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

[Etna]

View attachment 375773
Elon in the Netherlands now? Any chance this has something to do with a European gigafactory?

I read yesterday in the Dutch media that he was expected to visit the Tesla facility in Tilburg so that may be all there is.

 

[Fact Checking]

Watching the RO-RO ships travel around the world, something struck me.

I've written a couple times (here and elsewhere) about how while it's not economically practical (with current tech) to make large electric-powered cargo ships that travel nonstop (don't care to redo the calculations yet again, but feel free to do them yourselves), it is economically practical to use them with floating "gigachargers" (deep sea wind, floating solar, inside a breakwater - ideally with the breakwater being a wave-power generator). These would transfer - for ships the size of a Maersk Triple-E - about a gigawatt hour per 80% charge, about every day or so.

Something occurred to me, though - and the situation could actually be a lot more than merely "economically practical" - rather, a major economic advantage.

Speed is a key part of the economics of shipping. For one, the faster you deliver your cargo, the more trips you can take. For another, the faster you deliver cargo, the more you get paid for that delivery (the reason why people do air shipping even though it's insanely expensive compared to shipping at sea). Double the speed and you might quadruple your revenue, for a given capital investment.

So why don't ships just go faster? Energy consumption, of course (operations, not capital, costs). The faster you travel, the more energy your ship has to burn to do so. Ships today don't want to have to pay more for fuel, so their cruising speeds are limited (the Glovis fleet usually cruises at about 20mph/30kph, for example).

Now, this might seem even worse for electric shipping. After all, big batteries are expensive, and the more power you burn, the larger the battery you need to have in order to charge at a given interval. But what happens if we reduce that interval significantly?

The rate at which you can charge a battery pack is irrespective of the size of the battery pack; for a given cell and cooling design, a 1kWh pack takes the same amount of time to charge as a 1GWh pack. A ship can do the same 30 minute 0-80% that a car or truck can, so long as the charger are sized to do so (just through a *much* fatter, crane-hoisted cable!). You certainly have more overhead - sailing a ship into a breakwater, docking alongside a charger tower, and connecting a liquid-cooled cable wider than your thigh, is not a 1-minute job like parking your car at a Supercharger and plugging in. But assuming that overhead can be kept "reasonable", there's nothing to stop you from charging far more often than once per day.

(Note that electric propulsion makes things like azimuth-mount thrusters ("azipods"), which allow ships to sail sideways and tightly control their position, more practical)

Let's say that instead of sailing for 23 hours and docking / charging for 1 hour, you sail for 5 hours then dock/charge for 1 hour. Now you're charging 4 times as much energy per day, for 87% as much sailing time. Burning four times the power lets you roughly double your travel speed - ~40mph/60kph. Meaning you can depreciate your capital costs across far more trips, and get paid more per trip for the faster delivery speed.

The only downside is that you burn twice as much power per trip. From an environmental standpoint, it's really a nothing issue: it's the power of the wind and/or sun, and most of the world's oceans are "deserts" - vast expanses with relatively little life, due to the lack of the sort of nutrient upwellings that you get near the coasts:

In the above map, dark red zones have 1000 times more photosynthesis as dark blue zones, 150 times more than cyan zones, and 50 times more than green zones. It's mineral-limited, not sun-limited; if you block some sun in one location, it just leaves the minerals for the next bit over. On the other hand, sea life tends to flourish around manmade floating structures, akin to how it does around reefs.

Historically, ships have been getting a great rate on fuel costs, as they've been burning high-sulfur bunker fuel. Those days come to an end at the end of this year - the standards on bunker fuel have been raised to the point that it's now basically diesel, and in direct competition with diesel to boot. Ships can still use low grade fuel, but only if they put in (expensive) scrubbing systems on their ships that may cost more than just switching fuels. You're looking at at least "$2/gal" equivalent (prices are usually measured in $/MT), and more if oil prices rise from their (currently low) pricing regime, or further emissions restrictions (or carbon taxes) increase costs further. Let's say a long-term average of $2,50/gal - and that may well prove incredibly optimistic in the long run.

