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But I came across a secret internal pm from Ford that says that the first 100,000 F-150s produced are not to be sold but instead they are gonna give each one for free to anyone that promises to drive around all day following Teslas. There is then a reward for the first one that can find one that has run out of power and films it.
It says it could take a year but will be worth it in newspaper headlines.
I don't think it'll work though because it'll take them more than a year to make 100,000 trucks.
First thing, levelised cost (LCOE) and lifecycle energy payback are two very different things…Lifecycle energy payback is a different thing. I've really said nothing about lifecycle energy.
I understand the difference between LCOE and lifecycle energy payback, but they are related because energy expenses are a component of the LCOE. I brought up lifecycle energy payback just as one way to estimate the total embodied energy in solar power systems as a way to indirectly estimate the cost delta of switching that energy over to cleaner power sources than dirty Chinese coal plants.
In my opinion a significant factor in the low levelised costs we are observing are because most solar is made with energy prices that are set by cheap but polluting coal in China. The actual electricity running the plants may well be hydro or solar or wind, but the price is dictated by the coal. That coal-derived energy in turn permeates the entire supply chain, from food prices to copper smelting to polysilicon, transport, everything. Those Chinese plants have also benefitted very significantly from low interest loans or equivalent, and it is only in more recent years (with the 2016 Yingli bankrptcy being a good milestone, it is not a happenstance that the CAGR trend changes abruptly at that time) that they have started to shift to a more sustainable financial model. If those solar manufacturers had to run on Western costs, Western returns, and non-coal-derived inputs then my hypothesis is that we would see solar pricing (as measured by LCOE) drop to c.1% CAGR decline, go flat, or even climb. If the EU were to introduce a full CBAM tomorrow and the US to follow, then that would begin to address these factors, or at least the carbon-offshoring part of it. The anti-dumping (unequal commercial markets) aspects are trickier to get at, especially as Biden just paused the anti-dumping action yesterday for at least two years. Whilst I am commenting, then yes I will also fully support the point that continual improvements in products & processes have also been going on: todays solar is not my father's solar. ... My underlying point is that if something looks too good to be true, then normally there are other factors we should examine to reach a better understanding of what is really going on.
Do you have hard data and numbers to support this hypothesis? Math starting from first principles would be convincing and the specific important questions are:
1) For solar panels exported from China, in the value chain from mine to shipping completed product, what percentage is energy cost in the total levelized cost per MWh of electricity ultimately made from the panels in a utility-scale solar farm?
2) How much would you estimate this component of the cost would increase if the Chinese solar industry switched from the current Chinese energy mix to only solar-wind-batteries at today's prices?
3) What percentage of total cost is financing for making the plants?
4) If Chinese government financing subsidization were deleted and replaced with free market financing, how many $/MWh does that add to total LCOE?
5) What trends in $/MWh LCOE are expected for the rest of the cost structure?
6) How does this all stack up?
7) If cheap, polluting coal in China is the biggest factor in cost of solar power, how do we explain the fact that inflation-adjusted solar panel prices fell by almost an order of magnitude between 2008 and 2020 despite China reducing the proportion of coal in their energy mix from 78% to 61% and increasing hydro/wind/solar from 18% to 29% over that time? (Source)
----------------------------
I’m wondering if I’m misunderstanding your point. I will need to look into CBAMs and their pricing, but what I’m not understanding is how it can possibly be very expensive to use cleaner energy for the panels when the entire lifecycle CO2 equivalent emissions of solar is only 40 kg CO2e per MWh. Also, according to the NREL estimates I looked at yesterday, only about 24-28 kg of that carbon dioxide total is in embodied energy in raw materials extraction, materials production, module manufacturing, system/plant component manufacture, and construction. For a system with components made in China and built elsewhere, this would probably be too high of an estimate because only some of these energy costs occur within China. So if we go with 28 kg CO2e/MWh for Chinese portion of energy consumption plus shipping, I’d view that as conservative. Even if all of this upfront portion in setting up the solar plant is carbon offset at an outrageous price of $100/ton CO2e, that would only add $2.80/MWh to the price which is less than 10% of the $30-$40/MWh unsubsidized levelized cost of solar power in Western nations.
