Defects shouldn't make it to the line though; they should be dealt with at the component testing level.
40% failure rate seems high, but how they are counting it matters a lot-- one failed component per 2.5 cars (out of thousands of components) vs 40% of front right quarter panel (or whatever).
Their overhead costs likely do not scale with direct energy costs, and in Oregon if people are better incentivized to charge at home it reduces the burden on Tesla's infrastructure.
(And to the GP... they are re-investing cash flow rather than profits from what i can see... not to be pedantic.)
You are on the wrong rate plan; best pricing is with a separate meter for the EV charger, for SCE it is TOU-EV-1, and puts you at $0.12-13/kWh.
If you don't want to install a second meter then you can switch from a tiered rate plan to a pure time-of-use (and have your car only charge after 10PM). $0.17/$0.23 winter/summer
Yes, people react to light differently. But, the light levels they describe are what I would consider "very bright" for sleeping; 10 lux is the minimum a corridor should be lit in an emergency, and relatively speaking brightness is logarithmic so 1 lux is half as "bright".
Some tricks for me: we added a projector clock that sits on a dresser at the foot of the bed and projects on to the wall with faint, large digits to avoid looking at phones (or nightstand clocks) at night. We sleep with the bedroom door open, so for me, I have a laser projector turn on at 5am as my passive alarm clock-- if I am too tired I can keep sleeping, but it will generally break me out of sleep gently. Our bathroom now has LED bulbs that don't work with the occupancy sensor, so the bulbs glow dimly at night... close bathroom door to avoid light trespass into the bedroom. (And of course the electrical tape over the stupid LED indicators.)
But/. folks... no comments about the epic unit fail? Explaining a lux as literally a foot-candle but using 0.3m...
They are actually reasonably popular in certain types of companies. We have two with hard walls for a small office, and I wish we could have more. I am also considering just going with 7x6' offices to be able to give more people a private space to work... but it gets expensive.
Supercapacitors are great as a source for short term outages (generator starting), but when you are talking 150W, 8h they are not competitive. Lead acid batteries have a useful place; the problem is that connecting a SLAB to a useful load is overly complex; the manufacturers and marketing folks are caught up on load rather than run time.
Battery resistance can easily be trended for each cell or jar, and you have good indication of a pending failure.
The real problem with UPSs is the series(-parallel) combination of lead acid cells leads to the aging of the string being partially dictated by the worst cell. With per-cell battery management system like you need with Li-ion you could dramatically improve battery life.
Nor would the building department or fire marshal. Everything hooked up needs to be UL-Listed, not just a UL Recognized component (or another NRTL). The same holds true for Canada and Europe.
That said, there are some interesting opportunities in this space with good reference designs. For large UPSs there used to be a number of service options, now you are pretty much stuck with the OEM. The service organization often is a big part in UPS selection.
There is also big potential in the grid-connected battery segment, which is a natural segway.
Count me as one. Rented a car for the weekend for a work project, and while it is fun to wander outside my normal radius on a rainy day, I really hate driving.
Somewhat ironically, I drove along the hyperloop track and past the falcon 9 booster at the SpaceX HQ with my automobile freedom today for inspiration.
The main issue is inflation. When this was originally proposed about 20 years ago, the “cost” was about $10B. Inflation in California is about 5% annually, so take ~50 years of inflation, and you are magically at $100B. The original cost was likely half of the real cost at the time, so this is what you get... $1Million/mile for the track was a reasonable cost at the time, double it for land, double the total again for cars and stations.
But, the real problem is land acquisition. They should have condemned the land in the first year for the route, and completed purchase before breaking ground. They should have also condemned a 1/2 mike (or more) radius around each station to foster transit-oriented development.
Sadly, it has been so screwed up now, I don’t know what they can do to get it on track in my lifetime.
Yes, until you realize that with current sea level there is a lot of damage from flooding at king tides when it rains in those areas. Raising that up 1m pushes the impacted areas inland significantly; even 10cm can have a huge impact.
Part of what people don't always realize is that when you pull water out of the ground (french drain around your foundation as an example) you are removing both water mass and dirt mass and that ultimately leads to lowering the elevation of the surrounding ground. The leaning tower of San Francisco is a good example of what can happen.
