Tesla To Close a Dozen Solar Facilities In 9 States (cnbc.com) 226
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Electric car maker Tesla's move last week to cut 9 percent of its workforce will sharply downsize the residential solar business it bought two years ago in a controversial $2.6 billion deal, according to three internal company documents and seven current and former Tesla solar employees. The latest cuts to the division that was once SolarCity -- a sales and installation company founded by two cousins of Tesla CEO Elon Musk -- include closing about a dozen installation facilities, according to internal company documents, and ending a retail partnership with Home Depot that the current and former employees said generated about half of its sales. About 60 installation facilities remain open, according to an internal company list reviewed by Reuters. An internal company email named 14 facilities slated for closure, but the other list included only 13 of those locations.
My perspective as a stock holder. (Score:5, Insightful)
I've seen short sellers jumping on this, claiming Tesla's energy division is failing, claiming that this is confirmation that the Solar City buyout was a bailout for Elon's cousins.
What I see here is Tesla restructuring to be more efficient and consistent.
Tesla is a company that grew very quickly and incorporated into itself a few smaller companies, the largest of which is Solar City.
As a result of that past there are a lot of roles that grew out of a structure that fit a much smaller company that don't make sense now, roles that are redundant between Tesla and SC, etc.
As far as I understand, SC was more of a distributed solar power company that dealt with all aspects of installation, maintenance, financing, etc.
Tesla's residential energy division is transitioning more towards having solar and battery products being something the consumer or the house builder buys directly as product.
So they sold off the maintenance/upkeep contracts to other solar companies and they're bringing all their sales people inhouse, into the same stores they display and sell their cars in.
Tesla's battery storage division is growing significantly.
And sure, like the with the Model 3 production, their new solar tile/panel factory might be taking longer than expected to ramp up, but I wouldn't take that as failure by any stretch, I often see analysts looking at last year's number, comparing it to this year's number and deciding that because it's lower or higher it is worse, without even considering it in the actual context of how the company is run.
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Re:My perspective as a stock holder. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not just restructuring to be more efficient, it's simple - Trump put a huge tariff on Solar Panel imports. That means it's much harder to make a profit being an installer now.
This is quite literally Trump's trade war in action.
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Since then, [Trump's tariffs] many economists have publicly disagreed that raising tariffs so sharply will improve the economy, as Trump asserts it will. In particular, experts have pointed to the failure of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act [history.com], passed in June 1930, to protect U.S. industries with tariff increases.
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System installation was NEVER the goal. Energy sales is and was.
Often heard "you get to sell the energy you don't use to the utility".
No YOU don't. Solar City does. Aggregated with the energy from all of their other installations. The utility won't buy from you, but they will from the aggregator, Solar City.
Just like the supermarket won't buy from your backyard garden, but if you have an organic farm, they will.
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Since you mention TVA, I'll presume you mean the Tennessee Valley Authority and I'll have to qualify my comments somewhat
There is an entity in every electrical region known, at the federal level, as an independent system operator. In California, it's called CAISO. A goole search seems to say the one in Tennessee is called PJM and it serves several states. This is where regions interconnect and energy producers connect to, to distribute what they make to consumers.
The independent system operator complaine
Re:My perspective as a stock holder. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is quite literally Trump's trade war in action.
I like to crap on Trump as much as anyone, actually probably more so, but this.... this looks like a continuation of Tesla's end game. It made no sense for Tesla to be in the business of selling generic solar panels through Home Depot, and quite telling is this restructuring isn't actually affecting Tesla's core solar product, their actual solar roof.
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It'll be like the auto industry was when they didn't have to compete globally, cars that only had odometers that went to 99,999.9 because they'd never last long enough to hit 100,000 and Americans going on about how wonderful their automobile industry is.
In Musk-world (Score:2)
In Musk-world, any investor who is dissatisfied is a 'short seller.'
Just one component of the illusion being spun.
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Listen to the Pravda comrade!
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You are a f...ing idiot. You probably don't even know what a short-seller is. Tesla is one of the most shorted stocks ever.
