Tesla, TSLA & the Investment World: the Perpetual Investors' Roundtable

[Everett Ruess]

CA government will chose virtue signals over actual problem solving ten times out of ten.

Someone from Park City complaining about Ca. government.

 

[ggr]

Delta-V requirements are exponentially related to payload mass.

Incorrect use of the word "exponentially". This is a huge bugbear for me.
One form of Tsiolkovsky's rocket equation:

Note that it is actually linear in relation to total mass, the exponential relates to the exhaust velocity.

 

[StealthP3D]

"In the net-zero scenario analyzed here, spending by companies and consumers on new vehicles—cars, trucks, buses, and two- and three-wheelers—would probably average $3.4 trillion a year for the next three decades (Exhibit 2). An additional $100 billion a year would go to new EV-charging networks and hydrogen distribution and fueling systems."

Study: EV Adoption Rate Too Slow To Prevent The Worst Of Climate Change

Apparently, the main reason why we’re not transitioning to EVs more quickly is still because of the infrastructure.

insideevs.com

I learned decades ago these kinds of industry predictions and projections are pure fiction, chock full of erroneous assumptions and that the impetus behind spending the time and money to do this kind of "study" is almost never to learn the truth but to support a preferred narrative, typically for profit reasons.

In this case, the conclusion that adoption of EV's is being hampered by lack of charging infrastructure is obviously false because the real bottleneck is, without question, manufacturing capacity. If more EV's were manufactured, more EV's would be sold. Therefore a lack of charging infrastructure cannot be the limiting factor.

The idiocy of these kinds of studies would be truly astounding if not for the fact that we know to expect strong bias and a lack of rigorous thinking from previous experience.

 

[Everett Ruess]

CA government will chose virtue signals over actual problem solving ten times out of ten.

Ca. government right. That is pretty rich coming from someone in Park City or anywhere in Utah. I have read this board for years. All in on Tesla and there is not much to tell you people about this company. Now what made me join is the comments about the Colorado River and Glen Canyon Dam. Now you are in my wheelhouse. We better get our act together about the SLC, St. George and Phoenix cities in the west or we will have more to worry about than interest rates.

 

[TheTalkingMule]

TMC: Today we watch TSLA stock in silent contemplation, a small tear in our eyes and slight flush of rage on our faces.

As those in the "other thread" lick their chops. Back to the lazy hazy summer days of printing easy money.

"This is ludicrousness and this cannot last. (beat) The new Ann Taylor store on the right." - Speed Levitch

 

[betstarship]

I learned decades ago these kinds of industry predictions and projections are pure fiction, chock full of erroneous assumptions and that the impetus behind spending the time and money to do this kind of "study" is almost never to learn the truth but to support a preferred narrative, typically for profit reasons.

In this case, the conclusion that adoption of EV's is being hampered by lack of charging infrastructure is obviously false because the real bottleneck is, without question, manufacturing capacity. If more EV's were manufactured, more EV's would be sold. Therefore a lack of charging infrastructure cannot be the limiting factor.

The idiocy of these kinds of studies would be truly astounding if not for the fact that we know to expect strong bias and a lack of rigorous thinking from previous experience.

Yep, I get ya and agree with you after some thought - most of the time I like to share these articles to promote discussion and identify the validity of some of these reports regardless of whether I agree with it or not. It's an internet forum about a company we're following and having discussions about on a regular basis (i.e. we're prioritizing our time towards Tesla over other things for various reasons).

Personally, these reports provide thoughtful discussion rather than the drivel of hearing what people are tweeting out (sometimes its the opposite and I wish it was posted from a personal blog that gets affiliated via twitter or other aggregators). At least people would gain $$ from the work, via ads/newsletter subs/etc from their personal site, they're doing rather than just giving it away for free in order to just get blasted thereafter from trolls and bots.

 

[henchman24]

Vix is continually rejecting going up and going down. I'd take that as a positive sign considering the miss in expectations in China and just the normal churn of the market (bit of consolidation after Thursday/Friday). Getting a break below 28.50-28 is going to allow for the next leg up.

 

[WADan]

I learned decades ago these kinds of industry predictions and projections are pure fiction, chock full of erroneous assumptions and that the impetus behind spending the time and money to do this kind of "study" is almost never to learn the truth but to support a preferred narrative, typically for profit reasons.

In this case, the conclusion that adoption of EV's is being hampered by lack of charging infrastructure is obviously false because the real bottleneck is, without question, manufacturing capacity. If more EV's were manufactured, more EV's would be sold. Therefore a lack of charging infrastructure cannot be the limiting factor.

