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: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: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.

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.

[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: 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

[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).