I'm not a stock holder (Score:2)
https://www.technologyreview.c... [technologyreview.com]
Yeah, it MAY be solved and then again. H2 solves it now and for a long time. yes, fuel cells use platinum... About as much as is used in a catalytic convertor.
so we stop making catalytic convertors and start making fuel cells. net zero change
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https://www.teslarati.com/tesl... [teslarati.com]
Tesla has been one of the first to recognize and start addressing the problem. 59% reduction in Cobalt usage while increasing the battery pack capacity is nothing to sneeze at.
> H2 solves it now and for a long time.
Great, where do I get the Hydrogen from? Virtually every habitable building in the US has electricity, but there are very few hydrogen fueling stations. I can tell you form first hand experience that a modest CNG station costs north of $2mil, so if a hydrogen
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At one time there were no chargers either. Europe and Asia are going full on for hydrogen storage vs heavy, slow to charge batteries.
I will only say there is this somewhat common but mildly dangerous chemical around called dihydrogen monoxide that is a fairly useful for for obtaining hydrogen... You almost certainly have some of the chemical around your home. Especially useful when one is store and use excess energy from things like solar and wind. The equipment for doing this isn't even particularly exp
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> At one time there were no chargers either.
You don't need a charger... the charger is in the vehicle for L1 and L2 level recharging, which is perfectly adequate for the vast majority of people. Fast chargers are more a convenience and marketing tool than a necessity.
All you need is electricity; which, again, can be found at just about every habitable building.
> I will only say there is this somewhat common but mildly dangerous chemical around called dihydrogen monoxide that is a fairly useful for for
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No, actually 22 liters/hours at 7 bar isn't the desktop torch you mentioned.
It does need 6Kw to do that and running at that rate consumes 750 gallons of water per hour.
It took me all of 20 minutes to locate the device for a bit over $1000.00.
This is doing it the crude way too, but several will easily fit into a 20 foot shipping container (to give an idea of physical scale).
An even better idea of scale is that the average American residence could operate for 12 days from stored output of one hours run of tha
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Do share a link, then, 'cause all I can see are "HHO" generators which produce a stream of hydrogen and oxygen gas mixed, aka hydrogen torch machines.
Then make sure you price out a desiccant dryer 'cause you'll have to get the humidity down to under 0.1% so you don't condense water into your tanks as you compress it to 350-700 bar.
Oh, and you'll need a compressor that can boost the pressure to 350+ bar.
=Smidge=
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Since your dog likes the taste of your homework:
https://www.alibaba.com/produc... [alibaba.com]
There are a number of others along side the HHOs and I will be first to grant spec sheets are NOT the be-all end-all.
But the tech is there, it works and is more than the snake oil that has been sold and now looks as if is about to do an Enron or Madoff.
Re:I'm not a stock holder (Score:5, Informative)
> But the tech is there
Yes, electrolysis and fuel cells exist and have for some decades now. The question is if they are good enough and cheap enough to replace gasoline engines. The answer so far is no, and by such a wide margin that the only people still advocating for such are either hucksters or die-hard hopefuls.
Here's why;
The larger of the two models you linked (The $4000 one) is listed as producing 0.5 liters per minute at 7 bar. Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles start at 340 bar, such as the Honda Clarity with it's ~4kg storage tank. The only other HFC vehicle I know of is the Toyota Mirai which uses a 700 bar tank...
Hydrogen is just under 0.0001 kg/L at STP. So for 4kg you need 40,000 liters of gas. That's 80,000 minutes to fill a tank, or just over 55 days. (The pressure difference is so large that the 7 bar is almost negligible here). The Clarity has an EPA rating of 240 miles per tank. It takes over 50 days to refill 240 miles worth of driving, or an equivalent of 0.18 miles of added drivable range per hour.
Compare to an EV recharging at L1 rates, which maxes out at 1.4KW. Even a mediocre EV will get 3 miles per KWh, so at L1 (standard wall outlet) that's about 4 miles of added drivable range per hour. L2 charging at home is about 5 times faster but let's keep it simple.
To get the equivalent hydrogen refueling rate, you'd need about 22 of those units... or $88,000 worth of electrolysis machines. Compressors not included. (The EVSE that plugs your electric car into the wall costs ~$200 for a nice one, and you get one with the car itself.)
