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

[kanweg]

It won't help in Dec/Jan/Feb which is the pinch months. Of the new renewables only wind helps in those months, plus the old renewables (hydro) and of course nuclear and fossils.

This is the issue that the pro-solar lobby never want to face up to. Wind of course also means big grid transmission links, and big battery storage schemes, in order to provide the requisite despatchibility in those critical winter months.

This is the same issue worldwide in all temeperate locations where humans live.

So .... over-investing in solar is the ultimate wasted investment.

Emotionally good, technically less so.

the Netherlands misses the southern half of Germany, and even there the sun shines during winter. In my case, I have only six panels and the worst month still give 40 kWh, I.e. 30% of my monthly consumption. my neighbor has 20 panels so it is not impossible. Once I switch to an electrical heat pump, that equation changes a bit (but then I’m significantly reducing my primary energy use).
As it happens, solar and wind ar anticyclical. There is more wind energy in winter. And with well-insulated homes, heat pumps have a little leeway in when they run.

@AukeHoekstra begs to differ with you on the feasibility of 100% to match energy consumption.

 

[lafrisbee]

Flaring gas is worse because all that energy for those thousands of daily use cases must still be produced. So you are doubling the amount of energy used up.

Word problems are my thing.
And NO. You did not give the right answer. It is not a doubling.

I will keep it simple. The gas "flared off" is not doubled. Only if the same amount of gas was provided at the same cost (Not liquefied, transported etc) would it be a "doubling." More energy is used to replace the flared off gas.

And then the environmental issue. The carbon cost. More processes to deliver increases the carbon footprint of "the gas." Different fuel sources have a greater carbon footprint for the same number of energy units.

So it is much more/worse than a "doubling."

However if an alternative energy source cannot be found/used for a portion of the flared off gas then it could result in a reduced usage on that side of the equation. Not likely enough to take the total below the "Doubling" number.

 

[UncaNed]

The fault lies with German politicians and organizations who built pipelines into Russia and shut down all their nuclear plants in exchange for suitcases of money from Gazprom. These are also the same people who delayed Giga Berlin as much as they could.

They should be in prison.

Are German citizens discussing this?

 

[UncaNed]

...There is, IMHO, huge disruption coming for global industries dependent on neon (Ukraine), Petroleum products (especially Russian natural gas), or water (a global disaster)....

The only question is whether human ingenuity can cope with all this...

Ingenuity maybe, but this should serve to unite more people and industries against Russia, and hopefully against those who fought against Germany's initial push for renewable energy.

 

[betstarship]

Ingenuity maybe, but this should serve to unite more people and industries against Russia, and hopefully against those who fought against Germany's initial push for renewable energy.

Personally, I think human progress is based on human willpower and ingenuity to actually "get stuff done".

We're going to need to will this happen and our best, alongside ingenuity, is Elon Musk. It looks like the VC's are catching up on this by pushing more people with great willpower and ingenuity to build better clean energy and transportation products/services. This is a true fight against our environment, not ourselves (even though ourselves are being pushed into it to gum up the transition).

 

[petit_bateau]

the Netherlands misses the southern half of Germany, and even there the sun shines during winter. In my case, I have only six panels and the worst month still give 40 kWh, I.e. 30% of my monthly consumption. my neighbor has 20 panels so it is not impossible. Once I switch to an electrical heat pump, that equation changes a bit (but then I’m significantly reducing my primary energy use).
As it happens, solar and wind ar anticyclical. There is more wind energy in winter. And with well-insulated homes, heat pumps have a little leeway in when they run.

@AukeHoekstra begs to differ with you on the feasibility of 100% to match energy consumption.

I think we can all agree on the cold hard data.

This data is for (my) house in southern UK, further south than all of NL and about the same as Frankfurt. For 3-months of the year I am am electrical importer even with an oversized solar PV array (83% import : 17% self-consumption, i.e. a oversized array) and that is with my existing gas boiler. With an ASHP (which I plan to install later this year) and (my) well insulated home the export/import fraction will improve in my favour (i.e. the array will right-size) but even then no amount of battery will get me (or anyone, or even the whole grid) through those three critical cold dark mid winter months of Dec/Jan/Feb on solar PV alone. Only wind solves that. With wind we can reach 100%, but without wind we cannot.

