Weekly-ish News - Episode 31 (October 20, 2021)

What's the Alternative?

If you have any feedback or suggestions, please feel free to find me on Twitter @archduketyler

Electric Vehicles:

Waymo vehicles have decided to use a single street as a turnaround point and it's hilarious.

Nikola has landed a Letter of Intent from PGT Trucking to lease 100 fuel-cell trucks in 2023.

• This also includes fueling infrastructure.

VW's CEO Herbert Diess invited Elon Musk to speak at a VW executive crisis meeting.

• Diess praised Tesla's ability to be nimble and adjust to the changing market (specifically the silicon shortage).
• Elon referred to VW as Tesla's greatest competitor.
• Apparently Tesla's new plan in Germany can crank out a car in 10 hours where it takes VW 30 hours or more to build a car.
• I love this story.

Green Car Reports has a First Drive review of the Volvo C40 Recharge if you're interested in such things.

Toyota made some announcements, but they're nebulous. We'll allegedly see 15 EV models by 2025.

• 7 of these models will be "Beyond Zero" models???? Whatever that means.

The "Made in America" index is out for the year and Tesla tops the charts in terms of EVs, with 65% of their vehicles being made in America.

A new study showed that battery cathodes made from recycled materials work significantly better than cathodes made of "fresh" materials.

• This is specifically with Nick-Manganese-Cobalt (NMC) batteries, it's not clear if this applies to other chemistries.
• The recycling was done by Battery Resources, a company in the process of commercializing.
• The paper shows they were able to achieve a higher cycle life than "fresh" cathodes:
• There are lots of open questions about scalability and how widely applicable this is.

Energy:

The company B2U Storage Solutions is making money using old EV batteries for grid storage.

• They use old Nissan Leaf batteries.
• They make **$175** profit for every MWh of electricity sold to the grid. ($175 is the correct number, in the audio I say $105 at some point, but I misspoke.)
• The project cost $200/kWh ($200,000/MWh).
• Assuming the batteries can only cycle once per day, this is a 3 year return-on-investment.
• They currently have 4MWh of storage at 2.75MW of power output.
• The project is also paired with a 1MW solar project on-site.
• There is a video in the article that is 4min long and *well* worth watching.

Renewable Energy Group is expanding their Geismer, LA plant to produce 340m gallons of renewable diesel, up from 90m gallons.

• This is a $950m investment.
• It will add 60 permanent jobs and 500 temporary (construction) jobs.
• Full production begins in 2024.
• Louisiana's governor said this project will help us achieve our net-zero goals in Louisiana, which won't be true unless we have incentives that make renewable diesel cheaper, since it's all sold out of state currently.

There's lots of solar power coming to Kentucky, most recently a 125MW project that will supply the University of Kentucky, North American Stainless, Dow, and the University of Louisville.

• In total, Kentucky has 815MW of solar to be built in the next 5 years.