Your Tax Dollars At Stake: Battery Maker A123 Running Out Of Runway
The irrational electrification exuberance claims another victim: Battery maker A123 Systems Inc is running out of money. A lot of it is your money. Says Reuters:
“The company, which received a $249 million grant from the Obama administration as part of a program to develop advanced lithium-ion batteries, said in documents filed with U.S. regulators that it “expects to have approximately four to five months of cash to support its ongoing operations” based on its recent monthly spending average.”
Reuters views A123’s issues as “a reminder of the struggles for a U.S. electric-vehicle industry still in its infancy and dealing with lower-than-projected demand.”
The wire service calls President Barack Obama’s goal of getting 1 million battery-powered vehicles on the road by 2015 “a target that is looking increasingly unrealistic.”
America’s best-selling plug-ins, the Volt, the plug-in Prius and the Nissan Leaf jointly sold 2,990 units in June. They were out-sold by a small sports car targeted at drifters, the Toyobaru hachi-roku, which sold 3,502 units in June.
Bertel Schmitt comes back to journalism after taking a 35 year break in advertising and marketing. He ran and owned advertising agencies in Duesseldorf, Germany, and New York City. Volkswagen A.G. was Bertel's most important corporate account. Schmitt's advertising and marketing career touched many corners of the industry with a special focus on automotive products and services. Since 2004, he lives in Japan and China with his wife <a href="http://www.tomokoandbertel.com"> Tomoko </a>. Bertel Schmitt is a founding board member of the <a href="http://www.offshoresuperseries.com"> Offshore Super Series </a>, an American offshore powerboat racing organization. He is co-owner of the racing team Typhoon.
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Many commenters are conflating energy storage and energy production. Batteries store energy, but if you don't like coal and you don't like nukes then chances are almost 2 in 3 that you don't like the source from which the energy stored in a pure battery car is actually produced. Not true of a hybrid with regenerative storage of energy produced by gas, which of course, many people also don't like. edit - just after posting, I read a link from Instapundit that natural gas produced as much electricity as coal in April... well, some people don't like fracking.
There is no one magic bullet for alternative energy. There's not enough available land to have enough solar or wind to free us from oil. There's not enough arable land to grow enough corn for ethanol production. Sorry to bust someone's well meaning bubble. I'm cheap and the Prius V is looking pretty good to me. The ability to use little gas on long trips and Toyota reliability seems like a good deal. However, most of my electricity comes from coal fired plants. Coal mining, sometimes hill topping, coal fired plants. When you're around me don't wrap yourself in your binkey of smugness and Eco friendliness when your electricity comes from coal.
"When you’re around me don’t wrap yourself in your binkey of smugness and Eco friendliness when your electricity comes from coal." Sorry but an EV like the Leaf running around on electricty generated by coal is still cleaner than any Prius. And there are people currently generating more electrical power with the solar panels on the roof of their homes then they use in their EV's. Obviously these are extreme cases but it just goes to show you what can be done when you open your mind.
Many major power drill manufacturers (ex: DeWalt) have moved away from the A123 cells to less capable ones - this is a crime to humanity akin to putting an anemic 200hp engine in the toyobaru that clearly deserves more. We should be up in arms about this instead of talking about electric cars!