Tesla Gigafactory

[nativewolf]

Mass production of batteries at Gigafactory 1 begun January 4, 2017. Sweet.

I'm surprised more people didn't comment on this news. It's just huge news :

On target- Tesla has some target missing history
Model 3 - key to success there too
Energy products- gigafactory has to be rocking and rolling for me to get my PW2s on time. Oh ...did I not mention I'm a bit biased about news on this?

 

[krla]

great article with some nice details gathered from the factory tour last week

Tesla reveals more details about ‘Gigafactory 1’: Model 3 battery pack, largest rooftop solar array in the world (70MW), & more

 

[JRP3]

D' E' ? They invented a new alphabet as well?

 

[AssortedBread]

Tesla posted this on there Facebook yesterday, they also quickly deleted it. But man oh man this machine gun analogy couldn't be more accurate. Every bullet (Cell) is another shot into the ICE heart. And “the exit rate of cells will be faster than bullets from a machine gun.” - Elon Musk.

Edit: Song used is Robot Food- Kevin Paez (a very fitting song, in line with Elons love of witty accompanying music, example: "Back in Black" used when Tesla returned to Profitability)

 

[Oil4AsphaultOnly]

D' E' ? They invented a new alphabet as well?

just in case you're not joking, it's math. read it as D-prime and E-prime.

The next row would be A'', B'', C'', D'' .....

 

[JRP3]

just in case you're not joking, it's math. read it as D-prime and E-prime.

The next row would be A'', B'', C'', D'' .....

I was joking but didn't get the notation. Thanks.

 

[Snerruc]

Don't know what the rate is, but decades ago my uncle built/ designed a machine for Shell that could fill 4000 quart sized oil cans a minute. Don't think they ever got the support machines able to keep up. Batteries are a more comlex product, but I don't see why such rates can't be achieved with 30+ years better technology.

 

[googlepeakoil]

Two major factors here. First is that Tesla needed Panasonic (or somebody) to go in on the factory to help absorb some of the cost and streamline production. Second is that Panasonic massively ramped up production in their current factory to accommodate Tesla. There's no way Panasonic would sign the gigafactory deal of it was going to be a hardship in their current facilities. So yes, Tesla had to agree to continue with the current distribution line as well as the new battery line in Nevada.

I read Tesla convinced Panasonic about how big the use of these 18650 batteries could be by asking them how many 18650's does the end-user have in their home. Panasonic said about 6 (thinking laptop, maybe a camcorder). Tesla told them, we envision each having about 7000.
Before Tesla came along 18650's were dying (like VHS) because everybody wanted flat batteries for their laptops, tablets and phones. The 18mm thickness of an 18650 was too fat for modern thin laptops (preivous laptops would have a 3x2 or a 3x1 arrangement in a block). Because of this Tesla could buy 18650's at commodity prices (probably $1 each in the 100s of millions) get the reliability (produced for a decade with probably a 1 in a billion failure rate at factory) and I think being round though it was easy to stack the 18650's vertically in a car, surround them in a non-flammable liquid (to prevent thermal runaway spreading) and voila - super dense high power, non-flammable, reliable, cheap battery pack.

 

[googlepeakoil]

Indeed, but Gigafactory 1 by itself is way too small. It will take 20 years at full capacity to produce enough batteries to offset demand for 400,000 barrel of oil per day, while oil consumption is at 94.5 million barrels per day. So we at least 30 of these to halt the oil industry, but about 200 for electrics to entirely replace all new oil-burning vehicles.

What's your maths working there?
300m petrol vehicles in US approx - 1 per person.
Tesla will be making battery packs for 1370 packs per day (500,000 at max run rate / 365days).
300million / 1370 = 218,978 days to replace 300m cars. = 600 years of production to replace 300million cars.

America uses 20mbpd. 1/3 in cars supposedly (rest in aviation / heating / chemicals / shipping). So 6.66mbpd in cars/trucks/lorries.
You said "to replace 400k barrels". So that's replacing only 6%.

6% of 600 years = 36 years to replace 400k barrels.
That's my ballpark maths. What assumptions did you use?

The best way for america to reduce oil consumption is to stop driving trucks that get 10mpg.
Reduce/re-use/recycle was a 2nd world war mantra. Reduce is the quickest way to ween yourself off oil.
I always think no other industry works to make things so "inefficient" as cars. Lets compare to other modes of transport.
Shipping: containerisation for efficient storage massive ships (Brunel figured back in the 19th C that the larger the ship the more efficient it became). Propellors vs paddle-steamers. Long-sleek ships. "water-tunnel" test on propellors to get that extra 1% of efficiency.
Look at airlines: big airlines carrying 300-600 people crammed together. GM vs RollsRoyce 1-upping each other in efficiency. The Dreamliner - $10bn development to get a 15% fuel efficiency improvement.
Cars: I read once (US survery on new car features) # cup-holders ranked about 12th. 1 higher than fuel economy.
World is a bit crazy.
Fuel economy is a factor of drag which is based on rolling resistance (weight / wheel size), engine size (efficiency) car frontal area size and slipperiness (how streamlined). Neither of those 3 things are areas most people want to compromise on.

