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Tesla Could Be Hogging Batteries and Causing a Global Shortage, Says Report (gizmodo.com)
According to a report from the Korea news outlet ETNews, Tesla's solution to fixing a manufacturing bottleneck responsible for a $619 million loss last quarter could be causing a global battery shortage. Panasonic reportedly gave most of its cache of batteries in Japan to Tesla so that the automaker and Gigafactory 1 energy-storage company could keep up with its ambitious production schedule. Gizmodo reports: In early October, Tesla struggled with a "production bottleneck," but by the end of the month, Panasonic stated it would increase battery output at the Gigafactory, now that it understood the issues that led to the bottleneck and could automate some of the processes that had been done by hand. But this likely did not help Tesla fix any immediate shortage issues. ETNews claims that Panasonic is coping with the shortage by shipping batteries in from Japan. And many Japanese companies in need of cylinder batteries have turned to other suppliers like LG, Murata, and Samsung -- but those companies have not been able to meet the demands. Reportedly, companies that had contracts before 2017 aren't affected by the shortage, but several other manufacturers have not been able to place orders for batteries, and won't be able to order more batteries until the middle of next year.
Fuck everyone else. It's just good business.
As we shift from fossil fuels to batteries, we will have to ramp up production. Tesla is causing that to happen NOW, rather than in the future when it could be even more disruptive. This is a Good Thing. We need to produce more lithium, and more cobalt. We need to make more batteries, and make them cheaper and more efficiently. By bringing the inevitable supply problems forward, innovators will be incentivized to find solutions.
Let's see: company (Tesla) has more need for materials furnished by a partner company(Panasonic), so orders more and partner company supplies the extra materials. Other companies WITHOUT existing supply contracts whine about being unable to buy batteries from partner company. Isn't this at some level how basic capitalism works? It's not like there aren't other battery suppliers and - yes! - demand is skyrocketing. Welcome to the real world.
What's the environmental impact of this battery manufacturing?
Compared to extracting oil from the Alberta tar sands, the impact is modest. Lithium is extracted from salt flats and underground brine, which are not ecological hotspots. Cobalt is mostly a byproduct of open pit copper and nickel mining, and little mining is done specifically to extract cobalt.
If they're being shipped from Japan to the US, then they'll have a higher carbon footprint due to being shipped across an ocean than batteries manufactured locally, no?
Not really. Ocean transport is very efficient, and adds little to the carbon footprint of these vehicles.
Are vehicles that use batteries like this truly more environmentally friendly
Yes, by a big margin.
Ocean shipping is dirty as hell!
Container ships burn high sulfur bunker fuel, which produces lots and lots of sulfates, which are nasty pollutants ... ON LAND. But at sea, the sulfates settle onto the surface of the sea, where they have a negligible effect since the ocean already contains quadrillions of tons of sulfur.
Sulfur is a pollutant in the same way that salt is a pollutant: It depends on where you put it.