(this is why I buy from a renewables only company, in my case GoodEnergy)

A very large fraction of humanity lives in similar latitudes.

 

[insaneoctane]

I think we can all agree on the cold hard data.

This data is for (my) house in southern UK, further south than all of NL and about the same as Frankfurt. For 3-months of the year I am am electrical importer even with an oversized solar PV array (83% import : 17% self-consumption, i.e. a oversized array) and that is with my existing gas boiler. With an ASHP (which I plan to install later this year) and (my) well insulated home the export/import fraction will improve in my favour (i.e. the array will right-size) but even then no amount of battery will get me (or anyone, or even the whole grid) through those three critical cold dark mid winter months of Dec/Jan/Feb on solar PV alone. Only wind solves that. With wind we can reach 100%, but without wind we cannot.

(this is why I buy from a renewables only company, in my case GoodEnergy)

A very large fraction of humanity lives in similar latitudes.

View attachment 846433

I see 4 months you're a net importer....

 

[loquitur]

Karen Rei's analysis is quite good, but it doesn't actually cover the Advanced Manufacturing Production credit, which is the subject of the Limiting Factor Video. It's a tax credit of up to $45 per kWh that can go directly to Tesla for their battery manufacturing efforts.

As much as I'd like to take Karen's word as gospel, she still doesn't quite put to rest what constitutes a "foreign entity of concern". She says "My read is...", and goes on to say that anything from China counts. Others take a more narrow view of what constitutes an entity of concern under the new law.

I've given up. We gotta wait to know for sure.

Agree to the ambiguity for now, after mistakenly posting earlier that a "foreign entity of concern" was a specific company or individual on an explicit list, as it was historically.

Now, if indeed the IRA is using the broader definition that "owned by, controlled by, or subject to the jurisdiction or direction of a government of a foreign country that is a covered nation" (including China) then that's limiting indeed, at least in 2025.

Question -- is CATL (USA) Inc. sufficiently controlled by non-China interests? Shades of ByteDance/TikTok if not.

On Tesla's behalf, I appreciate the Nafnlaus suggestion of sending a portion of Indonesian nickel ore elsewhere for processing (to a free-trade country like Australia or Canada), although both of the latter countries seem to have plenty of nickel. For lithium, from the Tesla 2021 Impact report, supplier Livent passes the test (mined in Argentina, refined in the U.S.), but Albemarle may have some work to do.

 

[Fred42]

On Tesla's behalf, I appreciate the Nafnlaus suggestion of sending a portion of Indonesian nickel ore elsewhere for processing (to a free-trade country like Australia or Canada), although both of the latter countries seem to have plenty of nickel.

Indonesia does not allow export of unprocessed ore. They could cut a deal with Tesla to allow it, but this would be contrary to the government's objective to get as much revenue as possible downstream from mineral mining.

 

[ZsoZso]

I love this equal-opportunity catering to both past and future renewable energy transportation at a Canadian Tire parking lot in the Ontario countryside:

 

[Fred42]

I love this equal-opportunity catering to both past and future renewable energy transportation at a Canadian Tire parking lot in the Ontario countryside:
View attachment 846469

I was driving thru Pennsylvania Dutch Amish country on US 30, as I often do. At a traffic light, a Model X that wanted to turn left waited for an oncoming horse and buggy. No fossil fuel was being consumed.

 

[powertoold]

Sunday random info relating to Dojo / FSD training:

Karpathy talk on 6/20/21: Tesla has 5760 Nvidia A100 GPUs in training cluster (1 of 3)
Nvidia earnings call on 8/24/22: Tesla upgraded to over 7000 A100 GPUs

Over a year, Tesla increased # A100 GPUs by more than 21.5%

 

[Doit]

Right on schedule...

View attachment 846427

A critic is like a eunuch in a harem. He sees what's been done and he can criticize the technique, but he can't do it himself. - Cited by Isaac Asimov in his I. Asimov, A Memoir
There are idiots in every walk of life - Isaac Asimov

An idiot cites a meritless critic. Let them be.

