Thoughts on TESLA

[brett]

Absolutely.

No to the stock. No to their product at this time.

 

[Sunnymar]

You guys are scaring me, we already own a model S, my DH LOVES it, loves the technology. I'm more neutral, I prefer to drive our Audi Q7. The best feature for me is driving solo in the carpool lane with the CAV decal.

 

[dixonge]

Some interesting info from Worm Capital:


Gigafactory 1 is 2nd largest building in U.S. - after expansion it will be largest in world (2020)


Have ordered 3 new Grohmann machines - 1st will increase Model 3 battery production to 8,000/week


Currently produces more battery capacity than all other car mfg combined (including China) - will soon hit a BILLION/year.


https://www.wormcapital.com/insights/tesla-gigafactory-visit

 

[ERD50]

Some interesting info from Worm Capital:


Gigafactory 1 is 2nd largest building in U.S. - after expansion it will be largest in world (2020)


Have ordered 3 new Grohmann machines - 1st will increase Model 3 battery production to 8,000/week


Currently produces more battery capacity than all other car mfg combined (including China) - will soon hit a BILLION/year.


https://www.wormcapital.com/insights/tesla-gigafactory-visit

Impressive. But let me put that in perspective for people thinking we can replace fossil easily with RE and battery storage. I read in a related article that "When complete, the Gigafactory is expected to be .... reaching a battery production rate of 35 gigawatt-hours per year,"

If we took an entire years production from that largest building in the world, and used it to store lulls in solar/wind, and wanted to eliminate a single 800 MW coal plant - that entire year's worth of battery production could supply 800 MW for less than 2 days. It sure would take a long time to provide weeks of partial backup for a significant percent of our fossil fuel, nation-wide.

I was also intrigued by this part of it:

"When complete, the Gigafactory is expected to be the largest building in the world, entirely powered by renewable energy ..."

I'll be impressed if that means they won't have a grid connection (using their batteries to store solar to run the plant). Otherwise, they are not "entirely powered by renewable energy". They are powered by the grid, and are producing an offsetting amount of RE. That might be a good thing, but it's not the same thing.

-ERD50

 

[dixonge]

Impressive. But let me put that in perspective for people thinking we can replace fossil easily with RE and battery storage.

And yet no one was thinking that. It was an article about Tesla and their batteries. It wasn't an article about fossil fuels or the overall RE market. But thanks for once again pretending to like RE while simultaneously shitting all over every positive RE news or post.


Yeah, that'll get me a demerit. Don't care. I keep forgetting how much this site draws me into arguing over stupid things with strangers.

 

[ERD50]

The thread touches on both. Musk says we have plenty of electricity for his cars if we stop refining oil. But that's not true, and it plays into the whole RE and EV and Tesla story. The numbers need to be analyzed.

Don't shoot the messenger. I'm just trying to provide perspective - many people really do not know how to deal with big numbers of energy. Most people don't grasp the difference between a watt and a watt-hour.

When you said " will soon hit a BILLION/year." A Billion what?

I believe in "reality", "facts", and "truth", not "negative" or "positive". Negative/positive comes from the facts.

OK, so Tesla will have a big building. What does this really mean for the company? I have no idea. They have lots of competition, their credits are running out (not just customer credits, but credits from other car companies that need to meet 'zero pollution' quotas in some states). I think Tesla the car company will have a tough time of it.

Maybe their batteries will find a place in load leveling on the grid (the seconds/minutes/hours I spoke of)? We will see.

-ERD50

 

[Scrapr]

What do you think if Apple buys TSLA? Lets Elon out with a payday and puts management in place to run an actual company. Clark Howard brought this up recently. Sounds intriguing. Allows Apple to kick start the autonomous car program

 

[aja8888]

What do you think if Apple buys TSLA? Lets Elon out with a payday and puts management in place to run an actual company. Clark Howard brought this up recently. Sounds intriguing. Allows Apple to kick start the autonomous car program

With many top engineers and executives leaving Tesla, I'm not sure Apple will want to buy it. Also, that's not their business model (cars, batteries, debt) and would probably create a huge distraction for Apple management.

 

[Chuckanut]

Apple buys Tesla? Nope. We would have nothing but $150,000+ EVs within Five years.

 

[Scrapr]

Apple buys Tesla? Nope. We would have nothing but $150,000+ EVs within Five years.

have you seen Model X It's here now!

 

[aja8888]

Apple buys Tesla? Nope. We would have nothing but $150,000+ EVs within Five years.

But they would probably come with a free iPhone.

 

[NW-Bound]

... let me put that in perspective for people thinking we can replace fossil easily with RE and battery storage. I read in a related article that "When complete, the Gigafactory is expected to be .... reaching a battery production rate of 35 gigawatt-hours per year,"

If we took an entire years production from that largest building in the world, and used it to store lulls in solar/wind, and wanted to eliminate a single 800 MW coal plant - that entire year's worth of battery production could supply 800 MW for less than 2 days. It sure would take a long time to provide weeks of partial backup for a significant percent of our fossil fuel, nation-wide...