Ship engines are efficient - about 50%. Now, EV motors would also be unusually efficient in such situations, as they'd be large motors tuned for cruising speeds, and the charging process would also benefit from operation at scale. Let's say 87% round-trip efficiency. The fuel-powered ship gets propulsive energy for 27MJ/$. So if we're doubling the propulsive energy requirements, in order to match the price, electricity (at industrial rates, not home rates) needs to be generated at 54MJ/$ - aka, $0,067/kWh. Remember that it doesn't actually need to match bunker fuel costs, as you're shipping at nearly double the rate, drastically slashing your depreciation per trip while drastically increasing your income per trip.

That said, it would be awesome if electricity costs could beat fuel costs even when moving at double the speed. Is $0,067/kWh achievable? Well... "probably"?

• Floating solar plants have so far mainly been built in freshwater, but if you have an effective breakwater, then it just comes down to an issue of material compatibility. Prices are similar to that of land-based PV - for example, Three Gorges Group is making a 150MW floating solar plant for a construction cost of $151M, or $1/W. That's just a few cents per kWh generated. The fixtures are more expensive, but installation is simpler and cheaper, on cheap/free "land". Since floating solar is a newer technology, it also has more room for price improvement.
• Deep sea wind is not yet there in pricing; it's currently significantly more expensive than land-based and shallow-water wind. That said, it's also highly immature, and has a lot of room for improvement (and all oceanic wind has the advantage of being basically unlimited in tower height, with hardware shipped cheaply to its destination). Additionally, one of the major costs of deep-sea wind is transmission back to the shore, which is not applicable here.
• Wave power is currently expensive, but regardless, not much is needed - only enough to make a breakwater.

Floating solar, at present, looks like the most realistic option for the bulk generation, with deep sea wind only as a supplement (turbine towers could double as platforms for storing charging hardware and/or docking ports)

Can chargers (and battery banks) be built at scale, using adjacent-generated solar at current solar pricing, and sell power for $0,067/kWh? That's harder to say - but this is exactly Tesla's plan for megachargers for Semi - and their announced pricing is $0,07/kWh (combining the low cost of solar generation with the battery banks it needs to be a reliable power source (direct DC/DC conversion, no grid costs) - batteries which simultaneously enable high charging speeds using said same DC/DC converters). A gigacharger would gain even larger economies of scale.

So... "probably". But the key aspect is: you can earn drastically more revenue from your ship if you run it on electricity, by sailing faster - since your fuel is cheap, clean, and it's much cheaper to add more electric powertrain power than diesel power.

Great idea to electrify bulk shipping!

A couple of thoughts:

• Business model: I believe it would make sense to approach this issue from the high end as well, just like Tesla approached automotive electrification: instead of bulk cargo, go for really high speed sea delivery, with an electric fleet. Delivery times to Europe and China within 1 week will already favorably compete with air freight - which is a big and lucrative market. A 4x speedup to ~80 mph (radar assisted, of course) would cut delivery times to Europe from 20 days to 5 days and to China from 30 days to ~7 days. 100 mph+ speeds would push things from a safety POV though, but would be even more lucrative - and might allow approaches like a catamaran design, which would lower sea resistance and reduce energy costs.
• Cell longevity is going to be an issue, as the major depreciation factor. The current global commercial shipping fleet's average age is over 20 years. Steel ship hulls can go on forever, and are expected to. How long are the best, most durable cells going to last, and what is degradation curve and how predictable are the failure modes, and is there a continuous maintenance mode that effectively refreshes all cells over the long run?
• Battery module safety: that's a lot of energy stored, many tons of TNT-equivalent, with the nearest fire trucks thousands of kms away. Robust, yet environmentally friendly modes of fire suppression of a battery fire have to be found - probably by compartmentalizing/sealing battery modules where a fire could not escape even if a runaway thermal reaction triggers inside. There's a billion dollar ship to protect ...
  
