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Seems to me like there's only money to be made with EV if the market share shifts remarkably. The amount of car drivers over time is not going to increase because of EVs (and hopefully over time if anything it decreases). So there's no remarkable* upside for Ford if they successfully transition from ICE to BEVs and... retain the exact same market share that they have now. The only remarkable money to be made here from a stock gambler pov is if there's a surprising marketshare shift here where some nobody company (eg. BYD, Rivian) somehow replaces a major player or becomes so important/dominant that a major player is forced into acquiring them at a high price. * People have been musing about more complex infotainment systems in cars offering more revenue opportunities to car makers but remains to be seen.
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Jan 14, 2024 20:44
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Femtosecond posted:Seems to me like there's only money to be made with EV if the market share shifts remarkably. I think the upside is in the supply chain because there's a lot of companies with no prior involvement in the automotive industry that will need to grow substantially from what is still a low base to provide the components (batteries, motors etc) needed for the transition from ICE to EV.
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Jan 14, 2024 20:53
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gay picnic defence posted:I think the upside is in the supply chain because there's a lot of companies with no prior involvement in the automotive industry that will need to grow substantially from what is still a low base to provide the components (batteries, motors etc) needed for the transition from ICE to EV. I agree with this, and if there were a battery companies ETF That was based on future prospects I’d turn into Jim Kramer in a heartbeat and be hitting buy everywhere
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Jan 15, 2024 01:22
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Ubiquitus posted:I agree with this, and if there were a battery companies ETF That was based on future prospects I’d turn into Jim Kramer in a heartbeat and be hitting buy everywhere Like this one? https://www.globalxetfs.com/funds/lit/
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Jan 15, 2024 09:02
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I get my investing advice from random strangers on weird, dead gay comedy internet forums... and so I'm going long on this
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Jan 15, 2024 22:16
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Instead of the ETF, I've been eyeballing just buying ALB since pmchem brought them up a ways back. This ETF has ~10% of their money in ALB, but I'm not a huge fan of a lot of the other companies they are holding, like TSLA. And too many obscurely run chinese (and korean) companies. I just don't really feel like I can trust that shareholders are being looked out for, at least public shareholders. ALB management seems pretty on point, good financials. You're not getting diversification, but screw it, get your diversification elsewhere. (I have not bought it yet, was hoping to get in around 120)
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Jan 15, 2024 22:43
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Baddog posted:Instead of the ETF, I've been eyeballing just buying ALB since pmchem brought them up a ways back. This ETF has ~10% of their money in ALB, but I'm not a huge fan of a lot of the other companies they are holding, like TSLA. And too many obscurely run chinese (and korean) companies. I just don't really feel like I can trust that shareholders are being looked out for, at least public shareholders. fun to examine this, their earnings are in 1 month. last presentation: https://s201.q4cdn.com/960975307/files/doc_earnings/2023/q3/presentation/Q32023_presentation.pdf transcript: https://capedge.com/transcript/915913/2023Q3/ALB date of that call was Nov. 2. on Nov. 1, https://twitter.com/Sino_Market/status/1719606396969156925?s=20 chinese futures 171,000 yuan/ton they hit a low of about half that, 85,800 yuan/ton near start of winter. currently, https://twitter.com/Sino_Market/status/1744613725863354852?s=20 vaguely 100k yuan/ton lithium carbonate is something like $17/kg right now(various google sources), as opposed to 20's during the call. from the call: quote:Operator so, at the time, management was 'perplexed' why the price is where it was. since then lithium price is down another 40% or so in china and I dunno 30% on lith carb, below the analyst's presumed-bad-case hypothetical. doesn't inspire confidence. I suspect slide 12 of the q3 presentation, 'number go up' at CAGR 20-30%, is gonna get revised or left out of Q4. lithium futures do seem to have levelled off in china, but what do those levels do to ALB's margins going forward? it's not clear. multiple analysts in the call grilled them on cutting back capex, guess we'll see how that played out in a month. also mentioned on the Q3 call was their CFO retiring. stock is basically flat since that earnings call! poo poo man, I dunno, their management might be dumb and the CFO may be getting out while it's good. but if EV sales start inflecting up bigly again, they'll make bank. buying ALB right now is just basically a bet on the second derivative of next quarter's global EV demand
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Jan 15, 2024 23:26
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pmchem posted:... buying ALB right now is just basically a bet on the second derivative of next quarter's global EV demand In general I've been thinking EV is just going to pick up steam everywhere, and be the dominant technology within 5 years or so. But then you see something like this. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/08/automakers-turn-to-hybrids-ev-transition.html Which I guess doesn't say that EV's are losing market share, just that hybrids are growing faster. To me hybrid is the worst of both worlds, two separate systems and all the extra to manage flipping between them. 