You got me interested, so I looked for some additional numbers.

The US used 3.83 trillion kWh in 2017. That's an average of about 10.5 billion kWh per day.

A battery large enough to store one day of usage for the US would take Tesla 300 years to produce.

The article on Tesla Gigafactory said that the battery price was expected to get down to $100/kWh, which is pretty good by today's standard.

The 1-day giga battery for the US would cost $1 trillion dollars!

What are we going to do when fossil fuel runs out? We will all live in tiny homes, sweating bullets in the summer, and freezing our buns off in the winter. I am glad I will be already dead when it comes to that point. My great grandchildren will be living in caves to have moderate temperatures.

 

[Popeye]

... I'm not sure, but I think the efficient co-gen turbines are more for base load, not so much for peaker (I'll try to look that up later).


-ERD50

A little delayed, but here's a quick video on the newer co-gen plant design. It basically uses a steam turbine to recover waste heat from the gas turbine exhaust. They do bump up the efficiency a good bit. But steamers do not like to stop and start. Proper start up procedure on a large steamer is not measured in minutes. You need many hours to do it right.



https://youtu.be/eeiu-wcyEbs

 

[kcowan]

I have to believe that Musk is well aware of the total energy numbers highlighted in this thread. Thanks guys for providing perspective in face of all the hype. TSLA is a highly speculative stock. I am passed that phase in my investing life. I suspect it was the higher level facts that caused the exodus of executives. It may be contributing to Musk's state of stress.

 

[samclem]

The 1-day giga battery for the US would cost $1 trillion dollars!

What are we going to do when fossil fuel runs out? We will all live in tiny homes, sweating bullets in the summer, and freezing our buns off in the winter. I am glad I will be already dead when it comes to that point. My great grandchildren will be living in caves to have moderate temperatures.

If we imagine a world where oil sells for $500/bbl and solar energy can be made for 0.25 cents per watt, a lot of things become economically feasible. We can make liquid fuels (alcohol and hydrocarbons) from air and water using chemical processes and cheap solar electricity (or let algae do it in bioreactors). It is always sunny or windy somewhere, so at some price very long range power grids become feasible. Breeder reactors become politically acceptable.
The bigger problem is that all of this makes energy cost more than it does today (or else we'd already be doing them). That means lower economic productivity and a lower standard of living. Places with dirt streets and unsafe water today might stay that way.

 

[dixonge]

The thread touches on both.

But the article I posted did not, unless you count their take on Tesla's broad mission statement. The rest of the article focused narrowly on battery production, automation, etc.

Musk says we have plenty of electricity for his cars if we stop refining oil.

Again, not mentioned in the article I posted, which you were responding to?

When you said " will soon hit a BILLION/year." A Billion what?

The answer to your question is both in the article AND specifically in my post - "BATTERY CAPACITY" - using caps to help it stand out...



And before you jump back to the bigger picture of world-wide renewable energy, that's battery capacity for Tesla products produced from a Tesla factory. The thrust of the article, for those who haven't read it, was for cars and Model 3 specifically.

OK, so Tesla will have a big building. What does this really mean for the company? I have no idea. They have lots of competition, their credits are running out (not just customer credits, but credits from other car companies that need to meet 'zero pollution' quotas in some states). I think Tesla the car company will have a tough time of it.

You seem to have missed it, but I did not introduce the Gigafactory building size with the phrase "Proof of success!" - instead, I labeled it as merely 'interesting' - yet you focus on it. I'm puzzled by that.


Moving on, I find most of the media coverage of Tesla to be polluted with short-seller FUD, especially surrounding their finances. I found this article to be (again) interesting - as well as informative:


Tesla is structurally bankrupt - but then so are GM and Ford

Maybe their batteries will find a place in load leveling on the grid (the seconds/minutes/hours I spoke of)? We will see.

Again you seem intent on broadening the discussion to the world's entire energy needs. Who looks at any one company and then dismisses them because they can't possibly supply more than a small percent of the world's demand? Who uses that standard for anything? Why would Tesla's Gigafactories need to do that? Just like their automotive division, there is a lot of competition out there. It's a transition, not an all-or-nothing jump.

 

[ERD50]

A little delayed, but here's a quick video on the newer co-gen plant design. It basically uses a steam turbine to recover waste heat from the gas turbine exhaust. They do bump up the efficiency a good bit. But steamers do not like to stop and start. Proper start up procedure on a large steamer is not measured in minutes. You need many hours to do it right.

https://youtu.be/eeiu-wcyEbs

Thanks, nice video. Because of the relatively slow ramp up/down you mention, these won't be able to replace all the NG plants, but hopefully a high % can be brought on-line. Moving from ~35%~40% to ~60% , for even part of the base is a good thing. Probably won't affect kWh prices much, the increased costs of the plant will temper the fuel savings. But we do get to conserve our NG supply, and lower emissions of all types.

