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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.
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
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.
The Energy and Motor industries get far more in subsidies, tax breaks and bailouts.
So much so that dwindling fossil fuels can still compete economically with kinetic energy that costs nothing.
This perpetual motion machine Lisa made is a joke, it just keeps getting faster and faster. - Homer
Stop spreading lies.
http://www.energycomment.de/wp...
These "record amounts" of yours amount to half of what was burned in 1990 and in fact the amount of brown coal burned has been basically more or less the same since 1996.
As one can clearly see from the graph, nuclear power has been displaced by renewables and only by them. Fossil fuels use either remains stable or goes down in the case of oil.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
I can prove that an underground solar farm would be a great idea with a back of the napkin calculation, reality however is not so easily simplified.
Reality is that I put a 3kW system on my roof a few months ago for about $3,100 (in Western Australia). I sell excess power back to the grid on days when I'm not using much, and buy from the grid when I am. My power bills have been close to zero most months, and I even had a rebate in May when I was on holiday. In the near future, I'll invest in batteries and additional panels to store enough power to run my house overnight.
There are so many of us in WA switching to rooftop solar that the local electricity utility hasn't even powered up some of the fossil fuel plants it built recently, and looks at risk of getting caught in a "death spiral" as more people transition to renewables and fewer and fewer customers remain to pay off the utility's investment.
The chances of the West Australian electricity grid becoming the first to fall victim to the so-called “death spiral” for utilities appears to have increased after it was revealed this week that the gap between the cost to generate, transmit and sell electricity and the charge to consumer has widened.
The “death spiral” is a term coined by utilities in an attempt to defend their business models against the rise of the “pro-sumer”, customers who are no longer just buying energy but who are sourcing cheaper electricity from their own generation, usually rooftop solar, and cutting demand from the grid.
The WA grid, however, has helped create its own death spiral because it has never recovered the cost of its largely fossil-fuel fired electricity from the consumer. The costs keep rising, and now it has emerged that electricity demand has fallen so low that the major utilities may be forced to pay for fossil-fuel generation they will never use.
http://reneweconomy.com.au/201...
Also a bit of a lie yourself. 1990 = reunification. Any country can do better than when it just absorbed an entire other country that might as well have been burning forests in terms of efficiency.
They are 'green plants' because they clean the exhaust.
And no they don't burn biomass. How retarded can you be that you believe anyone is burning freshly cut trees, anyway?
Biomas is fermented to CH4, in a lesser extend plant oils and ethanol are produced, but they don't count as biomass.
The CH4 is either fed into the natural gas grid or more commonly used in decentralized small plants.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Actually you and Dunkelfalke made similar mistakes.
He focused on energy sources, and his point that the increase in usage of brown coal is neglegtible, is correct.
You focus on TWh production of elictricity, where you clearly see there is a noticeable increase in terra watt hours of electricity produced ... however no one can deduce how much more brown coal was used for that.
In fact the amount is indeed neglible, because the "more terrawatts" come from the new more efficient coal plants, that replaced older less efficient ones ... so bottom line the "record usage" of brown coal is still nearly 20% below the 1990 level (in primary energy) and roughly 10% below 1990 level in electric power production.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
How much of that comes from their invesment in renewable energy, though? Other neighboring European countries that have not invested in renewables have comparable prices, as shown on this map. Denmark is 13% more expensive and Italy is 15% less expensive and the UK is 36% less expensive. Germany is towards the top there, but it is not an outlier. There are a few countries with prices comparable to the USA in the EU, such as Estonia which is 2.4 times chepear than Germany. But it seems strange to claim that the main difference between Germany and Estonia is the amount of renewables. And as this image shows, the price of electricity in Germany has been following the average in the European Union for some time now, which again doesn't match with the hypothesis that power in Germany is more expensive than in the USA because of all the solar power.
You have misinterpreted what is happening. The German public is buying back electricity generation and distribution. It's becoming nationalised as companies give up trying to make a profit and sell off infrastructure.
