Tesla Gigafactory Begins Production (reuters.com) 201
Thelasko writes: Right on schedule, Tesla's Gigafactory has begun production of battery cells. The fact that the factory has opened on schedule has surprised many critics of the company. Reuters reports: "Electric car maker Tesla Motors Inc has started mass production of lithium-ion battery cells at its gigafactory in Nevada along with Japan's Panasonic Corp, the company said on Wednesday. The cylindrical '2170 cells,' which will be used to power Tesla's energy storage products and the new Model 3 sedan, have been jointly designed by Tesla and Panasonic, its longstanding battery partner. The gigafactory will initially produce battery cells for the company's Powerwall 2 and Powerpack 2 energy products, Tesla said. The factory is expected to drive down the cost of battery packs by more than 30 percent, the company has said. At peak production, the gigafactory is expected to employ 6,500 workers and create between 20,000 and 30,000 additional jobs in the surrounding regions, Tesla said."
Guess I just never paid attention (Score:2)
Re:Guess I just never paid attention (Score:5, Informative)
Am I the only person here who took this long to realize that Tesla cars are powered by what amounts to a shitload of flashlight batteries wired up in a tub?
It's actually an excellent system for a low price. The cells are insulated and have a cooling system so as to maintain a optimal temperature. Furthermore, as cells age and get a open/short or bad cell, the pack rewires itself around the trouble allowing it to gradually fail gracefully unlike simple packs. Finally tesla and the government want these to be cheap so they offer massive subsidies and car companies like tesla sell them at a loss so as to not turn people off with a 30 thousand dollar price tag (like it would be marked up for general purpose at a typical company). It's a good deal for the money given today's tech.
I feel the plan is kinda dumb (Score:2)
Import marked up lithium film from China after paying Chinese export tax, then trying to compete with Chinese cell makers.
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>It's actually an excellent system for a low price.
I don't think so. Bigger cells are invariably better priced per W/h except if they come in exotic sizes. Chinese themselves have switches to LiFePo4 chemistry from LiCo or LiC (conventional li-ion) for all big cells years ago. Musk and co. will have to play catch-up hard, and they will have to retool the assembly line in the future invariably unless they want to produce worse cells, at higher than the market price...
Re: Guess I just never paid attention (Score:2, Interesting)
You need lots of cells to balance the pack. Li-ion are finicky. That's one reason the giga factory is so large: you need a huge inventory because (1) the cells need to age and (2) the more cells you have the easier you can find a matched set for a well balanced battery. Tesla batteries perform really well, in part because of the effort that goes into selecting the cells that go into each one.
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Yeah, I'm sure they didn't bother doing any CBA or before building a $5B factory. Hopefully someone at Tesla will see your post and save their business before it's too late!
Re: Guess I just never paid attention (Score:2)
I hope so. Americans tend to be lamers at doing business, but Musk is African though.
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WTF? If there is any single area where "Americans" excel, it's business. Not the most enthusiastic laborers, the most vibrant artists, the most ingenious scientists, nor the most precise engineers. But they are fucking good at business.
Re: Guess I just never paid attention (Score:4, Interesting)
100% of your products can't be loss leaders.
Typically that makes them an excellent buy as a consumer. I don't care how they stay in business, if only all my products that I buy had this value per dollar spent I'd be much happier. Personally all that means for me is I would stay away from investment.
Re: Guess I just never paid attention (Score:4, Insightful)
For products where your relationship with the producer ends at the point of purchase (and you don't much care whether or not you will continue to be able to buy that product in the future), that makes sense.
For a lot of the more complex products (in particular cars, software, computers), however, the value of your purchase will depend strongly on its manufacturer's continued ability to exist and support that product.
i.e. if you bought a Pebble watch last month, you're probably not too happy that Pebble called it quits this month, since that means you won't be getting much in the way of support or updates in the future, and your watch might stop working entirely.
Re: Guess I just never paid attention (Score:5, Insightful)
If you bought a "smart watch", you have bigger problems than the company that makes them going out of business.
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“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.” -- Douglass Adams. RIP.
Re: Guess I just never paid attention (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't care how they stay in business
Perhaps you should. Selling below cost initially is how monopolies are created. A company can sell at a loss for a while if they know this means driving off the competition. They don't need to drive everyone off, just diminish the ability for any competition to arise to the point that they can charge a premium for a substandard product. They would be betting on the ability for them to undercut any future competition later with greater volume (lower margins) and/or some reserves in resources to outlast the competition in a price war. This might not apply to electric cars exactly since this is not the kind of fight that a small company like Tesla can win against the likes of Ford and GM.
