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Tesla Completes World's Largest Battery Project In Half the Time Promised (engadget.com)
Rei writes: Tesla announced the completion of the world's largest battery -- a 100 MW/129 MWh wind-power backup system for 30,000 homes in South Australia. Three times more powerful than any other battery on Earth, the $50 million project had garnered press due to Elon Musk's Twitter boast that it would be completed within 100 days of the contract signing or it would be free. In the end, Tesla took it up a notch: the battery was finished 55 days from the date of contract signing and 99 days from the date of Musk's boast itself.
The man said he would do the thing, and he did the thing.
I assumed when he made the boast that it would be 100 days from the signing of a contract, or that there'd be an allowance for shipping times to Australia and possibly other 'fudge factors'.
I'm now assuming instead that there was a huge loss involved here in order to move and install the required hardware in such a short time, just to prove the point it was possible and would actually work, and thus make future sales more likely.
Why is it any story about Musk ends up dominated by trolls and assholes? Butt-hurt much that he can actually get things done?
Nobody else wanted his batteries so they had plenty of stock.
Yeah, no one wanted his batteries so much that he was unable to fulfil the order using the existing contractual supplier (Panasonic) or from his existing factory and had to turn to Samsung SDI as an emergency second supplier.
I'm waaaaaiting....
I read zerohedge too, and it's full of Musk-hate and fake news, or just spun so hard it'll fly apart. Yeah, Musk has gotten some subsidies. More than Boeing and the rest of the MIC who get their own ExIm bank to loan countries with bad credit the money to buy MIC stuff? Which has gone on longer than Elon's been alive?
Perhaps the haters can explain how the ULA drops out of bidding whenever SpaceX shows up, even though they got more subsidies for longer - and they say that they can't meet the bid price. Or how NASA crows about the huge savings they're now getting.
Oh, we're talking about cars. So, GM got no bailout or subsidy to make my Volt?
Haters gonna hate, but damn, check some facts, people.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
Why is it any story about Musk ends up dominated by trolls and assholes? Butt-hurt much that he can actually get things done?
Because when Tesla is viewed as a black box - considering only revenue, profit, and other information without considering the context or goal horizon - the economic forecast is very bad.
Almost all stock predictions made today are based on this sort of black-box calculation. Every month the analysts plug a bunch of companies' numbers into their spreadsheet algorithms, and those algorithms tell them how well the stock is doing. They then write an article noting what happened in the previous month as the "reason" they say the stock is doing whatever the algorithm said.
The analysts give the impression that they reviewed the information and are giving expert opinion. In reality, they are reporting events and claiming the algorithm outputs as their conclusion.
Also, the algorithm goal horizon is 6 months, and Tesla has been reinvesting lots of revenue into new production (ie - gigafactory). Tesla's goal horizon is a couple of years down the road, where they will be in a position to corner the market in battery production or supercharger network or home solar.
So a lot of people bought Tesla short, and are hoping it goes down so they can make some money. I don't know how many people are shorting Tesla right now, but 8 months ago it was something like 22% of all Tesla stock was short. Since Tesla has been doing well, that number has dropped considerably, but there are still bunches of people holding out and hoping that Tesla crashes so that they can at least mitigate their loss.
It's a less right now, but we still hear "echoes" of all the nudging and convincing that people were doing to try to make the stock crash.
It'll fade over time.
Ok, I'll give you that Musk is a tax soak. But unlike most tax soaks, he actually delivers some cool and useful things for the taxpayers dime. In this case, I'm willing to look the other way. When it comes to cutting waste of taxpayer funds, there are a lot of other candidates I'd cut before I got around to Musk.
Progressivism: Parasites helping parasites to help themselves - to other people's stuff.
Toyota's sold over 10 million cars every year, for many years. Toyota's stock is valued at $184 billion.
Tesla sells less than 100,000 cars a year, less than 1% of Toyota's sales, and doesn't have a track record of decades of consistent success that Toyota has. Tesla's stock is at $53 billion.
1% of Toyota's sales. If Tesla also had Toyota's proven track record, the company might be worth 1% of Toyota's price. It's overpriced by at least 30X.
"But Tesla sells ELECTRIC cars!", someone says. Toyota sells more ELECTRIC cars than Tesla does.
Tesla uses different battery chemistry for the stationary storage units.
Tesla uses different battery chemistry for the stationary storage units.
Not quite. Tesla uses different battery chemistry for their stationary storage units designed specifically for daily cycling, e.g. the Powerwall which has nickel-manganese-cobalt chemistry. Additionally this battery is much safer and less likely to burn your house down due to thermal runaway. Oh but it's more expensive.
The PowerPack (which is their grid storage solution) actually uses nickel-cobalt-aluminum, the same chemistry as their cars. This is mainly due to the load expectations being similar. The grid connected solution is not expected to be cycled on a daily basis and the chemistry favours high rates of charge and discharge which is precisely what is needed in order to stabilise a large grid, especially when the primary reason for the design is to avoid cascading failures due to a breaker opening somewhere.
Now that being said the Powerwall used to come in two different versions, a daily and a backup model, the latter having a larger capacity and also the same nickel-cobalt-aluminum batteries as used in the cars. Not sure if that is still the case though.
Now that ALSO being said, earlier this year Tesla's car division hired an expert who some people believe are the first step to the company shifting the Car / Powerpack chemistries to NMC as well.