 

[googlepeakoil]

In some parts of the world the break even point is much longer than others. Here in the Pacific Northwest we have at least 3 months of sun from about mid-June into September, but the sun is a hit and miss thing in the winter with more cloudy days than sunny. Additionally solar panels get less and less efficient the further north you go. We also get most of our power from hydroelectric and our power rates are $0.08 a KWH.

I can only think of two houses in this town with solar panels on them. The city of Vancouver, WA installed a city solar project in a city park. The power generated goes onto the local grid.

If I wasn't saving money right now I might consider it though. The south side of the house faces SW and gets blasted by the sun in the summer. We run the air conditioner a lot even on days that aren't that warm. My office upstairs can easily get over 80 F on a 60 F day when the sun is shining.

Hot climates really should have solar now.
People use A/C in hot climates - and it's hot when the sun is shining - so the electricity is being generated at the right time of the day! Also the panels shade the roof - preventing the heat being absorbed by the tiles then radiating that heat into the roof during the day and night (due to the thermal mass of the tiles storing the heat like a reservoir). It's not just people's fault - governments need to remove barriers to people doing this - hopefully Telsa's new solar tiles will remove the aesthetic objection.
Also - the panels are pretty cheap. $200 each wholesale thanks to cheap Chinese mass-production (some call it dumping - but it's low wages and mass-production making them cheap). We should take advantage of this cheap energy!
You can get 320-350w per panel now (Sunpower, LG, Tesla when they finally have theirs) 5 years ago the best panels were 200-250 only. And they really do get very close to nameplate capacity in the sun. I have 14x285w LG panels for 4kW total. On a sunny day in the UK the panels will peak around 3800watts (some DC cable / inverter loss). But actually when the sun pops out from behind a cloud it can spike to 4200w. In a good day i'll get 28kw/h.
Although panels are getting more efficient - I think we're near the theoretical max efficiency at reasonable cost - after all current panels have had billions of R&D costs now. Although the 350w panels are only called about "22% efficient" - that's 22% of solar energy received into electricity. The theoretical max is only about 40% - and getting that last 18% is near impossible unless cost is not an option (space satellites) or arranging mirrored arrays to focus light.

 

[wdolson]

Hot climates really should have solar now.
People use A/C in hot climates - and it's hot when the sun is shining - so the electricity is being generated at the right time of the day! Also the panels shade the roof - preventing the heat being absorbed by the tiles then radiating that heat into the roof during the day and night (due to the thermal mass of the tiles storing the heat like a reservoir). It's not just people's fault - governments need to remove barriers to people doing this - hopefully Telsa's new solar tiles will remove the aesthetic objection.
Also - the panels are pretty cheap. $200 each wholesale thanks to cheap Chinese mass-production (some call it dumping - but it's low wages and mass-production making them cheap). We should take advantage of this cheap energy!
You can get 320-350w per panel now (Sunpower, LG, Tesla when they finally have theirs) 5 years ago the best panels were 200-250 only. And they really do get very close to nameplate capacity in the sun. I have 14x285w LG panels for 4kW total. On a sunny day in the UK the panels will peak around 3800watts (some DC cable / inverter loss). But actually when the sun pops out from behind a cloud it can spike to 4200w. In a good day i'll get 28kw/h.
Although panels are getting more efficient - I think we're near the theoretical max efficiency at reasonable cost - after all current panels have had billions of R&D costs now. Although the 350w panels are only called about "22% efficient" - that's 22% of solar energy received into electricity. The theoretical max is only about 40% - and getting that last 18% is near impossible unless cost is not an option (space satellites) or arranging mirrored arrays to focus light.

In the hot places in the US solar is becoming popular even among the more politically conservative who were scoffing at such "liberal" ideas a few years ago. I heard a story on the radio the other day where they interviewed a solar installer in Arizona who works in a town of mostly retired people, most of them politically conservative. He said he doesn't need to sell anyone on solar, they are already sold because their neighbor is paying $30 a month for electricity when they are paying $400.

I think the next wave in solar will be not making the panels that much more efficient, but making them more capable of being installed in more places. A few years ago I heard of a paint that was in R&D that was a solar panel. It wasn't as efficient as a panel, but you paint your house with the stuff and hook up electrodes and it produces some electricity (only about 5% efficient instead of 20+, but the whole house is covered with it).

