2017 Investor Roundtable:General Discussion

[generalenthu]

The conversation about GF reminded me of this old article.

How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work

I think people underestimated the importance of China GF, that is 100% Tesla owned. The speed and flexibility it provides is unmatched. It matters little that the Tesla still pays some tax to import cars into China. The point is Tesla can freely export this stuff.

The scale of this factory should be breathtaking. 2-3x of the Nevada GF. But first Tesla and panasonic have their task cut out - prove that GF1 can do what was promised.

 

[sundaymorning]

So it’s looking like Tesla is slashing its part order of 5,000 a week for December and reducing it down to 3,000 per week. Their long term goal of reaching 10,000 units per week in March was extended to May or June of 2018. If Tesla is confident enough to hold onto 3,000 parts per week for December then I think the GF is currently doing ok in terms of batteries. At the end of the day S&X production remain strong, buying the M3 much needed time to properly ramp. With the slow stream of M3 currently being delivered (Vin 530s) I feel quite good about our current situation. Compare this to the months of X debacle where zero new cars were being produced and I feel quite confident that M3 is actually ramping much better than MX. Just look at where we are with MX ramp currently, we’re doing quite well. So hang in here Bulls, let the bears have their day, it’s likely not going to end well for them, 2018 is just around the corner (8 weeks) to go. Cheers.

 

[zdriver]

Sooo, this post got really long and much more involved than I expected, but tl;dr, I think Panasonic is at least partially to blame here, and numbers from another guy I found appear to back up the first guy's claims.

This does lend some support to the story from "random racist" about a week ago. I agree, if irregular power supply is a grave issue it should have been addressed long ago -- it's not as if Tesla hadn't heard of battery Power Packs so what took them so long?

Yeah, definitely same guy. He's a special one alright. Comments most frequently on the local news site, KOLO.

EnDeep 6 months ago
Gun bans and welcoming arms to Muslims working great for Europe, and still the liberals in the US support both because Obama told them to.

So here's a pile of interesting bits. Found another guy who claims to have inside information, and disputes some of the crazy guy's claims. (not directly though) Furthermore, this guy seems legit, as he frequently combats the common trolls that attempt to spread misinformation on Electrek. That said, he also confirms many of the claims crazy guy makes, like # of production lines, the rotations Panasonic's employees from Japan are on and emphasis on teaching new American employees, who are supposed to then teach other American employees.
Disqus Profile - carsonight

The Gigafactory is about 35 miles from where I live. At one point I did not have any skin in the game, but now I have friends and family working on the Panasonic side. I listen to what they have to say and it gives me a unique insider's view of things.

There are very few companies that can do what Panasonic is doing. Outside of China and besides Panasonic I can only think of LG and Samsung, and Panasonic is stretched to the limit right now. They are hiring non-stop and have staff coming out from Japan to the Gigafactory on a 2 month rotating biases to train all the new employees, and it is considered a hardship post. They also have all of their commitments to other customers. The reason Samsung made the batteries for Tesla's Australia deal is because Panasonic had too much on it's plate.

I have lived in Japan within the last five years.. English is a second language there, and required in school. Beyond that, though, Japanese consider English to be cool. There are numerous business franchises there that use English names, such as Family Value, a convienence store chain, or Moss Burger, a fast food chain. In bookstores, the covers of magazines and the headings for magazine articles are in English, and the text is Japanese. On trains announcements are is Japanese and English. The list goes on. We had occasion to ask a random stranger directions on a train, and she not only answered in impeccable English, but wrote directions in English. I can give numerous such examples, but I think I have made my point. I am told the Panasonic employees from Japan speak English well, and have reason to believe it.

Since I have lived in this area for more then 50 years, I believe I can vouch for the reliability of the grid. Reno and Las Vegas were built on abundant and reliable power and tourists, especially in Las Vegas, would tolerate nothing less. Speaking personally, the last time I expierienced a power outage was a couple of years ago, when an automobile hit a power pole. Service was restored within an hour.

