Tesla Gigafactory Begins Production (reuters.com)

Thelasko writes: Right on schedule, Tesla's Gigafactory has begun production of battery cells. The fact that the factory has opened on schedule has surprised many critics of the company. Reuters reports: "Electric car maker Tesla Motors Inc has started mass production of lithium-ion battery cells at its gigafactory in Nevada along with Japan's Panasonic Corp, the company said on Wednesday. The cylindrical '2170 cells,' which will be used to power Tesla's energy storage products and the new Model 3 sedan, have been jointly designed by Tesla and Panasonic, its longstanding battery partner. The gigafactory will initially produce battery cells for the company's Powerwall 2 and Powerpack 2 energy products, Tesla said. The factory is expected to drive down the cost of battery packs by more than 30 percent, the company has said. At peak production, the gigafactory is expected to employ 6,500 workers and create between 20,000 and 30,000 additional jobs in the surrounding regions, Tesla said."

Comments

Re: Open Source Hypocrites

[Anonymous Coward]

Watson will take care of it.

Then

[Anonymous Coward]

How much can I sell my Golf Cart for you fucking assholes.

Why do they call it the "Gigafactory"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone?

Re:Why do they call it the "Gigafactory"?

[dejitaru]

The name Gigafactory comes from the factory’s planned annual battery production capacity of 35 gigawatt-hours (GWh). “Giga” is a unit of measurement that represents “billions”. One GWh is the equivalent of generating (or consuming) one billion watts for one hour—one million times that of one kWh. https://www.tesla.com/gigafact...

Re: Why do they call it the "Gigafactory"?

[Anonymous Coward]

That'll operate a flux capacitor for over a day! (27.27... hours in fact.)

Re:Why do they call it the "Gigafactory"?

[Khyber]

Giga comes from the Greeks, meaning GIANT. By square footage, this factory is the largest on the fucking planet. THAT is where its name comes from.

Re:Why do they call it the "Gigafactory"?

[dunkelfalke]

Nope. The Boeing Everett factory is a larger building. And if we go by the factory complex, not just a single building, then there are far, far larger ones. The Kamaz site, for example, has about the same size as Sunnyvale, CA.

Re:Why do they call it the "Gigafactory"?

[dehachel12]

>Boeing Everett factory is a larger building
in volume, not in footprint

Re:Why do they call it the "Gigafactory"?

[dunkelfalke]

Also in footprint. 400000 m^2 vs 200000 m^2.

Re:Why do they call it the "Gigafactory"?

[Rei]

Wikipedia lists it as the largest building in the world by area. And from this:

The original plans for the Tesla Gigafactory call for a facility with a footprint of 5.8 million square feet, on two stories for 10 million square feet of floor space. That would already give it the largest footprint of any building in the world. But that could just end up proving the starting point.

The Gigafactory is being built in a modular fashion, and Tesla is reportedly buying up adjacent plots of land in order to expand the facility. Another 1,200 acres have reportedly already been acquired, with an additional 350 or more on top of that also being looked into. Three modular blocks in addition to the original four could take it up to 24 million square feet of floor space.

In normal-people-units that's 539k m^2, 929k m^2, og 2,2m m^2, respectively.

Re:Why do they call it the "Gigafactory"?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg is over ten times as large. The BASF chemical factory complex in Ludwigshafen is even larger.

Re:Why do they call it the "Gigafactory"?

[dunkelfalke]

You are confusing the car assembly plant with the battery factory.

Re:Why do they call it the "Gigafactory"?

[Anonymous Coward]

If this is annual, it would make more sense to say 4 MWy or 4000 KW for a whole year.

Re:Why do they call it the "Gigafactory"?

[TheRaven64]

It's a Lexx reference.

Re:Why do they call it the "Gigafactory"?

[Rei]

That first link was erroneous; I was trying to link the wikipedia article on the world's largest buildings, as you can see from context.

The second link, quoted in my post, is specifically about the gigafactory.

Re:Why do they call it the "Gigafactory"?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is true for now but they have permits and plans to build more possibly exceeding the 400000m^2 of Everett factory. The actual name of the factory is Gigafactory 1. That is the name Tesla gave it and that is where the names is coming from. Whether Giga is inspired by factory building size, its production or penis size of the Tesla owner is another matter.

Re:Why do they call it the "Gigafactory"?

[fbobraga]

Ora ora, we have a Xeroque Romes here!

Re:Why do they call it the "Gigafactory"?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

They were planning to string together make shift wires from church belltowers to harness lightnings and save the energy in batteries. Everyone knows lightnings have 88 jigawatts of electricity. To avoid copyright claims with Steven Spielberg, they changed it to giga instead of jiga.

Re:Why do they call it the "Gigafactory"?

[esonik]

This is what you might think, but actually the reason it's called Gigafactory is because you can fit 50 billion hamsters in it.
Source: Elon himself https://youtu.be/U-Szj2qIYX8?t...

Guess I just never paid attention

[subk]

Am I the only person here who took this long to realize that Tesla cars are powered by what amounts to a shitload of flashlight batteries wired up in a tub?

Re:Guess I just never paid attention

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes.

Re:Guess I just never paid attention

[burtosis]

Am I the only person here who took this long to realize that Tesla cars are powered by what amounts to a shitload of flashlight batteries wired up in a tub?

It's actually an excellent system for a low price. The cells are insulated and have a cooling system so as to maintain a optimal temperature. Furthermore, as cells age and get a open/short or bad cell, the pack rewires itself around the trouble allowing it to gradually fail gracefully unlike simple packs. Finally tesla and the government want these to be cheap so they offer massive subsidies and car companies like tesla sell them at a loss so as to not turn people off with a 30 thousand dollar price tag (like it would be marked up for general purpose at a typical company). It's a good deal for the money given today's tech.

Re:Guess I just never paid attention

[haruchai]

Am I the only person here who took this long to realize that Tesla cars are powered by what amounts to a shitload of flashlight batteries wired up in a tub?

Laptop, not flashlight. Popular Science featured the Roadster and its batteries in its May 2007 article, "Can 6,831 laptop batteries change the world?"
And the answer to your question is "You probably are"

Re: Guess I just never paid attention

[Anonymous Coward]

100% of your products can't be loss leaders.

Re: Guess I just never paid attention

[burtosis]

100% of your products can't be loss leaders.

Typically that makes them an excellent buy as a consumer. I don't care how they stay in business, if only all my products that I buy had this value per dollar spent I'd be much happier. Personally all that means for me is I would stay away from investment.

Re:Guess I just never paid attention

[subk]

Laptop, not flashlight.

Ok, if you want to be pedantic, laptop AND flashlight battery.. Not to mention e-cigs, bluetooth speakers, and a zillion other things the nearly ubiquitous 18650 is used for.

Re:Guess I just never paid attention

[Guspaz]

I would imagine that eCigs use something way smaller than an 18650 cell, they're nearly an inch wide and two and a half inches long.

Re: Guess I just never paid attention

[Jeremi]

For products where your relationship with the producer ends at the point of purchase (and you don't much care whether or not you will continue to be able to buy that product in the future), that makes sense.

For a lot of the more complex products (in particular cars, software, computers), however, the value of your purchase will depend strongly on its manufacturer's continued ability to exist and support that product.

i.e. if you bought a Pebble watch last month, you're probably not too happy that Pebble called it quits this month, since that means you won't be getting much in the way of support or updates in the future, and your watch might stop working entirely.

Re:Guess I just never paid attention

[subk]

Well, then you should stop imagining things. 18650 is by far the most popular battery for nicotine vaporizing devices. Nothing else even comes close to being popular.

Re:Guess I just never paid attention

[jo7hs2]

You would imagine wrong then, the 18650 is THE cell for eCigs. I know because my brother-in-law vapes and has the things laying around everywhere, which I find mildly disturbing. Regardless, a quick Google search shows plenty of proof. http://ecigarettereviewed.com/... http://vaping360.com/top-5-186... https://www.vapinginsider.com/...

Re:Guess I just never paid attention

[Tough Love]

Am I the only person here who took this long to realize that Tesla cars are powered by...

Pretty much. Your geek card is on probation.

Re: Guess I just never paid attention

[PopeRatzo]

if you bought a Pebble watch last month, you're probably not too happy that Pebble called it quits this month

If you bought a "smart watch", you have bigger problems than the company that makes them going out of business.

Re:Guess I just never paid attention

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry that's bullshit. They're not selling at a loss!

Re:Guess I just never paid attention

[Anonymous Coward]

To add to this:

_You_ (GPP) try wiring up a shitload of flashlight batteries in a tub and safely drawing as much power out of them as fast as a Telsa does under high acceleration.

Any idiot can -eventually- wire up a bunch of batteries and get a high-power and/or high-capacity battery bank. Being able to get a compact bank that doesn't shortly (ha!) suffer heat failure (catastrophic or otherwise) under high load is _very_ much non-trivial.

Re:Guess I just never paid attention

[Anonymous Coward]

it's really that simple. Just google "Boeing 787 Dreamliner battery problems" to see what can happen when you don't follow your instructions.

Re:Guess I just never paid attention

[fubarrr]

>It's actually an excellent system for a low price.

I don't think so. Bigger cells are invariably better priced per W/h except if they come in exotic sizes. Chinese themselves have switches to LiFePo4 chemistry from LiCo or LiC (conventional li-ion) for all big cells years ago. Musk and co. will have to play catch-up hard, and they will have to retool the assembly line in the future invariably unless they want to produce worse cells, at higher than the market price...

