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March 31, 2017

THE YEAR THAT ELECTRIC CARS WILL ECLIPSE SMARTPHONES

Electric Vehicles
Energy Storage
Manufacturers
Mobile Devices
Nadim Maluf

We, that’s all of us on this planet, buy every year 1.6 billion smartphones. It works out to one new smartphone every year for every four living human beings on this planet. Cumulatively, we own and use 4 billion smartphones around the world. Every region of the world, rich or poor, is buying smartphones. Many developing nations in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia are growing their smartphone subscriptions at a fast rate. Ericsson reports that by 2021, there will be 6.3 billion smartphone subscriptions, that’s nearly every man, woman and child around the world. Impressive!

Of course, each and every one of these smartphones has a battery in it. Your first reaction is: “that’s a lot of batteries.” Yes, that is true. Sadly, many of these batteries go to landfills after they are exhausted. The easiest way to gauge the size of the market for batteries is to calculate the entire energy supplied by all of them. Of course, that is a large number. It is measured in billions of watt-hours, abbreviated as GWh. As a reference mark, the battery in a top of the line Tesla S is 100 kWh. One GWh = 1 million kWh = 10,000 Tesla S.

In 2016, the battery factories around the world manufactured about 50 GWh worth of batteries for consumer devices. That drives an industry and a market worth in excess of $10 billions annually. Forecasts indicate that the consumer market will use about 65 to 70 GWh worth of batteries in 2020. Our appetite for more batteries is insatiable and the numbers show it.

Now let’s look at batteries in electrified vehicles, including both hybrid plug-in cars and pure electric cars (xEVs). This is a relatively new market. The Tesla S first came in 2012. The Nissan Leaf came a little earlier in 2011. Many states in the US or countries around the world haven’t yet experienced or experimented with such vehicles. In 2016, all of these vehicles accounted for a mere 0.9% of all car sales. In total, they amounted to less than 1 m vehicles in 2016.

However, in battery lingo, these cars accounted for an increasingly large number of GWh. The year 2016 was the first year that the battery capacity used in xEVs equalled that of all consumer devices, about 50 GWh. By 2020, xEVs will account for ⅔ of all battery production in the world. No wonder Elon Musk and the major car makers pay a lot of attention to their supply chain, including building these Gigafactories.

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