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Jan 15, 2024 23:56
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gay picnic defence posted:Like this one? Not quite what I meant. I want to invest in private companies researching different battery tech, not supply anything along the lithium supply chain
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Jan 16, 2024 00:15
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Ubiquitus posted:Not quite what I meant. I want to invest in private companies researching different battery tech, not supply anything along the lithium supply chain I have to imagine any research stage battery company that is accepting private equity investments from individual retail investors is very likely to be a scam. There is an absolute ton of money available in this space for legit players from large PE firms and other large investors.
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Jan 16, 2024 01:59
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Sodium ion batteries are beginning to make their way into EVs. They’re cheaper than lithium ion, and have similar energy density to lipo batteries.
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Jan 16, 2024 02:10
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Baddog posted:To me hybrid is the worst of both worlds, two separate systems and all the extra to manage flipping between them. Hybrids are perfect for low-power appliance cars and leverage the engine tech that big auto has been developing for 100 years. EVs make perfect sense to a certain consumer: own/rent a dedicated space to charge the vehicle and don’t require driving ~200mi frequently. That consumer probably describes ~45% (or more) of the auto market, but a large portion of that base is going to have range anxiety / not-a-first-adopter mentality and self-select themselves out. But you know who hybrids appeal to? everyone. I mean everyone, even the freak supercar nutters. It’s all positives except for an extra $3k on the hood. The “but what about the battery maintenance” whiners are completely delusional and using that as an excuse to justify their own prejudice; there’s a reason all taxi fleets are Priuses and it isn’t because the maintenance cost is high. DNK fucked around with this message at 02:30 on Jan 16, 2024 |
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Jan 16, 2024 02:28
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The US is way, way, way behind on having enough electrical infrastructure to support home-charged EVs if even half of all drivers switched to an EV. The batteries are not the bottleneck. If you don't see states massively investing in adding generation and greatly expanding transmission and storage, home-charged full EVs cannot take over the american privately owned vehicle market. This is part of why hybrids are attractive for long-term investment. I don't know if it's the reason they're actually selling more, I doubt most consumers know that while they can totally charge their own car on their 220v outlet in their garage, if everyone tries to do that we'll start getting brownouts. I think people still have a lot of "range anxiety," and worry about the longevity of batteries. We all see the frankly ridiculous degree to which our rechargable batteries in consumer devices fail to live up to their advertised longevity, and people quite reasonably transfer that experience to being dubious that their EV will last eight years - even though a large percentage of new car buyers sell in four years. But there's a hard limit to how many EVs the US can actually support charging and we are not doing or even planning to do what's necessary to raise that limit in the next decade. The automakers are aware of it even if consumers aren't. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 18:34 on Jan 16, 2024 |
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Jan 16, 2024 18:31
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Leperflesh posted:The US is way, way, way behind on having enough electrical infrastructure to support home-charged EVs if even half of all drivers switched to an EV. The batteries are not the bottleneck. If you don't see states massively investing in adding generation and greatly expanding transmission and storage, home-charged full EVs cannot take over the american privately owned vehicle market. This is not true at all. The mass adoption of air conditioning units affected the grid worse than EV charging will. Electric companies aren’t sitting on their hands while they see demand for their energy increases steadily.