Re: Guess I just never paid attention

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not?

Re:Guess I just never paid attention

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you find it disturbing?

Re: Guess I just never paid attention

[Anonymous Coward]

You need lots of cells to balance the pack. Li-ion are finicky. That's one reason the giga factory is so large: you need a huge inventory because (1) the cells need to age and (2) the more cells you have the easier you can find a matched set for a well balanced battery. Tesla batteries perform really well, in part because of the effort that goes into selecting the cells that go into each one.

Re:Guess I just never paid attention

[Khyber]

"_You_ (GPP) try wiring up a shitload of flashlight batteries in a tub and safely drawing as much power out of them as fast as a Telsa does under high acceleration."

Anyone with a basic understanding of circuitry can make a series-parallel array of cells for whatever current draw and voltage requirements you can imagine. Keeping it cool is simple, airflow and aluminum battery casings are the answer.

Gee, that wasn't hard to think of, at all. Might be for your ill-educated self.

Re:Guess I just never paid attention

[ls671]

No

Re:Guess I just never paid attention

[Anonymous Coward]

My eCig uses 2x18650 cells, and i need two sets to get through the day. And, yes i am using brand name high quality cells, not fake knockoff chinese garbage.

Thing is, ecigs makes the vapor by heat which is simplest, most reliant way to do it (you can use ultrasound too) in a tiny package. Whenever heat is applied at the hundreds of C range you need lots of power.

I use a large one, but i'm far from the highest end, i only use 40W peak. There are a lot of users who use 100W+

Re: Guess I just never paid attention

[blindseer]

I don't care how they stay in business

Perhaps you should. Selling below cost initially is how monopolies are created. A company can sell at a loss for a while if they know this means driving off the competition. They don't need to drive everyone off, just diminish the ability for any competition to arise to the point that they can charge a premium for a substandard product. They would be betting on the ability for them to undercut any future competition later with greater volume (lower margins) and/or some reserves in resources to outlast the competition in a price war. This might not apply to electric cars exactly since this is not the kind of fight that a small company like Tesla can win against the likes of Ford and GM.

What is another tactic, and more likely one that Tesla could employ, is the ability to sell at a loss now knowing that the customer will likely return to them for services in the future. If this means selling another car in the future then perhaps there is nothing wrong with that. If this means selling critical parts like a battery then this might be a problem. Tesla would be in a position to overcharge for the battery to make up for a loss on the initial sale. If customers somehow feel compelled to continue using an electric car then Tesla would be in a position to also overcharge for the next vehicle too.

If Tesla is able to sell below costs because of government incentives, like subsidies or lowered taxes, then you are paying for this below cost pricing even if you are never a Tesla customer.

There is no such thing as a free lunch. You are going to bear the costs in some way.

What bothers me most is when the below cost pricing is due to government interference. In that case I'm paying for some rich guy to buy a new car when I can't afford my own. This is a subsidy that takes from the poor and gives to the wealthy. All energy subsidies do this really, take from the poor to further enrich the wealthy. I'd rather I be able to keep my money, perhaps then I can afford some new windows on my house. If you want to see people saving the environment then we need to stop these subsidies so people like me can buy some new windows, attic insulation, or even just a new pair of wool socks, and not have to spend so much on heating.

Re: Guess I just never paid attention

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course it wasn't hard to think of. It's hard to do. If it was easy, anyone would do it. The fact that few have speaks volumes.

Re: Guess I just never paid attention

[Anonymous Coward]

In a car, you need to keep the batteries between comfortably lukewarm and above-freezing both when supercharging during a desert summer and when parked in an arctic winter. Air cooling will not do that on its own. Nissan Leaf is air cooled and has battery wear problems in the hottest regions and battery heaters and halved range in arctic winters.

Re:Guess I just never paid attention

[Anonymous Coward]

They are. Even without investments, Tesla loses money in most quarters. Without subsidies and carbon credits, they would have gone bankrupt a long time ago.

Re: Guess I just never paid attention

[dehachel12]

>I'm paying for some rich guy to buy a new
you're also paying for a huge military to provide you with oil, gas, and other resources.

Re: Guess I just never paid attention

[blindseer]

Yes I am, and I benefit from that directly. I see little benefit from someone else driving a new car while I don't.

Re: Guess I just never paid attention

[dehachel12]

that someone else isnt benefiting from those middle-eastern wars.

Re:Guess I just never paid attention

[dunkelfalke]

Because the cells might start a fire and when they are lying around everywhere, it is a potential fire hazard.

Re: Guess I just never paid attention

[Eunuchswear]

“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.” -- Douglass Adams. RIP.

Re:Guess I just never paid attention

[Rei]

A slow clap for the person who doesn't realize the difference between "selling units at a loss" and "company undergoing a super-rapid scaleup involving building some of the largest buildings on the planet operating at a loss".

Re: Guess I just never paid attention

[Rei]

Indeed. Tesla has some of the most advanced battery packs on the market. It's pretty dang impressive being able to make a car with that much mass of lithium ion batteries with decade-scale lifespans operating in outdoor conditions and has an order of magnitude lower rate of fires per mile traveled than gasoline vehicles.

Also, as for how they're wired up, in case anyone is curious: individual cells are wired up in parallel "bricks" in large numbers, so that if one cell dies, it has little effect on the brick as a whole (contrast with a laptop battery with 18650 cells just in series - if one goes, the battery is dead). The bricks are connected in series into "sheets" to raise the voltage, and the sheets in turn are connected in series to make up a pack. At least that's how they did it with the Roadster; I assume the Model S is individual. Within each brick, each cell is in its own isolated can; the goal is to prevent propagating failures.

The climate control issue took some time to get right. Early Roadsters suffered from fairly high parasitic drain when the vehicle wasn't plugged in, but they refined the climate control algorithm so that they could more properly maintain the pack temperature without wasting energy. Key to maintaining cell longevity are three main factors: charge/discharge rate, depth of discharge (upper and lower), and temperature. Getting temperature right is very important. As for the other two, the cells aren't charged to their full capacity when the vehicle is at "100%", they're at 90-something percent (at least they were with the Roadster). And on your average drive you only use a very small percent of the pack capacity, so in practice it's an extremely shallow depth of discharge. Both normal driving and overnight charging are low current applications per cell; only fast charging and track duty are relatively high current (but even still you're talking at least half an hour to charge or drain most of the pack).

Re: Guess I just never paid attention

[blindseer]

that someone else isnt benefiting from those middle-eastern wars.

Of course they are. That electric car is made using plastics from that oil, lubricated using that oil, and painted using that oil. The trucks used to bring in the parts to build that car were fueled with that oil, as were the trucks and trains that bring the finished product to the show room. Their food was fertilized and cultivated with that oil, then later harvested, refrigerated, cooked, canned, and brought to market with that oil.

Do I need to continue with the benefits of oil for electric car drivers?

Forget the oil for a minute. If that person driving the electric car is female, Christian, or homosexual, then that person is benefiting from keeping the fight over there than allowing it to come here.

Re:Guess I just never paid attention

[jo7hs2]

Precisely.

Re:Guess I just never paid attention

[thegarbz]

only possible because of "massive subsidies"? that's disgusting. that means these already overpriced cars can't be profitable on their own merits and we should look to alternatives for green energy, such as biofuel from scrub plants

Or we could introduce subsidies to cause companies to invest in technology and production facilities bringing down cost through R&D and economies of scale. You know, like every other industry that has ever existed.

Re:Guess I just never paid attention

[thegarbz]

Cells lying in the one situation least likely to cause spontaneous combustion is what concerns you the most? Get a helmet man.

Re:Guess I just never paid attention

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, I'll clap slowly for you if that makes you happy.

Re: Guess I just never paid attention

[Overzeetop]

It only has to be a loss leader until your competition is driven out of business. Then it's profit as far as the eye can see.

Re:Guess I just never paid attention

[StikyPad]

Yeah, I'm sure they didn't bother doing any CBA or before building a $5B factory. Hopefully someone at Tesla will see your post and save their business before it's too late!

Re:Guess I just never paid attention

[swb]

18650s are the go-to cell for contemporary sub-ohm vaporizers because they can deliver the high current needed to drive a half-ohm or smaller coil at 25+ watts and you can swap out batteries easily.

The fixed-battery "pen" size vaporizers of the older generation used something else but their batteries weren't replaceable and they worked at basically whatever the float voltage was into 1.5-2.5 ohm coils.

The really insane high wattage vapers seem to use fixed battery devices and I don't know what's in them, but they seem to be very high capacity, something like 5000 mAh.

Re: Guess I just never paid attention

[fubarrr]

I hope so. Americans tend to be lamers at doing business, but Musk is African though.

Re: Guess I just never paid attention

[halltk1983]

If you're paying enough taxes to make a difference in that rich man buying a car, then you're rich enough to buy a car, too. The bottom half of earners pay *very* little tax.

Re:Guess I just never paid attention

[fbobraga]

can't be profitable on their own merits

The Market's invisible hand have just grabbed my butt! (like in "grab them by the pussy"!?)

Re:Guess I just never paid attention

[necro81]

Anyone with a basic understanding of circuitry can make a series-parallel array of cells for whatever current draw and voltage requirements you can imagine. Keeping it cool is simple, airflow and aluminum battery casings are the answer.

If your only goal is to pump out power, then yes, most anyone with some basic knowledge can do it.