Japanese Panasonic emplyees are teaching the American employees the use of their equipment, and have made it plain that they expect these emplyoees to teach others. Your comments concerning the talent pool, drawn primarily from Nevada and California, are no more accurate then your comments about Japanese English proficiency or the Nevada power grid.

carsonight cronin • 5 hours ago
Gigafactory 1 currently has four lines of machines, with 14 machines in each line. Each machine is capable of more then 500,000 batteries per month, so all together the equivalent of ~10,000 Model 3s per month, and have been producing at that rate for at least the last two months. Two of those lines have been taken out of production for the Model 3 or Tesla Semi and reconfigured for production for batteries for Puerto Rico. That was happening before you read about the agreement between Tesla and the governor of Puerto Rico. Okay?

This implies half the current line capacity has been shunted away from Model 3, but also claims these lines have been producing at stated rates for >2 months. This is in response to a troll though, so I'm not confident he heard directly that everything has been running smoothly - probably has just inferred it based on when he heard the lines with that capacity were fired up.

Scuttlebutt is they will be reaching production of batteries for 20,000 vehicles per month by February 2018, (NOTE: in earlier comments, he was saying January 2018 for this quantity) and continueing to accelerate into 2019 and 2020. Whether Fremont can produce that volume of cars by then I don't pretend to know. And yeah, that's more then 100,000,000 batteries a month.

I do know that Tesla - Panasonic has figured out a way to produce 3 times as many batteries in a given space as they previously thought they could. That may be why Tesla felt they could begin production of the Model 3 now instead of waiting until 2020.

Now they are talking about 10,000 jobs and Panasonic is hiring. Believe me, they are hiring, at $14 to $17 per hour to start, plus a full benefits package including paid vacation, sick leave, health insurance, and retirement.

Sounds like parking is an issue there too...

Tesla has a parking problem that needs to be solved sooner than later. They require everybody entering the Gigafactory area to electronically open a gate with a key card, and we are talking about thiusands of cars. This is causing traffic to back up all the way onto Interstate 80, and it is frustrating to the other users of the Industrial Park and dangerous to all concerned. Maybe Tesl/Panasonic could put up a parking area outside their secure area and use shuttle buses to ferry employees in, but something has got to be done, if for no other reason than the amount of pollution that thousands of cars for being forced to idle for hours causes.

carsonight ben 10 days ago
"How soon can tesla ramp to 10k tractors/yr then to 100k a year? 2 yrs to 10k, 4 yrs to 100k i hope!"

Unfortunatly, no. Gigafactory 1 is currently producing enough batteries for about 5000 Model 3s per month, if my information is correct, and it is inside information. They plan on increasing that by a factor of 100, but that is still being built.

So >10 days ago, he was hearing ~1k/wk. This matches his comment above that 4 lines = 10k/month, but 2 lines are diverted for TE. That definitely puts Panasonic behind ramp schedule when you consider 2 weeks for cell aging, then handing over to Tesla for assembly into packs, then shipping those packs to Fremont to be assembled into cars...

carsonight windbourne 6 days ago
"Like I said, they are getting ready to announce some 4-5 new GFs."

I really do not think they can possibly do that anytime in the next few years. Most people do not understand that Panasonic is pushing their limits in Nevada. They are operating 24 /7. They are using mandatory overtime. Their employees from Japan are being sent by the dozens on two month rotations to Nevada to train new employees. With all of that, after two years of construction, Gigafactory 1 at this time is capable of 2-4gW. The building continues to be built, new machinery emplaced, and employees hired and trained who will in turn be training other new employees, but anyone who thinks all of this will happen overnight is going to be very disappointed.

This last comment is rather insightful, as it seems to imply Panasonic is struggling, and a previous comment implies Panasonic's ramp has slipped at least a month (for 20k cars/month, a month or two ago he was saying January, now 10 days ago said February - that doesn't bode well for 5k cars/wk by end of Dec.

Then there's crazy guy's posts. While likely exaggerated, there's probably a decent chunk of truth involved.