You got me interested, so I looked for some additional numbers.

The US used 3.83 trillion kWh in 2017. That's an average of about 10.5 billion kWh per day.

A battery large enough to store one day of usage for the US would take Tesla 300 years to produce.

The article on Tesla Gigafactory said that the battery price was expected to get down to $100/kWh, which is pretty good by today's standard.

The 1-day giga battery for the US would cost $1 trillion dollars! ...

Of course, these sorts of rough calculations are open to all sorts of alternative and mitigating effects. But they do help give us a sense of scale of the problem.

But you did leave out a HUGE factor - those batteries, going through heavy daily use, won't last so long. If we give a very generous 20 year life (assume improvements in battery tech), you only get ~ 7% of our needs covered, before the whole output of the largest building in the world has to start replacing the batteries it produced 20 years ago. Forever. You can't get there from here!

I did some rough calcs that indicated replacing every coal plant in IL with solar/batteries would cost the average IL household something like $500 a month, ongoing (so includes battery replacement). And they'd still need to buy the ~ 65% of the electricity not provided by coal.

....

What are we going to do when fossil fuel runs out? We will all live in tiny homes, sweating bullets in the summer, and freezing our buns off in the winter. I am glad I will be already dead when it comes to that point. My great grandchildren will be living in caves to have moderate temperatures.

If we imagine a world where oil sells for $500/bbl and solar energy can be made for 0.25 cents per watt, a lot of things become economically feasible. We can make liquid fuels (alcohol and hydrocarbons) from air and water using chemical processes and cheap solar electricity (or let algae do it in bioreactors). It is always sunny or windy somewhere, so at some price very long range power grids become feasible. Breeder reactors become politically acceptable.
The bigger problem is that all of this makes energy cost more than it does today (or else we'd already be doing them). That means lower economic productivity and a lower standard of living. Places with dirt streets and unsafe water today might stay that way.

I'm with samclem on this one. I do think that technology and conservation will come to the rescue. Yes, prices are likely to increase, but I expect it to be manageable.

Unfortunately, I just don't see any large scale storage that is viable, not even the 'far out' future ideas, even if you give them a huge does of optimism. But RE can supplement the grid, and future nukes can help, and maybe things we have not thought of?

-ERD50

 

[ERD50]

I'll preface all of your questions with a simple answer. This thread is titled "Thoughts on TESLA". Not "Thoughts on the Tesla Model 3", or "Thoughts on Tesla EVs". Tesla makes products like the PowerWall and PowerPack, which are designed to work with RE. And I believe that GigaFactory is producing batteries for those Power products as well as for their EVs, right (edit/add: Musk says 'yes': http://fortune.com/2015/05/18/tesla-grid-batteries-chemistry/ ) ? So yes, it all seems relevant to the thread.

But the article I posted did not, unless you count their take on Tesla's broad mission statement. The rest of the article focused narrowly on battery production, automation, etc.


Again, not mentioned in the article I posted, which you were responding to?

Quote: Originally Posted by ERD50 When you said " will soon hit a BILLION/year." A Billion what?

The answer to your question is both in the article AND specifically in my post - "BATTERY CAPACITY" - using caps to help it stand out...

And that is a perfect example of why I try to break down these HUGE numbers into something that people can relate to.

Yes, you put BILLION in caps. But you didn't answer my question - a billion what? What measurement of "BATTERY CAPACITY" is being used here? Is it watt-hours, kWh, ma-hrs, or unit volume? If unit volume, what is the unit?

OK, I went back and read it in more detail, and you know what, I really don't think that that BILLION refers to battery capacity (watt-hours) at all. It sounds to me like they are talking a BILLION cells of production capacity. A billion is 10^9, and Giga is 10^9, so 20 Gigawatt-hour annual production, divided by a billion 'somethings' is 20 watt-hour 'somethings. And 20 watt-hours matches what I've found for a single cell in a Tesla battery pack, and requires somewhere around 3,000 cells per pack.

So when you jump from "will increase Model 3 battery production to 8,000/week" to "battery capacity ... - will soon hit a BILLION/year." without including units, it is hard to follow.

...
And before you jump back to the bigger picture of world-wide renewable energy, that's battery capacity for Tesla products produced from a Tesla factory. The thrust of the article, for those who haven't read it, was for cars and Model 3 specifically. ...

Fine, but the factory will be producing the Power products as well (unless you have info to the contrary), so why not make it part of the discussion?

