Slashdot Mirror
If Tesla Can Run Its Gigafactory On 100% Renewables, Why Can't Others?
Lucas123 writes Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said his company's Gigafactory battery plant, the world's largest, will be "self contained" and run on solar, wind and geothermal energy. The obvious problem with renewable sources is that they're intermittent at any given location, but on a larger scale they're quite predictable and reliable, according to Tom Lombardo, a professor of engineering and technology. Lombardo points out that Tesla isn't necessarily going off-grid, but using a strategy of "net metering" where the factory will produce more renewable energy than it needs, and receive credits in return from its utility when renewables aren't available. So why can't other manufacturing facilities do the same? Is what Tesla is doing not necessarily transferable to other industries? Sam Jaffe, principal research analyst with Navigant Research, believes Tesla's choice of locations — Reno — and its product is optimal for using renewable and not something that can be reproduced by every industry.
Germany is well on the way to doing this on the scale of a whole country. It just takes some political will.
Korma: Good
Tesla is selling $100k cars, while other battery factories make batteries for $100 phones and $500 laptops. Maybe it is too expensive for them to set up a fully renewable process.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
It's because people like you want a $600 smartphone device every 2 years made by a Chinese worker getting $1 an hour using 100s of toxic, cancerous materials, all processed by coal power.
In the race to the top in the present it's the future generations that come in last.
Hydroelectric dams are right next to many aluminum smelters and even next to some datacenters along the Columbia river.
The issue can be a complex one, but I think it boils down fairly easily:
1. Most companies can go completely to renewable power, excepting some where they need the byproducts for other uses. Concrete manufacturing, refining iron and making steel, etc... However, this doesn't mean that it's economic to do so.
2. There is however a limit - if the manufacturer uses more energy than their roof/property collects, they obviously can't go 100% renewable without obtaining more property.
3. I figure that it's probably easier to go 100% renewable if you plan to do so before even breaking ground on the factory. Such as selecting a location with nearly ideal solar patterns.
4. Net metering only works so long as there are other customers looking to buy the power when it's being produced, and generators producing when it isn't. If 'everybody' tries to do it, the system would break down.
5. To go along with this, even if they can't net meter, they're a battery factory. They can create a lot of backup storage even if they only drain/refill all their produced batteries once as a 'test', cleverly arranged to provide back up power. Or produce some batteries at cost, use degraded but still functional batteries returned under warranty/core charge, etc...
I don't read AC A human right
Tesla is still new and young and isn't bogged down by gigantic bureaucracies and regulations and NIH-syndrome people.
If you have to use the credit system then it can't work for everyone, there has to be enough power to go around all the time if everyone is going to make the switch. The Tesla fatctory can produce on average more than it consumes but when it is not producing energy from a renewable source it is consuming it from a non-renewable source. Any reliance on oil/gas/coal means that it is not 100% renewable powered, even if it has "credits" saying that they made up for it on another day. If they want to be 100% renewable powered they need to put a monster of a storage center on their property and stop consuming any power from the local grid. Until they they NEED oil/gas/coal plants, without them they could not operate.
sounds like scifi.
all you need is unlimited energy, sand (silicon) and a mostly nitrogen atmosphere. really.
waiting for electrical vehicule made from seashell.
energy cost on balance sheet approaching zer0. good.
The fiction of net metering is that you will not be paid the same amount for the electricity you generate as for the electricity you consume.
On of the purposes of "Smart Meters" is to permit differential pricing on electricity produced vs. consumed; it's not just to provide a temporal demand market. There are already tariffs in place in California where PG&E only has to buy as much electricity as you consume for a net 0 energy usage, rather than being required to purchase everything you generate over what you consume.
The idea of a large grid only works if someone pays to maintain that grid, and that pricing comes in as a differential.
Everyone can't do what Tesla is doing because not everyone is going to have the storage capacity to make it economical; Tesla can just rota the batteries it manufactures in service to the manufacturing plant itself, as part of "burn in testing", so that it'll get local off-grid storage as a side effect of the manufacturing process itself.