Then there’s the managers for the production lines. I have no idea why they hired them, they have absolutely zero technical or production experience and there’s no hope that they ever will have useable working experience. We had 3 of the then only 4 running production lines down to less Han 40% of production capacity because a manager was told o-ri gs were needed for the electrolyte filling machines. 3 months went buy and he still had not ordered the o-rings, slowly machine after machine went down, unable to run without the simple 3 cent o-rings he manager totally dropped the ball on. The managements complete incompetence in production or technical experience has proven time after time there to be an absolute destructive force on the production rate Panasonic is fully capable of. I’ve seen the managers fire top quality workers just because they didn’t like them, yet keep people who should have never been hired in the first place. It’s just unbelievable how poorly managed hat place is on the American side of Panasonic, truly unbelievable.

3 lines = 7500 cars/mo * 40% = 3000 cars/month. However, he implies there's now more than 4 running productions lines, so that sounds positive at least.

There has also been talk from the Japanese at the Gigafactory about bringing in battery backup systems for at least the power sensitive portions of the production lines, primarily the battery electrolyte filling stations which are extremely sensitive to power outages because the atmospheric conditions in the equipment is strictly regulated and the electrolyte itself dries up quickly and turns to crystal if production is halted. Once it crystallizes it takes hours to disassemble, clean, dry, reassemble then recalibrate the equipment again before production can restart.

If you could see the equipment you’d understand it would take a second building the size of the Gigafactory to store a spare everything. Panasonic came here with the production experience and an awareness of commonly failed parts to have in stock. What they couldn’t of foreseen were the parts that were going to be lost and damaged just due to technical ignorance and very avoidable human errors.

The production lines are completely custom and all the parts are hand machined in Japan then shipped here and assembled. You can’t just buy a battery producing production machine like going out and buying a new piece of standard equipment like a plastic injection molding machine.

When just a 1/10th of a second long power outage takes place there it is absolute devastation to Panasonic’s production lines. It takes up to 6 hours on average to recover the equipment and get it back into production after even just a split second power bump. Not to mention 4 hours worth of production made before the power bump becomes ruined and has to be trashed. This happens a minimum of 1-2 times a week out there due to NV Energy’s unreliability.

This sounds actually sounds plausible now. Imagine any part of the line that relies on precision encoders for measuring out any process material. Small power blip and the controllers reset, losing the last known position. Suddenly everything that's in that part of the process has to get cleaned out, and anything else that's halfway in a process may "go bad" while the other parts are cleaned out. A 100ms blip could probably be ignored if a controller's PSU only had low power stuff on it, but if servos or steppers are on the same bus, the PSU's caps will get drained pretty quick, so these short blips may in fact go unnoticed by normal residents, but cause issues for precision Panasonic equipment that was designed under far more reliable power conditions. If a full process line was designed to run continuously, i.e. no easy way to store mixes for 4-6 hours without risking degradation, I could see how a line stoppage would result in having to discard an entire batch.

Anecdotally, where I work (in a small commercial/industrial park) has awful power. Lights flickering once or twice a week isn't at all uncommon, but one employee lives in apartments a couple blocks away and has never noticed issues there. May not be the power company after all, could be others in that industrial park causing issues. In my case I've had to deploy a UPS to every network switch in the building because these random blips would cause packet loss at a minimum (VoIP calls went robotic sounding), or commonly a couple minute network outage while the switch rebooted.

The more I read, the more I'm inclined to believe there's at least a decent size chunk of truth involved, as the personnel issues sounds quite similar to my own past experiences as a sysadmin.

I’m already in a lower level management position there and attend the daily production meetings. Bringing up the obvious issues has already painted me as not being a team player or cause for the current management to feel threatened.
...
I’d love to see the problems fixed, but my background isn’t in people management it’s in technical service and production equipment. I do know what is needed to get the production done, but it also requires the management and people needed to get there.
...
Eventually they’re going to figure out the existing management is the problem after they’ve exhausted every other attempt at getting the production where it should be. Panasonic management from Japan is going to have to realize finger pointing and blame are a necessary evil within the American work force and individuals need to be held accountable for their own incompetences. That’s going to be another tough barrier to cross because doing so goes against their own culture and how they do things in Japan.