What is another tactic, and more likely one that Tesla could employ, is the ability to sell at a loss now knowing that the customer will likely return to them for services in the future. If this means selling another car in the future then perhaps there is nothing wrong with that. If this means selling critical parts like a battery then this might be a problem. Tesla would be in a position to overcharge for the battery to make up for a loss on the initial sale. If customers somehow feel compelled to continue using an electric car then Tesla would be in a position to also overcharge for the next vehicle too.
If Tesla is able to sell below costs because of government incentives, like subsidies or lowered taxes, then you are paying for this below cost pricing even if you are never a Tesla customer.
There is no such thing as a free lunch. You are going to bear the costs in some way.
What bothers me most is when the below cost pricing is due to government interference. In that case I'm paying for some rich guy to buy a new car when I can't afford my own. This is a subsidy that takes from the poor and gives to the wealthy. All energy subsidies do this really, take from the poor to further enrich the wealthy. I'd rather I be able to keep my money, perhaps then I can afford some new windows on my house. If you want to see people saving the environment then we need to stop these subsidies so people like me can buy some new windows, attic insulation, or even just a new pair of wool socks, and not have to spend so much on heating.
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Yes I am, and I benefit from that directly. I see little benefit from someone else driving a new car while I don't.
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Yes I am, and I benefit from that directly. I see little benefit from someone else driving a new car while I don't.
You're benefitting from less pollution being emitted by that guy's car. And you're also not really paying for it; your children or grandchildren will be doing that. Whether that last bit makes it better, worse or has no relevance is a complicated question.
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that someone else isnt benefiting from those middle-eastern wars.
Of course they are. That electric car is made using plastics from that oil, lubricated using that oil, and painted using that oil. The trucks used to bring in the parts to build that car were fueled with that oil, as were the trucks and trains that bring the finished product to the show room. Their food was fertilized and cultivated with that oil, then later harvested, refrigerated, cooked, canned, and brought to market with that oil.
Do I need to continue with the benefits of oil for electric car drivers
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It only has to be a loss leader until your competition is driven out of business. Then it's profit as far as the eye can see.
Re:Guess I just never paid attention (Score:4, Informative)
Sorry that's bullshit. They're not selling at a loss!
Re:Guess I just never paid attention (Score:5, Informative)
A slow clap for the person who doesn't realize the difference between "selling units at a loss" and "company undergoing a super-rapid scaleup involving building some of the largest buildings on the planet operating at a loss".
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A slow clap for the person who doesn't realize the difference between "selling units at a loss" and "company undergoing a super-rapid scaleup involving building some of the largest buildings on the planet operating at a loss".
His name is Bob Lutz. [cnbc.com] He either has no understanding of finance, or has an axe to grind. Considering his history of leadership in the big three, either is plausible.
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only possible because of "massive subsidies"? that's disgusting. that means these already overpriced cars can't be profitable on their own merits and we should look to alternatives for green energy, such as biofuel from scrub plants
Or we could introduce subsidies to cause companies to invest in technology and production facilities bringing down cost through R&D and economies of scale. You know, like every other industry that has ever existed.
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If your only goal is to pump out power, then yes, most anyone with some basic knowledge can do it.
If, however, you want to make a reliable and safe product that can last for years with predictable behavior, replicate it 100,000 times at reasonably cost, then stuff it i
Re: Guess I just never paid attention (Score:5, Informative)
Indeed. Tesla has some of the most advanced battery packs on the market. It's pretty dang impressive being able to make a car with that much mass of lithium ion batteries with decade-scale lifespans operating in outdoor conditions and has an order of magnitude lower rate of fires per mile traveled than gasoline vehicles.
Also, as for how they're wired up, in case anyone is curious: individual cells are wired up in parallel "bricks" in large numbers, so that if one cell dies, it has little effect on the brick as a whole (contrast with a laptop battery with 18650 cells just in series - if one goes, the battery is dead). The bricks are connected in series into "sheets" to raise the voltage, and the sheets in turn are connected in series to make up a pack. At least that's how they did it with the Roadster; I assume the Model S is individual. Within each brick, each cell is in its own isolated can; the goal is to prevent propagating failures.