The only way to make this economically viable is to consolidate, and leverage economies of scale. An electrolysis setup specially engineered for refueling a single vehicle overnight (8 hours max) might cost $20,000 to be very optimistic, but a $2,000,000 centralized station can perhaps refuel well over 100 cars per day at a few minutes each. Problem is, now you have to built enough $2,000,000 hydrogen fuel stations before enough people will buy HFC vehicles to make it a profitable thing to do. Once upon a time gasoline cars had a similar problem, but considering the only competition at the time was horses or steam powered trucks - and the fact that gasoline stores and transports rather nicely - it wasn't an insurmountable problem.
Hydrogen doesn't even make a whole lot of sense for stationary storage; The losses from electrolysis to storage to generation add up quick, and it has a tough time competing with chemical batteries for $/KWh.
=Smidge=
(I suppose to be perfectly fair with comparisons, a typical gas pump dispenses ~10 GPM, resulting in about 18,000 drivable miles per hour equivalent...)
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do you really think 5000 PSI (344 BAR) is that much greater than 3300 PSI (SCUBA HIGH)? That's done in the back room of dive shops. 344 BAR is the standard pressure for the Nikola and with very few exceptions, every other FCEV on the market.
The arguments you present against the adoption of hydrogen fueling are the EXACT same arguments that were presented against battery charging before someone actually did it.... And by the way, the same that were presented against petroleum fuel for internal combustion e
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Density (at STP) 0.08988 g/L
or
0.8 Kilos per 1000 L
3.5 Kilos is 4000 L
This discussion has been extremely useful
Thank you
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> Density (at STP) 0.08988 g/L
Yes.
> 0.8 Kilos per 1000 L
No. It's 0.089 kilograms per 1000 liters: 0.089 [grams per liter] = 0.089 [1000 grams per 1000 liters]
You need 50,561.80 liters for 4.5 kg of hydrogen at STP. I did a lot of generous rounding for quick and easy math and ended up with 40,000. Still within an order of magnitude and the "real" number actually hurts your case quite a bit.
=Smidge=
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350 vs 220? Its not a big difference, but you also need to consider that all the valves and seals needs to withstand the tank.
And the extra seals needed to secure hydrogen properly, because its so low on the atomic scale that it leaks really really badly if you just store it in anything resembling normal containers and high pressure tanks.
But this is do able. And its not a issue.
>The US is the only place in the world NOT making a major push this direction...
Russia, Norway, China and Japan isn't making a
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> do you really think 5000 PSI (344 BAR) is that much greater than 3300 PSI (SCUBA HIGH)?
Well it is about 1.5x more... but if you were paying attention you'd notice the pressure doesn't actually matter in any of the calculations. It's only relevant insofar as you will need a compressor which is added cost you haven't accounted for.
> The arguments you present against the adoption of hydrogen fueling are the EXACT same arguments that were presented against battery charging before someone actually did it
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Yes, this is what happens when I do arithmetic in my head. It's a failing.
I'm guessing the engineers working for GM, Honda, Hyundai and Toyota are SO much dumber than you are or are outright frauds. None of those cars are on the road or can possibly be running.
Oh, and none of the solar driven hydrogen stations in California and Connecticut exist either. Nor are the Hydrogen/hybrid buses in the San Francisco bay area are really what they say they are. The 800 truck order by Anheuser Busch are a fraud on
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> I'm guessing the engineers working for GM, Honda, Hyundai and Toyota are SO much dumber than you are or are outright frauds.
No, I'm sure they're doing the best they can to try and make it work. And maybe they will! Maybe there will be a breakthrough. Hydrogen does have some advantages (like longer range and faster refueling) that make it an attractive goal. Or maybe they won't ever reach that breakthrough... It won't be the first time that companies invested millions - even billions - into a technology
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The big bonus of EVs is: cheap fuel. Really cheap.
The big malus of hydrogen (besides storage etc. and all the other stuff everyone is talking about) is: it is significantly more expensive than gasoline.
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As far as I understand, SC was more of a distributed solar power company that dealt with all aspects of installation, maintenance, financing, etc. Tesla's residential energy division is transitioning more towards having solar and battery products being something the consumer or the house builder buys directly as product.
