You need an inverter that matches your production, not your demand. Its called grid tied net metering. For instance, I need 3000-3500 kW PV production to meet my 600kWh/month demand. My peak demand is likely 4x as much, but I don't need a bigger inverter, unless I go off grid, which makes no sense right now. Here in Brazil we must sell 100% of our grid tie production to the grid then buy it back as needed. So the Solar PV inverter has no job in consuming electricity at all.
No it won't max out. There's this thing called the PowerWall and PowerPack that fundamentally changes this whole debate. PowerWall 2.0 just came out, 14kWh storage, built in inverter, higher power. And the large scale PowerPack 2.0 now has 200kWh of storage at a lower $$$/kWh price. No later than Q2 2017, the 3.0 versions will be announced which combined with either Tesla Solar Tiles or even cheaper solar PV will make living off grid almost as cheap as being connected to the grid. American Samoa Ta'u now runs almost 100% on solar using the old Powerpack 1.0. Next comes Hawaii smaller islands. By 2020 a large chunk of tropical islands without grid connections to shore will be running on solar, its already cheaper to do solar than diesel. I bet Hawaii will be 100% renewable before 2030. Not because solar is cute, but because it will be cheaper. That will also make solar cheaper to end consumers than being connected to the grid, including 2 days worth of battery storage. PS: I'm also very much pro nuclear, but so far the nuclear industry is only humming in China/South Korea/India/Russia (mostly). It seems to be waiting for molten salt reactors and/or thorium.
India's Narendra Modi says solar is cheaper than Coal in India already. Coal isn't prohibited in the USA, its just uncompetitive.
Meanwhile in unrelated news, Brazil's Itaipu dam on track to produce 100 TWh in 2016, equivalent to an average power output of 11500MWs throughout the year. Hot damn ! They installed 20kW net worth of solar PV at Itaipu just to say its also a solar plant ! Nothing like having 18 turbines, each as powerful as an old nuclear reactor turbine.
Top rooftop solar panels already at 24% efficiency. In a few years it will break 30%, which means over 500 Wp per panel.
Electric vehicles will greatly flatten the power demand curve of the grid. Teslas only need a software patch to let them charge when the grid tells them to (in exchange for a big electricity discount). Any new nuclear project starting today will come online some 10 years from now when Li Ion electricity storage will be quite cheap, just distribute Li Ion packs throughout the grid so they can charge at off peak hours and discharge at peak. Any efforts of say no to nuclear isn't increasing solar/wind adoption, but rather helping coal and natural gas stay. Nuclear reactors can do some load following. EDF in France does it. US reactors don't do it cause there are few enough reactors their job is to produce as much electricity as possible, all the time. You can double nuclear in the USA and many other countries without creating problems for renewables. Nuclear needs to replace the really bad baseload coal plants. Replacing them with natural gas isn't the best solution !
There is no Thorium reactor design available off the shelf today. The closest we are to a Thorium fueled design is Thorium+Plutonium MOX fuel on existing/under construction LWR/BWR reactors. See Thor Energy and LightBridge. The first molten salt reactors might not use Thorium at all. See Canada's Terrestrial Energy. Every other MSR design is likely 10+ years away from a demonstration prototype, mostly due to US NRC regulatory insanity. A proper Thorium reactor (MSR+Thorium fuel) isn't being aggressively pursued. We have far more Uranium than we know what to do with. We have lots of Plutonium in spent nuclear fuel, Plutonium already separated (reactor grade) and weapons grade plutonium awaiting disposal, oh and a few tons of U233 that is for Thorium what Plutonium is for U238.
Lets separate long term dreams to doing nuclear today/next year. Right now the only choice is PWR/BWR/AHWR (water as coolant).
They wanted a reactor 100% identical to the existing one at the same site, with the same controls, systems, everything. So the operations/maintenance people are the same. So they ended up with a reactor with a mix of old analog systems and new digital (that has been installed in the new and the old reactors).
I think you got it completely wrong, either by ignorance or wilful distortion. The expensive part of generating your own electricity is if you store it for later usage, by yourself. Using the grid as your electrical battery is a gift. A huge gift.
And don't tell me you're forbidden from storing the energy you produced yourself. There's no such thing. The battery packs cost far more than the solar panels to do that.
In the long run the issue will be the opposite. In order to get net metering, consumers will be required to have some form of self storage, in order to balance out peak load on the grid. If that happens after 2025, Li Ion (or better) storage will be cheap enough this will be affordable, and most solar panel investment will have paid off, or new panels will be ultra cheap.
Every vehicle that performs regen breaking have little break pad wear. So both pure EV and plugin EV generate very little particulates from break pad wear. The argument about tires is like saying, we shouldn't drive at all, cause all tires pollute the environment. The whole thing sounds like a huge heap of boloney, we should realize there is such things as scientists for hire that will say pretty much anything whoever pays them enough money tells them to say.