I haven't heard anything more about the paint so maybe it didn't end up being commercially feasible, but other ideas along those lines will be coming along. I think the Tesla solar roof is just the first of a number of building materials that will be coming along that also generate electricity.

Around here we get intense winds, especially in the winter when storms come in. Across the Columbia from us (about 2 miles) they have clocked wind gusts at 100 mph and steady winds in the 30 mph range aren't unusual. Most of the area that doesn't have houses on it is protected scenic area so there aren't many big windmills, but small windmills on houses could generate power when the wind blows. For us it would be very convenient because the wind comes out of the NE. We could put windmills on one side of the house and solar on the other side.

Even though solar is more expensive in Washington state than any state in the US, I am thinking about putting in a system. I calculated there is enough room on the SW side of the house for a 15 KW system. In the summer we'd be running the air conditioning for free.

Now if only we could get free water. They bundle storm water maintenance, sewer, and fresh water in one bill and at the cheapest time of the year it's bigger than the electric bill sometimes. In the summer it gets painful. I could do some storm water capture, but my SO vetoed the idea because she doesn't want mosquito breeding grounds. Despite our reputation for rain, the summers here are very dry, we rarely get rain between mid-June and September.

 

[googlepeakoil]

Makes you think about the energy consumption. So solar energy will need produce enough to energy to generate heat for ovens as well as lighting, air con and machinery

Not a insignificant amount will be "pre-charging" a few million 2170 batteries a day! You can't ship uncharged lithium batteries. I presume the manufacturing process doesn't cause a battery to become charged in it's construction!

 

[Cult Member]

H&T Battery Components is the german company that was mentioned as a partner in the Gigafactory handout.
Find their new location in Nevada on the bottom of this page, please.
H&T Battery Components

 

[FlatSix911]

Interesting reading ... Tesla’s battery cell presentation at the Gigafactory: ‘the output of this thing is going to be insane’ [audio of Q&A]

 

[Oil4AsphaultOnly]

What's your maths working there?
300m petrol vehicles in US approx - 1 per person.
Tesla will be making battery packs for 1370 packs per day (500,000 at max run rate / 365days).
300million / 1370 = 218,978 days to replace 300m cars. = 600 years of production to replace 300million cars.

America uses 20mbpd. 1/3 in cars supposedly (rest in aviation / heating / chemicals / shipping). So 6.66mbpd in cars/trucks/lorries.
You said "to replace 400k barrels". So that's replacing only 6%.

6% of 600 years = 36 years to replace 400k barrels.
That's my ballpark maths. What assumptions did you use?

The best way for america to reduce oil consumption is to stop driving trucks that get 10mpg.
Reduce/re-use/recycle was a 2nd world war mantra. Reduce is the quickest way to ween yourself off oil.
I always think no other industry works to make things so "inefficient" as cars. Lets compare to other modes of transport.
Shipping: containerisation for efficient storage massive ships (Brunel figured back in the 19th C that the larger the ship the more efficient it became). Propellors vs paddle-steamers. Long-sleek ships. "water-tunnel" test on propellors to get that extra 1% of efficiency.
Look at airlines: big airlines carrying 300-600 people crammed together. GM vs RollsRoyce 1-upping each other in efficiency. The Dreamliner - $10bn development to get a 15% fuel efficiency improvement.
Cars: I read once (US survery on new car features) # cup-holders ranked about 12th. 1 higher than fuel economy.
World is a bit crazy.
Fuel economy is a factor of drag which is based on rolling resistance (weight / wheel size), engine size (efficiency) car frontal area size and slipperiness (how streamlined). Neither of those 3 things are areas most people want to compromise on.

It's actually sooner than that. Of the 300m cars, only a fraction are actually driven. So you can completely ignore the number of cars and focus on the number of miles driven.

It's only taken less than 3 months for the 200k global tesla vehicles to accumulate 500 million miles. At 25mpg for your average car/truck/hybrid-combined, that's 20 million gallons of gas saved, or 476,190 barrels of oil (42 gallons per barrel). Since there's ~90 days in 3 months, that's 5291 barrels per day with 200k vehicles. So we'll need at MOST 75 x 200k telsa vehicles to save 400k barrels per day. Or about 15million Teslas max. They're shooting for 500k production per year in 2018 and 1 million by 2020, so we'll hit 400k barrels per day saved well before 2035. And that doesn't even count all the coal and nat gas saved from the Tesla Energy side of battery use (since only 35GWh of the 150GWh capacity of batteries was dedicated to the model 3).

