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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."
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?
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have backups to corrupt.
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.
in about 25 years.
... 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."
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
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...
That'll operate a flux capacitor for over a day! (27.27... hours in fact.)
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!"
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.
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.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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 $350,000 (3350 eur) Tesla Model 3, with its impressive 21 mile (3460km) range and 1550 mph (25kph) top-speed.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
What I really want to know is... if some revolutionary new battery chemistry hits overnight, how much of this place can be flipped at a moment's notice to start mass production on something completely different?
Everyone's been after something better (or at least less volatile) than lithium for years now, and it seems inevitable that something 2-3x as energy dense is needed for truly useful electric cars.
Import marked up lithium film from China after paying Chinese export tax, then trying to compete with Chinese cell makers.
Giga comes from the Greeks, meaning GIANT. By square footage, this factory is the largest on the fucking planet. THAT is where its name comes from.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Im just putting it out there. :) No need to drive something over a ton, I dont need it or want it.
[($)]
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.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
>Boeing Everett factory is a larger building
in volume, not in footprint
Also in footprint. 400000 m^2 vs 200000 m^2.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
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.
For the love of Crom, am I the only one here who wants to keep the U.S. technologically competitive?
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.
For the love of Crom, am I the only one here who wants to keep the U.S. technologically competitive?
You are confusing the car assembly plant with the battery factory.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
It's a Lexx reference.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I assume something called a GigaFactory will be 3-D printed by drones and be a self-aware AI.
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.
For the love of Crom, am I the only one here who wants to keep the U.S. technologically competitive?
Ora ora, we have a Xeroque Romes here!
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.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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...