Because you just don't get it (TM). Tesla could be profitable if it wanted to. But they choose to grow faster and do it right (TM) rather than do it profitably. But, here's the kicker. Once Q1 2016 financials are published, we'll see increasing revenues, and the end of Model X tooling/ramp-up expenditures. Meanwhile, Model X revenues begin to skyrocket. You do know that Model S/Model X generate about 20% positive cash flow, do you ? What happens is that 20% cash flow goes into R&D/tooling. So what happens when MS+MX yearly revenues break through US$ 10 bi / year. That means US$ 2 bi / year in cash to invest. Plus, I expect Model 3 reservations to break through half a million easily and very likely get to over a full million pre-orders. That's a one billion USD interest free loan to Tesla. So it looks like Tesla should be able to in total invest some US$ 5-6 billion in Model 3 design, tooling and rampup, including moneys already invested without borrowing. Of course Tesla still needs cash to complete the giga factory, to do Tesla Energy tooling/rampup, and for the Y model. But if you understand how companies work, if Tesla needs to increase its debt by up to US$ 2 billion, the market will probably see that as a positive aspect rather than negative (its INVESTMENT money, not a cash burning money pit). It you can't understand that, then you really should shut up, as you have proven you know nothing about business. You can't compare Tesla's financials with Ford, GM or Fiat, those are established companies. Tesla is still somewhere between startup and steady state company. Tesla's revenue will eventually break US$ 25 billion / yr, and continue to grow to at least US$ 50 billion / yr on the conservative side (one million units / yr at US$ 60k average price, mostly M3, but some 20% MS+MX which sells for average US$ 100k each). At US$ 50 bi / yr, Tesla will easily pay off all of its debt, fund continuing growth and pay a dividend.
Boloney.
Tesla stated before taking pre orders delivery is scheduled for late 2017. That's about 20 months away. I don't see how you can say Tesla can't begin to deliver in 20 months, as it already has a handful of prototypes right now (they gave test drives, you know it, doesn't you ?)
A for Tesla doesn't have enough money, that's another BS argument. Tesla is loosing money overall because its funding for Model 3 R&D with revenues from MS/MX deliveries. For the last reported quarter (Q4 2015) MX deliveries were still inconsequential. But Q1 2016 MX deliveries have skyrocketed, and by years end more than half of deliveries will be MX, substantially increasing revenues.
I fully expect by the time Model 3 deliveries start, there will be one million reservations. That's a US$ 1 billion interest free loan to Tesla, courtesy of its future customers. By end of Sat, 4/2/16, reservations were closing at 276k (in just three days). Half a million reservations are already a SURE thing in my book, with a very high probability of a full million reservations.
Tesla doesn't have the obligation to deliver all of those reservations in 6 months or in a year. It might very well take them 2 years or more, which might make the whole cycle self funding (once the first 50000 units are delivered, Tesla gets paid, which funds the next 100k units and so on).
You should take a look at this: http://www.fool.com/investing/...
Its NEVER single fiber. Its always two strand (two fibers) one TX, one RX. DWDM requires one fiber for each lane. Anyhow, nobody lays optical cables with 2 strands for long range networks. Its always 12-288 strand cable. And 12 stand is being really cheap. 36 strand is a more common low end. So a 36 stand cable allows for 18 DWDM systems, 1 Tbps each, or 18Tbps of bandwidth on a low end cable. This is another case of state of the art (regardless of cost) advancing, which someday will trickle down to real world optical links on land networks first, then years later onto oceanic cables (which require very long distances between active regenerations).
GW capacity doesn't matter. We need to compare how many GWh each energy source will contribute. A 1.1GW nuclear reactor means 95% availability long term, 98+% in the first 10 years. A 5GW solar farm would be required to produce the same total energy. At the same time, nuclear+solar is an interesting combo. Solar is reliable in its unreliability (aka we can forecast when it will produce).
Again, we'll see the same old solar+wind cheerleaders that don't understand how the grid works, and why we're not ready even for 1/3 solar+wind. I'm pro solar, as long as we understand the limitations and respect them. The cheerleaders on the other hand, don't even understand the limitations, so there's zero respect for them. Hopefully in another 10 years battery grid scale battery storage will be here, and we'll be able to store excess solar production in the summer and excess wind production in the winter, and whenever wind falls short, baseload sources (nuclear or gas) will run at 100% through the night to make up for the shortfall.
The fundamental problem with traditional car markers and BEVs is dealerships don't want to sell them. Dealers get most of their money from maintenance. BEVs require very little maintenance. I'm yet to see a real solution to this conundrum. Walk into a Nissan dealership and ask for the lowest emissions car they have to offer, I doubt they will point you to the LEAF. Walk into a GM/Nissan dealership and ask for a LEAF/Volt and odds are they will tell you all kinds of reasons not to buy the LEAF/Volt.