I suppose that "every rechargeable battery manufacturer can do what Tesla does" would be a fair statement, but that's a tiny subset of "everyone"
The obvious problem with renewable sources is that they're intermittent at any given location
Yeah. How are they going to store intermittent power for when they need it later? At a battery factory?
This is a tough problem.
You cannot base any real analysis on figures take by looking at an artists rendering of the site.
The article says that they will have 85 windmills because there are 85 windmills in the picture. This is garbage. It is an artists rendering!
If you want to have a serious discussion, you have to wait until there is some actual real info to discuss.
Note that net metering is not running your plant completely off renewables. It's running it off renewables some of the time.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Yes, everybody can do what Tesla is doing, if all entry-level cars cost $70000, last only a few years, and were still subsidized massively by tax payers.
Is that the world you want to live in? A world in which only the wealthy can afford cars?
I really commend Tesla for the approach and the commitment to reducing environmental impact, but it's important that we recognise their strategy cannot easily be applied universally. That's likely because, in any given 24-hour cycle, their peaks and troughs of both energy production and energy consumption are likely to align with other similar contributors. So if all producer-consumers are generating periods of net surplus and net demand in the same time windows, the grid is somehow going to have to take up the slack...
There was some experimentation with this in the UK many years ago, using a reversible hydroelectric power station at Lock Awe. The idea was that at night, when demand was low, the turbines were converted into pumps that lifted water from the lower reservoir to the upper one. Then, during times of peak demand, the facility ran as a conventional hydropower unit and contributed electricity to the grid.
The challenge, of course, is finding enough suitable hydroelectric facilities nearby to make it work. As we migrate more of our energy production to renewables, the inherent inflexibility of renewable generation may become a significant limiting factor - to the extent that we may always require either a fill-in alternative of some kind.
It's generally called "co-generation", and although that applies to energy generated by a wide variety of means many are renewable. Burning methane from sewerage treatment plants to run generators is one with quite a few decades of history, another is burning plant waste such as "bagasse" from sugar cane.
.... tesla is not selling for bottom dollar.
How is the product relevant? Isn't it more about location? If you build a gigantic factory building, you can put all kinds of things on the roof. If you built in a location that has sun, wind and geothermal capabilities, how would your product influence whether you could go renewable?
Isn't it still about whether you can get your investment back and in what time-frame?
How does Tesla renew the lithium?
The standard way: nuclear fusion, with peaking capacity provided by supernovas.
BCuz it makes battery and it run on battery it makes. Hard 4 u?
Other factories do not get government loans, do not make their money by selling their product at a loss then make their actual profit by selling zero emissions credits to their competitors, and they don't need the PR blitz for doing so because their customers are mainly environmentalists. Profitable companies need cheap energy that is available at full output on 24/7. That rules out all renewables except hydroelectric. They can't shut down because the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing.
Renewables are "predictable and reliable"? This quote is all over the net in summaries of TFA, but it does not exist in TFA, nor even in Prof. Lombardo's original article.
It's great that Tesla is putting this effort in. Note that they have chosen a very special location - masses of sunshine, shallow and easily accessible geothermal, etc.. However, as usual - if the title of the article contains a question, the answer is in the negative - no, others cannot do this.
The expense is massive; Tesla is doing this primarily for political "green" points. It takes massive amounts of land. It requires a special location. Few other companies will be in a position to reproduce this.
And - to get back to my first point - renewables are neither predictable nor reliable. Tesla is not going off-grid, nor could they. There have been plenty of previous references on Slashdot to the actual (non-)reliability of wind farms and solar. Even geothermal has its limits, not only location, but for each location there is a hard limit as to how fast can you remove heat.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Please wake me up once somebody manages to run their gigafactory completely off the grid. This credit system is just bollocks. It's the same b.s. they pull with the CO2 certificates, where you can literally buy clean air from the past to compensate...
Everybody with sufficient deep pockets can throw in a whole bunch of solar panels and windmills, use them when conditions permit and dump the rest back onto the grid. Unfortunately, that's not how power consumption plays out in the real world.
The problem sets in when it's cloudy without sufficient wind, which happens quite a lot. So what then? Draw from the grid again? And where does that power come from?