Another way of arriving at a physics-based estimate is to take that 28 kg CO2e/MWh figure and conservatively assume 100% of it is coming from inefficient coal plants and ICE equipment for e.g. mining and construction with average carbon intensity around 0.8 tons of CO2e per MWh of load powered.
28 kg CO2e/MWh of solar * 1 MWh fossil fuel power/0.8 tons CO2e = 35 kWh of renewable power needed for making 1 MWh of additional future solar production.
Even if you want to be extremely conservative and say that switching from coal to 100% solar + batteries power sourcing will add incremental total electricity costs of $0.05/kWh if implemented today, the total extra cost would be 35 kWh * $0.05/kWh = ~$2 per MWh of solar energy, which roughly the same estimate as we got with the first method, so we're probably close to accuracy.
Also, as I had cited in a previous post, retail electricity prices in China are $0.08/kWh on average. Prices are a bit higher than that for industrial customers, even higher than in the southwest US. (Link1, Link2, Link3, Link4). This is cheaper than electricity in rich nations but only by about 1.5-4x. Link4 indicates that China is in 49th place in the running for cheapest retail electricity prices amongst all nations, but those other 48 nations aren't solar panel manufacturing powerhouses like China is.
It's not all about coal either. Natural gas is an order of magnitude cheaper in the USA and Canada than in Asia, thanks mainly to shale fracking (link). This is what a lot of the solar supply chain is trying on for the parts that aren’t supplied by electricity from their grid. Furthermore, coal is only 60% of China’s electricity mix today. Gasoline is 10% cheaper in the USA than China right now (link), although China is ahead on diesel prices by 10% (link).
Overall, I see zero evidence that China even has significantly cheaper energy overall than other comparable moderately wealthy industrialized nations in the first place, let alone that Chinese energy prices are the primary reason their solar panel manufacturing industry is so strong. Why not Mexico, for example, with electricity prices that are almost equal to China's, and which has tremendous domestic sunshine resources and direct proximity to the enormous solar market in the US Southwest?
I would like nothing better than for these solar LCOE prices to keep falling at the 8% CAGR rates you expect going forwards rather than the 1% rates I expect. It will be very easy to see which way this goes, we just need to keep on watching the Lazards utility scale unsubsidised solar LCOE for the next 5-years and we will find out. The 2021 range is $30-$41 /MWh with a mean of c.$35.5, so let us watch and we will see.
I hope you will help critique my full thesis in a few weeks. I am doing the math on estimating the impact of these key factors:
Deleting most of the transmission grid in favor of on-site solar and microgrids
Continued optimization of installation and other soft costs
Cleanup and standardization of regulatory barriers driving up soft costs, streamlining permitting and inspections
Continued improvements in panel efficiency, longevity, and mass
Including rooftop solar from the start for greenfield construction projects
Tesla Solar Roof
Reduced marketing and transactions costs
Agrovoltaics
Relaxation of COVID logistics and raw material cost spikes
Economies of scale
Miscellaneous experience curve effects / Wright's Law
Cheap solar power driving down energy prices and thus reducing the energy cost of making more solar power
Growing usage of air conditioning in summertime driving up demand for midday electricity and
Many of these benefits multiply and thus compound each other's effects.
Briefly, let's look at the NREL data for the United States again for example. The majority of the total cost improvement since 2012 has come from soft costs, installation labor, structural and electrical hardware, and inverters. These costs are incurred not in China but in the USA. China does export a lot of inverters and steel, but companies like Enphase are now investing elsewhere such as Mexico and Romania. I think the main factor is that inverter design and manufacturing techniques have improved considerably. In fact, the chart shows that solar panel prices were the same in 2017 as in 2020, yet the total cost fell 13% from 1.08 to 0.94! In 2017, panel costs were ~30% of the total cost, which means the soft costs fell ~19% in just 4 years! This happened despite rising prices for oil & gas, polysilicon, copper, steel, American construction labor, and other key inputs.