You do understand that will just massively increase labour costs, giving further incentives to outsourcing... 32 hours/wk is a gift. Keep it.
The issue people can't see is productivity will keep increasing, eventually leading to a massive unemployed force. Massive social programs are indeed inevitable, but that will only work when all countries have them, otherwise a lot of labour will jump to the countries where they don't have to pay for that.
Its the big problem with the democrat / republican polarization. Both sides have some merits, but until they can see the whole picture by accepting both sides valid points, the disfunctionality will just continue, hurting the US economy.
Wrong. While GPS is very useful for long range strikes. Nuclear weapons are the least dependent on GPS, as they have substantial blast radius. Its conventional long range weapons that need GPS the most. Some attack weapons like tomahawk has systems that recognize landmarks and update its positioning accordingly. But ballistic weapons different. Radar guided weapons also different.
GPS is a FORCE MULTIPLIER. Not having GPS or some similar alternative means your force lost its multiplying edge. Doesn't mean you must give up and go home, but it will be less effective in many subtle ways for us civilians, but very much in the mind of captains of the ships on both sides. One side having GPS/equivalent vs the other side not having IS significant.
Long distance targeting usually involves relaying target coordinates between sensor platforms like a destroyer and its chopper, a carrier strike group and awacs radar aircraft. Coordinate grids are used.
The less accurate is your determination of where you are in the grid, the less accurate is your targeting. Launching a sea attack against a target 50nm away usually involves telling the harpoon/whatever what bearing to fly at and how long until homing radar goes active. You want to delay activating the homing radar as long as possible to avoid alerting your enemy. So if your coordinates might be 10nm off vs 0.1nm off you might be forced to set your weapon to go active too soon, allowing your energy to shoot it down. Modern sea-to-sea battles involve swarm of weapons, cause your typical high tech enemy has the means to shoot at least a few incoming missiles down.
So unless you're fighting within gun range, and alone, having something ideally that gives you accurate positioning within.1nm is very important, with many shades of gray all the way to dozens of nm errors.
Its not by chance that GPS is a FORCE MULTIPLIER. Having no GPS means your force looses effectiveness.
Wrong. Civilian GPS is single frequency. Military GPS is dual frequency L1/L2 P(Y) signals. Civilian GPS use a hack called semi codeless to do iono corrections without a second civilian signal. L2C is still not even IOC status. It should take another decade until there are a normal 30 operational L2C sats. The other advantage of two full military GPS bands is if one is jammed and the other isn't (unlikely but possible), then you can still get a fix in the 10 meter range.
Just because intentional degradation of L1 C/A is gone doesn't make it all the same.
Tomahawk range is hundreds of nm. Perhaps you're talking about harpoon and other sea attack weapons, if I recall harpoon top range is 55nm, beyond line of sight for a radar fix.
Modern sea war needs accuracy in the 0.1nm range. 10nm is a very degraded mode fighting.
But continuous enhancements to INS should allow for a whole week without GPS while maintaining a 1 nm error.
Military GPS accuracy = 0.001 nm (a few yards). Inertial accuracy = 0.1 nm / hour degradation Celestial navigation accuracy = hundred nm So unless GPS is gone for days, inertial is still better That's a result of USA getting rid of LORAN which before GPS was the primary update source for inertial systems, and after GPS was fully operational switched to backup. Celestial navigation is pretty much strictly a means to getting to the nearest port. Very limited usage for combat operations.
ARM does scale. The problem isn't ARM in general. The problem is usually slow bus, slow ram, slow peripherals. Oh and old/slow ARM CPUs. Take high end 8 core Cortex A57 with high end RAM and a fast bus and it will do all things you do with a Core i3 and most things you do with a Core i5. The fact is there is very little performance ARM stuff in the market. When people get ARM they usually do because of massive cost advantages, which mean low performance implementations. Cortex has native JAVA acceleration for instance. Most JAVA byte code runs natively on modern Cortex CPUs. Cortex also has some natural performance advantages due to cleaner binary code. No need to be compatible with 8/16 bit modes. Just 32/64bit modes. RISC instruction set from day one. In the end that is wiped by Intel using ultra expensive much smaller gate sizes and larger caches. Which explain why ARM is sooo much cheaper than Intel without a proportional cost disadvantage.
