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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.
It's a lot more economical when you get a couple billion in grants and tax breaks from the government!
But anyway - net metering is the "creative accounting" of the green energy industry. It lets companies like Tesla pretend they are "100% renewable energy" when in reality they are using electricity from the same non-renewable plants after dark as anyone else.
Now, if they did actually STORE that solar energy produced in the day time to use later that would be impressive, and they should receive proper credit. Since one of the uses of the batteries they produce will be (high end) industrial storage, it's possible they could make this happen... probably way too expensive for them to be profitable, but who knows...
Electricity costs consumers three times what it costs in the US:
http://shrinkthatfootprint.com...
German consumers pay a lot of money to subsidize big corporations and manufacturers of solar and energy-intensive manufacturing is being outsourced from Germany. Is that what you want for the US?
Australia was too until the conservatives got into power and decided the Coal barons might lose too much money. The Average house here averages about 20kwh/day give or take, which would be covered by a 3kw system. These retail for about $3k which pays itself off in less than 3 years.
So some simple maths means that if every domestic house installed a 3kw system, and govt funded a scheme to distribute that energy where it's needed, then we can all live on free energy (ie at home at least).
Obviously there's more to it than that (baseloading, time of usage etc), but it passes the back of the napkin test, and the free energy is there to be taken. The only issue now it purely political.
yeah but that doesn't count since the dam isn't on the factory premises ;D. that's what the article is wanting factories to do.. it doesn't care if you do it like sensible being and put the power generation outside the plant premises..
btw the usual way to run factories a 100 years ago was on "100%" (or over 100% if you count out the extra..). the papermills etc were usually built so that they had an included hydro plant. last time i got an update the old, old hydro dam at my hometowns powerplant was only providing for lightning though. the old textile plant in the bigger city near my hometown was the first place to have electric lights(iirc in all of nordic).. and those were from hydro. to run the textile mill when it was dark with smaller risk of fires..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Nope, the answer is specialization and marketing.
Tesla's customers are largely environmentalists, who will be that much more eager to buy due to the factory being greener. For comparison, someone buying a can of pasta sauce won't care about the specifics of the canning factory, so price is the only factor.
The other reason is specialization: most factories do one thing and do it well, and trade for whatever else. While it's entirely possibly for a company to generate its own power, grow the food its employees will eat, make its own tools, etc. that all adds unnecessary complexity and gets in the way of specialization. Instead, do the thing you're good at and buy the rest. In the case of power, I could see more and more companies adding solar panels, since so much of their cost is installation. But for now going full renewable is only for marketing purposes.
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Considering how much gas Germany buys from Russia (38% of gas imports), the true cost is even higher.
"Environmentalists" know better than the bozos who have been telling the public that the next iteration of nuclear technology will definitely be safe, this time, for as long as nuclear power plants have been in use. Some of the designs that are regularly proposed as the future of nuclear power plants in discussions on this very web site have been tried and tested in Germany - and failed in new and interesting ways: One might be tempted to say "unpredictably", but you'd have to ignore an uninterrupted streak of new and interesting problems with nuclear power plants to do that.
Remember the recent story about 1 in 3 wild boar in Germany still being so contaminated with the fallout from Chernobyl that they're unfit for consumption and have to be discarded? Chernobyl may be ancient history to someone in the US, but that particular catastrophe is far from over in Germany. Chernobyl is 1000km and two countries away, and Germany isn't even usually downwind from it.
Germany would probably keep developing, building and operating nuclear power plants if there were no other options, but there are. If you take another look at the graph that Dunkelfalke linked to, you'll see that about a third of the energy consumption is oil. Germany doesn't use oil to make electricity. That's fuel for traffic and heating. Now remember that this story is about Tesla's Gigafactory. That big chunk of Germany's energy consumption could be replaced by batteries (made in 100% renewable-powered factories) storing renewable power.
I would add (6) Many states have regulations making it impossible to do what Musk is doing. I live in Republican-Controlled Virginia, where I can't buy solar panels from Musk's SolaryCity, which has a location 20 minutes away from me in Washington DC and more locations in Maryland, because my state has pretty much given Dominion Power a monopoly on supplying electricity here, giving them exclusive rights to net-metering--which they have made cost-prohibitive to implement, and the company has actually successfully sued organizations that install solar panels.