If, however, you want to make a reliable and safe product that can last for years with predictable behavior, replicate it 100,000 times at reasonably cost, then stuff it into an automobile to let any joe-shmo use it, it's a whole hell of a lot harder. That takes uncommon knowledge, skill, and experience, a whole hell of a lot of money, and a tremendous comfort with risk.

For anyone who is interested, here is a 2014 teardown of a Model S battery pack. It's pretty awesome stuff, and clearly a lot of careful thought and design went into it. Incidentally, the pack is not thermoregulated* using airflow - it has tubing with circulated coolant.

* For Li-Ion chemistry, it's not merely a matter of keeping the cells cool; keeping them at a uniform temperature across the pack is far more important for avoiding accelerated aging and catastrophic failure

Re: Guess I just never paid attention

[Hodr]

WTF? If there is any single area where "Americans" excel, it's business. Not the most enthusiastic laborers, the most vibrant artists, the most ingenious scientists, nor the most precise engineers. But they are fucking good at business.

Re: Guess I just never paid attention

[Anonymous Coward]

No, they aren't. Chicoms are much better

Re: Guess I just never paid attention

[Anonymous Coward]

Americans excel even more so in marketing.

Re: Guess I just never paid attention

[swillden]

Yes I am, and I benefit from that directly. I see little benefit from someone else driving a new car while I don't.

You're benefitting from less pollution being emitted by that guy's car. And you're also not really paying for it; your children or grandchildren will be doing that. Whether that last bit makes it better, worse or has no relevance is a complicated question.

Re: Guess I just never paid attention

[ventsyv]

Americans invented the telephone, the telegraph, the electric bulb, the airplane, the computer, the Internet, put a man on the Moon ... If that's doesn't qualify as ingenious science and precise engineering, I don't know what does.

Re: Guess I just never paid attention

[Anonymous Coward]

When that business is the business of money. We were founded by merchants after all, hello! :)

Re: Guess I just never paid attention

[fubarrr]

That was long time ago, when Americans were hungry. Times change

Re: Guess I just never paid attention

[Anonymous Coward]

What bothers me most is when the below cost pricing is due to government interference. In that case I'm paying for some rich guy to buy a new car when I can't afford my own. This is a subsidy that takes from the poor and gives to the wealthy. All energy subsidies do this really, take from the poor to further enrich the wealthy. I'd rather I be able to keep my money, perhaps then I can afford some new windows on my house. If you want to see people saving the environment then we need to stop these subsidies so people like me can buy some new windows, attic insulation, or even just a new pair of wool socks, and not have to spend so much on heating.

Got news for you bub - if you are in the US, all driving is subsidized. From the city streets the vehicles drive on (paid out of the general fund) to the mandated amount of vehicle parking at stores. Then you have an additional indirect subsidy by not charging ICE vehicles for the pollution they cause, an externality that's frequently picked up by the poor who live next to interstates.

Things won't change because as much as people don't want to give others a free lunch, they'll gladly take their own share and justify it with twisted logic.

Re: Guess I just never paid attention

[Anonymous Coward]

So that makes Musk "African American"?

Re:Guess I just never paid attention

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod Points!

Re:Guess I just never paid attention

[Thelasko]

A slow clap for the person who doesn't realize the difference between "selling units at a loss" and "company undergoing a super-rapid scaleup involving building some of the largest buildings on the planet operating at a loss".

His name is Bob Lutz. He either has no understanding of finance, or has an axe to grind. Considering his history of leadership in the big three, either is plausible.

Re: Guess I just never paid attention

[Anonymous Coward]

To say you are a clueless windbag is going easy on you.

Re: Guess I just never paid attention

[liquid_schwartz]

That was long time ago, when Americans were hungry. Times change

Fair enough. Who is hungry now and doing amazing things? I haven't seen comparable achievements coming from other countries.

Re: Guess I just never paid attention

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't care how they stay in business

Perhaps you should. Selling below cost initially is how monopolies are created. A company can sell at a loss for a while if they know this means driving off the competition. They don't need to drive everyone off, just diminish the ability for any competition to arise to the point that they can charge a premium for a substandard product. They would be betting on the ability for them to undercut any future competition later with greater volume (lower margins) and/or some reserves in resources to outlast the competition in a price war. This might not apply to electric cars exactly since this is not the kind of fight that a small company like Tesla can win against the likes of Ford and GM.

What is another tactic, and more likely one that Tesla could employ, is the ability to sell at a loss now knowing that the customer will likely return to them for services in the future. If this means selling another car in the future then perhaps there is nothing wrong with that. If this means selling critical parts like a battery then this might be a problem. Tesla would be in a position to overcharge for the battery to make up for a loss on the initial sale. If customers somehow feel compelled to continue using an electric car then Tesla would be in a position to also overcharge for the next vehicle too.

If Tesla is able to sell below costs because of government incentives, like subsidies or lowered taxes, then you are paying for this below cost pricing even if you are never a Tesla customer.

There is no such thing as a free lunch. You are going to bear the costs in some way.

What bothers me most is when the below cost pricing is due to government interference. In that case I'm paying for some rich guy to buy a new car when I can't afford my own. This is a subsidy that takes from the poor and gives to the wealthy. All energy subsidies do this really, take from the poor to further enrich the wealthy. I'd rather I be able to keep my money, perhaps then I can afford some new windows on my house. If you want to see people saving the environment then we need to stop these subsidies so people like me can buy some new windows, attic insulation, or even just a new pair of wool socks, and not have to spend so much on heating.

Except Tesla is not selling the cars at a loss, they're targeting 30% profit and realizing a few percentage points below that... theoretically they could sell their cars for 25% less and be at a similar margin to Ford, Toyota, etc... but they're trying to finance a huge expansion in capability, which means huge capital outlays for things like factories and robots...

You hear people say they loose money on each car and that the government subsidies are the only thing keeping them afloat, neither thing is true, unless you configure your equations to generate the result you prefer... they are spending more than they make, on purpose, to chase growth

Re:Guess I just never paid attention

[iggymanz]

please enlighten me on which industry was created by subsidies.

Re: Guess I just never paid attention

[Khyber]

" It's pretty dang impressive being able to make a car with that much mass of lithium ion batteries with decade-scale lifespans operating in outdoor conditions and has an order of magnitude lower rate of fires per mile traveled than gasoline vehicles."

You're comparing not even a decade of Tesla versus over a hundred years of gasoline-powered cars. This comparison is wholly disingenuous.

"contrast with a laptop battery with 18650 cells just in series"

They were only made like this in 3 and 4-cell packs for tiny laptops. I've got battery packs from loads of laptops. They almost all run series-parallel bank config (usually 2 parallel banks of 3-in-series li-ion cells.) Most flat-packs are the exact same - series-parallel config. Without this, you simply couldn't give a laptop the power draw it needed (just a few years ago you needed ~90w average for a laptop, at lithium-ion's nominal 3.7V that's almost 30 amps of current. Non-parallel Li-ion packs can't handle that kind of load. 1C is the best you can really hope for safety in li-ion, which means a 2400 mAh li-ion cell can only be ideally charged and discharged at 2.4A.

Re:Guess I just never paid attention

[iggymanz]

+3 informative....bwhahaha my sides.

Tesla has never made a profit, exists solely on investor money and subsidies. Each and every thing they sell is at a loss

Re: Guess I just never paid attention

[Anonymous Coward]

It only has to be a loss leader until your competition is driven out of business. Then it's profit as far as the eye can see.

... when you raise prices and screw your customers by overcharging. Then you get broken up by the DoJ for violating anti-trust laws.

No, this is not a winning strategy. Tesla needs to figure out how to become profitable in a competitive environment, not constant losses on every product it sells for pure marketshare.

Re: Guess I just never paid attention

[Anonymous Coward]

0% of their products are loss leaders. It's getting real tiring to have to keep reposting this year after year for tesla-bashers who can't be bothered to read their quarterly reports. They are making positive margins on all their products (hence, they're profitable). The company loses money as a whole because they're spending all that profit (and more) on reinvesting for future growth / r&d. That's a big difference from "100% of products being a loss leader".

Re: Guess I just never paid attention

[Anonymous Coward]

Elon has already come out in favor of this. He's publicly said that if ALL energy subsidies, car industry subsidies, ect were dropped, Tesla would be winning even faster than they are now. They get pennies on the dollar (subsidy-wise) compared too all the other entrenched industries/companies.

Re:Guess I just never paid attention

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry that's bullshit. They're not selling at a loss!

No, it is not bullshit. Look at their earnings report. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TSLA/financials?p=TSLA

Tesla makes money on the direct costs of the cars, which includes the inputs, the manufacturing costs, and the costs to sell the cars. However when you get to operating income, which includes all of their other costs from SG&A, which is their non-manufacturing staff, their buildings and rent, depreciation of equipment etc., they are operating at a loss and have been for a long time. Then you factor in their R&D cost, and they're losing around $250M per quarter. The only quarter this wasn't true was Q3 where they barely squeaked out a profit and, good for them, it was base on increased sales. The question is Q4, which by their indication they did not have a great quarter, just a midling one, so the likelihood is they will be not profitable in Q4 and then for 2016 their total loss will be around $750M. So while they are covering the cost ot manufacture a car, they are not covering their total costs with their products at all and they are selling at a loss.