Then why did Tesla buy out Solar City in the first place and take on all that dead weight? There's no logical reason other than because Musk needed to bail out himself and other insiders. As well as not take a hit to his reputation that a company with his stamp on it going under would do.
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While not a Musk fanboy this direct linking of PayPal with him is a bit strong. Most scummy activities happened after he (and the others) were bought out by ebay, in fact I can't remember anything dirty before that.
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I know half a dozen people who got their accounts blocked by Pay Pal, years, if not a decade, before eBay bought them.
Half of them never got the money back. The other needed to file law suits to get it. And for a few it was really a bad problem, traveling the world with an pay pal credit card and getting the account blocked because pay pal thought: it is not normal that a person uses the card over months in various different countries. How would you feel if you travel with the trans siberia express from Ger
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And please keep in mind, batteries are NOT necessarily required to have an EV.
The Tesla drags a 1400 pound battery pack... Fuel Cells weight a whole lot less
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An extension cord that reaches as far as a Tesla can range on a charge would weigh a hell of a lot more
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An extension cord that reaches as far as a Tesla can range on a charge would weigh a hell of a lot more
One way to avoid that problem would be to make the extension cord static [bostonstreetcars.com] and allow multiple cars to share it.
Note that the cars could still contain batteries if desired, to allow for "off-grid" driving, but the batteries could be much smaller if the car is able to recharge while it is driving.
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I REALLY wish I could mod this one up! LOL
Shills and dupes for con-men are far more common (Score:2)
Yes, and similar quantities of platinum are used in catalytic converters now.
No ICE engine, no catalytic converters. Net zero change.
Check out industrial electrolyzers on Alibaba (22 liters/hour with 6Kw input power at 7 bar) and solutions currently being deployed in Europe and Asia.
You're correct, centralized hydrogen production and distribution has some issues ( metals exposed to hydrogen over time become brittle... coat with polymers? ).
Decentralized production using PV and wind is MUCH more practical a
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And bumble bees can't possibly fly.
Re: Shills and dupes for con-men are far more comm (Score:2)
The idiots who repeat that "bumblebees" misnomer are usually the same idiots who believe that Bill Gates really thought computers would never have more than 640k RAM. You think that you're providing a witty rejoinder to his comment when, in fact, you're just further demonstrating your own ignorance.
Re: Shills and dupes for con-men are far more com (Score:2)
I got his sarcasm; the issue here is that you're as ignorant as he is, so both of you believe the "Hurr durr scientists thought bumblebees couldn't fly" nonsense. Which is why you completely missed my point.
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You can make hydrogen gas by electrolysis using electricity.
But I agree that fuel cells are not a practical option at the moment, but then neither were electric cars until quite recently.
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But I agree that fuel cells are not a practical option at the moment, but then neither were electric cars until quite recently.
Fuel cells can and maybe will be developed to the point of practicality, but at the rate things are going it will be too little, too late. By the time fuel cells are cheap enough for mass production AND a significant hydrogen-generation-and-distribution infrastructure is built out, battery-powered cars will be so cheap, high-performing, and ubiquitous that nobody will be interested in buying a fuel-cell-based car that offers no competitive advantages.
Selling fuel-cell cars in the 2020's will be like sellin
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Here, allow me to do your homework for you:
Fuel cells consume hydrogen gas, typically at about 3300 PSI aka 7 BAR, reacting that in the presence of a catalyst with oxygen to generate electricity and water vapor. To get an idea of what that means, SCUBA takes come in two kinds, high and low. SCUBA high is 2200 PSI.
The typical fuel cell to produce the energy stored in that 1400 pound battery pack is about 100 pounds, with the carbon fiber reinforced polymer tanks to hold the hydrogen gas, about 300 pounds.
Ol
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Try again. 300 mile range. Look at reality... Existing vehicles.
Wikipedia articles of unknown provenance that fail even think about what exists? Please.
Dupes like you will continue to fund and promote fraud while wishing for Unicorns and puppies.
Next you'll say the earth is flat.