Ask the Germans how green their shit actually is... Big coal-fired plants constantly need to be on the stand-by, because those things need hours to go up to capacity. Running at sub-optimal temperatures and thus still burning coal and producing even more pollution per burned tonne than running at optimal load factors...
Brag about how well this works after ten years of operation. I'd love to see if this is actually sustainable. Sure, they can build it... and sure they can start doing it that way... but is it economical? Actually?
We won't know until the system has been operating for years.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I wuz wondering the other day (spelling is an intentional affect). What if we had light bulbs and small appliances, or medium appliance, or even big watt users like vacuum cleaners that had built in batteries? They could charge up at night, when the electrical grid could charge less for electricity. When you used them during the day or early evening off battery power, they would run off battery power first, switching to direct power if the batteries charge ran down. Thus evening out the diurnal variation of demand on the grid. With some good number crunching, we could decide if it was worth it. Setting aside politics. (Sarcasm).
Already Dyson is advertising a cordless vacuum cleaner, although on the basis of easier use; no cord to get tangled up. (I read a review; it sucks. Sorry.) On the other hand, and the other hand, I tried the Dyson new Most-est! and Best-est! (it said so on the unit) Hand Dryer in a bathroom at a local business. I slipped my hands into the unit--and was promptly spayed in the face by the water coming off my hands. They dried rather well, though. The hands, that is.
When I go to a high point in this city and look down, I see countless flat roofs that could easily host solar panels. Even with all the fog this city gets, that would make a significant impact on our use of non-renewable energy. But it is not to be. Homeowners tend not to like the upfront expense, they tend not to know about SolarCity, and a bunch of the homes are rented. Absent some regulation, they aren't going to install renewable energy.
I think the neatest time to add renewable energy to a building is during construction. Absent that regulation, unless the owner makes it a priority, then the architects are not going to add it to the plan. For example, my work place recently commissioned and moved into a new building. It has an unobstructed, south-facing, 2-story-high, 10-foot-wide window that we have to cover up on the inside to maintain the climate. My immediate thought was: Solar energy. But I had no authority; the people in charge just put a poorly designed curtain on it. It just doesn't occur to them that we could put renewables in this building.
Actually, in the current political climate, I think renewable energy gets negative publicity from these deployments. Conservatives under the thrall of Koch money see renewables as an admission of AGW, and reject it. No! That reason is stupid! And regardless of AGW, renewables will help us survive the depletion of the oil reserves! The Koch-funded people claim that there is no depletion. I live in a state of extreme pessimism.
Have a nice time.
Lithium Ion batteries are only about 1% lithium by weight. There are significant amounts of other stuff to source.
http://seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/2023573267_bmwmoseslakexml.html
"Dr. Klaus Draeger, a member of BMW’s eight-member board of management, said the carmaker chose Eastern Washington for its cheap hydropower and to create a “green” supply chain using sustainable energy."
The plant is already productive and will be expanded to triple its output next year. So, in fact other companies are already pioneering that concept. When will that Gigafactory thingy be ready?
why does the worlds largest solar power plant need/want to supplement their power generation abilities with natural gas?
Telsa has some grand plans and it might work for them but to expect for example a steel plant to follow suit shows just how ignorant most of you are.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
Tesla is doing this
Uhm. They haven't even broken ground yet. So no, they're NOT.
Until the site is up and 100% operational, this is all smoke being blown out someone's ass.
Why don't others do this?
Because this sort of solution isn't suitable everywhere.
Reno sees about 250 sunny or partly sunny days a year, with roughly 60% of those being totally sunny.
A place like Chicago sees 189 sunny or partly sunny days a year with roughly 40% of those being totally sunny.
Places like Reno don't have to deal with long stretches of extreme low temperatures and snow measured in feet.
Also, there's the land use to consider. Farmland is a LOT more valuable for what it can produce than a big stretch of desert land. So converting it to a wind/solar farm from food production is idiotic.
There's also issues of space availability. If you have a factory in someplace like Los Angeles, you simply aren't going to have the land area to build a totally renewable setup.
On top of this, what other environmental impacts does building in this manner, on a wide-scale basis (not just one factory, but dozens/hundreds/thousands of businesses and their facilities) have?