Re: Guess I just never paid attention

[Anonymous Coward]

If that person driving the electric car is female, Christian, or homosexual, then that person is benefiting from keeping the fight over there than allowing it to come here.

False dichotomies are lies.

Re: Guess I just never paid attention

[MattskEE]

You're comparing not even a decade of Tesla versus over a hundred years of gasoline-powered cars. This comparison is wholly disingenuous.

No, it isn't. ICE cars have 90 vehicle fires per billion miles driven. EV's cumulatively have over 1 billion miles driven, and there is enough statistical significance to say that EV's, including Teslas, have a lower vehicle fire rate.

Without this, you simply couldn't give a laptop the power draw it needed (just a few years ago you needed ~90w average for a laptop, at lithium-ion's nominal 3.7V that's almost 30 amps of current. Non-parallel Li-ion packs can't handle that kind of load. 1C is the best you can really hope for safety in li-ion, which means a 2400 mAh li-ion cell can only be ideally charged and discharged at 2.4A.

The amount of power that can be drawn from a pack doesn't depend on the series/parallel arrangement of the cells. If you put two cells in parallel the voltage is the same but allowable current doubles, so power doubles. With two cells in series the voltage doubles while current stays the same, so power still doubles. Nevertheless it is generally more practical to have a combination of series and parallel arrangement because the ultimate power consuming electronics in the laptop run off of relatively low voltages, so putting the cells all in series would reduce the efficiency of the buck converter that downconverts the voltage, and necessitate use of higher voltage components.

Re:Guess I just never paid attention

[thegarbz]

Farming, coal, railway, roads, cars, mining, oil, gas, solar, battery, ....

It would be easier to just imagine an industry that was ever completely untouched by the government and work backwards. Subsidies are a handle on the world just like taxes and regulation. They are one of the tools that governments use to drive the economy in a specific direction based on ultimately the will of the people.

You shouldn't be asking for enlightenment. You should be asking for a basic high-school economics course followed by a long and detailed history class.

Re: Guess I just never paid attention

[blindseer]

False dichotomies are lies.

That may be true but I gave no dichotomy, much less a false one. I merely pointed out two examples of the benefits of a military, protecting the economy, and defending against foreign aggressors. There are others, like defending against domestic aggressors, and a force able to react to national disasters.

Re:Guess I just never paid attention

[dunkelfalke]

I have three helmets. Two Met and a Bell.

Re:Guess I just never paid attention

[iggymanz]

those industries *have* subsidies, not a one of them *created* by subsidies. My sides, you have no knowledge of the history of science and tech do you?

Re:Guess I just never paid attention

[thegarbz]

LOL get a clue on how subsidies work in that they "create" industries. Hell solar panels have existed since the 60s. So they weren't created by subsidies either. ... idiot.

Re:Guess I just never paid attention

[iggymanz]

You're backing down, you now realize NO INDUSTRY WAS EVER CREATED WITH SUBSIDIES.

solar panel INDUSTRY existed for decades with no subsidies.

Farming, thousands of years and not created with subsidies.

Coal industry, existed centuries with no subsidies.

Subsidies only prop up bad business models. Home solar power is not cost effective without subsidies which just makes every solar home owner a parasite on the rest of us.

Re: Guess I just never paid attention

[Anonymous Coward]

Tesla do not sell their cars below cost. The Model S (currently their biggest seller) makes 28% profit per car. What they are doing is spending big building ever greater production facilities (both buildings and plant). All their profits go to funding expansion. You may have a problem with that, I do not.

Re:Guess I just never paid attention

[thegarbz]

You're backing down, you now realize NO INDUSTRY WAS EVER CREATED WITH SUBSIDIES.

Subsidies don't come as a nice pay package to existing industries. I'm trying to have an intelligent conversation I can only do that if you understand what a subsidy is, why it's used, and have done highschool economics. Go take an economics class, i'm done here.

Panasonic? Good

[mentil]

Headlines from the future:
"Today, Tesla's 'Gigafactory' battery production plant caught fire and then exploded. An initial investigation has traced it to the section of the plant utilized by Samsung to produce its batteries. An engineer has been quoted saying that the sector overheated due to being packed wall-to-wall to capacity; as little as 0.1mm air gap between the equipment and the walls could've prevented this catastrophe, but Samsung allowed 0mm."

Re:Panasonic? Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Your post history is a bunch of incredibly unfunny jokes. Please stop posting to Slashdot and just lurk.

Re:Panasonic? Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Please check this out.
https://www.thefusionmodel.com...

Chances are, you're at 29/29. The other poster is correct; you make painfully unfunny posts.

Re:Panasonic? Good

[Anonymous Coward]

His posts make User Friendly look like Broad City.

Will they only make car batteries?

[xevioso]

I understand that they are making these primarily for cars, but does Tesla have any plans to make consumer-friendly Lithium-ion batteries for general use? Seems like they could easily make these, and drive down the costs of these things pretty dramatically. Looking quickly on Google, general-use batteries seem to run hundreds of dollars. I'd be interested in one for various purposes if it dropped down into a $50-$100 range.

Re:Will they only make car batteries?

[jezwel]

The biggest individual cost for electric cars seems to be the batteries. Elon wants to replace combustion based vehicles with electric. He will need tens to hundreds of Gigafactories to meet demand, plus is also prioritising Powerwalls. I highly doubt the general purpose battery market is on the radar yet.

Re:Will they only make car batteries?

[haruchai]

I understand that they are making these primarily for cars, but does Tesla have any plans to make consumer-friendly Lithium-ion batteries for general use? Seems like they could easily make these, and drive down the costs of these things pretty dramatically. Looking quickly on Google, general-use batteries seem to run hundreds of dollars. I'd be interested in one for various purposes if it dropped down into a $50-$100 range.

Aside from the PowerWall / PowerPacks, I think that'll be left to Panasonic and I'm betting it may be written into their agreements.

Re:Will they only make car batteries?

[Anonymous Coward]

Electric cars and large static installations make sense, but the 2170 is a big damn battery, I can't see many consumer usages.

Re:Will they only make car batteries?

[Areyoukiddingme]

I understand that they are making these primarily for cars, but does Tesla have any plans to make consumer-friendly Lithium-ion batteries for general use?

It seems unlikely. Panasonic agreed to create the 2170 form factor specifically for Tesla. Tesla likes have large numbers of smaller, cylindrical cells because they can build packs out of them that give them finer control and better cooling than the large monolithic cells you seem to be referring to (very imprecisely). They're just a little bit bigger in both dimensions than an 18650 in order to improve the power density of the packs, while not losing the aforementioned advantages.

Because it's a custom Tesla-specific cell form factor, it's very likely a Tesla-exclusive contract as well. Panasonic is making these in a Tesla factory for Tesla, and nobody else. So when you start seeing advertising for Panasonic 2170 cells on Alibaba, don't try to buy them. They'll be fake. You're unlikely to see any real new 2170 bare cells on the open market. What you may see are used ones coming from someone buying a wrecked Tesla and tearing apart the battery pack. What you'll probably see is a noticeable drop in the price of 18650 cells. Tesla will be transitioning the Model S and Model X to redesigned packs with the new form factor (whether or not they announced it—it's just how they roll). That will significantly reduce worldwide demand for 18650s. Unless some cartel behavior comes into play, prices should fall.

Re:Will they only make car batteries?

[evilviper]

What you'll probably see is a noticeable drop in the price of 18650 cells. Tesla will be transitioning the Model S and Model X to redesigned packs with the new form factor (whether or not they announced itâ"it's just how they roll). That will significantly reduce worldwide demand for 18650s. Unless some cartel behavior comes into play, prices should fall.

That's not really how supply and demand works at this level. Show me the warehouses full of $1 CompactFlash cards, now that TF/SD have replaced them.

There's no guarantee prices will drop at all. If Tesla only gradually reduces orders, then suppliers will slowly reduce their workforce in tandem and all will remain basically equal. Tesla is a big enough customer that they might have contracts to buy cells below market rate, and the loss of that volume could even push suppliers to demand higher prices for the lower volume of sales to satisfy operating costs. And closing down a line (reducing supply, increasing prices slightly) when demand falls is also an option.

Re:Will they only make car batteries?

[es330td]

The number of cars Musk wants to make will consume the entire production of this plant. He had to build this plant to be able to build cars.

Re:Will they only make car batteries?

[Anonymous Coward]

The factories producing them probably won't tool down immediately though, no? And the inventory already out there, whatever that is?

Re:Will they only make car batteries?

[Teancum]

Indirectly, it is going to be making a huge difference for consumer cells. Most importantly, all of the production capacity that has been sucked up by Tesla for building their automobiles is going to be available for other folks (likely to be snatched up by other automobile companies for awhile) but in the long run it will simply imply that the whole market for Lithium-ion batteries is going to grow as a whole. All of the chemicals (besides Lithium) are also going to be made in much larger quantities, the machines which make the batteries are also going to be made... even to be made on an assembly line themselves... and more people simply getting familiar with how to cheaply and efficiently being able to make these batteries.

Besides automobiles, the one market that Tesla is getting into is power storage systems for homes and businesses. It is possible that you might end up having a bunch of these batteries in your home in the form of a Tesla power wall... especially if you have solar panels on your house. Other applications that require the storage of large amounts of electricity are likely to be the primary customers from this factory for awhile.

Tesla actually plans on building several of these factories in other locations too, because they anticipate that all of the production from this Gigafactory is going to be used for internal purposes (aka products that Tesla themselves are making where the batteries are but a part of those products). It is pretty odd that their planned consumption of batteries is going to outstrip this production facility.

