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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.
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.
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"
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
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.
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!!!
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.
Fukushima discredits Tokyo Electric Power Company, and their half-assed management of what was a completely containable and manageable problem.
That is kinda the problem. There will always be poorly maintained and half-ass managed facilities, it is simply the nature of humans. If a solution can not cope with this class of problem then it is not a good solution, human nature is one of the variables you have to take into account.
Lackadaisical safety management is dangerous.
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.