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Jan 16, 2024 19:50
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Even the worst case construction time of a power plant is 20 years. Best is 4. Demand will drive production. Plus increased prices will cause people to be more efficient. Hell if prices for up 2000 percent I might raise my cooling temp up a degree.
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Jan 16, 2024 19:57
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We have, right now, constructed power plants not connected to the grid because we're so far behind on upgrading the transmission grid. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/06/outdated-us-energy-grid-tons-of-clean-energy-stuck-waiting-in-line.html quote:The entire electric grid in the United States has installed capacity of about 1,250 gigawatts of power and there is currently 2,020 gigawatts of energy capacity waiting in line to be connected. The saving grace for EVs is that they're typically charged during off-load non-peak hours. But we're not going to be able to sustain attractive prices even for off-peak hour charging without a massive investment in interconnection that is currently serving as an obstacle to getting even the planned new capacity connected.
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Jan 16, 2024 20:27
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Leperflesh posted:The US is way, way, way behind on having enough electrical infrastructure to support home-charged EVs Do you have a link that supports this statement directly? I saw your other link but it's tangentially supportive at best There's a huge, massive oversupply of energy available overnight, when most cars charge, which is why a lot of providers charge less at night, to incentivize use then Is there enough infra to run the country AND charge Is there enough capacity to charge a third of all EV every third day from 60 to 90% from 9pm-6am? That's a more compelling question
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Jan 16, 2024 21:53
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FWIW, I'm in technology sector but have done a bit of work in the energy industry. Everything stated by Leperflesh is an entirely accurate. There is simply no way at this time to physically mine all the resources required EVs. Even if you did the only countries that have a grid to support this with renewables (and Nuclear) is maybe Sweden or Norway. The scale is absolutely insane. Unless there are multiple significant breakthroughs like cleaner, safer and more affordable Nuclear Power I think ICE and Hybrids will being around for a while. If you want to dig deeper I strongly recommend getting into Daniel Yergin books if you want to dig deeper into electricity, oil and gas, etc.
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Jan 17, 2024 02:09
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there's like 300m cars in the USA. about 300k EV were sold in the USA in the 4Q and the s-curve is already sloping down. this is really a nonissue for the near term, nationally, EVs simply aren't displacing gas cars quickly enough to strain the grid before 2030 (if then). idk maybe in like SF where everyone has to own a tesla or be cast out of the local cult
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Jan 17, 2024 03:14
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I get a lot of my science and technology news from Sabine Hossenfelder, a physicist who has transitioned into a career as a science commentator on youtube. This is her more recent, revised video on EVs generally, and I'm linking to the segment on the transmission capacity issues. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNBLhGsjHQI&t=616s It is tough to google for articles that cover this specifically in an unbiased way. What I do see is a fair bit of disagreement. Part of it is because the electrical industry itself wants to present itself as green, and getting greener: predicting that it's going to fail to support EVs is counter to the messaging. Another issue is that many articles look at constructed capacity, and current transmission capacity, at face value rather than looking in depth at where we can actually deliver that power and where the bottlenecks are, which parts of the capacity and especially infrastructure components of the grid are at end-of-life or on the verge of failure due to decades of deferred maintenance, and the inefficiencies imposed by weather that can reduce both at key times. Especially as we increase renewables as inputs into the grid, we have to pay attention a lot more to storage, because both wind and solar are interrupted, cyclical sources that don't just happen to give us peak capacity during every day of the year at the times we want power. It does vary by state. There are states like California that can hit 100% renewables-supplied power at certain moments of the year, and operates near that most of the time now; and there's states like Texas that are deliberately isolated from the rest of the country, which means they cannot operate full time on renewables period (unless they go all nuclear, which is technically a renewable) because they cannot effectively import power when it's cold, dark, and not windy or too cold for wind turbines to work. The truth is you can throw out the "EV" part: our electrical grid is poised for a crisis in the next 20 years regardless as we attempt to transition to all renewables, and overall demand grows from many sources. But if you're also charging something like 280 million vehicles at night or hell let's say only half of the fleet gets charged daily, 140M added to the grid nightly just stresses it further and worse.
