Reno Selected For Tesla Motors Battery Factory

First time accepted submitter Mikenan writes Tesla has finally decided that it will build its battery "gigafactory" in Nevada, sources say. "That's a go, but they are still negotiating the specifics of the contract," a source within the Nevada's governor's office told CNBC Wednesday afternoon. The source noted that it could be a week before the deal is official. Nevada is planning a press conference Thursday in Carson City.

Comments

CARson City

[MildlyTangy]

Now we know why Nevada was chosen.

CARson City.

Makes total sense.

Re:CARson City

[ShanghaiBill]

Point's still valid.

No it isn't. If you want to conserve water, then stop subsidizing wasteful irrigation. Nothing else matters. People have made similar complaints about casinos using water, but for every job created farms use more than thousand times as much water as casinos. We need farms, but we don't need farms in the desert.

Re:Stop Making Up Words!

[Dynotrick]

WTF is a "gigafactory?"

Is it somehow different than any other kind of factory? Or is it a made-up word designed to satisfy some narcissists ego?

It's the opposite of a nanofactory.

Re:Stop Making Up Words!

[i kan reed]

35 GWh/Year isn't fooling me!!!

That's only 4 megawatts!

Re:This company would be nowhere without handouts.

[AaronW]

Tesla is making over 25% profit on every car sold. All of that money is going into growth and expansion. While they get emission credits, they don't rely on them since they are shrinking.

Another building full of robots?

[ErichTheRed]

I mean, I guess it's good that they're not manufacturing the batteries in China (batteries are heavy so I guess the shipping outweighs the labor savings) but it sounds like Tesla is just going to pocket a ton of tax credits and other stuff in exchange for putting a building of robot manufacturers in Nevada.

Say what you will, but the middle class needs work. We need something for the vast majority of people who aren't scientists, engineers or politicians to do. That used to be traditional assembly-line manufacturing. After that, it was the millions of people routing documents and reports around large corporations. This next wave of automation is going to put a real crimp on the middle class that it can't easily absorb. Unless people start paying full-salary wages for stupid stuff like rating cat videos or posting on social media, the traditional model of 2-kids-and-a-mortgage is out the window. For the low end, we need something like the steel mills and other factories that would employ thousands of workers in 3 shifts. And for the medium end, we need to preserve at least some of the "corporate drone" jobs. At the risk of sounding like a Luddite, it looks like there's nothing left for the middle of the economy -- it's going to split into ultra low end jobs like cleaning and food service, and high-end jobs like engineering, science, etc. (And I'm guessing management will reserve itself a place in the high end too.)

The problem is, without rolling back a lot of the benefits automation brings, I don't know how we're going to handle the next level of change.

Re:Another building full of robots?

[ErichTheRed]

Right, which is what I was saying -- no one is going to actually support subsidizing unemployment no matter how bad things get. Look at the number of poor and lower-middle class people who idolize the "job creator" class and deride people on unemployment/welfare. People are convinced that just working harder will make them rich -- and no amount of convincing will change that mindset. Unless, of course, 80% of the workforce is unemployed.

I don't have a good answer for this. People who worked like dogs their whole life won't support it because their entire self-worth is based on what they've managed to save in their retirement accounts. People who are working are going to feel like they're subsidizing freeloaders. It's going to be a very ugly 21st century.

Re:Another building full of robots?

[sobiloff]

Whoops, 6,500 direct factory jobs, 9,000 associated jobs.

http://www.rgj.com/story/money/reno-rebirth/2014/06/15/reno-rebirth-tesla-game-changer/10406441/

Re:Another building full of robots?

[Grishnakh]

Say what you will, but the middle class needs work. We need something for the vast majority of people who aren't scientists, engineers or politicians to do.

Oh please. We can just put everyone to work in retail sales and real estate. We'll all get rich selling houses to each other!

Re:Another building full of robots?

[Areyoukiddingme]

... we wanted more. (And probably always will.)

No, we won't.

This is a major fallacy of economic thinking that really needs to be put to bed. It isn't true. Thinking like this is the basis for the Trickle Down Theory of economics, which has been soundly falsified. No, we won't always want more. Unbridled all-consuming unsatisfiable greed is a neurosis. It is abnormal and very unusual. Adults who suffer from the condition are considered stunted, little more than children. Children are expected to grow out of it, if they ever go through that phase at all. If you always want more, everybody around you thinks there's something wrong with you, and will usually avoid being around you any more after a while.

