Slashdot Mirror
Tesla To Power Gigafactory With World's Largest Solar Rooftop Installation (inhabitat.com)
Last week, Tesla announced that its Gigafactory has begun mass production of lithium-ion battery cells in Nevada. But the company failed to mention one thrilling detail in their January 4 announcement: the Gigafactory could be powered by the world's largest solar rooftop installation. According to an investor handout, a 70-megawatt (MW) solar array along with ground solar panels could let the factory operate entirely on clean energy. Inhabitat reports: The 70 MW solar array would be around seven times larger than any rooftop arrays currently installed, according to Tesla's exciting handout released by Electrek and confirmed as genuine by The Verge. The rooftop array currently boasting the title of world's largest is a 11.5 MW installation in India. The United States' biggest rooftop array is a 10 MW array atop a California Whirlpool distribution center. SolarCity will likely manufacture the solar panels, according to The Verge, as Tesla acquired the solar energy company in November. Powerpacks will store any excess energy generated by the vast solar installation. Tesla said in the handout the "all-electric" factory will be able to run with greater efficiency and will produce zero carbon emissions. Heating and water use at the Gigafactory will also be sustainable. In the handout, Tesla said a large part of heating for the building would come from waste heat obtained from production processes. Also, "Gigafactory's closed-loop water supply system uses six different treatment systems to efficiently re-circulate about 1.5 million liters (that's around 400,000 gallons) of water, representing an 80 percent reduction in fresh water usage compared with standard processes." Tesla even said they're building a recycling facility at the Gigafactory that will be able to "safely reprocess" battery cells, packs, and modules to obtain metal usable in new cells.
could make cars with rooftop solar cells...
Totally makes sense.
Don't know how much waste the recycle process produces, but not having to ship the material but across the street will save a bundle.
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
The largest footprint building on the planet, with a roof (as per all the artists renditions of the factory) covered in solar panels would literally necessarily be the largest rooftop solar installation :) and they wouldnt put solar panels all over the roof to not use them :)
This is re-volting news for the anti solar PV crowd.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
At least they're not planning to drive cars over those solar cells.
This is a problem why? Would you rather someone build a coal plant next to your house to supply the power instead?
The electricity has to come from somewhere.
Lowering air pollution benefits all.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Solar isn't baseload. They'd need some sort of crazy energy storage device.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
https://www.theguardian.com/en...
You still think a "coal plant" belches out black soot and smoke don't you?
Educate yourself. Fossil plants use baghouses, dry sorbent injection, activated carbon, flue gas desulfurization, selective catalytic reduction, among other technologies to clean up emissions. Mostly what you see today is water vapor.
Yeah no one wants a power plant near them, but happy to use the electricity it generates. Ignorance is bliss.
The only reason that coal plants use *any* of those technologies is because they were FORCED. And they spent DECADES resisting any attempts to curb their pollution. Yes, they're cleaner than ever but they were fucking nasty for the better part of my life.
If Trump disbands the EPA, they'll happily go back to spewing their shite directly into your air & water with a hearty fuck-u-and-blow-me
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Coal is dead, forget about it. Coal fuel costs more then you can make off the electricity you sell. Power prices keep heading down. Nobody is building coal plants anymore,
Not yet.
you need to educate YOURSELF
What is being grabbed is the VISIBLE particles.
PLENTY OF WICKED POLLUTION that can not be seen in visible spectrum come out of the smoke stack.
Solar panels in Nevada? A Heliostat would work as well and would not require such an unecological production process. Solar panels may be better than old tech power production but the chemicals used are pollutants. They are not as green as claimed but heliostat towers are far more green and in a area like Nevada. Why does a country like Morocco end up leading the world? https://www.revolvesolar.com/w...
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
Exactly, also private corporation doing private things, isn't that what your ppl cream yourselves daily too?
I happen to have not only one, but two natural gas power plants within a mile or so (along with a refinery). While I know enough to not be too worried about what comes off the cooling towers, stand around the fence for a while... ask yourself why you now have a bloody nose, itchy eyes, and shortness of breath. The joy of NOx.
Yes, things get diluted pretty quickly as long as wind is blowing things away from you, but I am only talking about short-term effects. The level of adult-onset asthma in the community is also very high. Treatment is only done to get levels down to be reliably at the regulatory threshold... otherwise you are wasting money.
Bottom line is we are better off with nothing going up the smokestack.
From SolarCity's 2015 impact report it seems that 70MW of installed power produced 28,630 metric tons of CO2. It's 2017 (which should have yielded further emissions savings over 2015), plus installing bulk might yield yet further savings.
But I'm a firm believe in the energy trap, so I think that's 28,630 tons of CO2 well invested.
It's much more load following. It peaks when the demand is highest and drops when the demand is lowest. Therefore you need less peak load capacity and can reduce the total power production you require for a grid.
Baseload (and night time rates) were created because nuclear power was expensive if you kept throttling the plant,so they produced 100% of what they could get out (sans accidents, maintenance and failures), but that was too much at night and too little at day, so they still needed expensive peaking plants whose capacity added to the grid was much higher than it needs to be if we replace most of the power production with solar and wind by their capacity. And because of the underproduction in the daytime, they couldn't close down nuke plants, and therefore they had to overproduce at night.
