteries have made a leap into the transport and power industries, but because of their cost, their application on the grid and in cars is only now starting to spread.
The battery boom is to be most evident to consumers in electric vehicles, with most major automakers planning plug-in models by the middle of the next decade.
Currently, electronics makers in Asia control the battery business. South Korea’s LG Ltd and Samsung SDI Co are among the top vendors, according to BNEF, and Asia is expected to maintain its lead with an additional eight factories being constructed in China alone.
Automakers are moving quickly to secure battery capacity. Daimler’s factory would be the biggest yet in Europe, responding to Tesla’s US$5 billion gigafactory venture with Panasonic Corp.
At Daimler, batteries are to feed its cars and a venture Mercedes-Benz entered with rooftop-solar installer Vivint Solar Inc to produce home energy storage systems.
“Looking a few years out, as we have a stronger penetration of EVs in the market, you’ll have more demand on the grid, which may need to be supported by storage,” Mercedes-Benz Energy Americas chief executive officer Boris von Bormann said.
Tesla’s plant was about a third complete in January and is to give it access to 35 gigawatts a year of capacity when finished, enough for its planned production rate of 500,000 cars per year. This would place the Palo Alto, California-based automaker as the No. 2 supplier behind LG Chem Ltd.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”