The climate control issue took some time to get right. Early Roadsters suffered from fairly high parasitic drain when the vehicle wasn't plugged in, but they refined the climate control algorithm so that they could more properly maintain the pack temperature without wasting energy. Key to maintaining cell longevity are three main factors: charge/discharge rate, depth of discharge (upper and lower), and temperature. Getting temperature right is very important. As for the other two, the cells aren't charged to their full capacity when the vehicle is at "100%", they're at 90-something percent (at least they were with the Roadster). And on your average drive you only use a very small percent of the pack capacity, so in practice it's an extremely shallow depth of discharge. Both normal driving and overnight charging are low current applications per cell; only fast charging and track duty are relatively high current (but even still you're talking at least half an hour to charge or drain most of the pack).
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Am I the only person here who took this long to realize that Tesla cars are powered by what amounts to a shitload of flashlight batteries wired up in a tub?
Laptop, not flashlight. Popular Science featured the Roadster and its batteries in its May 2007 article, "Can 6,831 laptop batteries change the world?"
And the answer to your question is "You probably are"
Re:Guess I just never paid attention (Score:4, Interesting)
Laptop, not flashlight.
Ok, if you want to be pedantic, laptop AND flashlight battery.. Not to mention e-cigs, bluetooth speakers, and a zillion other things the nearly ubiquitous 18650 is used for.
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I would imagine that eCigs use something way smaller than an 18650 cell, they're nearly an inch wide and two and a half inches long.
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Because the cells might start a fire and when they are lying around everywhere, it is a potential fire hazard.
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Cells lying in the one situation least likely to cause spontaneous combustion is what concerns you the most? Get a helmet man.
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18650s are the go-to cell for contemporary sub-ohm vaporizers because they can deliver the high current needed to drive a half-ohm or smaller coil at 25+ watts and you can swap out batteries easily.
The fixed-battery "pen" size vaporizers of the older generation used something else but their batteries weren't replaceable and they worked at basically whatever the float voltage was into 1.5-2.5 ohm coils.
The really insane high wattage vapers seem to use fixed battery devices and I don't know what's in them, bu
Nothing new under the Sun (Score:5, Funny)
Am I the only person here who took this long to realize that Tesla cars are powered by what amounts to a shitload of flashlight batteries wired up in a tub?
"Why, the fax-machine ain't nothin' but a waffle-iron with a phone attached!"
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Am I the only person here who took this long to realize that Tesla cars are powered by...
Pretty much. Your geek card is on probation.
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No
Will they only make car batteries? (Score:3)
I understand that they are making these primarily for cars, but does Tesla have any plans to make consumer-friendly Lithium-ion batteries for general use? Seems like they could easily make these, and drive down the costs of these things pretty dramatically. Looking quickly on Google, general-use batteries seem to run hundreds of dollars. I'd be interested in one for various purposes if it dropped down into a $50-$100 range.
Re:Will they only make car batteries? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Will they only make car batteries? (Score:4, Interesting)
I understand that they are making these primarily for cars, but does Tesla have any plans to make consumer-friendly Lithium-ion batteries for general use? Seems like they could easily make these, and drive down the costs of these things pretty dramatically. Looking quickly on Google, general-use batteries seem to run hundreds of dollars. I'd be interested in one for various purposes if it dropped down into a $50-$100 range.
Aside from the PowerWall / PowerPacks, I think that'll be left to Panasonic and I'm betting it may be written into their agreements.
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The chemistry of the Tesla cells probably makes them useless for general purpose consumer cells, so Panasonic likely won't bother using that factory for them. Tesla can carefully manage the cells, limiting them to 95% maximum charge and temperature controlling them. Consumer cells get more abuse so the chemistry has to be more robust.
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"The chemistry of the Tesla cells probably makes them useless for general purpose consumer cells"
They're not tied to a single chemistry. The original PowerWalls were using nickel-manganese for the 6.4 kWh & nickel-cobalt for the 10 kWh units.
The cars use other formulations - the Roadster's pack chemistry is different from the Model S
This is the benefit of having such a close relationship with Panasonic - a lot of battery expertise close at hand.
Re:Will they only make car batteries? (Score:5, Interesting)
I understand that they are making these primarily for cars, but does Tesla have any plans to make consumer-friendly Lithium-ion batteries for general use?
