lithium, page-12

Hi Blueskymine01, the price of lithium batteries is down to $US145/kwh already in the price that GM are paying for LGChem batteries for the Bolt. This was mid last year, with NO gigafactories up and running.
With the gigafactories up and running, I would expect much lower prices for the batteries, and by next year some batteries will go below the $US100/kwh region.

I think you are 100% correct in noticing how this cheap price will be what stops many other technologies from actually happening.
No-one is going to build a giga-factory of a new unproven technology, but to prove any other battery technology, they will need lots of sales over lots of time. If the price is higher than Li-on batteries, then they wont have the scale of sales needed to bring the price down. lithium is or HAS put them all in a catch 22 where they cannot match Li-on batteries.
Right now grid scale Li-on batteries are being installed, not flow or any other type, simply because the lithium is cheaper.

This morning I had a chat to the operating manager of Avass busses, Electric Buses for those that don't know them. They have their own proprietry technology on their busses, lithium batteries and they make their own batteries in China. They are struggling to keep up with orders, and the waiting time for orders is starting to get longer.
One bus fully charged can go to Sydney, be put on a fast charge for 20 minutes to get to 80% of capacity and drive back to Melbourne. Unbelievable stuff.

I was asking about trucks, but for Avass that is at least a year away, though there other companies starting to make them now, like Smith Electric Trucks in the US, that are available world wide.

Commercial vehicles are a huge use for Li-on batteries, and often not counted in the figures, as the trucks and buses often use 300kwh of battery power.

The companies like Avass that are only making buses now will extend their businesses as the demand for electric buses is eventually filled, then their attention will turn to trucks as well.
Eventually, within a couple of years there will be huge semi's driven by electric power, with batteries that are forkliftable on and off.
The "service stations" across the nullabor or on the Newell and Hume highways will become huge solar farms with fully charged batteries waiting to go for nearly flat ones in exchange, or operated by some of the trucking companies themselves.

When you think of the same type of thing happening around the world, you suddenly understand the consumption from all the gigafactories and the type of demand we are looking at for lithium in the next few years.

Forecasts of 320,000t of LCE by 2020 or 670,000t by 2025, are spectacularly poor and way behind what is actually happening in the world.

By 2025 commercial vehicles alone will probably be using 1M t of LCE, with electric overtaking diesel as the main form of power before then. I fully expect all forms of commercial vehicles to go electric, and take off extremely quickly.
When one person/company in the trucking game starts using a cheaper form of transport, the rest HAVE to follow straight away or face going out of business.