Regarding carbon capture I've operated (& managed, & designed, & done the economics for) amine plants that did CO2 capture (albeit in very unusual but informative circumstances). I've also operated large mole sieves (hydrocarbon drying) but they don't seem to be a front-runner for CO2 capture, not surprisingly. I've also done gas injection of hydrocarbon so although that is not CO2 I've seen all the stages of one of the more likely paths for CCS. I am deeply sceptical regarding almost every CCS proposal I have seen, with most of them simply being scanty excuses to carry on pumping fossil pollutants. But I'm always happy to look at the next one with an open mind.
I agree with this. Nobody has made a legacy CCS plant that actually works profitably. Using today’s energy prices, I don’t even know of any proof that profitable CCS is in the set of physically possible outcomes.
However, I am not even proposing CCS, but rather CCU (carbon capture and utilization), and the hypothesis is that in the future H2, CH4 and CO can be made with cheap reactors that use lots of electricity to drive the reaction with brute force. The enabler for sustainable, economical CCU is the arrival of cheap green hydrogen which is primarily dependent on electricity costs.
Here is a good chart from an excellent 2021 article from the American Institute of Chemical Engineering (AIChE) about electrifying the chemicals industry, except for the part about using H2 for the mobility sector since Li-ion batteries are going to continue dominating.
Electricity could be the key to the next industrial revolution.
www.aiche-cep.com
If a cheap electrolyzer makes H2 from H2O at 40% energy efficiency relative to thermodynamic ideal, that comes out to 100 MWh per ton of H2 produced. At today's retail energy prices on the order of $100/MWh, this would cost $10k per ton H2 which is not remotely viable. This is why green hydrogen production today uses much more energy-efficient electrolyzers to get total costs (energy + else) of around $7k/ton. However, the cheapest solar on Earth is selling for almost $10/MWh now, so if that power were fed directly into an H2 plant directly adjacent to the solar farm to minimize transmission costs that are normally ~$30/MWh, then the energy cost is ~$1k/ton H2 gas. If it falls another order of magnitude, $100/ton H2. This implies total annihilation of the market competitiveness of "grey" H2 produced in the US with steam reformation of cheap American natural gas, which sells for $2k/ton right now. Elsewhere, like Europe, grey H2 is more like $5k-6k per ton. This article has cost analysis on green hydrogen and says that today energy accounts for 60% of the overall cost, and again, this is with fancy, sophisticated electrolyzers designed to accommodate today's electricity prices, whereas the design architecture will certainly change to low efficiency, low CapEx, low non-energy OpEx designs if solar and battery costs keep on falling.
For CO2 capture, at this point my bet is still that the winning solution will be Direct Air Capture using some variant of lime calcination cycles as described in Terraform Industries' proposal.
Pop Quiz: Which indispensable industrial sector currently is responsible for ~8% of total human CO2 emissions?
Answer: CementLink1, Link2.
Do we suppose that Elon Musk and his teams of environmental do-gooders are not thinking about this? Especially Boring Co, who are vertically integrating their concrete tunnel segment fabrication and will need, by my calculations, around 10,000 cubic meters of concrete per mile of tunnel? People often ask him about about decarbonizing aviation, for example, but cement is a 5x bigger problem right now.
Cement production emits so much carbon dioxide mainly because of production of CaO (quicklime) from CaCO3 (calcite/calcium carbonate), which entails burning a lot fuel in a kiln to heat the calcite to 850 Celsius, and it also releases one mol of CO2 for every mol of calcite converted. The calcite comes from limestone or seashells. Quicklime production is a gigantic industry, with annual worldwide production of around 283 million tons (link), which for reference is on par with production of NaCL.
Left to its own devices, CaO spontaneously reacts with CO2 in air to reform to CaCO3. Some proposed processes use NaOH to help with this step instead of directly capturing CO2 with CaO.
