Tesla, its not looking good!

[GRG55]

Re: Tesla, its not looking good!

For quite some time now speculation has been far more richly rewarded than investment.

Tesla, and Elon Musk, are a product of our time. The former is a speculation, not an investment. And Musk is the consummate promoter.

His splashy, "surprise" introduction of an expensive, limited production sports car at a time when the future of Tesla is so heavily dependent on its being able to produce and "mass market" the Model 3 is ample evidence of how well Musk understands his role.

[Mega]

Re: Tesla, its not looking good!

The biggest problem for him is VAG.......Audi/Porsche will crush his very expensive cars ......VW will crush his cheaper one.............he toast

Perhaps he could go to the Goverment like John did?

[Techdread]

Re: Tesla, its not looking good!

Elon Musk wins bet, finishing massive battery installation in 100 days

Tesla has completed construction of a massive 100-megawatt, 129-MWh battery installation in South Australia. The new facility boasts the largest megawatt rating for any grid-connected battery installation in the world.

https://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-polic...n-in-100-days/

Tesla is normally thought of as a car company, but this announcement underscores that Tesla is really a battery company that happens to put some of the batteries in cars. It has built a massive battery factory in Nevada and needs to make sure it can sell the correspondingly massive number of batteries that factory will be producing in the coming years.

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: Tesla, its not looking good!

Thanks Techdread, nice find.

I think of battery manufacturing the same way as automobile manufacturing.
It's a mature market with global scale companies competing for thin margins at huge production volumes, with high capital requirements.

Is Tesla's outlook any better competing against Panasonic for battery sales, than it is competing against Honda for auto sales?

[BK]

Re: Tesla, its not looking good!

Here is another view of the Elon Musk Aussie battery PR Blitz
"Elon Musk Cons $50m Out Of South Australians - "Currently generation in South Australia is running at 1878 MW, so the Tesla battery could only run the grid for 4 minutes.
Alternatively, according to Tesla, it could power 2500 homes for a whole day, or 15000 for four hours."
"Given that there are 673,000 households in South Australia, the Tesla battery is an expensive irrelevance.

At a cost of £37m, the 15000 households who stand to benefit from four hous standby would have to pay £2466 each"
Full article here:
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.word...ns/#more-31002

Has anything really changes since the collapse of A123 and the rise of Tesla. Several massive companies that are very good at batteries and already have tons of capacity (please correct me if I'm misguided.
https://www.navigantresearch.com/res...transportation

[Mega]

Re: Tesla, its not looking good!

Good summing up
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-1...mageddon-tesla

[GRG55]

Re: Tesla, its not looking good!

Thanks Techdread, nice find.

I think of battery manufacturing the same way as automobile manufacturing.
It's a mature market with global scale companies competing for thin margins at huge production volumes, with high capital requirements.

Is Tesla's outlook any better competing against Panasonic for battery sales, than it is competing against Honda for auto sales?

South Australia appears the manufacturer of its own misfortune. It made an aggressive one-way bet on renewables and forced the premature closure of its coal fired power plants before it had adequate reliable replacement power. Power prices spiked, the blackouts started, the interconnect with Queensland (which was supposed to support South Australia) failed making the situation worse, and now it is finally "solving" the problem by increasing natural gas fired generation (and buying Tesla batteries, I suppose). In a very public show of "virtue signalling" it recently blew up its last coal fired station about 18 months after it was shut down.

Last SA coal-fired power station blown up

...Last May (2016) the plant closed with the loss of hundreds of jobs and saw immediate spikes in the price of power, along with a spate of blackouts, leaving South Australia at the time with the most expensive and unreliable power grid in the country...

...The state Labor government, in power in South Australia since 2002, is ideologically opposed to coal. South Australia has one of the highest concentrations of wind and solar power generation in the world.

Today’s summit heard from renewable energy advocates, who promised South Australians they would have the cheapest power prices in the country in as little as six months.

Although the state now has some of the lowest wholesale power prices because of increased gas generation, this is yet to flow through to household bills.