Radiation is everywhere. Massive distance from radiation levels that are likely to give you cancer from actual levels @ Fukushima. Radiation isn't like fire you can see and avoid. On the other hand radiation is everywhere. A little radiation is proven to be good for you. Otherwise cancer levels at Denver, SLC, Aspen and Vail must be higher than in NYC or LA. In fact its the opposite. If 20x background radiation levels were bad, there would be a serious pattern of more cancers among jet pilots than general population, last I heard, there are none. Astronauts at the ISS get 100x normal background levels radiation even with al the shielding. OMG 100x normal background, that must be deadly. Where are the dead astronauts ? And the ones that died from cancer. Trip to the moon even higher radiation levels (outside van allen belt). Where are the dead astronauts ??? You need to go a thousand times higher than normal background levels before we can begin to argue that results in people have higher cancer risks. Yet radiation levels in Fukushima outside the plant never got that high. Never got to ISS high radiation levels. Chernobyl was the only serious accident because the guts of the reactor burned for days, vaporizing all kinds of nasty stuff. Still 2 million deaths was predicted, but 1000 so far (including suicide by vodka) predicted 10 thousand. Its easy to have this anti nuclear prejudice and write everything that doesn't match your deadly expectations as a conspiracy theory. Every new nuclear accident actually serves to prove our radiation standards are too strict. Those radiation standards are a big part of why nuclear is too expensive. We shouldn't actually need that proof, as many radiation studies already indicated that, but US NRC and other nuclear regulatory bodies are too concerned with making nuclear as expensive as possible instead of making it safe without crazy and unreasonable regulation.
The tsunami killed 20 thousand people. A nearby oil refinery burned for days, killed dozens polluted the environment just as seriously as the nuclear reactor, but got no attention as nuclear/radiation=sensational, oil fire=boring. The problem isn't nuclear its the media that has been bribed by fossil fuel interests to put nuclear power under a microscope while giving fossil fuels a pass. Even if Fukushima eventually kills a hundred, it should have been a non event, as coal kills as many people every DAY ! Oil/Natural gas kills a hundred people every MONTH ! So yeah, nuclear is safe, and you're being paranoid and unfair to the facts.
Not from radiation. Its quite hard to run around using full face masks breathing though regulators. Depending on radiation levels people are severely limited in how much time they can spend being exposed to radiation. The fact is those standards are quite exaggerated. If radiation exposure limits were relaxed deaths could have been avoided by allowing people to do their jobs in a lesser hurry. Tsunami killed 20 thousand people. Forced evacuation in a hurry killed hundreds. If people were allowed to stay in all likely hood far less people would die from cancer long term than died in the stress of a hurried evac (mainly elderly deaths). Or evac them more carefully. Fear of radiation actually kills people. Radiation itself only killed in Chernobyl and some older medium severity accidents (affecting people inside the reactor building). There were also many accidents in USSR, they actually hid stuff under the rug and lied about stuff back then.
OMG ! All of this paranoia. Radiation level was far too low to actually cause detectable increase in cancer cases. I'm positive when this is all said and done, 10 years from now there will be no significant increase in cancer cases and no reason to believe in additional cancer deaths over normal levels. Having small cancer formations happen to a lot of people without actually being a 'cancer case'. It could be benign, it could also not evolve into cancer (uncontrolled multiplication of cells). Radiation safety standards are too paranoid. Chernobyl was calculated to kill 2 million people. Instead running counter is around 1000 people (including suicide by vodka) and highest scientific peer reviewed estimates less than 10 thousand people. From 10 thousand to 2 million, that's 200x discrepancy. TMI killed nobody and didn't cause any detectable increase in cancer levels. So once again, the anti nuclear paranoid are creating a whole story of mass cancer cases and deaths, so once this is disproven those with anti nuclear bias can cry "conspiracy theory with tepco, japanese government and IAEA sweeping it under the rug". From sea level radiation levels in LA or NYC to airline flying = 20x increase in radiation levels. From sea level to ISS = 100x increase in radiation levels. Yet pilots/flight attendants and astronauts aren't dying from cancer in droves. Exposure levels from Fukushima were much lower than ISS. So no cancers and no deaths.
Have you ever studied the history of industrial civilization ??? Pretty much EVERY new type of technology first comes to the market as a rich man's toy. As scale goes up, manufacturing investment pays off, processes get streamlined, you know, boring industrial engineering / economics things, price comes down. Before the Ford Model T all cars were rich people's toys. Then big cars were only affordable to the rich. Then hybrids were only affordable to the upper middle class. Although the fully loaded Tesla Model S is still very expensive, there is a 100% difference between the most basic and the top of the line Model S. In 10-15 years I expect a Tesla Model S / X to sell for US$ 50k corrected for inflation. The most expensive component is the battery pack, Li Ion prices will drop by half over a decade. The other big ticket item is the electric motor, once Tesla is buying a million a yr (vs current less than 100k / yr) prices will drop substantially too.
And the more modest Tesla Model III should go for US$ 40k before incentives in 2018/2019. Should be a much better car than the Nissan LEAF, better performance, better range, at the same price.
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You need an inverter that matches your production, not your demand. Its called grid tied net metering.