Re:Will they only make car batteries?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is quite little lithium actually in a lithium-ion cell, it's the key factor in the cells, but still quite low in quantity.

Biggest amounts afaik are iron, cobalt, copper, depending on exact cell chemistry. Some cellulose (thin paper layer) too.

All of these other stuff are already mined & made in huge quantities, so unlikely to affect them much.

Lithium is very abundant, but thee some extra economies of scale might help as lithium's consumption in cells is relatively small.

While this is as battery capacity absolutely tremendous bump in production, but for the raw materials we should not expect to see a huge jump, might even be just few % at best in global scale. All of the other stuff has significant other uses as well, and are already produced in immense quantities.

Most of the cost in a lithium-ion cell is probably the work, it's tremendous amount of thin layers made just so. Hell, it might even be that the most costly part is the cylinder itself by raw material cost, even tho cobalt is very expensive too but there is quite a bit of stainless steel by weight in there.

I just wish Tesla were experimenting with graphene based cells, current research data shows tremendous potential

Re:Will they only make car batteries?

[dehachel12]

> just wish Tesla were experimenting with graphene based cells,
they probably are, and with a few other chemistries as well.

Re:Will they only make car batteries?

[AmiMoJo]

The chemistry of the Tesla cells probably makes them useless for general purpose consumer cells, so Panasonic likely won't bother using that factory for them. Tesla can carefully manage the cells, limiting them to 95% maximum charge and temperature controlling them. Consumer cells get more abuse so the chemistry has to be more robust.

Re:Will they only make car batteries?

[jabuzz]

There are two major faulty assumptions in this argument. Firstly that demand for 18650 cells is flat. If demand for 18650 cells is growing even the loss of a major user like Tesla could no long term impact on prices and potentially very little short term impact either.

The second major faulty assumption is Tesla get's their batteries for Panasonic, and Panasonic are heavily involved in the Gigafactory. The idea the managers at Panasonic can't see the writing on the wall and adjust production accordingly is naive in the extreme.

Re:Will they only make car batteries?

[swb]

I'm surprised that nobody has marketed a DIY battery in the same form factor as a 12v car battery run by an array of 18650s with all the expected charging circuits and the ability to "rewire" around dead cells automatically.

Your standard car battery shell seems like it could hold a lot of 18650s.

Re:Will they only make car batteries?

[haruchai]

"The chemistry of the Tesla cells probably makes them useless for general purpose consumer cells"
They're not tied to a single chemistry. The original PowerWalls were using nickel-manganese for the 6.4 kWh & nickel-cobalt for the 10 kWh units.
The cars use other formulations - the Roadster's pack chemistry is different from the Model S
This is the benefit of having such a close relationship with Panasonic - a lot of battery expertise close at hand.

Re:Will they only make car batteries?

[Kjella]

Tesla will be transitioning the Model S and Model X to redesigned packs with the new form factor (whether or not they announced itâ"it's just how they roll).

Well they also plan to produce 100k Model 3s this year, so I guess that depends on whether the Gigafactory can ramp up quick enough. Eventually it will certainly happen but if the 3s eat all the new capacity there's no urgent need to switch.

Re:Will they only make car batteries?

[barc0001]

Actually knowing Musk I am sure it's on the radar, but whether he plans on steering toward that blip any time soon is another matter.

Re:Will they only make car batteries?

[Gravis Zero]

Elon wants to replace combustion based vehicles with electric. He will need tens to hundreds of Gigafactories to meet demand, plus is also prioritising Powerwalls.

This has been seriously considered.
"Just to supply auto demand you need 200 Gigafactories,"

It's worth noting that building the first factory is the hardest part because you have to design all the machines. Once it's running properly, the next the next 10 Gigafactories will be built in a fraction of the time.

Re:Will they only make car batteries?

[LinuxIsGarbage]

Lithium Iron ( LiFePO4) batteries are probably the closest Lithium technology battery to replacing a standard Lead Acid. Battery Tender makes batteries appropriate for such applications.

Re:Will they only make car batteries?

[Anonymous Coward]

* Gigafactory will double global production. And this is only for the Tesla brand to reach their target of 500k cars per year.
* This obviously the reason why the car makers are turning their backs to the electric cars right now. They dont have batteries.
* At this point maybe the Battery production is the most cash-back invest. Maybe it will be for many hears to come. Think about it..

Future Superfund Site

[Anonymous Coward]

in about 25 years.

Re:Future Superfund Site

[aaarrrgggh]

Oh, come on. The EPA won't exist in 2 years, so there won't be any superfunds to worry about. The free market will take care of it.

That said, as a TSLA shareholder, I really hope they don't have a fire...

Re:Future Superfund Site

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, come on. The EPA won't exist in 2 years, so there won't be any superfunds to worry about. The free market will take care of it....

The fun thing about gutting the EPA is it is kind of similar to gutting ethics rules. Had the republicans managed to do it, well nothing particularly bad would happen for awhile, so they could declare success, point to all the benefits and ignore all the bad things that are piling up down the road. After all most of the people that would have to deal with those bad things, well they ain't gonna live that long anyway...

Re:Future Superfund Site

[blindseer]

You mean like all those wind farms built 25 years ago and now abandoned?

Re:Future Superfund Site

[Rei]

I remember when that happened, after the great wind spill of '11. Those poor sailboats. :(

Slashdot Has Become a Press Release Aggregator!

[RobotRunAmok]

Same corporations, day in day out. C'mon, editors, *dig* a little! The Web is a big place, cast your story nets a l'il bit wider...

Re:Slashdot Has Become a Press Release Aggregator!

[Anonymous Coward]

Reminds me of 5-years ago when we saw the same shit with Apple & Steve Jobs where the tech press would fight over who could give him the best blowjob.

Re:Slashdot Has Become a Press Release Aggregator!

[Rei]

What reminds me of 5 years ago was all of the naysayers back then laughing at the concept that the Model S would be produced at all, let alone in quantities of nearly 100k per year. That they'd fail to produce them, that they'd fail to find customers, that the whole EV thing was a fad, and Tesla was imminently about to go bankrupt.

My, how things change. Or, not.

Re:Slashdot Has Become a Press Release Aggregator!

[Ol Olsoc]

What reminds me of 5 years ago was all of the naysayers back then laughing at the concept that the Model S would be produced at all, let alone in quantities of nearly 100k per year. That they'd fail to produce them, that they'd fail to find customers, that the whole EV thing was a fad, and Tesla was imminently about to go bankrupt.

Or wind power, or solar PV for that matter. All failures, and will continue to be failures, no matter how successful.

You have to give the naysayers some credit - they have a Wile E. Coyote level of persistence despite being so wrong so consistently. So many of those damn teenagers running around that their lawns have no more grass on them.

It will be powered by renewable ...

[CaptainDork]

... energy that has been fabricated by minerals and ores extracted by, and processed in plants powered by, fossil fuels.

God: "No, you can't get past the fucking 2nd law."

Re:It will be powered by renewable ...

[dfsmith]

God added: "Aren't you lucky that I created a giant source of readily available low-entropy radiation just 91 million miles away?"

Re:It will be powered by renewable ...

[haruchai]

... energy that has been fabricated by minerals and ores extracted by, and processed in plants powered by, fossil fuels.

God: "No, you can't get past the fucking 2nd law."

Does that include fossil nukes, hydro-fossilized or geothermalized petroleum plants?
We *can* phase out fossil fuels, just not yet but we can cut our usage drastically. We had to use other energy sources to kickstart our use of coal & oil; this is not different just on a much larger scale.

Re:It will be powered by renewable ...

[0100010001010011]

(Where did all of those fossil fuels get their energy from in the first place?)

Re:It will be powered by renewable ...

[Jeremi]

Man replied: "Not really, since in any scenario where that source didn't exist, neither would we. So it was pretty much guaranteed via the anthropic principle"

....at which point God smote mankind for being such intolerable smartasses.

Re:It will be powered by renewable ...

[CaptainDork]

God spoke to me: "Do not be afraid. The Sun, on average, is 93 million miles away. The oceans will not boil as quickly as the high-entropy post suggests."

Re:It will be powered by renewable ...

[CaptainDork]

You had the time and interest but you repeated what I said.

Re:It will be powered by renewable ...

[dfsmith]

Context! It's currently about 91Mmiles:* "Earth's closest approach to the sun, called perihelion, comes in early January and is about 91 million miles (146 million km)."

* Admittedly, when God created the Sun several GY ago, the distance was probably different, and immaterial. B-)

Re:It will be powered by renewable ...

[dfsmith]

Replying to my own post: apparently TODAY is perihelion day. Who'd have thunk?

2017 January 4, 2017 6:17 am 91,404,322 mi

Re:It will be powered by renewable ...

[Ol Olsoc]

You had the time and interest but you repeated what I said.

Now please tell me you were joking, because no one has seriously tried to invoke 2LD since the strong 2LD concept leads to an almost immediate ending.

Re:It will be powered by renewable ...

[Ol Olsoc]

(Where did all of those fossil fuels get their energy from in the first place?)

The Koch Brothers and Jeebuz.

Re:It will be powered by renewable ...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

It will be powered by renewable ... energy that has been fabricated by minerals and ores extracted by, and processed in plants powered by, fossil fuels.

Last I heard, solar panels pay off their manufacturing energy costs in less than a year.