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He focused on energy sources, and his point that the increase in usage of brown coal is neglegtible, is correct.
In that respect, that is correct, the increase might indeed be just noise.
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.
This data is pretty hard to come by, I agree, so I had to make some assumptions (elaborated below). Can you cite your sources?
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
While it is true that some efficiency offsets might be made, your numbers simply do not add up to the graph Dunkelfalke linked. It lists lignite at 3201 TJ in 1990 and 1645 TJ in 2012. That is not "[usage] of brown coal is still nearly 20% below the 1990 level (in primary energy)", that is a 50% reduction in primary energy. All of that also happened before the year 2000 - since then, pretty much no reduction in lignite use has occurred. If powerplant efficiency were indeed rising while electrical generation remained mostly flat during the 2000-2011 period, that would imply that a rising proportion of that input lignite energy (which flatlined during that time period too) is being used for heating and other uses. However that doesn't appear to be the case either (coal use outside of electricity is falling rapidly) - this leads me to believe that there hasn't been such a dramatic increase in efficiency as to be able to confidently say that the recent increase in generation is due to an increase in powerplant efficiency. Also, how can you claim use in electrical generation is 10% below 1990, when even you said yourself just a few moments before that "no one can deduce how much more brown coal was used for that". I'd really appreciate if you could cite your sources, that would allow us to clear up the situation. If you have access to figures on lignite consumption by coal fired power plants, that would be great. Otherwise, the only reliable thing we can say is that electrical generation from lignite is at an all time high since 1990.
Current version of German environmentalism unfortunately causes mass poverty and functions as a significant wealth transfer mechanism from poor to the rich at the moment. That's why more and more people get disillusioned with it even in Germany, where massive PR effort was used to hide the fact that Energiewende caused Germany to start increasing it's CO2 emissions for first time in over a decade and breach it's Kyoto targets.
Essentially it's a failure when it came to reducing emissions, which increased, it's a failure when it comes to providing affordable energy to people, as there are now people who suffer from "energy poverty", state where they cannot afford electricity and have to go without.
And finally it's a failure upon itself, because Germany has trouble adding more renewables for last couple of years, because subsidies make it really cheap to build renewables, but no one wants to operate coal plants needed to be their spinning reserve because they cannot sell their electricity due to "renewables first" rule at electricity sale exchanges.
It's a clusterfuck. Tyranny, not so much. Just a massive amount of incompetence on political level about real issues with energy production coupled with environmentalist beliefs pushed onto politiicans by people who are straight up scammers. And both people of Germany, as well as people around the world are paying for it. Germans pay for it with massive subsidies that make poorer people being unable to afford electricity at all, while the rest of us are paying for it through the fact that Germany produces more and more CO2 as more and more brown coal plants have to be fired up to provide spinning reserve for more and more renewables.
No its just normal diesel fuel, which by the way is pretty much the same thing as coal oil, just slightly different levels of refinement, most vehicles could use them interchangeably.
What they do typically is put a switch in the o2 sensor lines, and dash mount it. When the sensor is disabled the engine management goes into its limp mode will keep the injectors open. The engine uses much more fuel this way so most only do it when they want to annoy someone. It will also as you might guess clog filters etc if they are not also removed and its done often.
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We can stop 80% of today's CO2 emissions (at least here in the US) in 15 to 20 years with a concerted large scale government subsidized build-out of capacity at existing nuclear power plants. That is the radical action that we need now.
Many of the older coal plants are being closed, to be replaced by 6 fewer new ones: http://energytransition.de/201...
So there is a decrease, and the newer ones are cleaner anyway. Germany is aiming to make the transition around 2024, so is only 1/3rd the way in. It will take time for the grid to adjust to make bigger impacts on coal, but as you can see the energy companies clearly believe it will happen so are already reducing their capacity.
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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.
That is a much repeated statistic and in the short term ... yes, that is true. What is less often pointed out, probably because it does not serve the propaganda purpose of the fossil fuel industry as well as the previous fact, is that their long term goal is 80% renewables by 2050.
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.
I keep hearing people say this and never backing it up with facts. I know renewables have their own environmental issues but why should they be a show stopper? .... soooo: [Citation needed]
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