For instance, I need 3000-3500 kW PV production to meet my 600kWh/month demand. My peak demand is likely 4x as much, but I don't need a bigger inverter, unless I go off grid, which makes no sense right now.
Here in Brazil we must sell 100% of our grid tie production to the grid then buy it back as needed. So the Solar PV inverter has no job in consuming electricity at all.
No it won't max out. There's this thing called the PowerWall and PowerPack that fundamentally changes this whole debate. PowerWall 2.0 just came out, 14kWh storage, built in inverter, higher power. And the large scale PowerPack 2.0 now has 200kWh of storage at a lower $$$/kWh price.
No later than Q2 2017, the 3.0 versions will be announced which combined with either Tesla Solar Tiles or even cheaper solar PV will make living off grid almost as cheap as being connected to the grid.
American Samoa Ta'u now runs almost 100% on solar using the old Powerpack 1.0. Next comes Hawaii smaller islands. By 2020 a large chunk of tropical islands without grid connections to shore will be running on solar, its already cheaper to do solar than diesel.
I bet Hawaii will be 100% renewable before 2030. Not because solar is cute, but because it will be cheaper. That will also make solar cheaper to end consumers than being connected to the grid, including 2 days worth of battery storage.
PS: I'm also very much pro nuclear, but so far the nuclear industry is only humming in China/South Korea/India/Russia (mostly). It seems to be waiting for molten salt reactors and/or thorium.
India's Narendra Modi says solar is cheaper than Coal in India already.
Coal isn't prohibited in the USA, its just uncompetitive.
Meanwhile in unrelated news, Brazil's Itaipu dam on track to produce 100 TWh in 2016, equivalent to an average power output of 11500MWs throughout the year. Hot damn ! They installed 20kW net worth of solar PV at Itaipu just to say its also a solar plant ! Nothing like having 18 turbines, each as powerful as an old nuclear reactor turbine.
Top rooftop solar panels already at 24% efficiency. In a few years it will break 30%, which means over 500 Wp per panel.
Electric vehicles will greatly flatten the power demand curve of the grid.
Teslas only need a software patch to let them charge when the grid tells them to (in exchange for a big electricity discount).
Any new nuclear project starting today will come online some 10 years from now when Li Ion electricity storage will be quite cheap, just distribute Li Ion packs throughout the grid so they can charge at off peak hours and discharge at peak.
Any efforts of say no to nuclear isn't increasing solar/wind adoption, but rather helping coal and natural gas stay.
Nuclear reactors can do some load following. EDF in France does it. US reactors don't do it cause there are few enough reactors their job is to produce as much electricity as possible, all the time.
You can double nuclear in the USA and many other countries without creating problems for renewables.
Nuclear needs to replace the really bad baseload coal plants. Replacing them with natural gas isn't the best solution !
There is no Thorium reactor design available off the shelf today.
The closest we are to a Thorium fueled design is Thorium+Plutonium MOX fuel on existing/under construction LWR/BWR reactors. See Thor Energy and LightBridge.
The first molten salt reactors might not use Thorium at all. See Canada's Terrestrial Energy.
Every other MSR design is likely 10+ years away from a demonstration prototype, mostly due to US NRC regulatory insanity.
A proper Thorium reactor (MSR+Thorium fuel) isn't being aggressively pursued. We have far more Uranium than we know what to do with. We have lots of Plutonium in spent nuclear fuel, Plutonium already separated (reactor grade) and weapons grade plutonium awaiting disposal, oh and a few tons of U233 that is for Thorium what Plutonium is for U238.
Lets separate long term dreams to doing nuclear today/next year. Right now the only choice is PWR/BWR/AHWR (water as coolant).
They wanted a reactor 100% identical to the existing one at the same site, with the same controls, systems, everything. So the operations/maintenance people are the same.
So they ended up with a reactor with a mix of old analog systems and new digital (that has been installed in the new and the old reactors).
I think you got it completely wrong, either by ignorance or wilful distortion.
The expensive part of generating your own electricity is if you store it for later usage, by yourself.
Using the grid as your electrical battery is a gift. A huge gift.
And don't tell me you're forbidden from storing the energy you produced yourself. There's no such thing.
The battery packs cost far more than the solar panels to do that.
In the long run the issue will be the opposite. In order to get net metering, consumers will be required to have some form of self storage, in order to balance out peak load on the grid. If that happens after 2025, Li Ion (or better) storage will be cheap enough this will be affordable, and most solar panel investment will have paid off, or new panels will be ultra cheap.
Every vehicle that performs regen breaking have little break pad wear. So both pure EV and plugin EV generate very little particulates from break pad wear.
The argument about tires is like saying, we shouldn't drive at all, cause all tires pollute the environment.
The whole thing sounds like a huge heap of boloney, we should realize there is such things as scientists for hire that will say pretty much anything whoever pays them enough money tells them to say.
Because you just don't get it (TM).