The idiocy of these kinds of studies would be truly astounding if not for the fact that we know to expect strong bias and a lack of rigorous thinking from previous experience.

Charging infrastructure may not be the limiting factor in North America or EU, but I think it is elsewhere.
I just got back from a trip to South America (Argentina and Brazil) where most people live in (small) apartment on high rise buildings and there is virtually no room to park on the street, let alone charging.

 

[Gigapress]

There are other options for cities like Las Vegas and Phoenix:
1. Rip up every golf course and grass lawn
2. Stop building new homes in the desert and encourage people to move to other parts of the country that have water

72% of Arizona’s total 7 million acre-feet (8 billion m^3) of annual water consumption is used for agriculture (source). The rest of the Southwest is in a similar situation. It is much easier to grow crops like lettuce in the sunshine with irrigation than somewhere like the Northeast or Canada, especially in the winter. Some of this could be mitigated 99% with indoor farming but that doesn’t work for all kinds of crops.

Tony Seba’s RethinkX group presented analysis in 2020 in which they showed that places like California will have major overproduction of solar and wind generation on about 99% of days in order to meet current energy demands.
Many people have been proposing that we use that “superpower” for cryptocurrency mining and other low-value applications.

Tesla Energy will greatly benefit from anything expanding humanity’s overall electricity demand, and their entire mission is based around sustainability. When evaluating Tesla’s total addressable market for the Energy sector, I think investors have not been considering how much a cheap solar-wind-batteries system will expand the overall quantity demanded for electricity and consequently they are greatly underestimating the potential profitability and impact of Tesla Energy.

As a species we have severely disrupted Earth’s natural cycles for water, carbon and nitrogen. Obtaining our food and having bearable weather is fundamentally dependent on how we manage the flow of these atoms. It’s sink or swim now; if we do not defeat these challenges, civilization will collapse and we may go extinct entirely.

Luckily, all of these problems can be addressed directly with existing industrial processes and lots of electricity. Terraform Industries is getting to work on gigascale hydrocarbon synthesis with cheap future solar power. Carbon problem mostly solved. Their synthetic hydrogen and methane can replace natural gas for powering the Haber-Bosch process to make ammonia. Nitrogen problem mostly solved. Desalination scale up with accompanying underground aqueduct infrastructure can rely on cheap solar too. H2O problem mostly solved. These three energy-intensive industries could by themselves increase total human primary electricity demand by one or two orders of magnitude in the coming decades, and these aren’t the only power-hungry applications waiting on $1/MWh solar energy. How about melting down any ore or waste to separate the desired elements? How about making sugar to feed genetically programmable yeast colonies for all kinds of precision fermentation?

Tesla’s official projections for cumulative battery and solar capacity needed for sustainability are drastically understating the true opportunity, in my opinion. I think tens of trillions of dollars will be earned by Tesla and other companies who strategically position themselves around anticipation of the solar energy cost trend.

 

[Cosmacelf]

California Coastal Commission rejects plan for Poseidon desalination plant

After hours of intense debate Thursday, coastal regulators have rejected Poseidon Water's proposal to build a desalination plant in Huntington Beach.

www.latimes.com

Interestingly, a desalination project that was backed by California Governor Gavin Newsom was rejected just recently. It doesn't seem like the people of the LA basin actually want water or anything. We'll see how that goes for them.

The people want the plant, it is the unelected California coastal commission that‘s the problem. It’ll get built, late, and cost a lot more, when Colorado shuts off the water…

 

[Everett Ruess]

Ca. government right. That is pretty rich coming from someone in Park City or anywhere in Utah. I have read this board for years. All in on Tesla and there is not much to tell you people about this company. Now what made me join is the comments about the Colorado River and Glen Canyon Dam. Now you are in my wheelhouse. We better get our act together about the SLC, St. George and Phoenix cities in the west or we will have more to worry about than interest rates.

80% of Colorado River water goes to agriculture. It takes 1900 gallons of water to produce one lb of almonds. These figures change but Utah and other western states are shipping water to China. How? Hay is one of the biggest exports to china. Cattle on the public lands of the west is a environmental disaster. The golf courses and cities of the west fight over what is left. Good luck trying to spend tax dollars on salt water.

 

[StarFoxisDown!]

I sure hope everyone that is using margin here is doing so with a decent buffer (20-25% drop from here).