Normal people, by definition most people, are satisfiable. And satisfiable without actually all that many resources, in the grand scheme of things. Yes we all want more than a 19th century standard of living, but that's because the ancient Romans had a better standard of living than most of the world in the 19th century. It didn't take much to do better than that. Our needs get satisfied in a hurry. A variety of food, some indoor plumbing, and a roof that doesn't leak covers most of it. Add on some form of personal transportation if you live in a large, mostly empty continent like North America, and you're done. The wants that go on top of that are actually quite minimal. Almost nobody has more than two cell phones, and the vast majority of the world has only one. Practically every type of consumer electronics and appliance follows the same pattern. People have one cell phone, one tablet, one laptop, one desktop (they forgot they had), one blender, one microwave, one toaster oven, one deep fryer. The only people who have six cell phones are neurotic or app developers (but I repeat myself).

Yes, once you have one of everything, you can just go bigger. But again, there are pretty serious upper limits. Most people don't want a 700 room palace on the order of Versailles. Even those who did had a tendency to stuff 3000 permanent residents into that space. Most people don't want their own yacht, let alone their very own cruise ship, or there would be many more yachts in the world. So it goes for every thing you can possess.

So no, most people won't always want more. Most people in developed nations are quite satisfied with what they have. Sure they dream about palaces and fleets of sports cars, but drop unlimited funds on their cringing heads and they still won't buy all that. They'd be uncomfortable trying to live in a palace.

People's needs can be trivially satisfied. People's wants can be easily satisfied. Whither now your broken economic system that requires unlimited growth?

Re:California Betrayed

[LWATCDR]

Tesla has the car factor in CA and Elon has a major SpaceX factory there as well.
Betrayed?

Re:Stop Making Up Words!

[sumdumass]

Hmm.. "Prefix".. I'm not sure that word means what you think it means. At least the two examples you gave do not fit.

Re:Stop Making Up Words!

[Kohath]

Cucumber factory only has stem-removal jobs.

That's not what MotherJones says

[Tailhook]

From 11 months ago:

But make no mistake: Tesla still relies on subsidies to stay in the black. Its first-quarter profit, a modest $11 million, hinged on the $68 million it earned selling clean-air credits under a California program that requires automakers to either produce a given number of zero-emission vehicles or satisfy the mandate in some other way. For the second quarter, Tesla announced a $26 million profit (based on one method of accounting), but again the profit hinged on $51 million in ZEV credits; by year's end, these credit sales could net Tesla a whopping $250 million. There are also generous tax credits and rebates for electric-car buyers: $7,500 from the federal government and up to $5,000 if you live in California.

Beyond that, leaving out the HUGE tax credits buyers get for purchasing Telsa cars (10-17% of the price of a Model S) is intellectually dishonest on your part; Tesla would sell far fewer cars and at lower prices with out those extreme tax credits.

Re:That's not what MotherJones says

[kellymcdonald78]

It's possible to generate 25% margin on each car, yet still have the company post a loss (Learn to read an Income Statement). All it requires is the company to re-invest all of that margin (and more) say... building a Gigafactory or other R&D or expansion activities. When you're in a growth phase like Tesla and your overriding objective is to scale the business, you would expect the company to be running on the edge of profitability, simply because every dollar in profit is a dollar that can be used to fund your expansion.

Re:That's not what MotherJones says

[OhPlz]

Yea, but the people buying Tesla can afford to pay the full cost. Why are we subsidizing luxury cars for the higher wage earners?

Re:Stop Making Up Words!

[kamapuaa]

Am I missing something? Reno is a ten hour drive from Mexico.

Re:Stop Making Up Words!

[lgw]

OK, obviously there' selection bias in play here, but I've never worked for a large dev shop that preferred HBB workers over workers that didn't require sponsorship. There are certainly H1B-only shops that exist (in defiance of the law) to exploit young workers, but those are contract-only shops (they only do contract work for other businesses). If you're keeping it legal, H1B workers aren't any cheaper (including legal costs).

I have worked for places that had 80-90% of their developers working in India and/or China. That saves money. I'm happy to compete with anyone who works and lives in the US - we all have the same expenses (and I don't send half my paycheck back home).

None of which has to do with manufacturing, of course. Tesla does use some H1Bs for software development (friend of mine's wife works there), but AFAIK they're like most places and pay competitively.
 

Re:California Betrayed

[HanzoSpam]

Bloom off the rose? There are few things that give me greater pleasure than seeing a leftist parasite howling because it's been deprived of it's host. Go Tesla!

Re:Stop Making Up Words!

[viperidaenz]

That would be a Jiggafactory.

Re:California Betrayed

[Daetrin]

Well if California was actually betrayed by anyone, the first blame would have to fall at the feet of the state legislature, which failed to vote on the incentive package before the latest session ended. When the California governor promised Tesla the incentives the company responded with interest, and a few days after those incentives disappeared in puff of legislative smoke Tesla announced their decision to go with Nevada.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/...

When the topic first came up on Slashdot a number of people seemed to think offering such incentives was a bad idea. Maybe the California legislature agreed with that reasoning, but if they've made any statements about why they did what they did i haven't heard about it.