Tesla could be profitable if it wanted to. But they choose to grow faster and do it right (TM) rather than do it profitably.
But, here's the kicker.
Once Q1 2016 financials are published, we'll see increasing revenues, and the end of Model X tooling/ramp-up expenditures. Meanwhile, Model X revenues begin to skyrocket. You do know that Model S/Model X generate about 20% positive cash flow, do you ? What happens is that 20% cash flow goes into R&D/tooling.
So what happens when MS+MX yearly revenues break through US$ 10 bi / year. That means US$ 2 bi / year in cash to invest.
Plus, I expect Model 3 reservations to break through half a million easily and very likely get to over a full million pre-orders. That's a one billion USD interest free loan to Tesla.
So it looks like Tesla should be able to in total invest some US$ 5-6 billion in Model 3 design, tooling and rampup, including moneys already invested without borrowing. Of course Tesla still needs cash to complete the giga factory, to do Tesla Energy tooling/rampup, and for the Y model. But if you understand how companies work, if Tesla needs to increase its debt by up to US$ 2 billion, the market will probably see that as a positive aspect rather than negative (its INVESTMENT money, not a cash burning money pit). It you can't understand that, then you really should shut up, as you have proven you know nothing about business. You can't compare Tesla's financials with Ford, GM or Fiat, those are established companies. Tesla is still somewhere between startup and steady state company. Tesla's revenue will eventually break US$ 25 billion / yr, and continue to grow to at least US$ 50 billion / yr on the conservative side (one million units / yr at US$ 60k average price, mostly M3, but some 20% MS+MX which sells for average US$ 100k each). At US$ 50 bi / yr, Tesla will easily pay off all of its debt, fund continuing growth and pay a dividend.
Boloney.
Tesla stated before taking pre orders delivery is scheduled for late 2017. That's about 20 months away. I don't see how you can say Tesla can't begin to deliver in 20 months, as it already has a handful of prototypes right now (they gave test drives, you know it, doesn't you ?)
A for Tesla doesn't have enough money, that's another BS argument. Tesla is loosing money overall because its funding for Model 3 R&D with revenues from MS/MX deliveries. For the last reported quarter (Q4 2015) MX deliveries were still inconsequential. But Q1 2016 MX deliveries have skyrocketed, and by years end more than half of deliveries will be MX, substantially increasing revenues.
I fully expect by the time Model 3 deliveries start, there will be one million reservations. That's a US$ 1 billion interest free loan to Tesla, courtesy of its future customers. By end of Sat, 4/2/16, reservations were closing at 276k (in just three days). Half a million reservations are already a SURE thing in my book, with a very high probability of a full million reservations.
Tesla doesn't have the obligation to deliver all of those reservations in 6 months or in a year. It might very well take them 2 years or more, which might make the whole cycle self funding (once the first 50000 units are delivered, Tesla gets paid, which funds the next 100k units and so on).
You should take a look at this: http://www.fool.com/investing/...
Its NEVER single fiber. Its always two strand (two fibers) one TX, one RX. DWDM requires one fiber for each lane.
Anyhow, nobody lays optical cables with 2 strands for long range networks.
Its always 12-288 strand cable. And 12 stand is being really cheap. 36 strand is a more common low end.
So a 36 stand cable allows for 18 DWDM systems, 1 Tbps each, or 18Tbps of bandwidth on a low end cable.
This is another case of state of the art (regardless of cost) advancing, which someday will trickle down to real world optical links on land networks first, then years later onto oceanic cables (which require very long distances between active regenerations).
GW capacity doesn't matter.
We need to compare how many GWh each energy source will contribute.
A 1.1GW nuclear reactor means 95% availability long term, 98+% in the first 10 years.
A 5GW solar farm would be required to produce the same total energy.
At the same time, nuclear+solar is an interesting combo. Solar is reliable in its unreliability (aka we can forecast when it will produce).
Again, we'll see the same old solar+wind cheerleaders that don't understand how the grid works, and why we're not ready even for 1/3 solar+wind.
I'm pro solar, as long as we understand the limitations and respect them.
The cheerleaders on the other hand, don't even understand the limitations, so there's zero respect for them.
Hopefully in another 10 years battery grid scale battery storage will be here, and we'll be able to store excess solar production in the summer and excess wind production in the winter, and whenever wind falls short, baseload sources (nuclear or gas) will run at 100% through the night to make up for the shortfall.
The fundamental problem with traditional car markers and BEVs is dealerships don't want to sell them. Dealers get most of their money from maintenance. BEVs require very little maintenance.
I'm yet to see a real solution to this conundrum.
Walk into a Nissan dealership and ask for the lowest emissions car they have to offer, I doubt they will point you to the LEAF. Walk into a GM/Nissan dealership and ask for a LEAF/Volt and odds are they will tell you all kinds of reasons not to buy the LEAF/Volt.