• Electric motors have other advantages over diesel motors: the huge engines of the really huge cargo ships can take more than an hour to warm up for departure. With an electric ship the ship is immediately ready for departure the moment the containers are loaded. More 'just in time' logistics are possible with an electric fleet.
• "On the go" recharging: it takes capital investment but it's possible to do recharging "on the go": "recharging ships" which carry nothing but huge batteries, shuttling between cargo ships. The recharging ships would then periodically dock with the off-shore wind farms to recharge themselves. If there's enough of them then the offshore wind farms don't need any battery capacity at all: there would always be a "recharging ship" docked, using up available generated electricity.
• What are the risks of weather patterns with too little or too much wind, and the resulting disruption to available deep sea wind energy? Delivery times must be guaranteed even in the face of hurricanes or doldrums. There must be a fail-safe plan to keep the spice going, probably by having the 'recharging ships' go back to the coast for electricity, or enough solar energy to keep things going in the worst case.

 

[Buckminster]

View attachment 375773
Elon in the Netherlands now? Any chance this has something to do with a European gigafactory?

Oh dear - please don't tell me the meme review is going to be filmed from a "Coffeeshop"!!!
Elon won't be able to resist a spacecake....

 

[Krugerrand]

If they can sell every car they make, why would you expect a price reduction?

Tesla has lots of upcoming cash demands (expanding Superchargers & Service Centers, preparing for MY/semi/pickup production) and should be building cash reserves. Why forego revenue (twice in rapid succession) unless there's a demand issue?

This has been explained many times already. Not sure why you refuse to accept what is the truth of the purpose and mission of Tesla AND the FACT that Tesla/Elon have repeated that purpose hundreds, nay thousands, of times since they came into existence in 2012?

The mission has NOT changed even a little bit.

You’re in TSLA so you must have some ability to think outside the box/in a different way. Why are you so stuck in the thought process that Tesla exists to be run like every other ‘squeeze every penny out of the consumer you can before a price reduction’ company?

One last time, do everything humanly possible to get an EV in every car owning houshold, yesterday, replacing their existing ICEs before this planet implodes. That is the mission. FYI, A LOT more of those households can afford a 35k car over a 46k one.

Never mind. I give up. If you don’t know this by now, there is no hope you’ll ever understand. So fine, Tesla is demand constrained. Bankruptcy imminent. They’re clearly too stupid to know how to proceed forward, just dumb luck they got this far. It’s over. There will be no Y, no pick up, no semi, no GF3 or 4.

 

[Mark's Beagle]

Hi all,
my 1st post, hoping it to be potentially useful. Today's the 2nd time I see something about HW3 regarding European M3 deliveries.

In short: My Model 3 LR March delivery to Europe/Finland will have HW3.

In long, attempting to establish credibility level: About two weeks ago I called Tesla customer service Finland (redirected to Norway due to queue). Asking if my M3 will have HW3 sent the customer supp rep to discuss with someone what's the deal. Coming back in a couple of minutes confirming just what I wanted to hear. She did sound sincere and very enthusiastic through the whole discussion.

Other points that were not clear on my Tesla account: the all season weather tires will be Nokia R3 (exactly what I wanted); FSD can not be added to my order (oh well, later then).

And.. many thanks to all contributors of the thread! It's been a valuable tool with my TSLA investments.

Wait, Nokia makes tires?

 

[Mark's Beagle]

Elon Musk on Twitter

Just left Zeebrugge, now Tilburg, then Tesla HQ in Amsterdam & Oslo tonight to review service in Norway. Exciting to see thousands of Model 3’s on their way to owners in Europe! Elon Musk on Twitter

 

[mongo]

Tesla on Twitter
Good to see that Alien Dreadnought 0.5 is alive and well. Putting on the tires. This is in the Freemont building. Does the tent (for some of the lines) come after this, before this or replace this bit with manual labour?

This is the line in the building, the tent does it manually, likely with lifting assistance equipment. The tent takes a painted body and produces a completed car.

 

[Krugerrand]

OP referred to "a couple years ago" - so used 2 years.

You are right - if you bought before April 2017, you are likely significantly up. My original shares I got in 2011 are up 10x.

But, last ER I made 2.7x with options - even through all the ups and downs after the infamous tweet. This ER I'm significantly down, as of today - that would offset the gains I made between last ER and this ER. That's why my "Not an advice" would be to not play with options using money you can't lose.

I thought he said ‘a few years ago’. Too lazy to scroll back 6 pages and check since I’ve got 12 more ahead of me. If I blink, let alone scroll back there will be 52 pages ahead.