Honestly sounds like the mechanical systems version of rants I've had regarding totally incompetent sysadmins I've had to work with in the past. I was "not favored" by management, particularly after raising to light issues with much more senior employee's competencies, but meanwhile they loved the guys that regularly caused production outages by doing things like deleting the disk volume that a live database server was running on... in the middle of the day.

Lastly, this comment really resonates with me. The same exact reasoning is why I left my last job.

I am to the point of frustration with it though that looking for a different job seems a more viable solution to my own mental health lol. It’s frustrating for me to see what could be getting done yet isn’t and knowing I can’t singlehandedly fix the problems. I take a lot of pride in my work and experience I’ve spent a lifetime achieving. It’s not that I’m not a team player, it’s that you need a good team to work with.

Sounds like he'd be a better fit working for Tesla, rather than Panasonic...


Edit - The story only 2 days ago that Panasonic will be investing in increased production makes more sense now. I can imagine Elon loosing his sh!t over these issues and demanding they ramp production faster, any way and anywhere they can, ASAP so there's less risk of not hitting production targets in the future...

 

[GoTslaGo]

Sooo, this post got really long and much more involved than I expected, but tl;dr, I think Panasonic is at least partially to blame here, and numbers from another guy I found appear to back up the first guy's claims.




Yeah, definitely same guy. He's a special one alright. Comments most frequently on the local news site, KOLO.




So here's a pile of interesting bits. Found another guy who claims to have inside information, and disputes some of the crazy guy's claims. (not directly though) Furthermore, this guy seems legit, as he frequently combats the common trolls that attempt to spread misinformation on Electrek. That said, he also confirms many of the claims crazy guy makes, like # of production lines, the rotations Panasonic's employees from Japan are on and emphasis on teaching new American employees, who are supposed to then teach other American employees.
Disqus Profile - carsonight






This implies half the current line capacity has been shunted away from Model 3, but also claims these lines have been producing at stated rates for >2 months. This is in response to a troll though, so I'm not confident he heard directly that everything has been running smoothly - probably has just inferred it based on when he heard the lines with that capacity were fired up.





Sounds like parking is an issue there too...




So >10 days ago, he was hearing ~1k/wk. This matches his comment above that 4 lines = 10k/month, but 2 lines are diverted for TE. That definitely puts Panasonic behind ramp schedule when you consider 2 weeks for cell aging, then handing over to Tesla for assembly into packs, then shipping those packs to Fremont to be assembled into cars...



This last comment is rather insightful, as it seems to imply Panasonic is struggling, and a previous comment implies Panasonic's ramp has slipped at least a month (for 20k cars/month, a month or two ago he was saying January, now 10 days ago said February - that doesn't bode well for 5k cars/wk by end of Dec.

Then there's crazy guy's posts. While likely exaggerated, there's probably a decent chunk of truth involved.


3 lines = 7500 cars/mo * 40% = 3000 cars/month. However, he implies there's now more than 4 running productions lines, so that sounds positive at least.






This sounds actually sounds plausible now. Imagine any part of the line that relies on precision encoders for measuring out any process material. Small power blip and the controllers reset, losing the last know position. Suddenly everything that's in that part of the process has to get cleaned out, and anything else that's halfway in a process may "go bad" while the other parts are cleaned out. A 100ms blip could probably be ignored if a controller's PSU only had low power stuff on it, but if servos or steppers are on the same bus, the PSU's caps will get drained pretty quick, so these short blips may in fact go unnoticed by normal residents, but cause issues for precision Panasonic equipment that was designed under far more reliable power conditions. If a full process line was designed to run continuously, i.e. no easy way to store mixes for 4-6 hours without risking degradation, I could see how a line stoppage would result in having to discard an entire batch.

Anecdotally, where I work (in a small commercial/industrial park) has awful power. Lights flickering once or twice a week isn't at all uncommon, but one employee lives in apartments a couple blocks away and has never noticed issues there. May not be the power company after all, could be others in that industrial park causing issues. In my case I've had to deploy a UPS to every network switch in the building because these random blips would cause packet loss at a minimum (VoIP calls went robotic sounding), or commonly a couple minute network outage while the switch rebooted.