...
You seem to have missed it, but I did not introduce the Gigafactory building size with the phrase "Proof of success!" - instead, I labeled it as merely 'interesting' - yet you focus on it. I'm puzzled by that. ...

Again, just all part of the Tesla (company) discussion. And I agree, there is lots of negative, muddled hype on Tesla as well. But two wrongs don't make a right, and as I said earlier - I like facts and information. And hype from the CEO is different than hype from some blogger or short seller.

bold mine...

... Again you seem intent on broadening the discussion to the world's entire energy needs. Who looks at any one company and then dismisses them because they can't possibly supply more than a small percent of the world's demand?

I'm not doing that, I'm only trying to put it in perspective. If the largest battery factory in the world couldn't ever produce enough backup for even 10% of the US grid before they need to start over again to replace the first batteries they produced, it gives some perspective on how hard a nut this RE thing is to crack. I wish if weren't so, but "if wishes were fishes...". I think it is far more productive to plan for a future based on reality, not wishes.


So the Gigafactory is interesting, thanks for posting. What are your thoughts on Tesla?

-ERD50

 

[oneill225]

The future

I'm not doing that, I'm only trying to put it in perspective. If the largest battery factory in the world couldn't ever produce enough backup for even 10% of the US grid before they need to start over again to replace the first batteries they produced, it gives some perspective on how hard a nut this RE thing is to crack. I wish if weren't so, but "if wishes were fishes...". I think it is far more productive to plan for a future based on reality, not wishes.
So the Gigafactory is interesting, thanks for posting. What are your thoughts on Tesla?-ERD50

Goodness, ERD50, always so negative. Hydro power will never fully replace oil either, but we use what we can and we plan future electrical needs off of whatever percentage can be had from hydro. It is the same with battery tech and the current shift from oil and gas as fast as the tech will allow. This is a plan based on reality, not some Jules Verne fiction.

Tesla is working everyday to improve upon and mass market battery driven tech. Production, capacity, and cost are steadily improving over time and will, in fact, continue to do so whether by Tesla or others. Granted, batteries cannot solve all of our energy needs, today, but is that the standard by which we should judge this amazing company?

Regarding investment, what is Tesla's competition going forward? Tesla has passed the experimental phase for me as an investor. Until I see serious competition from the likes of Ford and other battery producers, I will continue to believe that Tesla is in the early stages of being the next Amazon of battery/auto production.

If "reality" starts to indicate otherwise I will support the next leader in this inevitable shift. And, yes, the shift off of oil and gas is as inevitable as full marijuana legalization in the US. Just a matter of time. Get on board, my friend. The train is leaving the station.

 

[Chuckanut]

There was an interesting article in the WSJ (last week?) about all the natural gas from fracking that is being flared off because they have no way of storing or transporting it to where it can be used. Perhaps we should fix stupid things like that first, while we wait for EV tech to get better. Just a thought.

OTOH, if somebody does not build EVs and make them available to the general population, then the tech may never improve enough. Necessity is the mother of invention.

 

[NW-Bound]

There are battery factories being built around the world, with the Chinese being most active.

BYD expects to raise its total output to 60 GWh/year by 2020, compared to Tesla planned 38 GWh/year.

CATL is building a battery factory in Germany. Volkswagen has a deal to buy $25 billion worth of battery from Samsung, LG Chem, as well as CATL.

 

[oneill225]

Good probleme to have

There was an interesting article in the WSJ (last week?) about all the natural gas from fracking that is being flared off because they have no way of storing or transporting it to where it can be used. Perhaps we should fix stupid things like that first, then get on with EVs later? Just a thought.

Nothing to fix. As ERD50 has repeatedly reminded us, we need more electricity production, now, to power a full shift to all electric cars. We should (and likely will) build more natural gas driven electric plants until other less polluting options are viable. One caveat, the current administration has taken the government boot off of natural gas and coal power generation. That will need to continue so that we can make good use of the gas being burned-off today.

 

[oneill225]

There are battery factories being built around the world, with the Chinese being most active.

BYD expects to raise its total output to 60 GWh/year by 2020, compared to Tesla planned 38 GWh/year.

CATL is building a battery factory in Germany. Volkswagen has a deal to buy $25 billion worth of battery from Samsung, LG Chem, as well as CATL.

All currently behind Tesla, but I hope the competition keeps getting hotter.

 

[corn18]

In the context of humanity, EV vs. ICE will be non-sequitur. I want someone to invent a transporter and warp drive so I can vacation on Saturn. My wife likes rings.

(note: I don't really know what non-sequitur means but thought it sounded cool in that sentence).

 

[oneill225]

In the context of humanity, EV vs. ICE will be non-sequitur. I want someone to invent a transporter and warp drive so I can vacation on Saturn. My wife likes rings.
(note: I don't really know what non-sequitur means but thought it sounded cool in that sentence).

I've got some good marijuana stocks for you, Corn.