The main differences if CaO is used as a carbon capture substrate instead of cement ingredient:
1) The calcination kiln will switch to electric power instead of combustion heating (which will also happen for the cement industry soon)
2) CaO will be used in a perpetual cycle to trap CO2 from air instead of being passed on downstream, so continual supply of CaCO3 is unnecessary
3) Airflow will be needed for the fluidized bed reactor where the CaO + CO2 --> CaCO3 magic happens
In a future scenario where the immense energy requirements of electric calcination can be met at a reasonable cost with cheap solar and batteries, then I think the rest of the plant would be cheap enough to supply CO2 affordably. Very simple, reliable, few moving parts, no exotic materials, but needs a lot of electricity. By Terraform's math, it doesn’t work profitably until electricity for <$5/MWh is available, which is sufficient to explain why nobody has been doing this yet. My understanding is that amine direct air capture of CO2 has higher complexity, capital costs and water requirements than lime calcination, but has the advantage of requiring much less energy for heating.
“CaCO3’s higher calcination temperature means this is roughly 10x as energy intensive as amines (submarines) or zeolites (space stations), but the capture material (lime) is <$10/T, not $2000/T (and up!), in accordance with our low capex/complexity design philosophy. No esoteric materials or catalysts are required. There are essentially infinite, flexible fungible supply chains for all component parts which serve the global cement industry, except for the electric calcination system. Electric calcination is in active development within the cement industry and, being similar to an electrical ceramic kiln, is not mechanically complex.”
I’m impatiently waiting to find out what process SpaceX intends to use for terrestrial CO2 capture. They have revealed nothing yet as far as I’m aware except that they will be using atmospheric CO2. Many startups are working on Direct Air Capture technology but I think the prior probability of SpaceX dominating a market niche that they're directly pursuing is pretty high, considering their track record and Elon's general track record.
My only beef with the above is that 40% efficiency for ICE is REALLY pushing it, even for diesel. Most are closer to 25% energy extraction from the breaking of said chemical bonds, with the majority of the energy of course being lost to heat.
Otherwise, nice to see a non-bashing article about EVs.
And that 40% diesel engine efficiency is the peak efficiency. Such an engine would be lucky to yield 30% thermal efficiency in real world usage- before drivetrain losses.
I understand the difference between LCOE and lifecycle energy payback, but they are related because energy expenses are a component of the LCOE. I brought up lifecycle energy payback just as one way to estimate the total embodied energy in solar power systems as a way to indirectly estimate the cost delta of switching that energy over to cleaner power sources than dirty Chinese coal plants.
Do you have hard data and numbers to support this hypothesis? Math starting from first principles would be convincing and the specific important questions are:
1) For solar panels exported from China, in the value chain from mine to shipping completed product, what percentage is energy cost in the total levelized cost per MWh of electricity ultimately made from the panels in a utility-scale solar farm?
2) How much would you estimate this component of the cost would increase if the Chinese solar industry switched from the current Chinese energy mix to only solar-wind-batteries at today's prices?
3) What percentage of total cost is financing for making the plants?
4) If Chinese government financing subsidization were deleted and replaced with free market financing, how many $/MWh does that add to total LCOE?
5) What trends in $/MWh LCOE are expected for the rest of the cost structure?
6) How does this all stack up?
7) If cheap, polluting coal in China is the biggest factor in cost of solar power, how do we explain the fact that inflation-adjusted solar panel prices fell by almost an order of magnitude between 2008 and 2020 despite China reducing the proportion of coal in their energy mix from 78% to 61% and increasing hydro/wind/solar from 18% to 29% over that time? (Source)
----------------------------
I’m wondering if I’m misunderstanding your point. I will need to look into CBAMs and their pricing, but what I’m not understanding is how it can possibly be very expensive to use cleaner energy for the panels when the entire lifecycle CO2 equivalent emissions of solar is only 40 kg CO2e per MWh. Also, according to the NREL estimates I looked at yesterday, only about 24-28 kg of that carbon dioxide total is in embodied energy in raw materials extraction, materials production, module manufacturing, system/plant component manufacture, and construction. For a system with components made in China and built elsewhere, this would probably be too high of an estimate because only some of these energy costs occur within China. So if we go with 28 kg CO2e/MWh for Chinese portion of energy consumption plus shipping, I’d view that as conservative. Even if all of this upfront portion in setting up the solar plant is carbon offset at an outrageous price of $100/ton CO2e, that would only add $2.80/MWh to the price which is less than 10% of the $30-$40/MWh unsubsidized levelized cost of solar power in Western nations.