I am watching as exactly the same thing is in danger of happening where I live. Coal power was already mandated to be terminated; one of the first acts of the current government was to arbitrarily half the time limit within which that is to be accomplished. No assessments, no studies, nothing more than more virtue signalling at the stroke of a pen. The coal plants are now shutting down, but there seems no plan to replace that power with anything other than platitudes. We have 1480 mW of installed wind generation capacity (against 6300 mW of remaining coal generation). Unfortunately the average collective output of the 900 wind turbines that make up that figure is less than 20% of installed capacity. That means we need to install somewhere between 20,000 mW and 30,000 mW of additional wind generation to effectively replace the current dependence on coal.

The first time we have a blackout in the middle of a severe winter cold snap is going to be an interesting affair, especially for those living in the downtown high rise buildings. By then, of course, the politicians who set us on this path will be long gone with generous public pensions.

It seems sensible, informed public debate, whether about climate change, taxation, campus lectures or anything else is now near impossible.

[GRG55]

Re: Tesla, its not looking good!

For quite some time now speculation has been far more richly rewarded than investment.

Tesla, and Elon Musk, are a product of our time. The former is a speculation, not an investment. And Musk is the consummate promoter.

His splashy, "surprise" introduction of an expensive, limited production sports car at a time when the future of Tesla is so heavily dependent on its being able to produce and "mass market" the Model 3 is ample evidence of how well Musk understands his role.

Just in case there was any doubt:

Elon Musk plans to launch a Tesla to Mars — blasting a David Bowie Song — on a SpaceX rocket

The billionaire is planning some cross-promotion by launching a Tesla Roadster on a rocket and putting it in orbit around Mars while playing the song ‘Space Oddity.’

The Washington Post
Sat., Dec. 2, 2017

...In tweets on Friday and Saturday, Musk said that SpaceX plans to pursue putting a Tesla Roadster on to the top of the rocket, launching it into an orbit around Mars, while playing David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.”

Why?

“I love the thought of a car drifting apparently endlessly through space and perhaps being discovered by an alien race millions of years in the future,” he wrote on Twitter...

Just as an aside, we UBC engineers generally confined ourselves to installing well used VWs in conspicuous, earthly places:

http://www.macleans.ca/general/i-prank-therefore-i-am/

[BK]

Re: Tesla, its not looking good!

Elon Musk know how to get rid of excess inventory - another built car that he will sell to SPACEX!

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: Tesla, its not looking good!

Thanks GRG55.

Yes, any good idea can be bungled and botched with poor execution including the transition away from coal.
One classic method, always popular, is to demand things be done much faster than they should, creating a bunch of trouble that could all be avoided.

Abundant natural gas at low prices makes coal terribly unattractive economically.
You are an energy guy GRG55, so you have probably been inside a few coal fired power plants.
Most people have not, and would be astonished to see the huge amount of equipment required to get all that coal in, and get all that fly ash out.

In round numbers, a 500 MW coal plant burns 1.4 million tons of coal in a year, uses 2 billion gallons of water each year, and uses 140,000 tons of limestone each year.
And 500 MW is a small plant. The coal fired plant closest to my house is about 4 times that big, moving 12,000 tons of coal every day, and pushing out the resulting thousands of tons of fly ash.
It's easy to gloss over big numbers without getting a good feel for them. My local coal plant is designed to accept 100 train cars full of coal every day. That's a huge amount of black gravel running down conveyors and hoppers 24/7. One hundred train cars today, 100 more tomorrow, 100 every single day.

Sure we bought all these existing coal fired power plants and they work just fine. But compared to a nice clean natgas pipeline running in to a clean gas turbine they make no sense at all, and we will certainly be decommissioning all of them in the G20 nations as they wear out.