There's also the issue that the local utility needs to be set up to accept power back into the system.
And finally, if everyone's doing this, how do you maintain a stable power production industry? And how does the industry finance maintenance, expansion and construction of new facilities to replace old/obsoleted facilities that have met/exceeded their productive lifetimes?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I'm from one of those midwestern post-industrial wasteland towns...during jr high and high school i watched a town that employed 20,000+ GM workers to one that employed 1,000 then zero.
Ford and General Motors business managers & production planners **did not give a damn** about any notions of doing anything like this, ever
You would have been laughed out of the meeting room if you were honestly suggesting what Tesla is doing.
Thank you Dave Raggett
And here in Grand Rapids Michigan we have several places that do it. The Van Andel Institute for example is covered in solar on their roofs and their solar program is very successful even through last winter when we saw more snow than Minnesota saw.
How about instead of wild speculation you actually look up the places that ACTUALLY have done it and have been running that way for years successfully?
Even Michigan Tech way the hell up against Lake Superior has a successful Solar power generation system in a place where they get on average 6 feet of snow falling per winter storm and over 30 feet of snow fall for the winter.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Right now Tesla's Gigafactory does nothing, because it's just some hype that's been used to get funding.
We need to wait for it to be built and see some results. Otherwise, we might as well be discussing the environmental soundness of the warp drive on the starship Enterprise, or the predicted efficiencies from the dreams any other capitalist has spun up.
Show us results before saying more.
Pfff. Please learn something about energy production and how the grid works. Solar is usable as a base production, not so usable as a load follower or peak plant. That's why it basically requires something else, such as natural gas, to supplement it. Same goes for coal, and especially nuclear. You can't just produce how much you want, you need to constantly match the usage. Otherwise you'll break shit.
Fukushima discredits the Soviet system.
http://www.businessweek.com/ne...
RWE AG said Aug. 12 it will halt an extra 1,005 megawatts of coal and lignite capacity by the first quarter of 2017, taking the total planned capacity cuts to 8,940 megawatts. Old lignite plants are candidates for closing, according to New York-based Pira, whose clients include oil companies, utilities and governments. A thousand megawatts is enough to power 2 million European homes.
They are shutting down the old coal plants, replacing them with new, more efficient and cleaner ones... and now they have to shut down and reduce production of those too.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...
Wind and solarâ(TM)s share of installed German power capacity will rise to 42 percent by next year from 30 percent in 2010, according to European Union data compiled by Citigroup Inc. The share of hard coal and lignite plant capacity will drop to 28 percent from 32 percent, the data show.
German utilities plan to start new hard-coal plants with 5,606 megawatts of capacity this year and next, data from Bonn-based national grid regulator Bundesnetzagentur show. That compares with a target of at least 10,000 megawatts from new solar and wind installations in 2014 and 2015 under Germanyâ(TM)s renewable energy act, which takes effect Aug. 1. Solar output reached a record 24,244 megawatts on June 6, according to EEX.
Because... They are getting more out of all the solar and wind than expected. They are getting negative electricity prices in January and May.
http://www.reuters.com/article...
http://www.businessinsider.com...
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
So, these places you're talking about have been removed from the grid and are in no way, shape or form reliant on traditional methods? No? They aren't? They still rely on traditional production during peak hours and at night?
Try again.
Tesla recycles its batteries.
Life is not for the lazy.
Your right. We should just quit trying and listen to your ideas...........I'm tired of hearing "we can only produce 40% of the power we need not 100% so this idea sucks.
Lithium comes from big bang nucleosynthesis primarily and is usually destroyed in stars. Deuterium tritium fusion relies on destroying lithium to produce tritium to continue the reaction. However, in a battery application, lithium is not destroyed and can be recycled. That makes it different, in that application, from fossil fuels which are destroyed when used as fuel.
They recycle the battery components, but not into new batteries I notice... bah.
Tesla's gigafactory won't run on 100% renewables. It will simply dumps more energy into the grid that it consumes.
But when its wind turbines and solar panels aren't producing enough it will use coal power like everyone else.