The more I read, the more I'm inclined to believe there's at least a decent size chunk of truth involved, as the personnel issues sounds quite similar to my own past experiences as a sysadmin.



Honestly sounds like the mechanical systems version of rants I've had regarding totally incompetent sysadmins I've had to work with in the past. I was "not favored" by management, particularly after raising to light issues with much more senior employee's competencies, but meanwhile they loved the guys that regularly caused production outages by doing things like deleting the disk volume that a live database server was running on... in the middle of the day.

Lastly, this comment really resonates with me. The same exact reasoning is why I left my last job.




Edit - The story only 2 days ago that Panasonic will be investing in increased production makes more sense now. I can imagine Elon loosing his sh!t over these issues and demanding they ramp production faster, any way and anywhere they can, ASAP so there's less risk of not hitting production targets in the future...

Awesome post! Thanks!

 

[SPadival]

That's it guys.. Give up already. Ford has beaten Tesla and has unwittingly included level 5 autonomy features into its cars.

Probe of Ford Fusion steering wheels that may loosen, detach

 

[Lessmog]

That's it guys.. Give up already. Ford has beaten Tesla and has unwittingly included level 5 autonomy features into its cars.

Probe of Ford Fusion steering wheels that may loosen, detach

Hope that's not what "uncork" means ...

 

[22522]

Sooo, this post got really long and much more involved than I expected, but tl;dr, I think Panasonic is at least partially to blame here, and numbers from another guy I found appear to back up the first guy's claims.




Yeah, definitely same guy. He's a special one alright. Comments most frequently on the local news site, KOLO.




So here's a pile of interesting bits. Found another guy who claims to have inside information, and disputes some of the crazy guy's claims. (not directly though) Furthermore, this guy seems legit, as he frequently combats the common trolls that attempt to spread misinformation on Electrek. That said, he also confirms many of the claims crazy guy makes, like # of production lines, the rotations Panasonic's employees from Japan are on and emphasis on teaching new American employees, who are supposed to then teach other American employees.
Disqus Profile - carsonight






This implies half the current line capacity has been shunted away from Model 3, but also claims these lines have been producing at stated rates for >2 months. This is in response to a troll though, so I'm not confident he heard directly that everything has been running smoothly - probably has just inferred it based on when he heard the lines with that capacity were fired up.





Sounds like parking is an issue there too...




So >10 days ago, he was hearing ~1k/wk. This matches his comment above that 4 lines = 10k/month, but 2 lines are diverted for TE. That definitely puts Panasonic behind ramp schedule when you consider 2 weeks for cell aging, then handing over to Tesla for assembly into packs, then shipping those packs to Fremont to be assembled into cars...



This last comment is rather insightful, as it seems to imply Panasonic is struggling, and a previous comment implies Panasonic's ramp has slipped at least a month (for 20k cars/month, a month or two ago he was saying January, now 10 days ago said February - that doesn't bode well for 5k cars/wk by end of Dec.

Then there's crazy guy's posts. While likely exaggerated, there's probably a decent chunk of truth involved.


3 lines = 7500 cars/mo * 40% = 3000 cars/month. However, he implies there's now more than 4 running productions lines, so that sounds positive at least.






This sounds actually sounds plausible now. Imagine any part of the line that relies on precision encoders for measuring out any process material. Small power blip and the controllers reset, losing the last known position. Suddenly everything that's in that part of the process has to get cleaned out, and anything else that's halfway in a process may "go bad" while the other parts are cleaned out. A 100ms blip could probably be ignored if a controller's PSU only had low power stuff on it, but if servos or steppers are on the same bus, the PSU's caps will get drained pretty quick, so these short blips may in fact go unnoticed by normal residents, but cause issues for precision Panasonic equipment that was designed under far more reliable power conditions. If a full process line was designed to run continuously, i.e. no easy way to store mixes for 4-6 hours without risking degradation, I could see how a line stoppage would result in having to discard an entire batch.