The runways and taxiways are pretty easy to deal with as long as it is less than about an inch per decade-- just a little extra asphalt. Even the drainage systems for an airport are fairly manageable; you will need to add more pump stations, but not rocket science.
Where it gets tricky is low-lying building structures like utility tunnels where a couple extra inches of hydrostatic pressure is enough to flood. Then, as you pump out water you add to the subsistence.
It is all about incremental improvements: 2FA is an improvement on the "shared secret" model where the end user doesn't have all the pieces to be able to do a login via VPN.
Of course, good practice would be to change that shared secret periodically... which isn't practical. So, 2FA adds to that increment.
Social engineering is another problem, but one that you need defense in depth for.
The general approach is you have an AC interconnect supporting a local/microgrid with a static switch that isolates either the macro-grid or a non grid-tie inverter for a second or two and corrects the total period count for whatever the pre-determined interval is, and then re-synchronizes with the grid waveform. The AC source gives you "best effort" power, and as long as it is reasonable quality there is no sense rectifying it and inverting it again with the associated losses.
If you need bi-directional power flow then you need to add a second grid-tie inverter to the AC input, and would generally isolate the macro AC from the microgrid AC when you have a surplus. (Or charge batteries.)
The investment is likely a lot less than one might think. Major utility distribution or sub-transmission substations could handle the work with minimal equipment-- a few MW of battery could support about 100,000 people for grid stabilization with the majority of capacity coming from wind and solar.
There are many ways to address that; the easiest by far with all very small power sources is using something like the Tesla Power Pack as a frequency regulator for the system. With the microgrid approach, frequency regulation can be more localized with slightly less pain assuming a consistent yet imperfect (slow rates of change) grid frequency source.
An IGBT pulse-width modulated inverter can sync with mains frequency trivially.
For an isolated microgrid, you would have to add in some reference time check if you wish to maintain average frequency accurately, but that is also a trivial exercise.
There is a french fry machine for restaurants (something like "perfect fries") that is a self-contained system that pops out either a single serving of fries or a batch of several servings that is closer to the GGP's comment; it doesn't take making thousands of burgers a day-- just being optimized for what it does need to do.
Likewise, automated drink machines hardly seem like a challenge for anything from the drive-through at McDonalds to Starbucks-- they might not be able to do everything, but triage of the easiest-to-automate tasks (or highest contact time, or lowest margin) hardly seems like rocket science.
I have introverted engineers that think writing down a question is a sign of weakness, and are deathly afraid of asking a question over the phone! The only way I can help them is (I kid you not) watching for them to wander near my office and asking if they need any help. (My physically walking around the office has mixed results.). When we establish that they have a question, I end up needing to look at their two (or three) monitors and tell them to bring up different data on each, ultimately resorting to a sketch pad (and often their peer or direct supervisor coming over as well).
While I have no problems picturing how the workflow could be handled remotely, I'm not sure what tools could actually do it, and I don't know how you get people to not be afraid of raising their hand.
Most senior managers want to be able to make it happen. The biggest bottleneck is mid-level or junior managers being unable to manage [their reports if they can't see them]. Training of junior staff also becomes harder. An office where everybody but the junior staff works remotely is non-functional.
I want to redefine my role as remote, but getting around the face-to-face culture within our office is hard.
Yeah, the batteries are really starting to piss me off, and I would say they are by far the biggest issue. The batteries have destroyed about $1,200 worth of electronics and badly damaged a $1,000 desk for me in the past two years.
I am happy to get the random Chinese bike lights (my bicycle looks like a Christmas tree), because they get stolen constantly, but I do buy a proper main light retail from a trusted store.
But now if it is anything expensive (or really cheap) I think twice about buying from Amazon.
Slashdot Mirror
Defects shouldn't make it to the line though; they should be dealt with at the component testing level.
40% failure rate seems high, but how they are counting it matters a lot-- one failed component per 2.5 cars (out of thousands of components) vs 40% of front right quarter panel (or whatever).
