Tesla Senior Vice President, Powertrain and Energy Engineering, Drew Baglino discusses the long term issues building the battery and electric vehicle supply chain.
This was at a Stanford University event. Drew talked with Yi Cui, Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Director of the Stanford Precourt Institute for Energy and Will Chueh, Associate Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Senior Fellow at the Stanford Precourt Institute for Energy, to share his experiences and what excites him in the energy storage space.
Drew discussed the challenges of getting 300 to 500 terawatt-hours of batteries and building supply chains that are dedicated to batteries and electric vehicles. This needs to reach a pace of 15-20 terawatt-hours per year. The industry needs to grow at 50% per year for 20 years. The battery world has reached 1 terawatt hour of batteries. There were 300 gigawatt-hours of batteries produced last year. This was leveraging mining byproducts of the oil and gas industry. This is now growing beyond piggybacking on the oil industry.
The fundamental bottleneck for the next decade is the raw materials. There needs to be more lithium extracted.
If sodium can be made as compelling as lithium, then this would reduce the demand on lithium scaling.
Stanford is working on extracting lithium from low concentration sources.
Tesla is working to get rid of all methods to get rid of metals in the cathode.
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