You made the point I came here to make. Why don't we wait until Tesla actually does it before we ask why other companies don't? It is all very well and good to praise Tesla for making the effort, but before we condemn others for not making the same effort we should wait to see if Tesla succeeds. Once Tesla has this plant up and running we can analyze their results against what they had to do to obtain those results and then judge whether or not this is something other companies should implement. For example, if Tesla's solution depends on the factory being located in Reno, NV with annual rainfall of about 8 inches, do we really want all of our manufacturing (and the people employed doing it) located in areas with such low annual rainfall? I was hoping to get an average for the entire U.S., but the average rainfall east of the Mississippi is slightly about 30 inches, close to 4 times that of Reno.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Don't forget that Elon's first focus is not making money but about changing the world.
If he can push the needle on sustainable factories, even if it's profit neutral, he will be very happy.
Even this discussion is exactly what he wants.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
One of our production facilities installed two large windmills that supply roughly 10-15% of the power the plant uses. You would think this would lower the cost for purchased electricity, but it didn't.
The electric company raised the rates for our plant because the usage dropped enough that they entered a lower usage bracket which has a higher cost per KW/h. We actually pay MORE each month in electricity costs even though the plant purchases 10-15% less electricity..
Obviously they are negotiating the contract terms now (it may be done) but this is just one example of how the utilities have everyone by the balls. They are going to get their money, one way or another.
I'm sure for Tesla, it will be easier since they are starting from the beginning instead of doing a retrofit. However I hear similar stories from residential users. Most times people want to make the choice to use returnables but outside factors make it monetarily difficult to pursue.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
I teach physics. The most depressing part of my job is teaching a general-education class where I have to explain global warming.
Scientists don't have a private agenda. We would LOVE to be wrong about this, but:
- Temperatures are going up worldwide
- Global temperatures are historically very well correlated to CO2 concentrations
- CO2 concentrations have a straightforward and well-understood effect on infrared light produced by
earth's blackbody radiation
- Even small changes to global temperature will create big changes to local climates
- We can stop this, but only if radical action is taken right now
so
- We're all fucked.
This is not the time for the debate about whether the effect is real. This is the time for debate about just how MUCH we should be panicking. We're in the deep shit here. We're talking about large proportions of humanity not having enough food to eat. The resulting warfare and hardship will be devastating.
"Germany's Energy Poverty: How Electricity Became a Luxury Good" By SPIEGEL Staff on 09/04/2013:
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
Tesla's dick is so tasty we get excited just dreaming about when we get the chance to suck it.
Could burn other byproduct of sugar production, but why waste good ole grog!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Your right. We should just quit trying and listen to your ideas...........I'm tired of hearing "we can only produce 40% of the power we need not 100% so this idea sucks.
Totally not what I said.
I said that there are places where this simply doesn't make sense. Either for logistical and/or economic reasons.
YOU added the "so we should never do it" sentiment.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Well, you're off to the races here... You've got quite a few misconceptions here, let me see if I can disabuse you of a few of them.
Other factories do not get government loans,...
Virtually *every* factory built gets government loans as part of the process. It's how things work these days.
...do not make their money by selling their product at a loss...
Neither does Tesla.
...then make their actual profit by selling zero emissions credits to their competitors...
Anyone running a factory that ends up with emission credits left over does. It would be both foolish *and* pointless to do otherwise. You have a resource that you don't or can't use, which other people want, and are willing to pay for. Why would you *not* sell it to them?
...and they don't need the PR blitz for doing so because their customers are mainly environmentalists.
Are we knocking a company for a PR blitz when they're doing something their customers like and want?
...Profitable companies need cheap energy that is available at full output on 24/7....
Profitable companies need energy that is available *when they're running*, which is *rarely* 24/7. Strangely enough, most factories are active during the *day*.
...That rules out all renewables except hydroelectric. They can't shut down because the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing.
Only if you ignore the *many* power storage methods available, and pretend that 'solar' means 'photovoltaic' *only*.
is better if I'm not buying a new smartphone every 2 years?
What's it like to be an idiot?
Maybe others can't/don't do this because there are very few locations that have the right conditions for wind/solar/geothermal production.