It seems unlikely. Panasonic agreed to create the 2170 form factor specifically for Tesla. Tesla likes have large numbers of smaller, cylindrical cells because they can build packs out of them that give them finer control and better cooling than the large monolithic cells you seem to be referring to (very imprecisely). They're just a little bit bigger in both dimensions than an 18650 in order to improve the power density of the packs, while not losing the aforementioned advantages.
Because it's a custom Tesla-specific cell form factor, it's very likely a Tesla-exclusive contract as well. Panasonic is making these in a Tesla factory for Tesla, and nobody else. So when you start seeing advertising for Panasonic 2170 cells on Alibaba, don't try to buy them. They'll be fake. You're unlikely to see any real new 2170 bare cells on the open market. What you may see are used ones coming from someone buying a wrecked Tesla and tearing apart the battery pack. What you'll probably see is a noticeable drop in the price of 18650 cells. Tesla will be transitioning the Model S and Model X to redesigned packs with the new form factor (whether or not they announced it—it's just how they roll). That will significantly reduce worldwide demand for 18650s. Unless some cartel behavior comes into play, prices should fall.
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That's not really how supply and demand works at this level. Show me the warehouses full of $1 CompactFlash cards, now that TF/SD have replaced them
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There are two major faulty assumptions in this argument. Firstly that demand for 18650 cells is flat. If demand for 18650 cells is growing even the loss of a major user like Tesla could no long term impact on prices and potentially very little short term impact either.
The second major faulty assumption is Tesla get's their batteries for Panasonic, and Panasonic are heavily involved in the Gigafactory. The idea the managers at Panasonic can't see the writing on the wall and adjust production accordingly is n
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Tesla will be transitioning the Model S and Model X to redesigned packs with the new form factor (whether or not they announced itâ"it's just how they roll).
Well they also plan to produce 100k Model 3s this year, so I guess that depends on whether the Gigafactory can ramp up quick enough. Eventually it will certainly happen but if the 3s eat all the new capacity there's no urgent need to switch.
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Indirectly, it is going to be making a huge difference for consumer cells. Most importantly, all of the production capacity that has been sucked up by Tesla for building their automobiles is going to be available for other folks (likely to be snatched up by other automobile companies for awhile) but in the long run it will simply imply that the whole market for Lithium-ion batteries is going to grow as a whole. All of the chemicals (besides Lithium) are also going to be made in much larger quantities, the
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I'm surprised that nobody has marketed a DIY battery in the same form factor as a 12v car battery run by an array of 18650s with all the expected charging circuits and the ability to "rewire" around dead cells automatically.
Your standard car battery shell seems like it could hold a lot of 18650s.
It will be powered by renewable ... (Score:2)
... energy that has been fabricated by minerals and ores extracted by, and processed in plants powered by, fossil fuels.
God: "No, you can't get past the fucking 2nd law."
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Re:It will be powered by renewable ... (Score:5, Funny)
Man replied: "Not really, since in any scenario where that source didn't exist, neither would we. So it was pretty much guaranteed via the anthropic principle"
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God spoke to me: "Do not be afraid. The Sun, on average, is 93 million miles away. The oceans will not boil as quickly as the high-entropy post suggests."
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Context! It's currently about 91Mmiles:* "Earth's closest approach to the sun, called perihelion, comes in early January and is about 91 million miles (146 million km)." [space.com]
* Admittedly, when God created the Sun several GY ago, the distance was probably different, and immaterial. B-)
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Replying to my own post: apparently TODAY [timeanddate.com] is perihelion day. Who'd have thunk?
2017 January 4, 2017 6:17 am 91,404,322 mi
Re:It will be powered by renewable ... (Score:4, Insightful)
... energy that has been fabricated by minerals and ores extracted by, and processed in plants powered by, fossil fuels.
God: "No, you can't get past the fucking 2nd law."
Does that include fossil nukes, hydro-fossilized or geothermalized petroleum plants?
We *can* phase out fossil fuels, just not yet but we can cut our usage drastically. We had to use other energy sources to kickstart our use of coal & oil; this is not different just on a much larger scale.
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You had the time and interest but you repeated what I said.
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You had the time and interest but you repeated what I said.
Now please tell me you were joking, because no one has seriously tried to invoke 2LD since the strong 2LD concept leads to an almost immediate ending.