So to move demand about as much as possible, they introduced two different tarrifs.
And moving to renewables could therefore reduce the cost per installed watt, per capacity factor watt AND per watt delivered.
Because instead of being an immovable base load source, it's much more load following.
"...failed to mention one thrilling detail"
"...according to Tesla's exciting handout"
Is this what reporting has devolved to these days?
- ------ Go 'til ya know.
Don't get high on your own supply.
And they'll remove the mercury warnings for seafood, which is also caused by burning coal.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tunas-declining-mercury-contamination-linked-to-u-s-shift-away-from-coal/
What you are forgetting is all the radioactive coal ash waste. Tons of material that must be handled properly (at significant expense, so you have to watch out for corner cutting) to prevent arsenic and other heavy metals from seeping into the water table. Huge coal ash spills have destroyed homes.
Coal is dead, forget about it. Coal fuel costs more then you can make off the electricity you sell. Power prices keep heading down. Nobody is building coal plants anymore,
Trump's EPA and government might be able to cut regulations enough to make coal competitive. Basically if he just says to hell with the environment, then it might make financial sense. It likely wouldn't cause enough damage in four years to prevent his reelection, or even if it did, he could probably get enough people to lie and say it didn't to get around it.
Personally, I think he is just a con man that will say anything to win, and try to do just enough to keep the con going. If screwing over the environment benefits the Donald, then the environment will be told to shove it.
My own bet would be for them to try to work out some plan which is mostly theater where trump and the republicans do their best for those hard working coal workers, while all the time trying to plan it out so the bill or whatever gets defeated. In other words, I think they may learn from obamacare. They got so much mileage out of that hate, and they didn't have to do a damn thing to actually improve it. In fact, some of them might wish there was a way to keep it just so they could keep complaining about it. So, to summarize, pretending to give a crap about coal, while in reality never quite getting it done, is likely their best strategy. That way they can keep going back to that well.
Stop pretending we will be back to 60's employment or taxation, just let the empire fall it will be better for everyone
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
A 2016 study estimated that global fossil fuel subsidies were $5.3 trillion in 2015, which represents 6.5% of global GDP.[3] The study found that "China was the biggest subsidizer in 2013 ($1.8 trillion), followed by the United States ($0.6 trillion), and Russia, the European Union, and India (each with about $0.3 trillion)."[3] The authors estimated that the elimination of "subsidies would have reduced global carbon emissions in 2013 by 21% and fossil fuel air pollution deaths 55%, while raising revenue of 4%, and social welfare by 2.2%, of global GDP."[3] According to the International Energy Agency, the elimination of fossil fuel subsidies worldwide would be the one of the most effective ways of reducing greenhouse gases and battling global warming.[4] In May 2016, the G7 nations set for the first time a deadline for ending most fossil fuel subsidies; saying government support for coal, oil and gas should end by 2025.[13]
Keep funding the middle east.
WRONG!
Medupi power station
Kusile power station
Both still under construction (and running behind schedule and over budget)
I grew up next to this monstrosity
Hendrina power station
When you woke up in the morning you had to wash the coal dust off the car, it would eat the galvanizing off fences because of the high sulpher content.
Sure it's a bit better now, but not by much. ZA has a fvckton of coal, it will be burning it for some time.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
70 is only 6 times 'larger' than 10.
7 times larger than 10 is 80.
But still, they are subsidies. You get subsidies to build solar. You get subsidies to build a coal plant. So if we are talking about a free market, you have to remove the subsidies for building the coal plant, because construction cost is part of the cost of a coal plant.
I wonder how much attention they are paying to how the closed recycling systems can be applied to the problem of sustained life in space or on Mars ...
>Sure it's a bit better now, but not by much. ZA has a fvckton of coal, it will be burning it for some time.
Don't be so sure of this. Coal comes in different varieties and a coal plant must be designed for a specific variety. And we have a problem here in ZA. Until around 2010 the coal we used in our plants had little export value, while the coal Europe used was exactly the coal we didn't need. So Eskom could get very low rates on the coal they needed - because the mines could make lovely profits selling the rest to Europe.
Since 2010 the European market has been shrinking fast, it's not a viable export market anymore. China on the other hand is growing rapidly and is now our major coal export market. Only problem: China's plants use the same coal variety we do. So suddenly the mines are very unhappy about selling coal at R5 a tonne to Eskom when they SAME coal can get R50 a tonne from China.
Part of why Eskom helped the Guptas to buy that coal mine is because the mine was about to go bankrupt. The owners are in a long-term cheap coal supply with Eskom and had decided they would rather close that mine and focus on the others (from where they could export the coal to China) than keep operating the one they had to sell so cheaply it was making a loss.
Helping the Guptas buy it was partly motivated by the risk that if the mine closes Eskom would face a critical shortage. That nobody was willing to buy it without kickbacks and help tells you a lot.