You do understand that will just massively increase labour costs, giving further incentives to outsourcing...
32 hours/wk is a gift. Keep it.
The issue people can't see is productivity will keep increasing, eventually leading to a massive unemployed force.
Massive social programs are indeed inevitable, but that will only work when all countries have them, otherwise a lot of labour will jump to the countries where they don't have to pay for that.
Its the big problem with the democrat / republican polarization. Both sides have some merits, but until they can see the whole picture by accepting both sides valid points, the disfunctionality will just continue, hurting the US economy.
Wrong. While GPS is very useful for long range strikes. Nuclear weapons are the least dependent on GPS, as they have substantial blast radius.
Its conventional long range weapons that need GPS the most.
Some attack weapons like tomahawk has systems that recognize landmarks and update its positioning accordingly. But ballistic weapons different.
Radar guided weapons also different.
GPS is a FORCE MULTIPLIER. Not having GPS or some similar alternative means your force lost its multiplying edge. Doesn't mean you must give up and go home, but it will be less effective in many subtle ways for us civilians, but very much in the mind of captains of the ships on both sides. One side having GPS/equivalent vs the other side not having IS significant.
Long distance targeting usually involves relaying target coordinates between sensor platforms like a destroyer and its chopper, a carrier strike group and awacs radar aircraft. Coordinate grids are used.
The less accurate is your determination of where you are in the grid, the less accurate is your targeting.
Launching a sea attack against a target 50nm away usually involves telling the harpoon/whatever what bearing to fly at and how long until homing radar goes active. You want to delay activating the homing radar as long as possible to avoid alerting your enemy.
So if your coordinates might be 10nm off vs 0.1nm off you might be forced to set your weapon to go active too soon, allowing your energy to shoot it down.
Modern sea-to-sea battles involve swarm of weapons, cause your typical high tech enemy has the means to shoot at least a few incoming missiles down.
So unless you're fighting within gun range, and alone, having something ideally that gives you accurate positioning within .1nm is very important, with many shades of gray all the way to dozens of nm errors.
Its not by chance that GPS is a FORCE MULTIPLIER. Having no GPS means your force looses effectiveness.
Wrong. Civilian GPS is single frequency.
Military GPS is dual frequency L1/L2 P(Y) signals.
Civilian GPS use a hack called semi codeless to do iono corrections without a second civilian signal.
L2C is still not even IOC status. It should take another decade until there are a normal 30 operational L2C sats.
The other advantage of two full military GPS bands is if one is jammed and the other isn't (unlikely but possible), then you can still get a fix in the 10 meter range.
Just because intentional degradation of L1 C/A is gone doesn't make it all the same.
Tomahawk range is hundreds of nm.
Perhaps you're talking about harpoon and other sea attack weapons, if I recall harpoon top range is 55nm, beyond line of sight for a radar fix.
Modern sea war needs accuracy in the 0.1nm range. 10nm is a very degraded mode fighting.
But continuous enhancements to INS should allow for a whole week without GPS while maintaining a 1 nm error.
Military GPS accuracy = 0.001 nm (a few yards).
Inertial accuracy = 0.1 nm / hour degradation
Celestial navigation accuracy = hundred nm
So unless GPS is gone for days, inertial is still better
That's a result of USA getting rid of LORAN which before GPS was the primary update source for inertial systems, and after GPS was fully operational switched to backup.
Celestial navigation is pretty much strictly a means to getting to the nearest port. Very limited usage for combat operations.
Correction, ARM so much cheaper than Intel without a proportional performance disadvantage.
ARM does scale.
The problem isn't ARM in general.
The problem is usually slow bus, slow ram, slow peripherals. Oh and old/slow ARM CPUs.
Take high end 8 core Cortex A57 with high end RAM and a fast bus and it will do all things you do with a Core i3 and most things you do with a Core i5.
The fact is there is very little performance ARM stuff in the market. When people get ARM they usually do because of massive cost advantages, which mean low performance implementations.
Cortex has native JAVA acceleration for instance. Most JAVA byte code runs natively on modern Cortex CPUs.
Cortex also has some natural performance advantages due to cleaner binary code. No need to be compatible with 8/16 bit modes. Just 32/64bit modes. RISC instruction set from day one. In the end that is wiped by Intel using ultra expensive much smaller gate sizes and larger caches. Which explain why ARM is sooo much cheaper than Intel without a proportional cost disadvantage.
Radiation is everywhere.
Massive distance from radiation levels that are likely to give you cancer from actual levels @ Fukushima.
Radiation isn't like fire you can see and avoid. On the other hand radiation is everywhere.
A little radiation is proven to be good for you. Otherwise cancer levels at Denver, SLC, Aspen and Vail must be higher than in NYC or LA. In fact its the opposite.