Wood burning trucks in North Korea. Renewable Juche!
Places like Reno don't have to deal with long stretches of extreme low temperatures and snow measured in feet.
Spoken by someone that's never been to Reno, NV in the winter time. Average snowfall is two feet. You Googled some info for your rant but not enough. I am guessing you work for the coal industry?
Probably, yes. Paying people to do things cheaply does not necessarily improve their life. The quality of life of a hunter gatherer is arguably better than that of a farm worker, and the quality of life of a farm worker is arguably better than that of a factory worker. None of this stops people converting from hunter gatherers to farmers to factory workers, because they want more resources and stability to look after their their children, but it doesn't usually work out that way. The extra 'richness' tends to support larger and larger populations of children, and richer and richer elites, while the quality of life of individuals does not get better on the whole.
Korma: Good
Because it costs a lot, and is far easier to do when you are starting from scratch. People seem to have this idea that companies can snap their fingers and boom, they are on renewable power. Doesn't work like that.
So, by that logic the Quality of Life of a Homeless bum must be better than that of the average American worker. Doesn't sound quite right...
"If."
where does he plan to get the water? Manufacturing anything requires water.
Spoken by someone that's never been to Reno, NV in the winter time. Average snowfall is two feet. You Googled some info for your rant but not enough. I am guessing you work for the coal industry?
Do yourself a favor and pull off the tinfoil hat kid.
And that's average snowfall over the entire year. Or an average of 2 inches a month.
There are some MONTHS (hell, in some storms, single DAYS) where a place like Chicago, Detroit, etc sees that much or more.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Hi. This was obviously a joke. However, if you want to be literal then I will point out that lithium can be formed via other fusion reactions besides the big bang, and, furthermore, that a supernova will indeed form lithium.
Finally, it's disingenuous to say that the lithium is not destroyed/is recyclable and simultaneously assert that fossil fuels *are* destroyed when used. Unless you're going to assert that burning fossil fuels is a nuclear reaction, then all the constituent elements are still present and can be recycled back to hydrocarbon form by using energy in the proper reaction context. Just like lithium from the batteries can be recycled using energy in the proper reaction context.
If you're going to pedant a joke, at least do it correctly.
Tesla is able to make profit from producing 40,000 cars a year. Most car companies make that number in a month. The Honda plant that makes civics produces 245,000 cars in a year alone. If more car companies went back to a pull system rather than a push system I could see them accomplishing this, but more production requires more energy. That extra energy might not be enough for renewables to supply.
And unregulated free-market nuclear power would be safer? Please!
"If they screw up and kill their customers, then they will be out of business!"
What libertarians don't get is that the KILLING PART is the WRONG PART.
It's funny... you keep using the subjective word "successful" to imply reaching an objective goal. And all without providing any links to back up your subjective claims.
What's it like to be an idiot?
You tell me. You don't seem to understand the concept of a "subject" and "body". I bet you were really confused when TWO text entry fields popped up when you went to post. I guess you did what you could to figure it out.
The problem with renewable energy is energy storage. This is a factory that will make gigantic batteries by literately the millions. They probably also get huge subsidies from the government. As with most energy projects, the up front capital costs are where the problem is. What company is going to do this when energy is cheap and available. Unless you make an electric car and it is probably worth the PR.
Tesla has yet to post any sort of profit yet, so perhaps others are concerned about the bottom line.
If Tesla Can Run Its Gigafactory On 100% Renewables, Why Can't Others?
Because gubbermint subsidies are backordered these days
The hydrocarbon's use as a fuel is ended. As a fuel, it is destroyed. I mention that because the thread was not distinguishing between renewal and recycling.
"Stellar nucleosynthesis, quiescent or explosive, forge the whole variety of nuclei from C to U but LiBeB nuclei are destroyed in the interior of stars, except 7Li which is produced in AGB and novae. The destruction temperatures are 2, 2.5, 3.5, 5.3 and 5 millions of degrees for 6Li, 7Li, 9Be, 10B and 11B respectively. It is worth noting that 7Li and 11B could be produced by neutrino spallation in helium and carbon shells of core collapse supernovae, respectively [96], [91]; however, this mechanism is particularly uncertain depending strongly on the neutrino energy distribution. It is clear that another source is necessary to generate at least 6Li, 9Be, 10B and this is a non thermal mechanism, namely the break up of heavier species (CNO, mainly) by energetic collisions, also called spallation." http://cds.cern.ch/record/3933...