Re: Financial Statements (Score:2)
It's true; the Mirai - which weighs 800lbs less than a Tesla Model S, and delivers 1/5th the horsepower - gets about the same range. It's still a pretty shit vehicle which costs more to operate and is far less efficient than a battery electric. The only advantage it could provide would be faster refueling if the hydrogen infrastructure ever gets rolled out; however at the moment it's even more inconvenient to refuel than a battery electric.
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Only in the US is there a lack and even here the infrastructure is going in:
https://www.triplepundit.com/2... [triplepundit.com]
According the rollout at Nikola, those stations will be built and maintained by Ryder and available to all hydrogen vehicles.
Because of the federal regulation of hydrogen dispensers, there won't be any nonsense of this dispenser only works with this type of vehicle.
Yes, you have to pay... But believe it or not, with a Tesla too, you just paid up front. With the newer Teslas, the "all free" model has
Re: Financial Statements (Score:3)
Only in the US is there a lack
This is an incredibly stupid thing to say. There are essentially zero countries which have well developed hydrogen vehicle infrastructure. While some countries are better than others, there are certainly far more countries where hydrogen fuel for vehicles is essentially nonexistent than there are countries where it's commonly available.
Those particular 8 words are pretty much the worst thing you could have said if you actually want to be taken seriously on the subject.
According the rollout at Nikola, those stations will be built and maintained by Ryder and available to all hydrogen vehicles.
Great, those 800 stations are a nice
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you are correct. I was reading from the wrong set of notes
Re:My perspective as a stock holder. (Score:5, Interesting)
50% of revenue with very low profit isn’t something to cry over.
The problem is essentially that SolarCity had a very high customer acquisition cost by using Home Depot ($7,500 from reports, as opposed to an average $4,000). That cost, even at the lower end, is simply too high unless the customer is spending $40k+.
By doing more to vertically integrate and leverage the high traffic Tesla stores, they do more to improve their brand. They can also switch more to a wholesale model where the battery division really shines.
As an investor, my only concern with this is making sure they can maintain access to the “Home Depot crowd” without a presence there.
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Retail builds brand awareness. I am in the periphery of the field, and could not name any direct competitors until a couple months ago.
By wholesale, I am referring to systems with a cost of over half a million— something in the range of what I personally might specify for a client.
Re: My perspective as a stock holder. (Score:2)
You equate "wholesale" to large-scale deployment, and they are not equivalent.
Re: My perspective as a stock holder. (Score:2)
Citation, please... You're telecom claims are fantastical and run contrary to my experience. For example, repairing copper pairs is cheaper that rolling out a fiber install when a copper pair breaks.
CA rules should help Tesla (Score:5, Insightful)
We'll see in a few years how Tesla does. But California's rules should help Tesla's solar panel and battery business.
The New York Times [nytimes.com] says California will require that all new homes have solar power, starting in 2020.
Also, a rate change that takes effect in 2019
will charge California customers based on the time of day they use electricity. So homeowners with energy-efficiency features — a battery in particular, allowing energy to be stored for when it is most efficiently used — will avoid higher costs.
Re:CA rules should help Tesla (Score:4, Informative)
Home battery installations (including charging control and voltage conversion) of a sufficient size to make buffering worthwhile will cost at least 5000 bucks, probably more. Such a battery might save a couple of hundred bucks a year in metered electricity costs by storing lower-cost electricity and returninging it at times of higher cost. The maths don't add up.
Poor people who rent an apartment in the city rather than owning a suburbian McMansion and who can't drop five figures on a solar/battery installation will have to pay the higher metered electricity rates regardless, of course but they're poor so who cares?
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Just take a PACE loan to pay for it, it's free*.
Re: CA rules should help Tesla (Score:3)
You know that each of the real estate agents make 2x that on a $400k home sale? That's on top of the other "transaction charges" in buying a home and getting financed.
$5k works out to less than a $1 a day including the interest on a 15 year loan.
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So just because one is paying $400k for a house (and some middleman made some money), paying $5k extra for something that might save you a few hundred bucks a year suddenly became a good investment?
No wonder Americans are neck deep in debt.
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It is if it adds $15k to the value of the house.
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You really want the world to be shit place don't you?
There may be help for your problem.
Re: CA rules should help Tesla (Score:2)
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California does a lot to favor the poor— tiered energy rates make low energy users cost per kWh lower than larger users.