BUT no one in their right mind uses the high-quality photovoltaic power for the bulk of the ore processing and other manufacturing processes, especially those that require heat. (If you want to power THAT by the sun you use a thermal collector. You get several times the power that way. Or you go ahead and use fuel if it's cheaper.) So the payback in post-carnot-cycle electricity is very short.

Photovoltaics are not just generation. They're generation on site. So they have to be compared to a grid plant AND the grid itself: In the fossil fuel case the fuel drives a heat engine (with the carnot cycle losses and other penalties), then transmission losses. That's FAR less than 100%.

Then there's their share of building the grid itself: Plant construction (and mining and processing raw materials for it), transformers, wires, insulators, meters, and so on. Cutting trees for poles. Cutting trees for clearance for the wires. Fuel for the machinery that did it, and for taking workers to/from the sites. Using up land for grid right-of-ways.

All of that is replaced by the panels and their supporting storage and inverter/control electronics.

God: "No, you can't get past the fucking 2nd law.

Second law has nothing to do with the ratio of manufacturing energy to collected energy, any more than the starter battery provides the power to drive a gasoline or diesel engine vehicle down the road. Solar panels are not energy storage devices. They're energy collection, conversion, and delivery devices.

Re:It will be powered by renewable ...

[CaptainDork]

It's simple physics and you know it.

"Clean" energy has its DNA in "dirty" energy and there's no free lunch.

Not ever.

Re:It will be powered by renewable ...

[haruchai]

You had the time and interest but you repeated what I said.

I was heading off what looked to be the start of another screed that those who want others to reduce waste/pollution/GHGs should first stop breathing or drop dead themselves.
Because freedom / God / my ancestors or some such shite.

If that's not where you were going, then I'll withdraw the comment.
Otherwise, it stands as is.

Re:It will be powered by renewable ...

[CaptainDork]

My point is that laypersons look at most renewable energy sources as the starting point of a life filled with unicorns.

It's so cool to own a brand new wind turbine, or electric car or a shiny solar panel.

As scientists, you and I know there's a back story and a future history that has to be added into the equation that will give us energy yield from cradle to grave.

We don't have to do any deep diving to learn the basics of production, maintenance, and disposal.

We know that conservation of energy coupled with the 2nd law of thermodynamics predicts we will never come close to breaking even.

Additionally, we can quickly determine current extraction methods of raw materials, look at molding and manufacturing techniques, add in shipping stuff from place to place, and we find that our shiny object is very dirty to begin with.

Then lets look at maintenance and see if there's anything dirty about that. There is.

Finally, the best we can do is recycle the crap at end of life and you know that's very inefficient, as well.

--

In summary, renewable energy is born dirty and it dies dirty.

It's not a judgement call.

It's science.

Re:It will be powered by renewable ...

[dunkelfalke]

And you have fish in your DNA. Does that make you a fish or a human?

Re:It will be powered by renewable ...

[blindseer]

Then there's their share of building the grid itself: Plant construction (and mining and processing raw materials for it), transformers, wires, insulators, meters, and so on. Cutting trees for poles. Cutting trees for clearance for the wires. Fuel for the machinery that did it, and for taking workers to/from the sites. Using up land for grid right-of-ways.

Stop the train right there. Every time solar power is brought up on Slashdot some genius will point out that the sun never sets on Earth, it just moves around. For solar to work then all we need to do is run some high voltage DC lines and spread that solar power goodness world wide. This then means cutting down trees for utility poles and clearing right of way.

If you are going to pull this nonsense in defense of solar power then you are opposing so many others that defend solar power. It's either we need this huge grid or we don't, make up your mind.

All of that is replaced by the panels and their supporting storage and inverter/control electronics.

So, if we're not cutting down trees and burning fuel to put up power lines then we're cutting down trees and burning fuel to dig up the minerals needed to make these batteries and electronics.

In case you think I'm just opposing solar power to defend continued fossil fuels I'll point out that I believe nuclear power to be a better option. Nuclear power has a lower carbon footprint, runs day or night (which includes charging up those batteries you like so much for load balancing), is already cheaper than solar, and kills fewer people per energy produced. If you don't believe me then look it up, you got internet just like I do.

Nuclear power saves lives, saves on carbon, and saves us money. Solar is a bad idea for so many reasons.

Re:It will be powered by renewable ...

[haruchai]

In summary, renewable energy is born dirty and it dies dirty.

It's not a judgement call.

It's science.

It's also economics & human nature.
Left to completely "natural" processes. all human beings are born dirty, die dirtier and would live lives that are nasty, brutish & short.
But we decided that wasn't good enough and we changed it.
It took a hell of a long time, is far from done and we have a lot of terrible mistakes getting to where we are now.
But we're past the point where we affect Nature as much as She affects us.
We *can* change that, without all of us reverting back to the godawful existence that was once the norm.
And we are going to fuck up from time to time but that's no excuse to keep doing things the way we've always done and in a way we know to be harmful.

Re:It will be powered by renewable ...

[angel'o'sphere]

I doubt anyone grasped what you wanted to say with all that 'dirty' and randomly mixing in the second law of thermodynamics.

Re:It will be powered by renewable ...

[angel'o'sphere]

Looking at his posts: it makes him a dork :)

Re:It will be powered by renewable ...

[DamnOregonian]

Shit logic.
Particularly in the domain of dirtiness that is the real concern, altering flux areas in the carbon cycle.
Certainly true that today, to make "clean" energy, one is largely stuck using "dirty", but this becomes less the case every single day, and will only continue becoming less the case as we progress in the direction we're progressing.

And frankly, the sun is a pretty free fucking lunch.

Re:It will be powered by renewable ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh heh ... God said "fucking" ... heh heh ...

Re:It will be powered by renewable ...

[Rei]

Jeebuz buring all of those dinosaur fossils in the ground and giving them suspiciously old radioisotope ratios was the best prank ever.

Re:It will be powered by renewable ...

[shilly]

Nuclear power ... kills fewer people per energy produced.

FFS. If things go really, catastrophically wrong with a solar panel installation, how many people could it conceivably kill? One or two if it fell off a roof? Whereas, if things go really, catastrophically wrong with a nuclear power plant, how many people could it conceivably kill? Bearing in mind that no production pebble bed reactors are in operation anywhere.

Tilting at strawmen rather than acknowledging the actual safety concerns people have about nuclear makes you look like a shite imitation of Don Quixote.

Re:It will be powered by renewable ...

[Ol Olsoc]

Jeebuz buring all of those dinosaur fossils in the ground and giving them suspiciously old radioisotope ratios was the best prank ever.

We laugh, but there have been some folks who actually believe that. Variation 1 is Satan putting them there.

Re:It will be powered by renewable ...

[blindseer]

Whereas, if things go really, catastrophically wrong with a nuclear power plant, how many people could it conceivably kill?

Given past events as examples? Probably dozens. Given that such reactors produce gigawatts for decades it still wins out over solar power, because the occasional slip-n-fall death compared to the minimal energy output means more people die per energy produced, just not all at once.

Bad car analogy time....
I drive a Ford that seats 7 people, but mostly just carries me. If anything goes wrong and there is an accident then that Ford and it's occupants face potential death and injury. If I flew in a Boeing 737 with 150 of my closest friends and something went wrong then those 151 passengers face potential death and injury. Therefore the Ford is safer than the Boeing. Right?

Of course that is wrong because the probability of anything going wrong in my Ford is many times higher than something going wrong on that Boeing. We don't hear about the many traffic fatalities because another person dying on the road is not news, just like a slip-n-fall death at a solar power collector is not news. A Boeing bursting into flames at the end of a runway is news, just like a nuclear reactor blowing its top, because that does not happen very often.

Nuclear power is safer despite your claims. Look it up, FFS.

Re:It will be powered by renewable ...

[david_thornley]

Significant nuclear accidents are very, very rare. Chernobyl isn't happening again. Fukushima might. The Fukushima nuclear meltdowns didn't kill many people at all.

In the meantime, people keep falling off roofs when installing solar panels. It's typically one person at a time, and although it's relatively rare it mounts up to a lot more deaths per watt or joule (whichever) than nuclear power.

Re:It will be powered by renewable ...

[eaglesrule]

FFS. If things go really, catastrophically wrong with a solar panel installation, how many people could it conceivably kill? One or two if it fell off a roof? Whereas, if things go really, catastrophically wrong with a nuclear power plant, how many people could it conceivably kill?

More people have committed suicide for various reasons than have actually died as a result of radiation exposure at Fukishima, which is so far, zero. With modern passive safety designs, more people will die from solar installation accidents than will from catastrophic meltdown, if history is any indication.

As for pebble bed reactors, the Chinese are building a Gen IV plant and installed the first reactor early last year.

The 'actual safety concerns people have' is just FUD from NIMBY types.

Re:It will be powered by renewable ...

[shilly]

No no no. NOT "given past events as examples". I said "conceivably*, didn't I? We don't plan safety engineering on the basis that "nothing too awful has happened so far".

Why people are so obtuse on this point is quite beyond me.

A nuclear power plant accident could conceivably injure or kill tens of thousands of people and render large tracts of land off-limits for human use for centuries. That is *precisely why* great efforts are made to create safety systems that mitigate these risks, such as defense-in-depth, redundancies, over-engineering, etc etc. But pretending the underlying risk doesn't exist because it's been mitigated so far (well, the injury / death part -- large tracts of land are indeed off-limits due to nuclear accidents for centuries to come) -- that's just moronic.