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You had the time and interest but you repeated what I said.
I was heading off what looked to be the start of another screed that those who want others to reduce waste/pollution/GHGs should first stop breathing or drop dead themselves.
Because freedom / God / my ancestors or some such shite.
If that's not where you were going, then I'll withdraw the comment.
Otherwise, it stands as is.
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In summary, renewable energy is born dirty and it dies dirty.
It's not a judgement call.
It's science.
It's also economics & human nature.
Left to completely "natural" processes. all human beings are born dirty, die dirtier and would live lives that are nasty, brutish & short.
But we decided that wasn't good enough and we changed it.
It took a hell of a long time, is far from done and we have a lot of terrible mistakes getting to where we are now.
But we're past the point where we affect Nature as much as She affects us.
We *can* change that, without all of us reverting back to the godawful existence that
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I doubt anyone grasped what you wanted to say with all that 'dirty' and randomly mixing in the second law of thermodynamics.
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(Where did all of those fossil fuels get their energy from in the first place?)
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(Where did all of those fossil fuels get their energy from in the first place?)
The Koch Brothers and Jeebuz.
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Jeebuz buring all of those dinosaur fossils in the ground and giving them suspiciously old radioisotope ratios was the best prank ever.
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Jeebuz buring all of those dinosaur fossils in the ground and giving them suspiciously old radioisotope ratios was the best prank ever.
We laugh, but there have been some folks who actually believe that. Variation 1 is Satan putting them there.
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It will be powered by renewable ... energy that has been fabricated by minerals and ores extracted by, and processed in plants powered by, fossil fuels.
Last I heard, solar panels pay off their manufacturing energy costs in less than a year.
BUT no one in their right mind uses the high-quality photovoltaic power for the bulk of the ore processing and other manufacturing processes, especially those that require heat. (If you want to power THAT by the sun you use a thermal collector. You get several times the
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Then there's their share of building the grid itself: Plant construction (and mining and processing raw materials for it), transformers, wires, insulators, meters, and so on. Cutting trees for poles. Cutting trees for clearance for the wires. Fuel for the machinery that did it, and for taking workers to/from the sites. Using up land for grid right-of-ways.
Stop the train right there. Every time solar power is brought up on Slashdot some genius will point out that the sun never sets on Earth, it just moves around. For solar to work then all we need to do is run some high voltage DC lines and spread that solar power goodness world wide. This then means cutting down trees for utility poles and clearing right of way.
If you are going to pull this nonsense in defense of solar power then you are opposing so many others that defend solar power. It's either we nee
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Nuclear power ... kills fewer people per energy produced.
FFS. If things go really, catastrophically wrong with a solar panel installation, how many people could it conceivably kill? One or two if it fell off a roof? Whereas, if things go really, catastrophically wrong with a nuclear power plant, how many people could it conceivably kill? Bearing in mind that no production pebble bed reactors are in operation anywhere.
Tilting at strawmen rather than acknowledging the actual safety concerns people have about nuclear makes you look like a shite imitation of Don Quix
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And you have fish in your DNA. Does that make you a fish or a human?
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Looking at his posts: it makes him a dork :)
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Particularly in the domain of dirtiness that is the real concern, altering flux areas in the carbon cycle.
Certainly true that today, to make "clean" energy, one is largely stuck using "dirty", but this becomes less the case every single day, and will only continue becoming less the case as we progress in the direction we're progressing.
And frankly, the sun is a pretty free fucking lunch.
Need another zero in there... (Score:5, Funny)
You're an order of magnitude off there, chief. That would be a hearing-aid battery. They're actually making 21700 cells. Tesla sometimes calls them "'21-70", but omitting the dash and concatenating the numbers makes no sense.
No big deal, I suppose, just a little typo... I still look forward to buying a $350,000 (3350 eur) Tesla Model 3, with its impressive 21 mile (3460km) range and 1550 mph (25kph) top-speed.
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Considering that's what Tesla calls them on Tesla's web page https://www.tesla.com/blog/bat... [tesla.com] I think you owe someone an apology.
GigaFactory (Score:2)
I assume something called a GigaFactory will be 3-D printed by drones and be a self-aware AI.
Re:Why do they call it the "Gigafactory"? (Score:5, Informative)
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Giga comes from the Greeks, meaning GIANT. By square footage, this factory is the largest on the fucking planet. THAT is where its name comes from.