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Jan 17, 2024 03:34
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Hadlock posted:Do you have a link that supports this statement directly? I saw your other link but it's tangentially supportive at best Check out the US energy flow:  Replacing fossil fuels in transportation would require significantly increasing electricity production. Its not just an issue of charging overnight when demand is currently lower. While this transition cant happen instantly, it certainly seems possible over the likely timeline of mass transport electrification (10+ years).
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Jan 17, 2024 03:36
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pmchem posted:idk maybe in like SF where everyone has to own a tesla or be cast out of the local cult In boulder you gotta drive a rivian now. elon lost his mind years ago, plenty of time to buy a new car!
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Jan 17, 2024 03:43
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drk posted:Replacing fossil fuels in transportation would require significantly increasing electricity production. Its not just an issue of charging overnight when demand is currently lower. The energy efficiency of fossil fuels greatly increases when it's used for producing electricity rather than powering transportation vehicles so you can't do a 1:1 comparison there. There's a lot of roadblocks for mass EV adoption in North America (sticker price, home charging availability, public charging price, preferred brand nonexistent, etc...). Edit: As the grid relies more on renewables, EVs will help flatten the demand curve by charging when solar/wind power is at the strongest. They may also sell energy back to the power companies in certain areas. Nfcknblvbl fucked around with this message at 17:13 on Jan 17, 2024 |
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Jan 17, 2024 17:10
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Nfcknblvbl posted:The energy efficiency of fossil fuels greatly increases when it's used for producing electricity rather than powering transportation vehicles so you can't do a 1:1 comparison there. Yes, its hard to directly compare, but the chart I posted does indicate that a lot of energy is "rejected". Presumably mostly in the form of waste heat, but with electricity there are also losses in transmission, conversion from AC<->DC, etc. Nfcknblvbl posted:Edit: As the grid relies more on renewables, EVs will help flatten the demand curve by charging when solar/wind power is at the strongest. They may also sell energy back to the power companies in certain areas. Out of curiosity, do any current EVs actually do this? Can you tell your Tesla to only charge when renewable production expected to be high? At least in CA, forecasts are available a day ahead of time, so this should be possible in theory. Even if this is technically possible, is it practical? For example, peak solar is around noon, when most people who can afford EVs are at work. The grid is substantially more fossil based in the evenings and overnight when people can charge at home.
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Jan 17, 2024 17:36
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drk posted:Yes, its hard to directly compare, but the chart I posted does indicate that a lot of energy is "rejected". Presumably mostly in the form of waste heat, but with electricity there are also losses in transmission, conversion from AC<->DC, etc. I did find it funny that it was labelled "rejected" instead of "wasted". I'm not missing something here, right? You can see from the graph though that we lose just amazing amounts of power everywhere. I believe energy distribution technology is basically the same as it was 150 years ago. Wires on a pole.
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Jan 17, 2024 18:01
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drk posted:Yes, its hard to directly compare, but the chart I posted does indicate that a lot of energy is "rejected". Presumably mostly in the form of waste heat, but with electricity there are also losses in transmission, conversion from AC<->DC, etc. It depends on the car, but yes, you can schedule charging on a wide variety of them. There's also pushes to put chargers in office car parks, so you can charge during the day.
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Jan 17, 2024 18:07
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drk posted:Out of curiosity, do any current EVs actually do this? Can you tell your Tesla to only charge when renewable production expected to be high? At least in CA, forecasts are available a day ahead of time, so this should be possible in theory. Yes, vehicle models are out now, and even more with this capability. Sure, many EV owners won't be able to take advantage of the incentive or even want to do this but the energy storage problem will need lots of creative solutions in the near future. It still beats having massive lithium battery farms imo.
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Jan 17, 2024 18:08
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Baddog posted:I did find it funny that it was labelled "rejected" instead of "wasted". I'm not missing something here, right? Its a weird term, but it makes sense in a lot of processes. For example in thermoelectric power generation, a lot of heat is "rejected" into the atmosphere or a body of water because the temperature is too low to be used in the electricity generating turbines.
