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

[silfen]

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?

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

[angel'o'sphere]

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.

Re:Not just Reno

[Luckyo]

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.

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

[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.

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.

Answer: They mostly can, but is it economical?

[Firethorn]

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...

Re:Answer: They mostly can, but is it economical?

[ideonexus]

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.

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"

Tough problem

[gargleblast]

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.

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.

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:Credit System

[rjstanford]

If only the Gigafactory could figure out some way to store electrical energy until its needed. That'd be awesome! Not really something they're equipped for though, I guess...

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?

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.

Re:It's not horseshit. It's happening.

[bigpat]

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.