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Panasonic To Invest Over $256 Million In Tesla's US Plant For Solar Cells (reuters.com)
According to Reuters, Panasonic will invest more than $256 million (30 billion yen) in a New York production facility of Elon Musk's Tesla Motors to make photovoltaic (PV) cells and modules. Reuters reports: Japan's Panasonic, which has been retreating from low-margin consumer electronics to focus more on automotive components and other businesses targeting corporate clients, will make the investment in Tesla's factory in Buffalo, New York. The U.S. electric car maker is making a long-term purchase commitment from Panasonic as part of the deal, besides providing factory buildings and infrastructure. In a statement on Tuesday, the two companies said they plan to start production of PV modules in the summer of 2017 and increase to one gigawatt of module production by 2019. The plan is part of the solar partnership that the two companies first announced in October, but which did not disclose investment details. Tesla is working exclusively with longtime partner Panasonic to supply batteries for its upcoming Model 3, the company's first mass-market car. Panasonic is also the exclusive supplier of batteries to Tesla's Model S and Model X.
$256m? Give every American about 80 cents. They'll need it since these factories will likely be automated with robots.
If you're in the business of designing and making robots you'll be doing well in the economy of the future. Assuming you can get home without being mobbed by the starving proletariat.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
This is a key point about lost manufacturing jobs. For a short time China had dirt cheap labor. That time has past. Still chirp, but no longer dirt cheap. In the steel industry perhaps half the jobs were lost to automation with the reset to strong competition and indeed some dumping for China. I would argue that the miss-west jobs did not go to China, they went to Everett (Boeing), Redmond (MS), LA (Hollywood), NY (wall street), etc. There are always winers and losers in these deals. Traditional manufacturing lost their protection so other US exports (aircraft, tech, media, finance, etc) could gain access to foreign markets. The promise by BOTH parties was that those workers who got screwed in the deal would be taken care of. Some were give retraining that did benefit them, most got nothing. These sorts of disruptions destroy business ecosystems in a locations so new business don't just jump in and fill a factory as a business closes. It took decades to build the manufacturing centers and silicon valley for that matter. Cut the heart out of a sector and it will not rebound on its own for decades.
No matter what anybody says these jobs are not coming back. Manufacturing will come back as a technology and capital intensive highly automated operations, but not with high school education jobs. We must find a solution for angry guys who saw their fathers make $40/.hour who themselves made $20/hour and they see their kids make $10/hour. Perhaps we need to parachute in some of our best entrepreneurs to turn the place around. Perhaps we need to provide incentive to get them to move where the jobs are? I remember in my native Oregon in the '80s as logging wound down there was massive discontent as these folks who for generations made good, if dangerous, living in the woods see their way of life come crashing down. The one gotcha for these logging communities was that they had to move to a new area every few years as the timber was cut. In the 70's the region was over cut and there was no where else to go. These communities lost their economic base and had no way to recover and their kids moved away to make lives of themselves (e.g., Kurt Cobain from Aberdeen, WA moved to Olympia homeless and nearly starving and started sining to make a living). I fear that that may be the fate of many of these rust belt communities.
In Australia it's because of two main issues:
1) Electricity providers charge both flat rate access fees, and per kWH usage, but the access fees don't truly cover the cost of the network. When usage goes down they are left short.
2) Many electricity providers took advantage of a government scheme to build excess capacity in to the network, and charge users for it. In some cases whole substations were built and sat around unused. Now that people are using less or going off grid, they are left with expensive underutilised capital.
The funny thing is, the more they try to claw back and/or raise fees, the easier it is to economically justify going off grid. They are shooting themselves in the foot.
I think Elon said something about scaling the factory up to 10+ GW per year when they acquire the solar panel manufacture Silveo, and I'm sure the capital costs per additional GW is much lower. Tesla only produces 100k cars in the Fremont plant now; however, the same plant was producing 500k cars a year when it was run by Toyota and GM. The energy market is enormous.
That's interesting - thanks. 10GW/yr with a 20-year lifespan translates to 200 TWh per year by the previous calculation. That's a significant portion (5%) of the US electrical needs, and from a single factory.
So it looks like in 20 years or so we should be rapidly reducing our carbon footprint, without having to reduce our lifestyle or hobble businesses with regulation.
In 40 years (certainly by 100 years) we might have leftover capacity and start sequestering carbon from the atmosphere in various ways. Also, world population should have peaked and started decreasing by then (estimates vary, from 2050 to 2090), and we will also be exporting the technology to other countries. Food production is stable and sufficient to feed everyone, and we're eliminating diseases at a rate of about one per decade.
It's starting to look like future problems will all be political.