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Nope. The Boeing Everett factory is a larger building. And if we go by the factory complex, not just a single building, then there are far, far larger ones. The Kamaz site, for example, has about the same size as Sunnyvale, CA.
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Also in footprint. 400000 m^2 vs 200000 m^2.
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Wikipedia lists it [tesla.com] as the largest building in the world by area. And from this [autoblog.com]:
The original plans for the Tesla Gigafactory call for a facility with a footprint of 5.8 million square feet, on two stories for 10 million square feet of floor space. That would already give it the largest footprint of any building in the world. But that could just end up proving the starting point.
The Gigafactory is being built in a modular fashion, and Tesla is reportedly buying up adjacent plots of land in order to expand
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You are confusing the car assembly plant with the battery factory.
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That first link was erroneous; I was trying to link the wikipedia article on the world's largest buildings, as you can see from context.
The second link, quoted in my post, is specifically about the gigafactory.
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That said, as a TSLA shareholder, I really hope they don't have a fire...
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You mean like all those wind farms built 25 years ago and now abandoned?
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I remember when that happened, after the great wind spill of '11. Those poor sailboats. :(
The future is now. (Score:5, Insightful)
Same corporations, day in day out.
Sometimes the "news for nerds, stuff that matters" comes from some small handful of active companes, as they bring their breakthroughs into public use. Sometimes it has been AMD, Intel, Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun, and so on.
Right now Tesla is big, as they finally bring the battery breakthroughs Slashdotters have been lamenting as "always N years off", to market, for electric cars and energy storage for taking houses off the grid and onto self-generated renewable energy.
Remember all the lamenting, just yesterday, about how the price breakthrough in photovoltaic solar would be useless because of the cost of storage (for night and dark weather periods) and voltage conversion? Remember how I pointed out [slashdot.org] that voltage conversion has already succumbed to Moore's Law and the battery breakthroughs were just about to come on line?
The future came today. Look out, grid utilities!
C'mon, editors, *dig* a little! The Web is a big place, cast your story nets a l'il bit wider...
The editors don't dig. The slashdot users dig and the editors chose. IMHO they were right on to post this one.
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"Remember all the lamenting, just yesterday, about how the price breakthrough in photovoltaic solar would be useless because of the cost of storage (for night and dark weather periods) and voltage conversion?"
That's because most of the people that post on /. now are utterly brainless. I've been building solar systems for housing quads, powering four houses on pure solar and battery for under $10,000. Been using lead-acid this entire time. Tesla's "Power" stuff simply can't handle the loads lead-acid can.
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Nonsense. Li-ion has a vastly higher power density than lead-acid. Where are you finding PbA that can do ~5kW/kg? Because some li-ions go that high. Most these days are over 1kW/kg. Sustained. PbA is, what, ~200W/kg, for brief periods?
The main reason li-ion hadn't taken over the storage market earlier is because of cost. But that's finally changing.
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Power density for storage in a static and basically spatially none constrained environment is largely irrelevant.
Basically it does not matter if the battery pack for my house weighs 500kg or 10 tonnes, because unlike in a car I am not hauling it about all the time it is static. In addition space is also less of an issue for similar reasons.
Where lead beats lithium is firstly in instantaneous power draw which is what the poster was referring to.
Lead also beats lithium due to that with a little care to make s
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Utility level electricity storage is not going to use the same kind of batteries as an electric car. Not even close. Utilities are not bound by weight and volume like an electric car would be. To the utility all it comes down to is cost. Utilities won't use lithium batteries. They probably won't use even lead-acid. They'll use some thing really cheap, and therefore really heavy because light costs money. I don't know what these batteries would look like but I'm quite certain they'll be shipped to the
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You simply have no clue about the topic.
Utilities won't use batteries at all. Or in only the most rare or even exotic circumstances.
Lets define the highest peak of the year in your power consumption/production (in your grid, not your house) as '100% peak'.
How many power plants on your grid do you have to replace by solar power that you have (at some point during sun hours) enough surplus solar power to store some in batteries? And when during your 24h cycle of the day do you have sudden demand that you can
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You simply have no clue about the topic.