Anecdotally, where I work (in a small commercial/industrial park) has awful power. Lights flickering once or twice a week isn't at all uncommon, but one employee lives in apartments a couple blocks away and has never noticed issues there. May not be the power company after all, could be others in that industrial park causing issues. In my case I've had to deploy a UPS to every network switch in the building because these random blips would cause packet loss at a minimum (VoIP calls went robotic sounding), or commonly a couple minute network outage while the switch rebooted.

The more I read, the more I'm inclined to believe there's at least a decent size chunk of truth involved, as the personnel issues sounds quite similar to my own past experiences as a sysadmin.



Honestly sounds like the mechanical systems version of rants I've had regarding totally incompetent sysadmins I've had to work with in the past. I was "not favored" by management, particularly after raising to light issues with much more senior employee's competencies, but meanwhile they loved the guys that regularly caused production outages by doing things like deleting the disk volume that a live database server was running on... in the middle of the day.

Lastly, this comment really resonates with me. The same exact reasoning is why I left my last job.

Sounds like he'd be a better fit working for Tesla, rather than Panasonic...


Edit - The story only 2 days ago that Panasonic will be investing in increased production makes more sense now. I can imagine Elon loosing his sh!t over these issues and demanding they ramp production faster, any way and anywhere they can, ASAP so there's less risk of not hitting production targets in the future...

Helpful. Thank you.

Cascade training is a false economy that produces inferior results at the trainee level. This is known. I am surprised Panasonic would do this.

That part does not sound right...

 

[brian45011]

This sounds actually sounds plausible now. Imagine any part of the line that relies on precision encoders for measuring out any process material. Small power blip and the controllers reset, losing the last known position. Suddenly everything that's in that part of the process has to get cleaned out, and anything else that's halfway in a process may "go bad" while the other parts are cleaned out. A 100ms blip could probably be ignored if a controller's PSU only had low power stuff on it, but if servos or steppers are on the same bus, the PSU's caps will get drained pretty quick, so these short blips may in fact go unnoticed by normal residents, but cause issues for precision Panasonic equipment that was designed under far more reliable power conditions. If a full process line was designed to run continuously, i.e. no easy way to store mixes for 4-6 hours without risking degradation, I could see how a line stoppage would result in having to discard an entire batch.

Anecdotally, where I work (in a small commercial/industrial park) has awful power. Lights flickering once or twice a week isn't at all uncommon, but one employee lives in apartments a couple blocks away and has never noticed issues there. May not be the power company after all, could be others in that industrial park causing issues. In my case I've had to deploy a UPS to every network switch in the building because these random blips would cause packet loss at a minimum (VoIP calls went robotic sounding), or commonly a couple minute network outage while the switch rebooted.

Maybe the un-reliability is just on the Tesla side of the utility/customer interface, i.e. such as if temporary electrical power for on-going construction is not properly isolated from the electrical infrastructure for the permanent facility. As Tesla is Panasonic's lessor (it's not a triple net structure), it would seem that it's Tesla's rather than Panasonic's obligation to resolve any inadequacy in utilities supplied to the site, regardless of origin.

Endeep claims Tesla abandoned the concept of self-sustaining solar/wind generation for the site--IMO it's not abandoned but needs the Buffalo facility output and additional capital to install

 

[avoigt]

Thats just impressive !

32% EV Market Share In Norway Now

 

[zmarty]

Well, it seems both leaks were on to something: [Exclusive] Tesla may tap Samsung, LG for EV batteries

I think Elon is just hedging his bets; I bet this is more like a threat to Panasonic to get their house in order ASAP.

 

[Cosmacelf]

Does anyone know who is paying for the Puerto Rico Powerpack projects? It isn't as if PR's credit is stellar...

 

[3Victoria]

Well, it seems both leaks were on to something: [Exclusive] Tesla may tap Samsung, LG for EV batteries

I think Elon is just hedging his bets; I bet this is more like a threat to Panasonic to get their house in order ASAP.

I think Tesla is just planning ahead. A new GF in Shanghai will need batteries, so a prudent company would see who is available and interested, and has product. Partnering with more than one company would be prudent.