I don’t think I’ve been this pessimistic about the share price action in a while. Stock continues to underperform its beta, down nearly 4X. As mentioned in a previous post, ever since May 4th, the stock has by far been the worst performing big cap stock. In fact it’s been trading worse that mid cap stocks that have a P/E that’s 2-3X TSLA’s. It’s just downright ugly.

I was curious to what today would be like, because it would say a lot about if Thursday was the bottom for TSLA. Unfortunately, seems clear that there’s going to continued intentional selling/capping pressure for a least all of May. And if the macros take another leg lower, I definitely see another 25% drop for TSLA. Probably an intraday dip well into the 500’s. So I hope everyone that is using margin has that kind of buffer

 

[bkp_duke]

72% of Arizona’s total 7 million acre-feet (8 billion m^3) of annual water consumption is used for agriculture (source). The rest of the Southwest is in a similar situation. It is much easier to grow crops like lettuce in the sunshine with irrigation than somewhere like the Northeast or Canada, especially in the winter. Some of this could be mitigated 99% with indoor farming but that doesn’t work for all kinds of crops.

Tony Seba’s RethinkX group presented analysis in 2020 in which they showed that places like California will have major overproduction of solar and wind generation on about 99% of days in order to meet current energy demands.
Many people have been proposing that we use that “superpower” for cryptocurrency mining and other low-value applications.

Tesla Energy will greatly benefit from anything expanding humanity’s overall electricity demand, and their entire mission is based around sustainability. When evaluating Tesla’s total addressable market for the Energy sector, I think investors have not been considering how much a cheap solar-wind-batteries system will expand the overall quantity demanded for electricity and consequently they are greatly underestimating the potential profitability and impact of Tesla Energy.

As a species we have severely disrupted Earth’s natural cycles for water, carbon and nitrogen. Obtaining our food and having bearable weather is fundamentally dependent on how we manage the flow of these atoms. It’s sink or swim now; if we do not defeat these challenges, civilization will collapse and we may go extinct entirely.

Luckily, all of these problems can be addressed directly with existing industrial processes and lots of electricity. Terraform Industries is getting to work on gigascale hydrocarbon synthesis with cheap future solar power. Carbon problem mostly solved. Their synthetic hydrogen and methane can replace natural gas for powering the Haber-Bosch process to make ammonia. Nitrogen problem mostly solved. Desalination scale up with accompanying underground aqueduct infrastructure can rely on cheap solar too. H2O problem mostly solved. These three energy-intensive industries could by themselves increase total human primary electricity demand by one or two orders of magnitude in the coming decades, and these aren’t the only power-hungry applications waiting on $1/MWh solar energy. How about melting down any ore or waste to separate the desired elements? How about making sugar to feed genetically programmable yeast colonies for all kinds of precision fermentation?

Tesla’s official projections for cumulative battery and solar capacity needed for sustainability are drastically understating the true opportunity, in my opinion. I think tens of trillions of dollars will be earned by Tesla and other companies who strategically position themselves around anticipation of the solar energy cost trend.

Excellent post. It's often glassed over that residential water usage is just a fraction of what commercial and industrial usage is, but "water restrictions" are typically put forward to target the public much more than these groups.

I mean, why is Nestle allowed to take millions of gallons of water for bottling purposes? And that is just one of hundreds of examples.

California Officials Move to Stop Nestlé From Taking Millions of Gallons of Water From Public Streams - EcoWatch

California water officials have accused Nestlé of draining more water out of southern California's Strawberry Creek in the San Bernardino National Forest than permitted. The drafted cease-and-desist order asked Nestlé to stop draining millions of gallons of water out of the forest every year and...

www.ecowatch.com

Seems like completely dumbassary.

 

[Nocturnal]

Charging infrastructure may not be the limiting factor in North America or EU, but I think it is elsewhere.
I just got back from a trip to South America (Argentina and Brazil) where most people live in (small) apartment on high rise buildings and there is virtually no room to park on the street, let alone charging.

Those cars all park somewhere for 90% of the day though. Just need some creative ideas to figure that out.

 

[TheTalkingMule]

I sure hope everyone that is using margin here is doing so with a decent buffer (20-25% drop from here).

I don’t think I’ve been this pessimistic about the share price action in a while. Stock continues to underperform its beta, down nearly 4X. As mentioned in a previous post, ever since May 4th, the stock has by far been the worst performing big cap stock. In fact it’s been trading worse that mid cap stocks that have a P/E that’s 2-3X TSLA’s. It’s just downright ugly.