... perhaps we should wait and see? In addition to being technically bright Musk is also an amazing salesman.
"If Tesla Can Run Its Gigafactory On 100% Renewables, Why Can't Others?"
Because others don't charge $100,000 a pop for their products!
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
I've got the answer.
The u.s. loves to spend that defense money.
The navy has a pretty good record working with nuclear power.
Just build a bunch of nuclear subs.
I mean I know it would still be horrible to have an underwater meltdown or detonation.
maybe build a lake to sit them in.
But it would probably contain the effects quite well.
And my solutions doesn't even need any new technology.
Yea I get this opens up a whole other case of cans of worms.
But it isn't like it couldn't be done.
The title was "If Tesla Can Run Its Gigafactory On 100% Renewables, Why Can't Others?" However, the factory isn't there yet. Shouldn't we wait to see if it is actually possible before taking it as a given?
If other companies can survive and suceed without millions and millions in tax breaks, do not require state and federal sponsorship (i.e. corporate welfare*), as well as not depending on government subsidized rebates to move their inventory? Then why can't Tesla survive without state sponsorship and compulsory citizen funding?
* See the insane price Nevadans are paying to get a Tesla battery factory.
Respect the Constitution
Recharging lithium batteries and recovering hydrocarbons from exhaust waste are not equivalent. Lithium battery discharge is a reversible process, so the original state can be recovered by input of the same amount of energy as was originally extracted from the system. Gasoline & turbine engines (like all heat engines) are non-reversible, which means it takes more energy to recover the initial state than was extracted as useful work. This is because only a portion of the energy produced by burning hydrocarbons can be extracted as work -- the rest escapes as heat.
Only a complete, total, and utter moron would not take advantage of the free storage battery that is the grid.
Come on back little kid when you actually know how this stuff works.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Sorry, is google broken?
Do you need him to wipe your ass for you as well?
Anyone with an IQ about 60 can find a ton of success stories that are well documented.
Oh wait, Except for republicans.... They are special needs and cant use google.
You must be republican! Sorry, I used big words.... you must be confused and angry now.
Go listen to a few Rush Limbaugh reruns to calm down.... It's all right.... the science and engineering boogymen are not going to get you....
There are dozens of reasons. Lets start with, the costs go up. Its the free market after all, if a company could _ACTUALLY_ reduce their power bill they would do it.
Second, lots (most?) of companies are strongly OPEX leaning, meaning that they are already shifting all their CAPEX , and investing in solar/wind is overwhelmingly CAPEX (or its going to drive up their debt).
Third, most companies are busy worrying about their next product, and a long list of other issues.
I could probably list another dozen things, but I'm betting that combination pretty much covers 99% of US companies.
If Tesla Can Run Its Gigafactory On 100% Renewables, Why Can't Others?
They could, but they won't. It is quite simple, greed. "Green" does not come cheap. Mr. Musk probably isn't trying to squeeze a triple digit profit margin out of his business for his investors like other "high-tech" companies. Thus he can afford to put a few points of potential profit back into the environment. And considering his personality from past news conferences and press releases this is probably a stunt to show that it CAN be done, if people are willing to try.
You failed your pedantry yet again.
Go read the joke. Did I say they used "stellar nuclear fusion, with peaking capacity provided by supernovas"? No, I didn't. I specifically stated nuclear fusion. You projected the stellar part.
Just stop. You're digging yourself deeper in the hole.
Lithium battery discharge is a reversible process, so the original state can be recovered by input of the same amount of energy as was originally extracted from the system.
Ooookkkaayy. Time for you to take remedial thermodynamics if you believe recharging or restoring lithium batteries is a 100% efficient process.