Either way, none of this is relevant to American coal-miners, we've never imported coal from them and we never will - since their coal won't work in our power plants and, like you said, we have plenty of coal anyway.
It's definitely in ZA's best interest to move away from coal - not least because the economics around mining and burning have changed and it's now a lot harder to do it economically. The answer isn't the ridiculous nuclear plan either.
The problem with nuclear is that it is extremely expensive and takes a long time to get online. A minimum of a decade - and nuclear plants are notorious for going extremely over budget and over time - look how late Kusile and Medupi already are, there's no practical way a nuclear project will produce a single KW/H of power in South Africa in under 30 years. We can't afford to wait that long.
Our answer must be solar - we can bring the same power as the nuclear project online with solar in 2 years for 10% of the capital costs. And the cost of the power is far cheaper as well. Even with storage factored in it remains the cheapest power source of all, and we are particularly suited to it what with being such a high sunshine country.
The best studies right now pegs the total cost per kw/h of coal at about R120, nuclear is at about R1.05. Wind is around 85c - solar is 55c.
Less than half the cost of coal.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
They would need a massive battery to store all that power to make this work. They clearly haven't thought it through.
Educate yourself. Fossil plants use baghouses, dry sorbent injection, activated carbon, flue gas desulfurization, selective catalytic reduction, among other technologies to clean up emissions. Mostly what you see today is water vapor.
We can find industrial emitters releasing illegal levels of pollutants as rapidly as we can pay people to sample them.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Where is the evidence for that? I just looked up what a baghouse was, and according to Wikipedia they, "came into widespread use in the late 1970s after the invention of high-temperature fabrics (for use in the filter media) capable of withstanding temperatures over 350 F." So maybe the reason coal plants were not cleaner is because the technology was not there yet.
Closed-loop water usage; large scale solar; on-site recycling. This sounds like an R&D project for SpaceX. No doubt much of the information gained by building and running this will feed back into other Musk projects.
Of course, if they want to practice this in a place without an atmosphere, they could always build Gigafactory 2 in Boring, Oregon - or even it's twin town of Dull, Scotland ;-)
Don't forget cheap leasing on federal land for coal oil and gas. Federal and state mineral/land leases have never been market rate.
And, since on the flat there are two reasons for needing ANY power to keep moving (Newton's first law, remember!) is to offset losses moving like wind resistance, that is a very important limit for speed.
So your complaint here is both irrelevant and unsupported.
Its not an urban legend, it's reality.
Nice parroting of the fossil fuel industry's PR line, however.
Who said "air conditioning" until you brought it up? I brought up night time rates. Ask your local heavy industry business owner what that means. Even if nobody else knows what that means in your country, they will.
I always love this sort of hypocrisy. Here we have a comment criticizing the free market for it's lack of caring about the environment in a story about a free-market company going above and beyond the law to reduce emissions and waste. So goodly, much applause.
Yes, the 70 mw of panels will be made in ny's solar factory which also gets its energy from solar. Nice and clean. No cock suckers like you in the loop.
Agreed. However, that won't cut it. Population continues to increase. Unfortunately, because of copyright I can't write a book about the inconvenient truth of population reduction being the only "long-term, sustainable" solution. Of course, Humans can't accept that so I'm just making noise. ;)
You first. Lead by example.
Using estimates from published research, the little coal-fired plant at the local university here in town, even though they use "clean" coal methods, still produces about $12 million in negative health impacts on people that live in the community. This primarily comes from fine particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, nitrious oxide, and doesn't even include the cost of disposal of the coal ash. Major coal plants have a much larger impact on human health, particularly if they are located near population centers.
Guess that will be good for employee work/life balance.
You first. Lead by example.
I am. I don't have kids and I refuse to do so. There, I'm leading by example. See? It doesn't have the slightest influence because it's unacceptable to deal with the reality of over-population leading us where we *say* we don't want to go.
Bull. Shit.
10 years ago I lived in the LaTrobe valley in Australia, just down the road from a coal power plant. You literally couldn't dry your clothes on the outdoor clothesline some days as they would go black from the soot and need to be re-washed. As for, say, riding a bike: that's something you only try once. And talking to friends who stayed there nothing much changed in the last 10 years.
Anyone who claims that coal is *clean* has is either lying or ignorant. All the after-market, government-mandated air-scrubbing tech in the world won't change that.
Where is the evidence for that? I just looked up what a baghouse was, and according to Wikipedia they, "came into widespread use in the late 1970s after the invention of high-temperature fabrics (for use in the filter media) capable of withstanding temperatures over 350 F." So maybe the reason coal plants were not cleaner is because the technology was not there yet.
Baghouse collection isn't the only method. Electrostatic precipitator, for example, have been around for over a century.
Also it should be possible to use heat exchangers to control the temperature of the smoke destined for the baghouse so as to keep it within the correct operating temp range - and pump at least some of the captured heat back to the boilers or furnaces to improve overall efficiency.
Of course, there are challenges with any approach but not insurmountable and were always worth doing giving the drastic impact of power plant pollution on air quality.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body