For smaller users, grid connected solutions won’t make economic sense; they essentially need appliances that are plug-in (like a ups) or just independent.
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Since batteries are getting about 5%-9% cheaper every year on average,
I presume you're talking about lithium-technology batteries here. Prices have come down over the past few years but that's no guarantee they will continue to fall in price at your projected rate. The minehead price of lithium carbonate, the main supply-chain feedstock for such batteries has doubled in price over the past year due to shortages and increased demand. New mine production is expected to come on stream to meet that demand and
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Can you tell me some of these "50%" improvements that you see coming? Cost-wise there's work being done to reduce and possibly eliminate the amount of cobalt used in lithium-ion battery cells but that's not the most expensive part of the cell.
One dated (from 2013) engineering report I saw suggested Li-tech batteries needed about 2.5 to 3kg of lithium carbonate per kWh of capacity. The minehead price for that material doubled to about $14,000 per tonne at the end of last year and it's only expected to fall
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In the end retail customers and especially the poorest retail customers will pay through the nose, because they are paying both for the backup generating capacity AND the expensive solar. Meanwhile industry will get free electricity throughout the day because of the vast oversupply of renewable energy ...
https://www.technologyreview.c... [technologyreview.com]
Win win, fuck the poor, reward the rich. Until the poor can't get any more loans to buy shit with, but worry about that later.
Re: CA rules should help Tesla (Score:5, Interesting)
What century were you born? The only thing we have that is more energy efficient than a battery is a capacitor. Batteries are in the 90+% range. Efficiency isn't the complaint about batteries. It's the weight and that's mostly it. Even the general grid is more inefficient.
A battery that can smooth out the energy demand of the grid over a week would be far more efficient than turning off and on on-demand inefficient plants. Of course at this time, on a macro level, a massive battery is a very very expensive investment. And that is the problem with batteries.
But the nice thing about batteries is that they can be scaled down while maintaining most of their efficiency. You can build a distributed network of batteries that are co-connected with the variances in demand; shielding the general grid from some of that variance. That way the general grid can run more efficiently.
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>And the bad thing about batteries is that you can't scale them up
Yes you can. You buy some more and install them. It isn't complicated.
Rude and wrong, a winning combination.
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It's peak-shifting, which may allow the grid as a whole to be more efficient.
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>unsupported by anything that resembles evidence
Evidence like it being widely reported in the press?
http://www.abc.net.au/news/201... [abc.net.au]
http://fortune.com/2017/12/26/... [fortune.com]
https://arstechnica.com/inform... [arstechnica.com]
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
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I see no evidence supporting the claim above in three of the four articles above. I won't bother with the fourth.
Musk fans are like their cult leader, they can only do one thing - lie. And not very well.
I see no evidence in your outlandish claims. Anonymous cowards who lie a lot don't carry much weight in an argument.
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So present an argument with substance.
The mechanisms of efficient energy storage and release mitigating spot market abuses by generators is simple to understand and has been shown to work in practice. I didn't make an argument of authority, I pointed to reports of it working when deployed.
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Solar City is clearly in the subsidy milking business, not the energy generation business. They probably couldn't care less how much energy (if any) their installations produce so long as the government checks continue to show up.
Mountains of molehills and shills (Score:2)
Meanwhile, in reality: "Tesla closes 13/14 out of 75 solar panel installation sites."
No wonder Elon Musk wants to get into the journalism accountability business, if he has to deal with nonsense like this all the time.
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Meanwhile, the market for residential PV has been stagnating. Tesla isn't the only company struggling. Competitors are also losing money but they are at least showing progress getting to break even.
Doubling down on an increasingly commoditized market seems like a
Re: Mountains of molehills and shills (Score:2)
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It was stagnating years before. Then California passed some rules to fast track solar installs which basically bailed out some big companies, bypassing inspections and allowing non-electricians to install solar installations.
And even with that residential is still expected to stay pretty much flat.
https://cleantechnica.com/2017... [cleantechnica.com]
Bigger news (Score:2, Troll)
Bigger news you just made up? (Score:2)
So what, is this whistler blower your mother?
I'm calling bullshit. The odds are incredibly against you having that kind of insider information and if you did you could find much better things to do with it then waiting for a slashdot article about a Musk business so you could bring it up in an internet forum.