Another way of arriving at a physics-based estimate is to take that 28 kg CO2e/MWh figure and conservatively assume 100% of it is coming from inefficient coal plants and ICE equipment for e.g. mining and construction with average carbon intensity around 0.8 tons of CO2e per MWh of load powered.
28 kg CO2e/MWh of solar * 1 MWh fossil fuel power/0.8 tons CO2e = 35 kWh of renewable power needed for making 1 MWh of additional future solar production.
Even if you want to be extremely conservative and say that switching from coal to 100% solar + batteries power sourcing will add incremental total electricity costs of $0.05/kWh if implemented today, the total extra cost would be 35 kWh * $0.05/kWh = ~$2 per MWh of solar energy, which roughly the same estimate as we got with the first method, so we're probably close to accuracy.
Also, as I had cited in a previous post, retail electricity prices in China are $0.08/kWh on average. Prices are a bit higher than that for industrial customers, even higher than in the southwest US. (Link1, Link2, Link3, Link4). This is cheaper than electricity in rich nations but only by about 1.5-4x. Link4 indicates that China is in 49th place in the running for cheapest retail electricity prices amongst all nations, but those other 48 nations aren't solar panel manufacturing powerhouses like China is.
It's not all about coal either. Natural gas is an order of magnitude cheaper in the USA and Canada than in Asia, thanks mainly to shale fracking (link). This is what a lot of the solar supply chain is trying on for the parts that aren’t supplied by electricity from their grid. Furthermore, coal is only 60% of China’s electricity mix today. Gasoline is 10% cheaper in the USA than China right now (link), although China is ahead on diesel prices by 10% (link).
Overall, I see zero evidence that China even has significantly cheaper energy overall than other comparable moderately wealthy industrialized nations in the first place, let alone that Chinese energy prices are the primary reason their solar panel manufacturing industry is so strong. Why not Mexico, for example, with electricity prices that are almost equal to China's, and which has tremendous domestic sunshine resources and direct proximity to the enormous solar market in the US Southwest?
I hope you will help critique my full thesis in a few weeks. I am doing the math on estimating the impact of these key factors:
Deleting most of the transmission grid in favor of on-site solar and microgrids
Continued optimization of installation and other soft costs
Cleanup and standardization of regulatory barriers driving up soft costs, streamlining permitting and inspections
Continued improvements in panel efficiency, longevity, and mass
Including rooftop solar from the start for greenfield construction projects
Tesla Solar Roof
Reduced marketing and transactions costs
Agrovoltaics
Relaxation of COVID logistics and raw material cost spikes
Economies of scale
Miscellaneous experience curve effects / Wright's Law
Cheap solar power driving down energy prices and thus reducing the energy cost of making more solar power
Growing usage of air conditioning in summertime driving up demand for midday electricity and
Many of these benefits multiply and thus compound each other's effects.
Briefly, let's look at the NREL data for the United States again for example. The majority of the total cost improvement since 2012 has come from soft costs, installation labor, structural and electrical hardware, and inverters. These costs are incurred not in China but in the USA. China does export a lot of inverters and steel, but companies like Enphase are now investing elsewhere such as Mexico and Romania. I think the main factor is that inverter design and manufacturing techniques have improved considerably. In fact, the chart shows that solar panel prices were the same in 2017 as in 2020, yet the total cost fell 13% from 1.08 to 0.94! In 2017, panel costs were ~30% of the total cost, which means the soft costs fell ~19% in just 4 years! This happened despite rising prices for oil & gas, polysilicon, copper, steel, American construction labor, and other key inputs.
I agree with this. Nobody has made a legacy CCS plant that actually works profitably. Using today’s energy prices, I don’t even know of any proof that profitable CCS is in the set of physically possible outcomes.
However, I am not even proposing CCS, but rather CCU (carbon capture and utilization), and the hypothesis is that in the future H2, CH4 and CO can be made with cheap reactors that use lots of electricity to drive the reaction with brute force. The enabler for sustainable, economical CCU is the arrival of cheap green hydrogen which is primarily dependent on electricity costs.