Those majestic coal fired power plants with advanced steam turbines might be one of the greatest engineering achievements in all of history, making modern life possible. I'm very proud of my father's generation of engineers who designed and built them, and very grateful for the electrical grid they supplied.
I'm proud that I've been able to play a small role repairing the generators in them, to keep a few in service a little longer.
But like the wooden sailing vessels of the 1800s their time has passed.

[jk]

Re: Tesla, its not looking good!

South Australia appears the manufacturer of its own misfortune. It made an aggressive one-way bet on renewables and forced the premature closure of its coal fired power plants before it had adequate reliable replacement power. Power prices spiked, the blackouts started, the interconnect with Queensland (which was supposed to support South Australia) failed making the situation worse, and now it is finally "solving" the problem by increasing natural gas fired generation (and buying Tesla batteries, I suppose). In a very public show of "virtue signalling" it recently blew up its last coal fired station about 18 months after it was shut down.

Last SA coal-fired power station blown up

...Last May (2016) the plant closed with the loss of hundreds of jobs and saw immediate spikes in the price of power, along with a spate of blackouts, leaving South Australia at the time with the most expensive and unreliable power grid in the country...

...The state Labor government, in power in South Australia since 2002, is ideologically opposed to coal. South Australia has one of the highest concentrations of wind and solar power generation in the world.

Today’s summit heard from renewable energy advocates, who promised South Australians they would have the cheapest power prices in the country in as little as six months.

Although the state now has some of the lowest wholesale power prices because of increased gas generation, this is yet to flow through to household bills.

I am watching as exactly the same thing is in danger of happening where I live. Coal power was already mandated to be terminated; one of the first acts of the current government was to arbitrarily half the time limit within which that is to be accomplished. No assessments, no studies, nothing more than more virtue signalling at the stroke of a pen. The coal plants are now shutting down, but there seems no plan to replace that power with anything other than platitudes. We have 1480 mW of installed wind generation capacity (against 6300 mW of remaining coal generation). Unfortunately the average collective output of the 900 wind turbines that make up that figure is less than 20% of installed capacity. That means we need to install somewhere between 20,000 mW and 30,000 mW of additional wind generation to effectively replace the current dependence on coal.

The first time we have a blackout in the middle of a severe winter cold snap is going to be an interesting affair, especially for those living in the downtown high rise buildings. By then, of course, the politicians who set us on this path will be long gone with generous public pensions.

It seems sensible, informed public debate, whether about climate change, taxation, campus lectures or anything else is now near impossible.

you don't think the coal will be replaced by nat gas for base demand?

[seobook]

Re: Tesla, its not looking good!

Just in case there was any doubt:

Elon Musk plans to launch a Tesla to Mars — blasting a David Bowie Song — on a SpaceX rocket

The billionaire is planning some cross-promotion by launching a Tesla Roadster on a rocket and putting it in orbit around Mars while playing the song ‘Space Oddity.’

The Washington Post
Sat., Dec. 2, 2017

...In tweets on Friday and Saturday, Musk said that SpaceX plans to pursue putting a Tesla Roadster on to the top of the rocket, launching it into an orbit around Mars, while playing David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.”

Why?

“I love the thought of a car drifting apparently endlessly through space and perhaps being discovered by an alien race millions of years in the future,” he wrote on Twitter...

Just as an aside, we UBC engineers generally confined ourselves to installing well used VWs in conspicuous, earthly places:

http://www.macleans.ca/general/i-prank-therefore-i-am/

Dump THEN Pump?

anyone remember the whole spiel from Musk about...

AI will destroy the world. it will be the end of us. we are screwed. this is the biggest thing of our lives. we must mitigate this risk.

...well now
https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/8/1...chips-hardware

“I wanted to make it clear that Tesla is serious about AI, both on the software and hardware fronts,” said Musk, according to The Register. “We are developing custom AI hardware chips". Tesla is “developing specialized AI hardware that we think will be the best in the world.”

[Mega]

Re: Tesla, its not looking good!

Ah, so to get the sub 3 sec 0-60 you need to :-
A, Burn out the battery/motors
b, Spend 30 mins preping the thing?

Mike