 

[googlepeakoil]

How many Superchargers actually have solarpanels on the top? Yeah, not that many. Not that many have powerpacks to grid-balance either. Also at maybe 3kw per bay (peak sunshine hours) it won't cover 1/20th, maybe only 1/40th of a fairly well used S/C that's pumping out up to 120kw. And do Tesla promise to buy electricity from renewable companies - even if the cost is higher? Probably not. So not really "powered by daylight". Many states have a high proportion of renewables it's true. But I'm not too surprised we haven't seen solarpanels on the GF roof yet. I don't expect to see them before the S/C plant is running it's new factory at full capacity - and it's not going into production until about 9-12 months from now.
I'm just saying - the incentive to install solar is a lot lower when the state gave you ridiculous cheap utility costs - and Tesla need to build their GF on the cheap - $5bn without going back to the city for more $ over and over again.
Note - I calculate 3kw per bay based on the best Sunpower / (or new S/C panels) at about 430w per panel (1x2m panels) and the generous spacing between cars in the S/C bays.

it does seem that only now the SolarCity takeover deal has gone through that now they're talking about covering the building roof in solarpanels. They now also have a solar partnership with Panasonic (who themselves make panels) helping at SolarCity's Washington factory. Panasonic helping there was mentioned on the SolarCity confirmation takeover call I recall. I imagine they can get the solarpanels at near-cost from Panasonic now they're tied so close to them.

 

[googlepeakoil]

Did I say that they should do it strait away? You was talking about that it would not pay out to do it as long as they got their subsidized electricity, and they will get that for 20 years. Waiting a year or so for the solar panel factory to be in production until they install it make sense. And by the way, the DO use their own power-packs, and have been doing to for a long time - at least in Fremont. I'm not sure of how many superchargers has got batteries yet.

Elon said that he thought he should have merged the companies last year.
Obviously it makes sense to wait for the SolarCity merger to go through - and get the companies cheap panels... or if not in production Panaosonic's.
My other point was that if they were demand constrained they might be delaying using their own product (especially a massive 10MW) - but with current difficulties at SC (they had flat growth / earnings for the last year). But same as the UK it seems politically things have moved to curtail the adoption of solar. Solar in the US is I believe still growing massively - just not as fast as it could be - and definately not as fast as some other countries. There's been a massive push in China, India, the Emirates, Portugal - so i've read.

 

[googlepeakoil]

great article with some nice details gathered from the factory tour last week

Tesla reveals more details about ‘Gigafactory 1’: Model 3 battery pack, largest rooftop solar array in the world (70MW), & more

One of the other facts in that article is that the solar-roofing is finally going to begin!! And at 10 MW it's going to be the largest rooftop installation. Note how i've highlighted rooftop - that's because there's ground mounted arrays in the Emirates that are 100x bigger. See:
Solar power in the United Arab Emirates - Wikipedia
I think it says it's about 8x bigger than the 2nd largest "rooftop" one - but that's not quite accurate. If anyone's been following the Apple Campus 2 videos / stats you'll know they are about 99% through the installation of a 4 MW solar roof on that massive 4 storey donut shaped building. Search youtube and you'll find some beautiful 1080p / 4k videos of the building filmed with some great quadcopters.
I'm not sure if the 4MW includes the enormous carpark roof - so it might actually be 5+ ... but then that's not a finished installation so hence they can claim to be 8x bigger than the #2.
A carpark is a great place for solar panels to be installed as it's 1. free flat land, 2. provides some raincover to the users, 3. helps keep cars on the top deck shaded - not a place people want to park in Calif in the summer I imagine!!!

 

[winfield100]

One of the other facts in that article is that the solar-roofing is finally going to begin!! And at 10 MW it's going to be the largest rooftop installation. Note how i've highlighted rooftop - that's because there's ground mounted arrays in the Emirates that are 100x bigger. See:
Solar power in the United Arab Emirates - Wikipedia
I think it says it's about 8x bigger than the 2nd largest "rooftop" one - but that's not quite accurate. If anyone's been following the Apple Campus 2 videos / stats you'll know they are about 99% through the installation of a 4 MW solar roof on that massive 4 storey donut shaped building. Search youtube and you'll find some beautiful 1080p / 4k videos of the building filmed with some great quadcopters.
I'm not sure if the 4MW includes the enormous carpark roof - so it might actually be 5+ ... but then that's not a finished installation so hence they can claim to be 8x bigger than the #2.
A carpark is a great place for solar panels to be installed as it's 1. free flat land, 2. provides some raincover to the users, 3. helps keep cars on the top deck shaded - not a place people want to park in Calif in the summer I imagine!!!

--->>70 megawatts<---, not 10 megawatts
Tesla reveals more details about ‘Gigafactory 1’: Model 3 battery pack, largest rooftop solar array in the world (70MW), & more

 

[Model 3]

Obviously it makes sense to wait for the SolarCity merger to go through - and get the companies cheap panels... or if not in production Panaosonic's.
My other point was that if they were demand constrained they might be delaying using their own product

I absolutely agree on this (but not for 20 years )