Here is a good chart from an excellent 2021 article from the American Institute of Chemical Engineering (AIChE) about electrifying the chemicals industry, except for the part about using H2 for the mobility sector since Li-ion batteries are going to continue dominating.
Electricity could be the key to the next industrial revolution.
www.aiche-cep.com
If a cheap electrolyzer makes H2 from H2O at 40% energy efficiency relative to thermodynamic ideal, that comes out to 100 MWh per ton of H2 produced. At today's retail energy prices on the order of $100/MWh, this would cost $10k per ton H2 which is not remotely viable. This is why green hydrogen production today uses much more energy-efficient electrolyzers to get total costs (energy + else) of around $7k/ton. However, the cheapest solar on Earth is selling for almost $10/MWh now, so if that power were fed directly into an H2 plant directly adjacent to the solar farm to minimize transmission costs that are normally ~$30/MWh, then the energy cost is ~$1k/ton H2 gas. If it falls another order of magnitude, $100/ton H2. This implies total annihilation of the market competitiveness of "grey" H2 produced in the US with steam reformation of cheap American natural gas, which sells for $2k/ton right now. Elsewhere, like Europe, grey H2 is more like $5k-6k per ton. This article has cost analysis on green hydrogen and says that today energy accounts for 60% of the overall cost, and again, this is with fancy, sophisticated electrolyzers designed to accommodate today's electricity prices, whereas the design architecture will certainly change to low efficiency, low CapEx, low non-energy OpEx designs if solar and battery costs keep on falling.
For CO2 capture, at this point my bet is still that the winning solution will be Direct Air Capture using some variant of lime calcination cycles as described in Terraform Industries' proposal.
Pop Quiz: Which indispensable industrial sector currently is responsible for ~8% of total human CO2 emissions?
Answer: CementLink1, Link2.
Do we suppose that Elon Musk and his teams of environmental do-gooders are not thinking about this? Especially Boring Co, who are vertically integrating their concrete tunnel segment fabrication and will need, by my calculations, around 10,000 cubic meters of concrete per mile of tunnel? People often ask him about about decarbonizing aviation, for example, but cement is a 5x bigger problem right now.
Cement production emits so much carbon dioxide mainly because of production of CaO (quicklime) from CaCO3 (calcite/calcium carbonate), which entails burning a lot fuel in a kiln to heat the calcite to 850 Celsius, and it also releases one mol of CO2 for every mol of calcite converted. The calcite comes from limestone or seashells. Quicklime production is a gigantic industry, with annual worldwide production of around 283 million tons (link), which for reference is on par with production of NaCL.
Left to its own devices, CaO spontaneously reacts with CO2 in air to reform to CaCO3. Some proposed processes use NaOH to help with this step instead of directly capturing CO2 with CaO.
The main differences if CaO is used as a carbon capture substrate instead of cement ingredient:
1) The calcination kiln will switch to electric power instead of combustion heating (which will also happen for the cement industry soon)
2) CaO will be used in a perpetual cycle to trap CO2 from air instead of being passed on downstream, so continual supply of CaCO3 is unnecessary
3) Airflow will be needed for the fluidized bed reactor where the CaO + CO2 --> CaCO3 magic happens
In a future scenario where the immense energy requirements of electric calcination can be met at a reasonable cost with cheap solar and batteries, then I think the rest of the plant would be cheap enough to supply CO2 affordably. Very simple, reliable, few moving parts, no exotic materials, but needs a lot of electricity. By Terraform's math, it doesn’t work profitably until electricity for <$5/MWh is available, which is sufficient to explain why nobody has been doing this yet. My understanding is that amine direct air capture of CO2 has higher complexity, capital costs and water requirements than lime calcination, but has the advantage of requiring much less energy for heating.
“CaCO3’s higher calcination temperature means this is roughly 10x as energy intensive as amines (submarines) or zeolites (space stations), but the capture material (lime) is <$10/T, not $2000/T (and up!), in accordance with our low capex/complexity design philosophy. No esoteric materials or catalysts are required. There are essentially infinite, flexible fungible supply chains for all component parts which serve the global cement industry, except for the electric calcination system. Electric calcination is in active development within the cement industry and, being similar to an electrical ceramic kiln, is not mechanically complex.”