Re:It will be powered by renewable ...

[shilly]

People really do seem to struggle with the word "conceivable", don't they? I know reactors have not killed that many so far (although I'll bet accident rates during construction are in line with industry average, not zero). But people aren't worried about an accident in line with historical nuclear accidents. They're worried about an accident that is *out of line*. A catastrophe. At which point, saying "how were we supposed to know? All previous accidents weren't that bad!" is really not going to cut it.

Re:It will be powered by renewable ...

[david_thornley]

People really do seem to struggle with conceivable things, don't they? They can take the worst-case scenario they can possibly imagine and imagine it's worth considering. What if all solar panels turn out to emit toxic gas under certain circumstances, which happen, and millions and millions of people die as a result? It's about as realistic as imagining a nuclear accident of unprecedented severity.

Re:It will be powered by renewable ...

[shilly]

Hmm, let's see if I can spot the difference between an accident mechanism which is very real and is the reason why nuclear plants spend billions on preventative and adaptive mechanisms and some made-up imaginative bollocks about solar panels that I'm going to cite for fun reasons of false equivalence. Why yes, I can. Because I'm not a complete idiot.

Re:Open Source Hypocrites

[Anonymous Coward]

And Bill Gates stole DOS

Nothing new under the Sun

[Black.Shuck]

Am I the only person here who took this long to realize that Tesla cars are powered by what amounts to a shitload of flashlight batteries wired up in a tub?

"Why, the fax-machine ain't nothin' but a waffle-iron with a phone attached!"

Re:Nothing new under the Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

> "Why, the fax-machine ain't nothin' but a waffle-iron with a phone attached!"

This is not a good way to make waffles. Sure, they might look delicious, but they taste like paper.

Re:Nothing new under the Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait... then why do the waffles I cook in the fax machine all reek of ozone?

The future is now.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Same corporations, day in day out.

Sometimes the "news for nerds, stuff that matters" comes from some small handful of active companes, as they bring their breakthroughs into public use. Sometimes it has been AMD, Intel, Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun, and so on.

Right now Tesla is big, as they finally bring the battery breakthroughs Slashdotters have been lamenting as "always N years off", to market, for electric cars and energy storage for taking houses off the grid and onto self-generated renewable energy.

Remember all the lamenting, just yesterday, about how the price breakthrough in photovoltaic solar would be useless because of the cost of storage (for night and dark weather periods) and voltage conversion? Remember how I pointed out that voltage conversion has already succumbed to Moore's Law and the battery breakthroughs were just about to come on line?

The future came today. Look out, grid utilities!

C'mon, editors, *dig* a little! The Web is a big place, cast your story nets a l'il bit wider...

The editors don't dig. The slashdot users dig and the editors chose. IMHO they were right on to post this one.

Re:The future is now.

[Khyber]

"Remember all the lamenting, just yesterday, about how the price breakthrough in photovoltaic solar would be useless because of the cost of storage (for night and dark weather periods) and voltage conversion?"

That's because most of the people that post on /. now are utterly brainless. I've been building solar systems for housing quads, powering four houses on pure solar and battery for under $10,000. Been using lead-acid this entire time. Tesla's "Power" stuff simply can't handle the loads lead-acid can.

Re:The future is now.

[blindseer]

Utility level electricity storage is not going to use the same kind of batteries as an electric car. Not even close. Utilities are not bound by weight and volume like an electric car would be. To the utility all it comes down to is cost. Utilities won't use lithium batteries. They probably won't use even lead-acid. They'll use some thing really cheap, and therefore really heavy because light costs money. I don't know what these batteries would look like but I'm quite certain they'll be shipped to the site by rail.

A bad car analogy...
This is like saying a Caterpillar D10 dozer will get cheaper because prices dropped on on the Nissan Versa. Both can move clay, only the Nissan moves it in the form of 30 pound bags of kitty litter while the D10 moves it in the form of 70 ton mounds.

Re:The future is now.

[angel'o'sphere]

You simply have no clue about the topic.

Utilities won't use batteries at all. Or in only the most rare or even exotic circumstances.

Lets define the highest peak of the year in your power consumption/production (in your grid, not your house) as '100% peak'.

How many power plants on your grid do you have to replace by solar power that you have (at some point during sun hours) enough surplus solar power to store some in batteries? And when during your 24h cycle of the day do you have sudden demand that you can use the stored energy?

There are plenty of ways to make battery storage useful, but most of them are already blocked by other technologies ... which no one is going to replace.

Battery storage only makes sense for households/installations that don't want/can feed surplus into the grid, or are off grid.

Re:The future is now.

[blindseer]

You simply have no clue about the topic.

That may be true but one thing bothers me, how much material would we have to mine so that we have enough electricity storage so that we only need to rely on solar power? I've seen the calculations and it's a lot, as in not enough in the Earth crust kind of "a lot". Even with distributed storage, as in each business and household needs to only store their own energy, the materials needed is huge. In fact the materials needed might be more than what utility storage would be due to a lack of economy of scale.

There is also the matter of cost. If every house in the world needed a multi-ton battery then what does that do to battery prices? We can make the batteries on an assembly line to make them cheap but there is still the matter of mining up enough material, which again is not trivial.

Re:The future is now.

[Rei]

Nonsense. Li-ion has a vastly higher power density than lead-acid. Where are you finding PbA that can do ~5kW/kg? Because some li-ions go that high. Most these days are over 1kW/kg. Sustained. PbA is, what, ~200W/kg, for brief periods?

The main reason li-ion hadn't taken over the storage market earlier is because of cost. But that's finally changing.

Re:The future is now.

[Rei]

No, you simply have no clue about the topic.

The grid already uses batteries - not extensively, but more and more each year. And they're going li-ion. My brother in law works for one such company, they just bought their first grid-scale li-ion bank. Li-ion is often coming in cheaper than even flow batteries nowadays. But it still has more to fall before competing with general peaking, it's mainly useful for very short surge loads, voltage maintenance on long lines, things of that nature. Within a decade or so, though, it may be giving peaking a run for its money. It depends on how well the pricing trends hold and progress.

That doesn't mean that li-ion is inherently the future. Other techs (some old, some new) are trying to beat li-ion on price, and may well succeed. But li-ion is is used in the grid, today. And the lower its price falls, the more it'll be used.

Re:The future is now.

[Rei]

What are you talking about? What "materials"? I certainly hope you don't mean "lithium", because if so it only exposes how little you know about how lithium is produced. Salar lithium, the current preferred source, isn't "mined", it's produced from brine pumped up in salt flats, sun dried, and the individual salts separated from each other. The undesirable salts are left on the surface. Every year, most of the salars flood, taking the salt with them.

There are various potential lithium sources which are mined, and in the future at times they may prove to be more economical than salars or fill in for an abundance in demand that salars cannot meet. But the ultimate lithium source, the effectively inexhaustible one, is the oceans, and that again just goes back to a brine process. Last I checked (which was long ago), oceanic lithium recovery prices were estimated at about 5x as much as typical salar recovery prices. But even a price like that would hardly impact overall lithium battery prices; it's still cheap, and they just don't use that much lithium.

Re:The future is now.

[blindseer]

There simply is not enough lead or lithium in the Earth's crust to build the battery you require.

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...

Look it up. I gave you a link. In short the batteries needed will require billions of tons of materials but known reserves are in the millions of tons. That is for lead acid batteries, lithium numbers are similar. Getting lithium from brine is insufficient for the supply required. Consider the economic and environmental impact of extracting these minerals. Then consider the building of the structures, concrete pads and steel roofs, to keep them from sinking in the mud and shorting out in the rain.

IT DOES NOT WORK!!

Re:The future is now.

[Rei]

Sorry, but right off: "reserves" don't work that way. A reserves figure is based on the current level of exploration, at the current price point, with current production technologies. It's completely disjoint from the actual amount available. At current price points, the current amount of lithium reserves is 7-8 orders of magnitude different from the amount of lithium reserves if you 5x the price of lithium - or correspondingly improve technology to 1/5th the seawater production cost.

Lithium in seawater is 0.17 ppm. The oceans are 1.4e24kg. That's 2,4e17kg of lithium. In what world is that not enough?

And if it's not enough? Hey, the oceans are only 0.17ppm lithium, but the crust is not only far more massive than the oceans, but is also 20ppm lithium - 2 orders of magnitude more concentrated. And that's 20 ppm *average*. Much, much higher in certain environments than others. But we mine things in order from cheapest to most expensive, so utterly overwhelming majority of lithium will remain untapped forever.

Lithium is not an expensive material. It's so cheap that we use it in ceramics and greases. And it never will be expensive, no matter how much we use. 5x higher cost - who gives a rat's arse? It's not a major portion of li-ion battery costs.

Re:The future is now.

[jabuzz]

Power density for storage in a static and basically spatially none constrained environment is largely irrelevant.

Basically it does not matter if the battery pack for my house weighs 500kg or 10 tonnes, because unlike in a car I am not hauling it about all the time it is static. In addition space is also less of an issue for similar reasons.

Where lead beats lithium is firstly in instantaneous power draw which is what the poster was referring to.

Lead also beats lithium due to that with a little care to make sure you don't get a hydrogen buildup it is also far less likely to burn your house to the ground.

I also suspect that lead probably has better longevity than lithium, it certainly has simpler chemistry for easier charging and discharging.

Re:The future is now.