Their overhead costs likely do not scale with direct energy costs, and in Oregon if people are better incentivized to charge at home it reduces the burden on Tesla's infrastructure.
(And to the GP... they are re-investing cash flow rather than profits from what i can see... not to be pedantic.)
You are on the wrong rate plan; best pricing is with a separate meter for the EV charger, for SCE it is TOU-EV-1, and puts you at $0.12-13/kWh.
If you don't want to install a second meter then you can switch from a tiered rate plan to a pure time-of-use (and have your car only charge after 10PM). $0.17/$0.23 winter/summer
SCE's tariff pages
Yes, people react to light differently. But, the light levels they describe are what I would consider "very bright" for sleeping; 10 lux is the minimum a corridor should be lit in an emergency, and relatively speaking brightness is logarithmic so 1 lux is half as "bright".
Some tricks for me: we added a projector clock that sits on a dresser at the foot of the bed and projects on to the wall with faint, large digits to avoid looking at phones (or nightstand clocks) at night. We sleep with the bedroom door open, so for me, I have a laser projector turn on at 5am as my passive alarm clock-- if I am too tired I can keep sleeping, but it will generally break me out of sleep gently. Our bathroom now has LED bulbs that don't work with the occupancy sensor, so the bulbs glow dimly at night... close bathroom door to avoid light trespass into the bedroom. (And of course the electrical tape over the stupid LED indicators.)
But /. folks... no comments about the epic unit fail? Explaining a lux as literally a foot-candle but using 0.3m...
They are actually reasonably popular in certain types of companies. We have two with hard walls for a small office, and I wish we could have more. I am also considering just going with 7x6' offices to be able to give more people a private space to work... but it gets expensive.
Does the Skype-as-phone work ok within the company? Their webex system is complete crap...
Supercapacitors are great as a source for short term outages (generator starting), but when you are talking 150W, 8h they are not competitive. Lead acid batteries have a useful place; the problem is that connecting a SLAB to a useful load is overly complex; the manufacturers and marketing folks are caught up on load rather than run time.
Battery resistance can easily be trended for each cell or jar, and you have good indication of a pending failure.
The real problem with UPSs is the series(-parallel) combination of lead acid cells leads to the aging of the string being partially dictated by the worst cell. With per-cell battery management system like you need with Li-ion you could dramatically improve battery life.
Nor would the building department or fire marshal. Everything hooked up needs to be UL-Listed, not just a UL Recognized component (or another NRTL). The same holds true for Canada and Europe.
That said, there are some interesting opportunities in this space with good reference designs. For large UPSs there used to be a number of service options, now you are pretty much stuck with the OEM. The service organization often is a big part in UPS selection.
There is also big potential in the grid-connected battery segment, which is a natural segway.
The material change is that he understands the need for more stations now so that it doesn’t aggravate local traffic.
Count me as one. Rented a car for the weekend for a work project, and while it is fun to wander outside my normal radius on a rainy day, I really hate driving.
Somewhat ironically, I drove along the hyperloop track and past the falcon 9 booster at the SpaceX HQ with my automobile freedom today for inspiration.
The main issue is inflation. When this was originally proposed about 20 years ago, the “cost” was about $10B. Inflation in California is about 5% annually, so take ~50 years of inflation, and you are magically at $100B. The original cost was likely half of the real cost at the time, so this is what you get... $1Million/mile for the track was a reasonable cost at the time, double it for land, double the total again for cars and stations.
But, the real problem is land acquisition. They should have condemned the land in the first year for the route, and completed purchase before breaking ground. They should have also condemned a 1/2 mike (or more) radius around each station to foster transit-oriented development.
Sadly, it has been so screwed up now, I don’t know what they can do to get it on track in my lifetime.
Yes, until you realize that with current sea level there is a lot of damage from flooding at king tides when it rains in those areas. Raising that up 1m pushes the impacted areas inland significantly; even 10cm can have a huge impact.
Part of what people don't always realize is that when you pull water out of the ground (french drain around your foundation as an example) you are removing both water mass and dirt mass and that ultimately leads to lowering the elevation of the surrounding ground. The leaning tower of San Francisco is a good example of what can happen.