That may be true but one thing bothers me, how much material would we have to mine so that we have enough electricity storage so that we only need to rely on solar power? I've seen the calculations and it's a lot, as in not enough in the Earth crust kind of "a lot". Even with distributed storage, as in each business and household needs to only store their own energy, the materials needed is huge. In fact the materials needed might be more than what utility storage would be due to a lack of economy of sca
Re:The future is now. (Score:5, Informative)
What are you talking about? What "materials"? I certainly hope you don't mean "lithium", because if so it only exposes how little you know about how lithium is produced. Salar lithium, the current preferred source, isn't "mined", it's produced from brine pumped up in salt flats, sun dried, and the individual salts separated from each other. The undesirable salts are left on the surface. Every year, most of the salars flood, taking the salt with them.
There are various potential lithium sources which are mined, and in the future at times they may prove to be more economical than salars or fill in for an abundance in demand that salars cannot meet. But the ultimate lithium source, the effectively inexhaustible one, is the oceans, and that again just goes back to a brine process. Last I checked (which was long ago), oceanic lithium recovery prices were estimated at about 5x as much as typical salar recovery prices. But even a price like that would hardly impact overall lithium battery prices; it's still cheap, and they just don't use that much lithium.
Re: (Score:2)
There simply is not enough lead or lithium in the Earth's crust to build the battery you require.
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the... [ucsd.edu]
Look it up. I gave you a link. In short the batteries needed will require billions of tons of materials but known reserves are in the millions of tons. That is for lead acid batteries, lithium numbers are similar. Getting lithium from brine is insufficient for the supply required. Consider the economic and environmental impact of extracting these minerals. Then consider the
Re: (Score:2)
Sorry, but right off: "reserves" don't work that way. A reserves figure is based on the current level of exploration, at the current price point, with current production technologies. It's completely disjoint from the actual amount available. At current price points, the current amount of lithium reserves is 7-8 orders of magnitude different from the amount of lithium reserves if you 5x the price of lithium - or correspondingly improve technology to 1/5th the seawater production cost.
Lithium in seawater
Re: (Score:2)
Huh, forget 5x ;) I just checked up on how much current prices vs. seawater costs have changed since I last looked.
Current price (Li2CO3): $12-14/kg [usatoday.com]
Seawater price (Li2CO3): $16-22/kg [watereuse.org]
Heck, seawater's almost at parity now. Last I checked, conventional carbonate was only about $5/kg and seawater was about $25/kg. There's some serious convergence going on - we may start using seawater sooner rather than later.
Re:The future is now. (Score:5, Interesting)
No, you simply have no clue about the topic.
The grid already uses batteries - not extensively, but more and more each year. And they're going li-ion. My brother in law works for one such company, they just bought their first grid-scale li-ion bank. Li-ion is often coming in cheaper than even flow batteries nowadays. But it still has more to fall before competing with general peaking, it's mainly useful for very short surge loads, voltage maintenance on long lines, things of that nature. Within a decade or so, though, it may be giving peaking a run for its money. It depends on how well the pricing trends hold and progress.
That doesn't mean that li-ion is inherently the future. Other techs (some old, some new) are trying to beat li-ion on price, and may well succeed. But li-ion is is used in the grid, today. And the lower its price falls, the more it'll be used.
Re: (Score:2)
Battery storage only makes sense for households/installations that don't want/can feed surplus into the grid, or are off grid.
The electric power grid is an endangered species. Too many slashdotters are having a problem understanding that.
Re: (Score:2)
What reminds me of 5 years ago was all of the naysayers back then laughing at the concept that the Model S would be produced at all, let alone in quantities of nearly 100k per year. That they'd fail to produce them, that they'd fail to find customers, that the whole EV thing was a fad, and Tesla was imminently about to go bankrupt.
My, how things change. Or, not.
Re: (Score:2)
What reminds me of 5 years ago was all of the naysayers back then laughing at the concept that the Model S would be produced at all, let alone in quantities of nearly 100k per year. That they'd fail to produce them, that they'd fail to find customers, that the whole EV thing was a fad, and Tesla was imminently about to go bankrupt.
Or wind power, or solar PV for that matter. All failures, and will continue to be failures, no matter how successful.
You have to give the naysayers some credit - they have a Wile E. Coyote level of persistence despite being so wrong so consistently. So many of those damn teenagers running around that their lawns have no more grass on them.
Re: (Score:2)
Since "overnight" in battery technology at the moment seems to be twenty years from lab to production, then why not?