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Jan 17, 2024 18:30
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drk posted:Out of curiosity, do any current EVs actually do this? Can you tell your Tesla to only charge when renewable production expected to be high? At least in CA, forecasts are available a day ahead of time, so this should be possible in theory. My iPhone has an option in the battery settings to prefer charging when clean energy is available. If my iPhone can do this I assume a Tesla can as well.
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Jan 17, 2024 18:44
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Has anyone tried buying IP addresses as an investment Like Bitcoin there's only a finite number, but unlike Bitcoin they have real world value and use You can buy a /24 which is a block of 256 ip addresses for $32-50 ea which is about $10,000 Amazon will start charging users $4/mo for use of static IP addresses Ipv6 exists and is functional (and virtually an unlimited number of ips) but the world still runs on ipv4 Hadlock fucked around with this message at 20:28 on Jan 17, 2024 |
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Jan 17, 2024 20:25
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Hadlock posted:
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Jan 17, 2024 20:50
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I feel pretty bullish on our ability to generate electricity if the extra demand is there. Mostly because to this point we've largely done the easiest simplest thing and there's enormous amounts of potential to try other things that has been unexploited simply because we haven't needed to. Offshore wind a major example. Geothermal another one. During the energy crisis of the 1970s Canada did a bunch of work to do geothermal exploration but then just shelved everything when gas became cheap again. And of course nuclear. I think the point around rare materials being hard to mine is more relevant and I'd see a slow down happening more due to that than other things should further technology improvements face friction. I dunno all of it means I think there's gonna be poo poo tons of work for companies that improve the grid for long time to come sort of regardless of what happens. Even if EVs are somehow a bust and we move to some other technology or way of doing transportation, there remains enormous interest in moving home heating to electrical. Many cities in Canada are now mandating electrical heating in new builds. Heating with natural gas is being phased out. One of the companies in this space is Quanta (PWR). I made a small investment in them a while ago. It was doing well for a while but seems to have encountered some headwinds recently. Not sure what other good companies there are in the space. Femtosecond fucked around with this message at 21:20 on Jan 17, 2024 |
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Jan 17, 2024 21:18
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Yeah that's a good call, find companies that build or upgrade transmission lines and neighborhood transformers. We need tens of millions of new transformers!
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Jan 17, 2024 21:19
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always curious with a broader sector bet how you time your exit. my naive assumption is that the electric infrastructure build out is going to end up resembling the railroad or telecom boom and bust, where a good exit is critical because over the long term it's a boring utility that was probably overbuilt at its peak
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Jan 17, 2024 21:57
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Great question... bail out when the best selling car in America is an electric?
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Jan 17, 2024 22:40
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Femtosecond posted:Great question... bail out when the best selling car in America is an electric? lol. well.... ehhh maybe when it's the best selling vehicle overall. All of this "bet on EV growth and grid improvements" might come tumbling down in 11 months.... might not be the best time to jump into anything perceived as "green".
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Jan 17, 2024 22:48
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Baddog posted:lol. well.... ehhh maybe when it's the best selling vehicle overall. How can weed stocks become more worthless?
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Jan 17, 2024 23:09
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Hadlock posted:Has anyone tried buying IP addresses as an investment How much is a taxi medallion in NYC?
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Jan 18, 2024 06:07
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pmchem posted:so, at the time, management was 'perplexed' why the price is where it was. since then lithium price is down another 40% or so in china and I dunno 30% on lith carb, below the analyst's presumed-bad-case hypothetical. doesn't inspire confidence. I suspect slide 12 of the q3 presentation, 'number go up' at CAGR 20-30%, is gonna get revised or left out of Q4. 2 days after my post...: quote:Chemical company to take an undisclosed charge in Q1 for cost-cutting moves
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Jan 18, 2024 20:31
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Allright, maybe I'll hold off on ALB until after earnings! Nfcknblvbl posted:Sodium ion batteries are beginning to make their way into EVs. They’re cheaper than lithium ion, and have similar energy density to lipo batteries. This worries me too....hmmm
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Jan 18, 2024 20:39
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