January 5th, 2016 by Zachary Shahan
Originally published on EV Obsession.
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.