 

[Buckminster]

Tesla Cargo Ship

 

[Fact Checking]

The tent takes a painted body and produces a completed car.

With battery module mated as well?

 

[Krugerrand]

Don’t know how I feel about these rumours of Tesla partnering up with other Auto companies to provide the drivetrain for vans and trucks.

As a human being, this is great news. As an investor, it seems a shame to forfeit such a huge market in exchange for only a couple of grand of profit per vehicle.

This human being wants to see Tesla crush everyone else that ever made an ICE, so I don’t like it either. Fortunately, the decision isn’t mine to make. Cooler heads prevail and stick to the mission. I’ll support those heads having already proven they’ve got this. (But I don’t have to like it and I probably won’t.)

 

[KarenRei]

Great idea to electrify bulk shipping!

A couple of thoughts:

• Business model: I believe it would make sense to approach this issue from the high end as well, just like Tesla approached automotive electrification: instead of bulk cargo, go for really high speed sea delivery, with an electric fleet. Delivery times to Europe and China within 1 week will already favorably compete with air freight - which is a big and lucrative market. A 4x speedup to ~80 mph (radar assisted, of course) would cut delivery times to Europe from 20 days to 5 days and to China from 30 days to ~7 days. 100 mph+ speeds would push things from a safety POV though, but would be even more lucrative - and might allow approaches like a catamaran design, which would lower sea resistance and reduce energy costs.
• Cell longevity is going to be an issue, as the major depreciation factor. The current global commercial shipping fleet's average age is over 20 years. Steel ship hulls can go on forever, and are expected to. How long are the best, most durable cells going to last, and what the degradation curve and how predictable are the failure modes, and is there a continuous maintenance mode that effectively refreshes all cells over the long run?
• Battery module safety: that's a lot of energy stored, many tons of TNT-equivalent, with the nearest fire trucks thousands of kms away. Robust, yet environmentally friendly modes of fire suppression of a battery fire have to be found - probably by compartmentalizing/sealing battery modules where a fire could not escape even if a runaway thermal reaction triggers inside.
• Electric motors have other advantages over diesel motors: the huge engines of the really huge cargo ships can take more than an hour to warm up for departure. With an electric ship the ship is immediately ready for departure the moment the containers are loaded. More 'just in time' logistics are possible with an electric fleet.
• "On the go" recharging: it takes capital investment but it's possible to do recharging "on the go": "recharging ships" which carry nothing but huge batteries, shuttling between cargo ships. The recharging ships would then periodically dock with the off-shore wind farms to recharge themselves. If there's enough of them then the offshore wind farms don't need any battery capacity at all: there would always be a "recharging ship" docked, using up available generated electricity.
• What are the risks of weather patterns with too little or too much wind, and the resulting disruption to available deep sea wind energy? Delivery times must be guaranteed even in the face of hurricanes or doldrums. There must be a fail-safe plan to keep the spice going, probably by having the 'recharging ships' go back to the coast for electricity, or enough solar energy to keep things going in the worst case.

Great commentary.

• Since you'd only ever charge up to 80% or so of nominal capacity (nobody is going to sit around deep sea waiting to charge to 100%), cell lifespan should be excellent. That said, you'd surely expect 1 or 2 battery swapouts over the lifespan of a ship. That said, maintenance on diesel engines over the lifespan of a ship isn't exactly cheap either Tesla powerpack expected lifespans are 15 years.
• Thankfully, the way you put out a li-ion battery fire is... water (and lots of it). Hmm, where could one find a ready supply of water.... Basically, you'd just design every powerpack/megapack/whateverpack onboard to be able to be flooded.
• You could even do more than that re: shuttling power. A ship with a >1GWh battery aboard could literally transport backup power from one port to another, for the costs of ship rents (I worked it out a while ago... it works out to somewhere between a fraction of a cent and several cents per kWh, depending on what ship rents are like at that given point in time - they vary a lot). Also, having multiple ships in a port with GWh battery packs and V2G connections would be a massive grid buffer. We're talking "Buffering entire coastal states / countries".
• Wind/waves and solar tend to run opposite each other at sea, which is why they're a good complement to each other. Regardless, just like shipping is already routed based on weather, routes can also take into account price of power at a given charger, which would be proportional to how much it's generating / has stored and how much it's forecast to have when a ship arrives. More price-sensitive ships would take the cheapest route, while more time-sensitive ships would take the fastest route.

