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.

Comments

Not just Reno

[biodata]

Germany is well on the way to doing this on the scale of a whole country. It just takes some political will.

Re:Not just Reno

[ShanghaiBill]

Germany is well on the way to doing this on the scale of a whole country. It just takes some political will.

I guess they used up all their political will on solar subsidies for one of the cloudiest places on the planet, and they had none left to stand up to the anti-nuke lobby. Which is why Germany is now burning record amounts of lignite (brown coal), one of the dirtiest fuels.

Re:Not just Reno

[durrr]

In environmentalist lala-land neither the end nor the means matters as long as your ideology is sitting in the drivers seat.

Re:Not just Reno

[Anonymous Coward]

In other words, no progress has been made. At a huge cost, reasonably clean ways of generating power have displaced another reasonably clean way of generating power while the percentage of dirty power has remained equal.

Re:Not just Reno

[Savage-Rabbit]

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? There are two things that are almost always true about zealots no matter what their political or religious convictions, firstly they think they're always right and that that gives them the right to walk all over everybody else and secondly they are all stupid idiots.

Re:Not just Reno

[jythie]

That also goes both ways. People tend to laud people they agree with, dismiss those with whom they do not, and then use selection bias to claim that only the other side is doing it.

Re:Not just Reno

[jythie]

I have to agree, actual coal burning trucks would be rather impressive in and of itself and be worthy of bragging about.

But yeah, people who build their identity around something which has as its core appeal that it upsets people, pretty douchy. Esp since many of the most popular videos involve blowing fumes on 'wrong' people like prius drivers or women who dare to not be impressed with catcalls.

Re:Not just Reno

[bigpat]

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.

Totally agree, but when people cite Germany as being well on their way to using 100% renewables they are missing the facts that Germany has increased its CO2 emissions in the last several years with its shift away from nuclear and they are increasing use of cheap dirty coal to balance the higher costs of renewables.

Renewables alone are going to be insufficient for the world's energy needs. And industrial scale renewables have their own very negative effects on habitats and the environment. Just as shifting food production to biofuels caused food shortages and food riots, there are going to be negative effects if we have to blanket large areas of the planet with solar panels and wind "farms". Just as we found that the downstream effects of hydro-electric dams are often very negative to fisheries, estuaries and sometimes to agriculture.

And I've said it once and I will say it a million times, nuclear is a far better option with far less negative consequences and with even far less risk than even renewables.

Re:Not just Reno

[GameboyRMH]

Don't blame the fallout of Germany's reduction in nuclear energy on an increase in renewable energy.

Expense

[perryizgr8]

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.

Re:Expense

[ShanghaiBill]

Tesla is selling $100k cars

Tesla is selling a luxury product to environmentalists. Most people buy their cars because they want to help the environment, and they want to drive a status symbol showing their green cred. Tesla's customer base is likely to be influenced by their "fully renewable process". So it is good marketing. Other companies are selling to different customers that are buying their products for reasons other than ostentatious environmentalism.

Re:Expense

[Inconexo]

What if someone really just wants a car that polutes less, made by an industry that polutes less? That automatically make him an ostentatious environmentalist? Is it only possible to want this car only as a status symbol?

Re:Expense

[haruchai]

Where would they run to, if no one was handing out multimillion dollar salaries & bonuses, especially when it's not tied to company performance?

Look in the mirror

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

[tlambert]

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"

same junk as last time

[YesIAmAScript]

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.

Re:Fukushima too

[fnj]

Lackadaisical safety management is dangerous.

It's not horseshit. It's happening.

[DoctorNathaniel]

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.