If 20x background radiation levels were bad, there would be a serious pattern of more cancers among jet pilots than general population, last I heard, there are none.
Astronauts at the ISS get 100x normal background levels radiation even with al the shielding. OMG 100x normal background, that must be deadly. Where are the dead astronauts ? And the ones that died from cancer. Trip to the moon even higher radiation levels (outside van allen belt). Where are the dead astronauts ???
You need to go a thousand times higher than normal background levels before we can begin to argue that results in people have higher cancer risks.
Yet radiation levels in Fukushima outside the plant never got that high. Never got to ISS high radiation levels.
Chernobyl was the only serious accident because the guts of the reactor burned for days, vaporizing all kinds of nasty stuff. Still 2 million deaths was predicted, but 1000 so far (including suicide by vodka) predicted 10 thousand.
Its easy to have this anti nuclear prejudice and write everything that doesn't match your deadly expectations as a conspiracy theory.
Every new nuclear accident actually serves to prove our radiation standards are too strict. Those radiation standards are a big part of why nuclear is too expensive. We shouldn't actually need that proof, as many radiation studies already indicated that, but US NRC and other nuclear regulatory bodies are too concerned with making nuclear as expensive as possible instead of making it safe without crazy and unreasonable regulation.
The tsunami killed 20 thousand people. A nearby oil refinery burned for days, killed dozens polluted the environment just as seriously as the nuclear reactor, but got no attention as nuclear/radiation=sensational, oil fire=boring.
The problem isn't nuclear its the media that has been bribed by fossil fuel interests to put nuclear power under a microscope while giving fossil fuels a pass.
Even if Fukushima eventually kills a hundred, it should have been a non event, as coal kills as many people every DAY ! Oil/Natural gas kills a hundred people every MONTH !
So yeah, nuclear is safe, and you're being paranoid and unfair to the facts.
Not from radiation. Its quite hard to run around using full face masks breathing though regulators. Depending on radiation levels people are severely limited in how much time they can spend being exposed to radiation.
The fact is those standards are quite exaggerated. If radiation exposure limits were relaxed deaths could have been avoided by allowing people to do their jobs in a lesser hurry.
Tsunami killed 20 thousand people. Forced evacuation in a hurry killed hundreds. If people were allowed to stay in all likely hood far less people would die from cancer long term than died in the stress of a hurried evac (mainly elderly deaths). Or evac them more carefully.
Fear of radiation actually kills people. Radiation itself only killed in Chernobyl and some older medium severity accidents (affecting people inside the reactor building). There were also many accidents in USSR, they actually hid stuff under the rug and lied about stuff back then.
OMG ! All of this paranoia.
Radiation level was far too low to actually cause detectable increase in cancer cases.
I'm positive when this is all said and done, 10 years from now there will be no significant increase in cancer cases and no reason to believe in additional cancer deaths over normal levels.
Having small cancer formations happen to a lot of people without actually being a 'cancer case'. It could be benign, it could also not evolve into cancer (uncontrolled multiplication of cells).
Radiation safety standards are too paranoid.
Chernobyl was calculated to kill 2 million people. Instead running counter is around 1000 people (including suicide by vodka) and highest scientific peer reviewed estimates less than 10 thousand people. From 10 thousand to 2 million, that's 200x discrepancy.
TMI killed nobody and didn't cause any detectable increase in cancer levels.
So once again, the anti nuclear paranoid are creating a whole story of mass cancer cases and deaths, so once this is disproven those with anti nuclear bias can cry "conspiracy theory with tepco, japanese government and IAEA sweeping it under the rug".
From sea level radiation levels in LA or NYC to airline flying = 20x increase in radiation levels. From sea level to ISS = 100x increase in radiation levels. Yet pilots/flight attendants and astronauts aren't dying from cancer in droves. Exposure levels from Fukushima were much lower than ISS. So no cancers and no deaths.
Have you ever studied the history of industrial civilization ???
Pretty much EVERY new type of technology first comes to the market as a rich man's toy. As scale goes up, manufacturing investment pays off, processes get streamlined, you know, boring industrial engineering / economics things, price comes down.
Before the Ford Model T all cars were rich people's toys.
Then big cars were only affordable to the rich.
Then hybrids were only affordable to the upper middle class.
Although the fully loaded Tesla Model S is still very expensive, there is a 100% difference between the most basic and the top of the line Model S.
In 10-15 years I expect a Tesla Model S / X to sell for US$ 50k corrected for inflation.
The most expensive component is the battery pack, Li Ion prices will drop by half over a decade.
The other big ticket item is the electric motor, once Tesla is buying a million a yr (vs current less than 100k / yr) prices will drop substantially too.
And the more modest Tesla Model III should go for US$ 40k before incentives in 2018/2019. Should be a much better car than the Nissan LEAF, better performance, better range, at the same price.