[Rei]

Huh, forget 5x ;) I just checked up on how much current prices vs. seawater costs have changed since I last looked.

Current price (Li2CO3): $12-14/kg
Seawater price (Li2CO3): $16-22/kg

Heck, seawater's almost at parity now. Last I checked, conventional carbonate was only about $5/kg and seawater was about $25/kg. There's some serious convergence going on - we may start using seawater sooner rather than later.

Re:The future is now.

[Ol Olsoc]

Battery storage only makes sense for households/installations that don't want/can feed surplus into the grid, or are off grid.

The electric power grid is an endangered species. Too many slashdotters are having a problem understanding that.

Re:The future is now.

[barc0001]

> Basically it does not matter if the battery pack for my house weighs 500kg or 10 tonnes

Sure it does. You think 4 tons of lead is cheap? Not to mention all of the racking and support structure you're going to need to build to properly house that much battery capacity in an easily maintainable fashion? Or were you just planning on covering your basement floor with dozens of lead acid batteries? Got a proper ventilation system for that if you're not using sealed cells?

Re:The future is now.

[Khyber]

You fail at reading. I said nothing about power density. I said current handling (as indicated by the word 'load.')

Lead-acid stomps Li-ion in current delivery capability.

Re:The future is now.

[Khyber]

4 tons of lead is relatively cheap if you buy it as scrap. $1,280 at $0.16 per pound current scrap spot price.

"Not to mention all of the racking and support structure you're going to need to build to properly house that much battery capacity in an easily maintainable fashion?"

You don't need much at all. Your typical multi-shelf wire rack will work just fine (and provide extra ground planes) and provide the air circulation space for battery venting (even sealed batteries release hydrogen, FYI. Nothing holds hydrogen back except a direct molecular bond.)

Re:The future is now.

[angel'o'sphere]

I did mot say that batteries have no use.
But they won't be ever used large scale as a storage system to acompany solar power e.g. on a grid.
And we are talking about what is happening right now, installing solar and wind right now. In our current situation there is no grid on earth that I'm aware of that has such a big solar or wind contribution that it makes any sense to store anything. You simply power down the load following plants to compensate 'surplus'.
In germany we face tge situation that we can not always transport all power generated in the north down to the south. But having storage in the north would not really help. It is only nice as a thought experiment.

Battery storages attached to grids will be likely either shared used with home solar installations or charging smart meter attached batteries. And those won't be used in the sense of storage as the parent meant but as 'eaters' of surplus power in the sense of balancing power.

So, yes, I think I have a clue about how grids work and how limited the usefullness of storage and batteries right now is.

The idea that solar and/or wind can not take of 'without storage' is a well fed myth on /. ... no idea where it actually originated, though.

Re:The future is now.

[barc0001]

> 4 tons of lead is relatively cheap if you buy it as scrap.

Yes, but it's not being bought as scrap, it's being bought as part of batteries.

As for the racking, you'd need a lot of racks. These would do:

https://www.grainger.com/product/EDSAL-Bulk-Storage-Rack-Starter-WP110458/_/N-mk0/Ntt-wire+racks?sst=subset&ts_optout=true&s_pp=false&picUrl=//static.grainger.com/rp/s/is/image/Grainger/12M959_AS01?$smthumb$&breadcrumbCatId=4572

But fitting 15 batteries per rack @170 lbs each, we're looking at 12 60" racks. I'll take a couple of powerwalls instead, thanks.

Re:The future is now.

[blindseer]

And if it's not enough? Hey, the oceans are only 0.17ppm lithium, but the crust is not only far more massive than the oceans, but is also 20ppm lithium - 2 orders of magnitude more concentrated. And that's 20 ppm *average*. Much, much higher in certain environments than others. But we mine things in order from cheapest to most expensive, so utterly overwhelming majority of lithium will remain untapped forever.

Again...

Consider the economic and environmental impact of extracting these minerals. Then consider the building of the structures, concrete pads and steel roofs, to keep them from sinking in the mud and shorting out in the rain.

Assuming the minerals are there for us to extract we'd be digging up a lot of dirt to get it. That means tearing up a lot of crops, forests, and mountains. We'd be paving over land with concrete to put in solar panels and batteries. This is land and resources better used to grow food.

Re:The future is now.

[angel'o'sphere]

The grids itself very likely not.
However the way how they work is changing drastically.

E.g. the idea of "base load plants" gets less and less important, with the shift to combined gas cycle plants (gas turbine plus boiler), special balancing plants are less needed (the americans call them peakers, but I guess that is a layme'n term).

Same for midrange/load following plants, combined gas cycle plants fill that niche as well.

OTOH the total demand for electric power will increase, as more and more will shift away from fossile fuels to electricity. That means grid upgrades for transportation and distribution *or* storage if you see a market for it instead of transporting it away.

Then again we have smart meters for demand shaping. Instead of transporting surplus away, or storing it (in non yet existing storage) *or* powering down a load following plant (which is to slow to adapt, so during powering down we waste fuel) and powering it up later (wasting fuel again) we simply tell customers to activate the washing machine now, or the fridge now or the freezer now: we change and adapt demand to the surplus instead of losing the surplus or getting rid of it in traditional ways.

That all would run much smoother and faster if other nations had similar laws like the EU regarding selling, production and transportation of power.

Re:The future is now.

[angel'o'sphere]

To your original question. no one is going 100% solar and using batteries for the night. It simply makes no sense.

We'd be paving over land with concrete to put in solar panels and batteries.
No we would not.
Arizona alone has more sunshine than the entire planet needs for electric power ... several times, I believe.

And solar panels can be placed over the crops ... or on buildings. Plenty of places can place solar panels in "the fields" where they don't disturbe anyone.

http://www.renewableenergyworl...

Need another zero in there...

[evilviper]

cylindrical '2170 cells,'

You're an order of magnitude off there, chief. That would be a hearing-aid battery. They're actually making 21700 cells. Tesla sometimes calls them "'21-70", but omitting the dash and concatenating the numbers makes no sense.

No big deal, I suppose, just a little typo... I still look forward to buying a $350,000 (3350 eur) Tesla Model 3, with its impressive 21 mile (3460km) range and 1550 mph (25kph) top-speed.

Re:Need another zero in there...

[Macdude]

Considering that's what Tesla calls them on Tesla's web page https://www.tesla.com/blog/bat... I think you owe someone an apology.

Re:Need another zero in there...

[Anonymous Coward]

That would be a hearing-aid battery

Maybe for an elephant. I don't know anyone who can fit something that's 21mm wide in their ear.

Re:Need another zero in there...

[Anonymous Coward]

1550MPH for only $350,000? There are going to be some very pissed off supercar manufacturers that can't even get past 250 for 3 times that price. Although the local constabulary will be pleased to issue a $17,000 ticket for going 1295MPH over the posted 55.

Re:Need another zero in there...

[evilviper]

Entirely in-ear hearing-aids are a fairly new invention, and absolutely have NOT entirely replaced the traditional, larger units.

Retooling

[Anonymous Coward]

What I really want to know is... if some revolutionary new battery chemistry hits overnight, how much of this place can be flipped at a moment's notice to start mass production on something completely different?

Everyone's been after something better (or at least less volatile) than lithium for years now, and it seems inevitable that something 2-3x as energy dense is needed for truly useful electric cars.

Re:Retooling

[dbIII]

if some revolutionary new battery chemistry hits overnight

Since "overnight" in battery technology at the moment seems to be twenty years from lab to production, then why not?

Re:Retooling

[Anonymous Coward]

To be honest mate, I came up with a fantastic new battery chemistry while I was banging your mom. But I forgot it in the heat of passion when I completely retooled her.

Nevermind.

Just thought you should know that.

I feel the plan is kinda dumb

[fubarrr]

Import marked up lithium film from China after paying Chinese export tax, then trying to compete with Chinese cell makers.

Re: Open Source Hypocrites

[Anonymous Coward]

Star Track is better

Tesla E-bike

[wolfheart111]

Im just putting it out there. :) No need to drive something over a ton, I dont need it or want it.

Solar battery storage is 10 percent of the cost..

[Anonymous Coward]

today, with 20KW solar systems. It requires about 2 grand every 5 years (assuming you want full capacity batteries and no risk of shorts) using lead acids to cover the daytime charging capability of the array. 4 grand if you want overcapacity and plan to add wind generators for winter months somewhere colder.

Behind solar panels themselves the big expense is ~20-30 percent for the charging/discharging/power transmission gear. Moving up to a multi-array system with longer distance transmission will set you back further as you need to buy lower demand inverter gear for long distance A/C transmission, plus hardware and software that can automatically balance grid load (likely only up to the 400-600V AC before you are getting into grid transmission gear and full time engineering staff to keep it operational.)

The problem with both the battery and charging/discharging/transmission system components is however the proprietary software you are relying on to ensure it stays running within parameters... If your parameters are different, or lower/higher rated replacement parts are used, you may very well find yourself replacing the system just to get interoperable parts again. Furthermore as with the PowerCube, you may just find a cloud update one day ruining your battery pack because MORE BUSINESS, or oops technical error.

While the storage capability we're gaining on a daily basis is becoming impressive, without true understanding and ownership of the devices it is contained in, you're just ending up slightly more entrapped by societies constraints, no matter how far off grid you choose to travel.

GigaFactory

[cstacy]

I assume something called a GigaFactory will be 3-D printed by drones and be a self-aware AI.