Please be considerate how much this thread is being contaminated by bringing in idiots, meritless critics, and faux experts.

 

[betstarship]

This is a little off-topic, but to everyone that posts here...please be careful to you and your families + friends. The next years look like they're going to be a doozy, hope we all make it out on the other end.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1564016626315452417

https://twitter.com/x/status/1563252444179492866

 

[Cosmacelf]

This is a little off-topic, but to everyone that posts here...please be careful to you and your families + friends. The next years look like they're going to be a doozy, hope we all make it out on the other end.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1564016626315452417

The Jackson headline is melodramatic. Last lines of the story:

“Mississippi’s Pearl River is expected to crest at 35.5 feet on Monday, six inches lower than previous forecasts, a NWS hydrologist told the New York Times. Though the flooding had reached some subdivision streets in Jackson, it has yet to reach houses.

A spokesperson for Lumumba said 100 to 150 homes could be affected in the city.”

 

[T@oo]

But that guy - Ronald Drimmel - makes a lot of good points. The number of Starship launches needed to get a viable constellation is truly mind boggling and the impact on our atmosphere is not going to be negligible.

Watch this and think and decide for yourself.

 

[NicoV]

Are you talking pure panel cost, or fully installed & energized?

If it's the second, lucky you!
Around here it's at least 2.5x the price and ~1 year waiting time due to parts and labor shortage.
And from what I read, af least Germany has massive labor shortage too.
I doubt this gets much better in the short term..

In the US, it costs 3x capitol expense for financing + installation of home solar. Certainly not the solar farm ratio possible, but that seems like opportunity knocking for non-commercial.

In an emergency, I could see a solar kit offering, ground based (lean against your wall crazy simple, wire into some heater coils) - EU heat this winter anyone? No inverter, no roof install, just a kit and a regulator for power delivery. I know I’d be ordering panels now in a similar situation.

10 years ago I got a quote to install 10kWp expensive SunPower Maxeon panels on my home for about 20K euro, and panels have gotten a lot cheaper (and lower quality panels are even less).
I haven’t got a recent quote, but this company gives me an indicative quote of around 17K euro for 10kWp solar panels with 10kWh battery storage (and most of the cost is for the battery storage):

Zonnepanelen - Solar Batteries

Zowel zonnepanelen alsook thuisbatterijen worden gekoppeld aan een omvormer; beide werken immers met gelijkstroom terwijl ons stroomnet op wisselstroom staat.

www.solar-batteries.be

EDIT: The above link contains a web form at the bottom of the page where you can choose a certain configuration of battery/solar capacity and get and indicative price.
I ‘m still hoping to get a Tesla solar roof this decade, so I haven’t inquired for concrete offers lately.

 

[aubreymcfato]

Do we have any piece of info about how Musk intends to avoid a shutdown of GigaBerlin? Has he said anything about that?

 

[-=buzz=-]

10 years ago I got a quote to install 10kWp expensive SunPower Maxeon panels on my home for about 20K euro, and panels have gotten a lot cheaper (and lower quality panels are even less).
I haven’t got a recent quote, but this company gives me an indicative quote of around 17K euro for 10kWp solar panels with 10kWh battery storage (and most of the cost is for the battery storage):

Zonnepanelen - Solar Batteries

Zowel zonnepanelen alsook thuisbatterijen worden gekoppeld aan een omvormer; beide werken immers met gelijkstroom terwijl ons stroomnet op wisselstroom staat.

www.solar-batteries.be

EDIT: The above link contains a web form at the bottom of the page where you can choose a certain configuration of battery/solar capacity and get and indicative price.
I ‘m still hoping to get a Tesla solar roof this decade, so I haven’t inquired for concrete offers lately.

Lucky you!

But that website seems to be a bit wonky. I managed to configure a 10KW system with batteries for 200€...

 

[-=buzz=-]

Do we have any piece of info about how Musk intends to avoid a shutdown of GigaBerlin? Has he said anything about that?

They've got on-site gas storage. Maybe they can switch between methane/propane/etc
For electricity they're grid connected and I doubt they could change to emergency generators.