I’m impatiently waiting to find out what process SpaceX intends to use for terrestrial CO2 capture. They have revealed nothing yet as far as I’m aware except that they will be using atmospheric CO2. Many startups are working on Direct Air Capture technology but I think the prior probability of SpaceX dominating a market niche that they're directly pursuing is pretty high, considering their track record and Elon's general track record.
Do any major Portland cement manufacturers use seashells rather than limestone to make their quicklime? The only time I can recall hearing about seashells used to make quicklime was by Henry Thoreau for use in his Walden home.
It's not quite at the free stage, and in a lot of places (notably Northern Europe, UK and Scandinavia it's not yet competitive on an unsubsidized basis when battery storage is included.
It's not cheap enough yet for billions of humans to afford electric heating and air conditioning, or to make H2 and synthetic hydrocarbons cheaper than from petroleum and natural gas, or to support indoor farming of most crops, or a lot of other things we want in order to increase the probability that the future is good.
Getting accurate predictions on how fast this happens and how crazy it will get is fundamentally important to evaluation of TSLA.
Do
Do any major Portland cement manufacturers use seashells rather than limestone to make their quicklime? The only time I can recall hearing about seashells used to make quicklime was by Henry Thoreau for use in his Walden home.
It's not quite at the free stage, and in a lot of places (notably Northern Europe, UK and Scandinavia it's not yet competitive on an unsubsidized basis when battery storage is included.
It's not cheap enough yet for billions of humans to afford electric heating and air conditioning, or to make H2 and synthetic hydrocarbons cheaper than from petroleum and natural gas, or to support indoor farming of most crops, or a lot of other things we want in order to increase the probability that the future is good.
Getting accurate predictions on how fast this happens and how crazy it will get is fundamentally important to evaluation of TSLA.
Not really. Volvo bought by Geely 2010, Polestar bought by Volvo from Racing company founder in 2015. Geely then sponsored launch of Polestar cars in 2017. Public launch of both was made in 2021ff to fund total BEV transition. Not a perfectly logical sequence, perhaps, but that is pretty much it. The Polestar and Volvo BEVs are all, so far, on the Geely/Volvo CMA (Compact Modular Architecture) and so far they are almost identical technically although China and Belgium built models have different battery suppliers.
China uses CATL and Belgium LG, with Northvolt to replace LG once it matures.
This is one reason the Twitter acquisition (or a Twitter like improved version from Tesla) is important for Tesla and its mission: this would be one of the most effective ways to fight the prevalent FUDsters' lies which 90% of the public believes. Great PR replacement for Tesla in addition to breaking the monopoly on news currently held by our misguided governing elites or their handlers.
Remember when AOL was huge and many people saw the news on their AOL landing page when they logged in. AIM was used for communication between people. Who bought AOL? How is it doing now?
Remember Yahoo and Yahoo Games and Yahoo Messenger? Who bought Yahoo? How is it doing now?
Twitter is the flavor of the decade. If Elon buys it, the powers that spread propaganda will move on to the next rising platform, putting money and advertising into it and helping it to grow while twitter withers. That's the way these platforms go. I think Elon is wasting his money, but it is his money to waste.
No it's not, unless you are referring just to the panel hardware, but the solar panels themselves are less than half of the total cost per MWh and have been for many years. Installation alone is 10% of the cost.
See the yellow "Module" bar in this chart from NREL for 2019 (source pg 45 fig 30):
Large scale solar isn't gonna get much cheaper...They're not magically gonna go from $70 a pop to $35 without some form of subsidies. Or maybe they will.
???
There is a direct relationship between energy consumption and GDP and standard of living. Cheaper is better. Cheaper means more profits for solar industry and faster scaling. Cheaper means carbon capture. Cheaper means stronger macroeconomy for Tesla to operate in.
The cost of solar is profoundly important, not irrelevant.
www.bnnbloomberg.ca