Whenever freight shipping goes electric, it's going to take a LOT of battery cell output to supply it. It's a massive, massive market.

ED: I see above that there's now a thread for this; all replies should probably be redirected there

 

[scaesare]

Tesla will only be a niche player unless it implements a good network of dealers or stores (the latter seems to not be possible) along with a positive communications strategy. It's not enough to have a superior product. You have to put the product in front of potential buyers and effectively communicate with them about it. Tesla doesn't do these things. Tesla cognoscenti are only a small portion of the car-buying public. The 3SR should be a good value, but I doubt that will be enough to support ongoing, good sales numbers. Tesla has accomplished a lot, but I think adjustments are needed for a successful future.

Edited for perspective:

"Tesla Amazon will only be a niche player unless it implements a good network of dealers or stores (the latter seems to not be possible) along with a positive communications strategy. It's not enough to have a superior product. You have to put the product in front of potential buyers and effectively communicate with them about it. Tesla Amazon doesn't do these things like Sears does did. Tesla Amazon cognoscenti are only a small portion of the car-buying goods-buying public. The 3SR books should be a good value, but I doubt that will be enough to support ongoing, good sales numbers. Tesla Amazon has accomplished a lot, but I think adjustments are needed for a successful future."

 

[sparcs]

Hi all,
In short: My Model 3 LR March delivery to Europe/Finland will have HW3.
.

Just don't be upset if it turns out not to be true. I doubt very much any rep is authorized to talk with a customer about HW3 availability.

It's easy to get a customer representative to say what you want to hear. Especially an enthusiastic one who is wanting to please their customer with good news.

 

[lascavarian]

Still, I'd be surprised if they're already shipping with HW3, with no announcement.

Very much agree and I just think that NN/2 early experience programs would be close to the factory.

However, it may be that there is a favorable regulatory environment for testing in some EU nations. I know Pharma companies often roll out in EU nations well before the US due to US heavy regulatory environment.

 

[winfield100]

Physically Unable to Perform....

Good question...... And soon, foretelling of the future...

@Smokey4141
hugz & kizzez 4 U

 

[Buckminster]

Elon Musk on Twitter
Just left Zeebrugge, now Tilburg, then Tesla HQ in Amsterdam & Oslo tonight to review service in Norway. Exciting to see thousands of Model 3’s on their way to owners in Europe!

 

[winfield100]

@KarenRei , great thoughts and this really needs to be shared with a wider audience than just TMC.

I invested quite some of my time these days in an article for @ZachShahan and want to encourage you to consider writing one about the points you made above. Ships are a huge polluting issues on our seas because most of the emissions go down in the water and what they burn is the most dirty oil of all.

Alex on Twitter

P.S. wild thought, actually a ship full of BEVs like Teslas is like a ship full of Batteries. Why don't charge them all up before leaving and use them combined like the ship battery?

Maybe technically a challenge but hey, engineering is magic!

@avoigt
University of Delaware got 38 of the electric mini Coopers from BMW 5-7 years ago to experiment with and made a small circuit board add on so the could do "vehicle to grid" for FCAS experiments with a larger battery bank....

 

[mongo]

With battery module mated as well?

Pack and drive units are mated in the tent also.
I believe the first pic in this article is the pack install point.
https://electrek.co/2018/06/16/tesla-model-3-dual-motor-performance-new-assembly-line/

 

[Fact Checking]

Very much agree and I just think that NN/2 early experience programs would be close to the factory.

HW3 is very likely "100% binary input/output compatible" with HW 2.5 neural networks, IMO.

This makes it much easier to deploy: HW3 produces the exact same output when running the same networks as HW2.5, if fed the same input data (video frames).

Installing HW3 right now avoids the expense of having to upgrade it in the near future, and probably also lowers costs, as Tesla doesn't have to buy Nvidia GPU chips anymore.

HW3 will truly shine once the much larger, more sophisticated FSD networks are released, later this year - and that can be done via an OTA upgrade.