Act Expo 2022 - Day 1

What's the Alternative?

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NOTES:

Industry-wide:

• Daimler:
  • 300,000,000,000 miles (482b km) of trucking annually in the U.S.
  • Full electrification of trucking would increase electricity usage by 20%
• GNA:
  • Around $3b annually is spent on incentives for alt fuels, but expecting $20b/year with Infrastructure Bill Funds.

Batteries:

• Cost:
  • 70% of a pack's cost is in the cells themselves
  • 30% is in the packaging, battery management system (BMS), thermal control, etc. (the pack stuff, basically)
• Manufacturing:
  • Battery Manufacturing apparently costs $65m/GWh of production rate to build a factory.
• Second-Life and Recycling:
  • The cost of breaking down and separating components of used batteries, plus the cost of reprogramming and repackaging them means that used batteries are nearly as expensive for grid storage and second life solutions than brand new batteries.
    • This implies that battery swap is a boon to second-life applications.
  • Italy has mandated that anyone bringing a battery into the country must have a plan for disposing of that battery (they own the value chain).
• Weight and Efficiency:
  • There was a resounding sigh when someone asked about getting battery weight down. The long and short of it is that it doesn't seem likely, according to all the panelists.
  • Battery packs get about 60% packing efficiency (60% of the pack is the cells, 40% is the housing and such). They hope to optimistically get towards 80% one day.
  • Cells have increased in energy density by 4x over the last 2 decades, but has stalled since 2017.
  • New form factors improve pack density, not energy density of the cells.
• Solid state:
  • Not in the next decade. Manufacturing ramp-up will take forever and they are too far behind traditional batteries. Will come to wearables and consumer electronics first.

Surprises:

• Romeo Power claims to have a battery that did 1000 cycles from 10-80% state-of-charge at 1MW of charging power, and the pack still has over 85% of its health.
• GNA said CNG and Propane no longer need incentives for adoption.
  • I think this is *maybe* true for Propane, very much not true for CNG.
• Refuse trucks (trash trucks) use around 50kWh of energy for trash compaction alone in a day's work.

Not Surprises:

• Shell says they really believe in hydrogen.
• The conference has, so far, been heavily focused on the California Market.
• There were lots of buzz words and often very little substance.