And, for that matter, who said the hydrocarbons had to be burned? Since you're imagining a 100% efficient lithium restoration process, now I'm countering with a 100% efficient solid oxide fuel cell that extracts the energy from the hydrocarbons without burning them, thereby bypassing the Carnot efficiency limit. You know, because it's not applicable because it's not a heat engine. This SOFC technology is real, it's just the 100% efficiency part that's obviously imaginary.
Just drop the pedantry and enjoy the transient amusement from the obvious absurdity of the joke.
Could be they don't need to earn a profit? This fellow can throw money away for the rest of his life and still have plenty left over.
Ah. The "I made a claim, you can waste time and try to Google it for me."
And this is why you're posting AC.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I'm not doubting that they can however; they haven't done it yet, it's not even built. Let's get articles like this after they've proven it first.
They are doing the right thing: appeal to the grand masses of the economically ignorant, sell your products at incredible prices and promise they will have out the grid factories. By the time everything crashes (remember Solindra) they will have collected some cash. Good work
And they pay 40 cents per kWh for electricity and still get 50% of their electricity from lignite coal.
Converting to that could take 50-100 years and a political and social will....
Converting to that could take 50-100 years and a political and social will....
and a business reason and foresight ...
your writing skill is very attrractive.......if you write day by day increase your career. pls visit this site http://www.freeurltracker.com/...
TMI discredits the Soviet system.
If lithium was created during the Big Bang, then it's not going to be renewed as easily as something created in stellar fusion.
Okay, for the last time: there are nuclear fusion reactions that produce lithium. These reactions can happen both in supernovas as well as non-Big Bang nuclear fusion. None of this is really under debate. If you want to continue perseverating, feel free to peruse "Thermonuclear Reaction Rates V" by Caughlan & Fowler in order to educate yourself.
For you aspies out there, perhaps your hint that the entire suggestion might be absurd is the allegation that Tesla could harvest additional lithium by triggering supernovas on demand and harvesting from the output. Go ponder that for a while. Perhaps you might even learn to grok humor.
FFS, I don't mind being pedanted on a joke, but the incompetence being displayed is just sad.
Tesla isn't doing anything
Tesla are making unsubstantiated CLAIMS they WILL do something
theres a world of difference
Tesla taking such initiative can really encourage and inspire other companies to go "green"
Whats wrong in this comment? why I got -1 for this?
You're probably right -- I do need to review my thermo. University was many years ago, and thermo was taught in a hot class room in the middle of summer by a prof who was in his 60s and coasting to retirement. But I meant to claim that lithium battery chemistry was thermodynamically reversible _in theory_, whereas a heat engine (such as a gasoline engine) is not. Although I'm not really sure if this is true either, but practical efficiencies are in the 90% range (according to the sources cited by wikipedia), which includes internal impedances, and other real-world losses. So it seems likely to either be theoretically thermodynamically reversible, or very close.
But you were the one who said the hydrocarbons were being burned (in your previous post). In this case, lithium battery discharge/recharge cycle is up to ~90% efficient, whereas gasoline burning has an average efficiency of 25-35%. So ignoring the efficiency of the hypothetical gasoline recovery process, that's a difference of at least 55%.
I think it's ironic that you consider a difference between 100% and 90% completely invalidates what I'm saying, but me pointing out a difference between 90% and 35% is being pedantic.
You failed to rescue your pedantry.
I never said hydrocarbons *had* to be burned. Yes, in my first example I mentioned them being burned, but you switched discussion contexts so I decided to do the same. Now you're continuing to discuss hydrocarbons in heat engines and comparing them to theoretical maximum efficiencies of lithium, while simultaneously implying I'm using strawmen. That's irony.
As I said, using hydrocarbons in a fuel cell bypasses the Carnot efficiency limits because a fuel cell is not a heat engine and therefore your comments about heat engines are irrelevant, and we can just ignore your second and third paragraphs.
Or, I suppose I can turn the tables and do what you did by comparing the theoretical max efficiency of hydrocarbons in a fuel cell against some inefficient application of lithium.
The point of all of this is that once you decide to pedant a joke, you had best be sure your facts and pedantry are completely, unambiguously correct. mdsolar decided to take us down this path, and you joined in.