The odds are vastly more likely that, like a child, you are making this up because you either want it to be true or for attention.
It seems to be ... (Score:3)
Many good business ideas fail in the sales and marketing process. And partnering with Home Depot appears to be a weak spot. Can't make any money there and can't sell on your own (possibly as a condition of the HD sales channel). HD caters to crazy little old ladies who insist on buying a flower at a hardware store. Or DIYers who don't notice when they exchange their Blum cabinet hardware line for cheap Chinese knockoffs.
So the tax breaks and gov't subsidy handouts (Score:2)
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Re:FAKE NEWS (Score:5, Informative)
Which isn't remotely what happened here. A dozen solar install locations are not "20% of their business operations".
Tesla's solar division (formerly SolarCity) is transitioning from being a (low margin) installer of other people's solar panels into a solar roofing product manufacturer.
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Which isn't remotely what happened here. A dozen solar install locations are not "20% of their business operations".
Tesla's solar division (formerly SolarCity) is transitioning from being a (low margin) installer of other people's solar panels into a solar roofing product manufacturer.
In addition, if the US tariff war continues for any length of time, the cost of solar panels from outside of the US will eat into the low profit margin of the home retail solar market. Reorganizing and repositioning the retail solar division makes smart business sense.
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It makes sense to focus your business on manufacturing your domestic products.
Re:FAKE NEWS (Score:5, Insightful)
Solar City acquired its debt load working on the Solar City Gigafactory (Gigafactory 2). It had, and has under Tesla, continually been transitioning from its old, low margin business model to this.
If you have an issue with the facts, explain them, but these are the facts. You don't build the largest solar plant in the US with pocket change.
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They only product SolarCity has that could eventually yield high margins is the solar roof, yet that is way to expensive for the common man, is way behind schedule on market availability, and will likely always cost sign
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You really don't have a clue, do you?
The Solar Roof is aimed squarely at new construction, where it won't be expensive, especially when Tesla's warranty is included in the calculations. CA just mandated solar on new houses, and Tesla Solar is uniquely p
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You can't compare Solar roof to panels. You have to compare Solar roof to the cost of panels plus the cost of the roof itself.
Yes, as a retrofit, Solar roof will be very expensive, but that's not the target market.
People buy houses with roofs that look nice but cost more. Those people won't want an ugly house with a cheap roof and some cheap panels slung on top, which may be as or almost as expensive as a very nice looking roof that will last the life of the house.
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You can't compare Solar roof to panels.
Yes you can. And if you are a consumer you have those choices. That is what you do with choices, you compare them. Of course you must consider roof costs, but as of now Tesla roof is way more expensive than traditional roof and solar panels, and as I said you are stuck one you install Tesla roof.
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Well, I can compare oranges and apples. It doesn't make the comparison valid, though.
Your argument is equivalent to arguing that a sidecar for a motorcycle is cheaper than a new BMW car. It's true, but irrelevant.
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Musk made almost his only real profit while operating PayPal, whichh is a 'useful' entity but also a far shadier version of 'banking' than most banksters engage in.
Musk peddles hopes and dreams. He markets hype to believers in a dystopian future; his hype provides the illusion of a way out of the percieved dismal fate.
I mean, damnit, it is not that difficult to see the obvious.
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He gets a lot of hype for things that don't have substance.
But he also has some real accomplishments, particularly with SpaceX.
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"Losing money left, right and centre doesn't mean you're not profitable."
Perhaps not, but there is often a strong correlation between losses and a lack of profitability. Plus which, it's a bit hard to classify closing facilities and firing workers as capital expenditure.
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Losing money left, right and doesn't mean you're not profitable.
Losing money is the strategy of the likes of Uber and Amazon.
Being profitable is for ancient, old-fashioned buggy whip bricks and mortar type companies.
Seriously rich folks don't pay any income taxes . . . because, although they live very well, . . . on paper . . . they are losing money.
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Seriously rich folks don't pay any income taxes . .
It never ceases to amaze me how people believe what they want to believe. I guess you don't know any rich people, or have never looked at where most income tax revenues come from.
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Take out a student loan!