 

[dalalsid]

Does anyone know who is paying for the Puerto Rico Powerpack projects? It isn't as if PR's credit is stellar...

Do we know of any other than the hospital? That one is probably a ppa kind of arrangement.

 

[mongo]

Does anyone know who is paying for the Puerto Rico Powerpack projects? It isn't as if PR's credit is stellar...

Perhaps the PP and panels are factory seconds. Fully functional, but not quite to new standards. PR gets power and Tesla gets to move out units. (Charitable deduction?)

 

[RobStark]

Perhaps the PP and panels are factory seconds. Fully functional, but not quite to new standards. PR gets power and Tesla gets to move out units. (Charitable deduction?)

You have to have net profits to make use of charitable deductions.

 

[SBenson]

Thats just impressive !

32% EV Market Share In Norway Now

Apologies if this was covered before. Why is a country whose bulk of wealth depends on oil wants to be a role model in going away from fossil fuels?

Sure they might care about the planet. But isn’t their daily living going away much sooner with this?

 

[mongo]

You have to have net profits to make use of charitable deductions.

Yeah, originally I put a caveat on that, but figured why be pessimistic. Then realized I wasn't sure on whether internal infrastructure spending was pre or post tax, so just threw it in as an parenthical afterthought. Besides, who is to say when/if the donation/ transfer happens?

 

[Starno]

Apple seems to be 5-6 weeks behind schedule as well

 

[Paracelsus]

Sooo, ..........
"This happens a minimum of 1-2 times a week out there due to NV Energy’s unreliability."

This is the part that I find most troubling - that the Gigafactory is potentially having issues with unreliable power from NV Energy. SolarCity's opportunities in Las Vegas and the surrounding areas were disrupted by NV Energy's efforts because of their desire to cling to the existing paradigm which includes significant fossil fuel power production in the state. That issue really reeked to me and I sorely wished the last administration would have called them out on national news for obstructing the growth of clean energy opportunities given Nevada's California-like potential for solar opportunities. Something does not smell good here if there is any truth to this claim. I understand that it will be many years before GF1 is completely off the grid with solar and wind like the original drawings suggested...........but the sooner the better!

Thanks for all you efforts to post this, @zdriver!

 

[Yggdrasill]

Apologies if this was covered before. Why is a country whose bulk of wealth depends on oil wants to be a role model in going away from fossil fuels?

Sure they might care about the planet. But isn’t their daily living going away much sooner with this?

That's a complex question. If you look at the EV incentives, they started as a way to support the only domestic auto maker, Think Global. The company eventually went out of business after several bankruptcies, but the incentives stayed in place.

Then, before it became apparent that BEVs would become very popular, all the parties arrived at at an environmental compromise to keep the incentives until we had 50,000 BEVs on the road. By the time this limit was met, the current coalition government had taken over, and they needed the support of the Liberal Party and the Christian Democrats. Those parties managed to convince the Progress Party and the Conservatives to keep the incentives beyond 50,000 BEVs. This wasn't a difficult compromise, because the incentives aren't very expensive. We aren't talking about direct subsidies like in the US; here, BEVs simply aren't taxed, while fossil cars have always been taxed heavily. There's a revenue hit, but fossil car taxes are simply raised to compensate for that. A couple of other factors that makes the EV incentives easy to support is that our electricity is quite clean, over 95% hydro- and windpower. That mostly eliminates the long tail pipe argument, and also means that supporting BEVs is to support the domestic electricity sector. Also, the incentives are quite popular, as this is the first time in history that the middle class is able to afford high-powered cars.

A third factor is the diesel-fiasco. Around 2000-2005, diesel cars were thought of by politicians as the most environmentally friendly solution, due to low CO2 emissions. Taxes were shifted to favour diesel cars over gasoline cars, and the share of diesel car sales rose to over 70%. This has been terrible for air quality in the cities. And one way to help remedy that is to ensure maximum adoption of EVs. Graph of fuel market shares below:

Make no mistake, there are political forces that want to see the EV incentives go away, but thus far the pro-environment movement has come out on top.