The outlay is high, although not that high compared to similar European countries. The end result will be much cheaper and very much worth it, not to mention putting Germany at the forefront of this lucrative global market for green technology.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
That is not "a lie'. A lie is saying they are burning record amounts when they are not. It does not matter if the record was set when the entire world unified into one country, a record is a record.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
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
No, they're not burning coal. They just disable the emissions controls on their engines to make them burn Diesel fuel incompletely, and maybe bypass particulate filters.
It would be somewhat cool if they burned actual coal, but these guys are just douchebags.
dom
They are 'green plants' because they clean the exhaust.
And no they don't burn biomass. How retarded can you be that you believe anyone is burning freshly cut trees, anyway?
The real question is "How retarded can you be that you make a statement like that without researching reality first?"
http://switchboard.nrdc.org/bl...
"First, just like fossil fuels, when trees are burned in power plants, the carbon they have accumulated is released into the atmosphere. However, because freshly cut wood is nearly half water by weight, a lot of energy is required to boil off this water before useful energy can be generated. This makes biomass facilities far less efficient than fossil fuel."
They're even using your exact nomenclature.
Another:
http://www.garp.org/risk-news-...
Yes, the idea has been out there for awhile - that you haven't heard of it isn't surprising. But that you make an ass of yourself over it says a lot about you.
Do you have ESP?
The average price of a new car in the US is $30K nowadays. A BMW 3-series starts at $32K, and given that Tesla started out going after the market dominated by things like the BMW 7 series, S-Class Mercedes, Audi A8 and Lexus LS, it's not surprising that the next market(s) they would go after would be similar -- the SUV will compete against things like the BMW, Mercedes and Lexus models and the smaller car will compete against the 3-Series, Audi A4 and Lexus models. The luxury auto business has higher margins and people who can afford those higher margins tend to want more of the latest anything -- phone, computer, tablet, clothes, thermostat, food/drink, etc. It would probably not be unreasonable to assume that the buyer Tesla is targeting is someone who likely has a fairly recent smartphone, luxury car less than five years old, owns a home, is married, and is in their late 30's to early 50's. They likely have a fairly established career, a family, and an income around $150K before taxes. They aren't going after the people who are shopping the Ford Fiesta, Toyota Yaris and Honda Fit, or recent college grads, or people with their first job. They are pretty much going after the same people Audi did when they were rebuilding themselves.
As someone who is shopping in the $15K range for my next car, and who is very close to hitting 200K miles on the current one, I largely agree with you. I have come around to the point where I'm aggressively eliminating all debt that I possibly can, with the eventual goal of being debt free. Pouring 40K into something that's going to be regularly doused with road salt, snow, rain, mud and will eventually wear out entirely seems like a waste of money. I need a car to get around, get to work, visit family and friends -- for my lifestyle there is definite value which owning an automobile provides, there is no denying that. But at this point in my life I can say that I'd rather spend $15K on a compact sedan that will accomplish all I need it to do than spend $40K on something that largely does the same thing. That extra $25K can go towards retiring debt, funding college for the kids, paying down the mortgage, etc.
Sources on the 30K price:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/mo...
http://www.autoblog.com/2012/0...
Sources on Audi:
http://www.npr.org/2011/11/29/...
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money...
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."
In environmentalist lala-land neither the end nor the means matters as long as your ideology is sitting in the drivers seat.
And how does that make them different from lala-landers of the politically incorrect christian conservative and occasionally coal rolling variety?
The environmentalists are incorrectly lauded for their beliefs while the other groups are dismissed off hand?
Climate change is not a belief, there is no faith involved, it is not an opinion that claim that ejecting vast amounts of sequestered carbon into the atmosphere is going to have very bad effects on the lives of our descendants and that using renewable energy sources is preferable to that. Climate change and the benefits of using renewables in place of fossil fuels are observable, measurable and given the volume of data we now have it is an irrefutable fact that renewables are preferable to fossil fuels.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Here's a list from Forbes on deaths per trillion kWhr:
Coal 170,000
Oil 36,000
Biofuel 24,000
Natural Gas 4,000
Hydro 1,400
Solar 440
Wind 150
Nuclear 90
Tell me again how Nuclear is the most dangerous choice?