The runways and taxiways are pretty easy to deal with as long as it is less than about an inch per decade-- just a little extra asphalt. Even the drainage systems for an airport are fairly manageable; you will need to add more pump stations, but not rocket science.
Where it gets tricky is low-lying building structures like utility tunnels where a couple extra inches of hydrostatic pressure is enough to flood. Then, as you pump out water you add to the subsistence.
It is all about incremental improvements: 2FA is an improvement on the "shared secret" model where the end user doesn't have all the pieces to be able to do a login via VPN.
Of course, good practice would be to change that shared secret periodically... which isn't practical. So, 2FA adds to that increment.
Social engineering is another problem, but one that you need defense in depth for.
The general approach is you have an AC interconnect supporting a local/microgrid with a static switch that isolates either the macro-grid or a non grid-tie inverter for a second or two and corrects the total period count for whatever the pre-determined interval is, and then re-synchronizes with the grid waveform. The AC source gives you "best effort" power, and as long as it is reasonable quality there is no sense rectifying it and inverting it again with the associated losses.
If you need bi-directional power flow then you need to add a second grid-tie inverter to the AC input, and would generally isolate the macro AC from the microgrid AC when you have a surplus. (Or charge batteries.)
The investment is likely a lot less than one might think. Major utility distribution or sub-transmission substations could handle the work with minimal equipment-- a few MW of battery could support about 100,000 people for grid stabilization with the majority of capacity coming from wind and solar.
There are many ways to address that; the easiest by far with all very small power sources is using something like the Tesla Power Pack as a frequency regulator for the system. With the microgrid approach, frequency regulation can be more localized with slightly less pain assuming a consistent yet imperfect (slow rates of change) grid frequency source.
An IGBT pulse-width modulated inverter can sync with mains frequency trivially.
For an isolated microgrid, you would have to add in some reference time check if you wish to maintain average frequency accurately, but that is also a trivial exercise.
There is a french fry machine for restaurants (something like "perfect fries") that is a self-contained system that pops out either a single serving of fries or a batch of several servings that is closer to the GGP's comment; it doesn't take making thousands of burgers a day-- just being optimized for what it does need to do.
Likewise, automated drink machines hardly seem like a challenge for anything from the drive-through at McDonalds to Starbucks-- they might not be able to do everything, but triage of the easiest-to-automate tasks (or highest contact time, or lowest margin) hardly seems like rocket science.
How do/did you deal with training?
I have introverted engineers that think writing down a question is a sign of weakness, and are deathly afraid of asking a question over the phone! The only way I can help them is (I kid you not) watching for them to wander near my office and asking if they need any help. (My physically walking around the office has mixed results.). When we establish that they have a question, I end up needing to look at their two (or three) monitors and tell them to bring up different data on each, ultimately resorting to a sketch pad (and often their peer or direct supervisor coming over as well).
While I have no problems picturing how the workflow could be handled remotely, I'm not sure what tools could actually do it, and I don't know how you get people to not be afraid of raising their hand.
Most senior managers want to be able to make it happen. The biggest bottleneck is mid-level or junior managers being unable to manage [their reports if they can't see them]. Training of junior staff also becomes harder. An office where everybody but the junior staff works remotely is non-functional.
I want to redefine my role as remote, but getting around the face-to-face culture within our office is hard.
Can't even do that, because with Amazon Fulfillment, you don't actually know whose product you received-- just who claimed the order.
Yeah, the batteries are really starting to piss me off, and I would say they are by far the biggest issue. The batteries have destroyed about $1,200 worth of electronics and badly damaged a $1,000 desk for me in the past two years.
I am happy to get the random Chinese bike lights (my bicycle looks like a Christmas tree), because they get stolen constantly, but I do buy a proper main light retail from a trusted store.
But now if it is anything expensive (or really cheap) I think twice about buying from Amazon.
Yeah... I have to agree. While my quality of life might be better with /. offline, from an IT perspective I would love to know what happened.
County contract provider; fairly common practice, although $150 seems very low. Might be impacted by the fire department roll.
Seems like what is needed is better access to non-critical emergency transportation, although SOP seems to be to put you in an IV no matter what.