I was as curious to what today would be like, because it would say a lot about if Thursday was the bottom for TSLA. Unfortunately, seems clear that there’s going to continued intentional selling/capping pressure for a least all of May. And if the macros take another leg lower, I definitely see another 25% drop for TSLA. Probably an intraday dip well into the 500’s. So I hope everyone that is using margin has that kind of buffer

Wow, that's quite the negative sentiment for such a run of the mill Monday! I'll take that as a hyper-bullish indicator.

Will your projection change if we close green today?

 

[Everett Ruess]

80% of Colorado River water goes to agriculture. It takes 1900 gallons of water to produce one lb of almonds. These figures change but Utah and other western states are shipping water to China. How? Hay is one of the biggest exports to china. Cattle on the public lands of the west is a environmental disaster. The golf courses and cities of the west fight over what is left. Good luck trying to spend tax dollars on salt water.

Last one for now. We need to dismantle Glen Canyon Dam. Let the water go to Mead. It was a mistake. Everett praying for one precision earthquake to free the Colorado River.

 

[SOULPEDL]

Desalination plants are not all they are cracked up to be.

The heavy salt water that gets pumped back into the ocean at the end of the process is known to be toxic to many species that form the base of the food chain. A proposed desalination plant for Huntington Beach, CA (LA area) was specifically rejected this week based upon that scientific fact alone.

A salty dispute: California Coastal Commission unanimously rejects desalination plant

The commission, in a marathon session today, killed a controversial desalination plant proposal that’s been debated for more than 20 years.

calmatters.org

Would be different if they would truck the salt out to the desert and bury it or something, but desalination is already an expensive process to begin with, they won't add that expense.

OT, Arizona has lots of salt water underground. I think we're headed that way anyway (until climate recovery?). Stories from the mountain regions are popping up already, like "One day, the well just went dry." Clearly there will be no warnings beyond what we know today in general because who wants to publish a problem with their own city... until it's too obvious to keep the secret.

I'm still wondering what this means for us living in the desert. Do we need a neighborhood co-op to purchase a Tesla Semi that transports our water in the future? At 1/2 KWh, it would cost less than $100 in energy to have it go fetch 80,000 lbs of water. Something tells me the price of the water could eclipse the cost to move it to other regions in the future. (The true value of water is not yet established, but I'd pay $1,000's for a glass of water if needed.) This obviously ignores capital or operating expenses, but there are few options here aside from migration. I wonder how many here considered (or paid) $20K for the Semi down payment. A Turo for Semi's?

 

[Ogre]

Charging infrastructure may not be the limiting factor in North America or EU, but I think it is elsewhere.
I just got back from a trip to South America (Argentina and Brazil) where most people live in (small) apartment on high rise buildings and there is virtually no room to park on the street, let alone charging.

Good argument for Robotaxi here.

Lots of high density areas are likely better served by robotaxi, particular poor areas where the cost of a vehicle is a big financial burden.

 

[jerry33]

Excellent post. It's often glassed over that residential water usage is just a fraction of what commercial and industrial usage is, but "water restrictions" are typically put forward to target the public much more than these groups.

I mean, why is Nestle allowed to take millions of gallons of water for bottling purposes? And that is just one of hundreds of examples.

California Officials Move to Stop Nestlé From Taking Millions of Gallons of Water From Public Streams - EcoWatch

California water officials have accused Nestlé of draining more water out of southern California's Strawberry Creek in the San Bernardino National Forest than permitted. The drafted cease-and-desist order asked Nestlé to stop draining millions of gallons of water out of the forest every year and...

www.ecowatch.com

Seems like completely dumbassary.

When there is a system where politicians do what they are paid to do, and it’s not the public that does most or all of the paying, then it’s inevitable that vested interests will rule the roost.

 

[bkp_duke]

OT, Arizona has lots of salt water underground. I think we're headed that way anyway (until climate recovery?). Stories from the mountain regions are popping up already, like "One day, the well just went dry." Clearly there will be no warnings beyond what we know today in general because who wants to publish a problem with their own city... until it's too obvious to keep the secret.

I'm still wondering what this means for us living in the desert. Do we need a neighborhood co-op to purchase a Tesla Semi that transports our water in the future? At 1/2 KWh, it would cost less than $100 in energy to have it go fetch 80,000 lbs of water. Something tells me the price of the water could eclipse the cost to move it to other regions in the future. (The true value of water is not yet established, but I'd pay $1,000's for a glass of water if needed.) This obviously ignores capital or operating expenses, but there are few options here aside from migration. I wonder how many here considered (or paid) $20K for the Semi down payment. A Turo for Semi's?

I wonder what the costs of "atmospheric extraction", similar to condensation you see from HVAC, would be.