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

[Ogre]

Speaking of that, where is @The Accountant ? Who scared him off?
I miss his input. No offense Ogre.

A lot of voices have gone quiet.

 

[Hiline]

This is manufacturing efficiency. Lithium should be quite inexpensive based on the possibility of Tesla bringing a 50 gwh refinery online within a year. If it were so difficult, it would take longer. Indeed, refineries were thought to take a half dozen years to build, which led to impossibly high prices for lithium.

This strikes me as a free lunch that Tesla is going to eat.

$200 per pack x 1.8million annual production is a $360million impact to the bottom line just for material costs

Procurement contracts etc in manufacturing are far more complicated than this and I think there will likely be a growing disparity between Chinese lithium (and other material) prices and critical minerals from non-Chinese sources that will qualify for credits/incentives in legislation like the US's Inflation Reduction Act, but this stuff can definitely have a big impact on profitability.

Yes. I was addressing the title of the article.

"Falling Prices of Lithium are Making Electric Cars More Affordable by $200".

Big deal.

 

[M|S|M MYP]

A lot of voices have gone quiet.

@The Accountant is probably in his busy season with his 'real' job, unlike us TMC addicts who spend < 6 hours/day on here!

 

[Rotte]

@The Accountant is probably in his busy season with his 'real' job, unlike us TMC addicts who spend < 6 hours/day on here!

Yeah, I follow him on Twitter and he has not posted there since early February.

 

[Ogre]

@The Accountant is probably in his busy season with his 'real' job, unlike us TMC addicts who spend < 6 hours/day on here!

Agreed. He tends to pop in and out. Others like @Discoducky seem to be gone entirely.

 

[GOVA]

A lot of voices have gone quiet.

Stealth3D has dissapeared from here too. Have seen him in other threads at TMC.

 

[rsm287]

I don't see any compelling information here.

In fact, I haven't seen any compelling information on the economics of the Megapacks. (Can't say that I've really been looking.)

These things are very expensive and it doesn't look like they can store more than a few hundred dollars of energy. How do you pay off a $2M investment by arbitraging energy for a few hundred dollars a day?

The model seems to be: we're going to sell water for $10/gal to people dying of thirst. Great idea if you can find a lot of people dying of thirst. Not so great if part of the plan is to first create a lot of people dying of thirst.

What percentage of the battery's capacity will be able to be used regularly? Obviously, it can't be 100%. The whole idea is that you don't have to build a peaker plant so there will be no backup for the backup. 50% or something like that?

If you're paying $500/ KWh for a battery and you can make 10c/day by time shifting energy usage ... then the earnings are $36.5/year on that battery. Not a compelling return.

Happy to be wrong but please provide evidence.

Love how people quote the phrase "quasi-infinite demand" but then leave off the "at the right price" part.

The economics of Megapacks will depend on the electricity market where the projects are located and will obviously vary by country/region. The Hornsdale Power Reserve in South East Australia (known as the 'Tesla Big Battery') was able to re-coup the cost of construction in a little over 2 years.

These utility scale projects don't buy and sell electricity at retail prices, but rather at the wholesale 'spot' price, which can vary much more than the retail price. For example, today in the UK the spot price varied between £250/MWh and -£50/MWH (i.e. a negative price).

The electricity provided by gas peaker plants is relatively expensive because these plants only run for short periods when demand is high. As such, the power supplied by peakers can cost about $150 - 200/MWh. The actual price can go higher than this though under some circumstances, such as when demand for electricity exceeds supply. In many markets, batteries are now much more cost effective than peaker plants.

Utility scale batteries are able to provide several services to the grid. The most well known is energy storage, smoothing and balancing the difference between energy generation and demand. But they can also provide other services such as voltage/frequency regulation and inertia to help stabilise the grid. Such services are becoming more important as more energy generation comes from renewable sources, which can be more intermittent. These services are also very valuable to the grid (without them there can be problems such as blackouts). That provides the potential for utility scale batteries to earn a lot more revenue, while providing these services much more economically and more effectively than the alternatives (batteries can react much more quickly than traditional power plants).

This is why the earliest availability for Tesla Megapacks is now Q4 2024.

 

[Zero CO2]

where have all the TMCers gone
back to work in the office people

it is eerily quiet with TSLA up over 7%

 

[GhostSkater]

Our boy Andrej made the vid! Very odd is not showing up...it's from OpenAI.

OpenAI is so open they disabled the comments

 

[Usain]

That is because the early buyers are all looking at very niche markets, frequency stabilization, time shifting to peak demand (which can be a lot more than the $0.10 that he pays in AZ). However what you are seeing is also pent up demand. You'll see the market change in 2 years. My caution would be not to extrapolate future earnings based on current demand. Electrons don't really care too much where they've been caught...they just want to be free. Utility storage will come down to price and risk. Strangely Tesla looks to me like IBM, no one was fired for buying IBM systems and no one is fired for buying a megapack. IBM milked that in a long slow slide to oblivion.

Let's just set the record straight on IBM.

IBM is more than 111 years old and its market cap is still 112.8B. It's still the 115th most valuable company in the world. That's not exactly oblivion. We should hope Tesla looks that good after 111 years.

 

[Electroman]

Mark Jacobson recently posted a brief summary comparing batteries to Diablo Canyon nuclear plant on California's grid. Despite what all the folks with stranded coal, natural gas, and nuclear power plant assets are wanting us to believe, the future is batteries, wind, and solar, not their stranded assets that they need us to continue to 'invest' in.

View attachment 919831

I am confused.. what does it mean by "batteries produced 3.02 GW" ?

Aren't they storing energy created by other sources such as Nuclear, coal, gas, solar and wind ?

 

[FSDtester#1]

@The Accountant is probably in his busy season with his 'real' job, unlike us TMC addicts who spend < 6 hours/day on here!

People on here have real jobs? Hmmm. I thought you all owned mountains and islands and were using your Starlink to chime in between margaritas ..

 

[Usain]

it is eerily quiet with TSLA up over 7%

Well, let me just say that I don't want the trading day to end.

 

[BioSehnsucht]

Apologies if this has already been posted (I did a forum search and came up empty).

Tesla reinstates Park Assist distance measurements for cars without ultrasonic sensors (USS) with 2022.45.11

Tesla has finally implemented a vision-based solution to bring back Park Assist distance measurements to cars without ultrasonic sensors (USS). Tesla removed the sensors, and the ability to measure distances to nearby objects, last year. […]

driveteslacanada.ca

According to this article, park assist will be back shortly, and better than USS - 360° measurements would be awesome, IMO. Maybe Tesla wasn't stupid for going 100% Vision after all (though the delay between removing USS and this software development was not cool: in the end, though, it is definitely a #firstworldproblem...)

"Weird Al" Yankovic - First World Problems

I've driven for most of my life without fancy parking measurements, and haven't scraped up any of my cars... It's nice, but... I'm also someone that prefers to look backwards rather than rely on rear cameras!

I guess we'll have to wait and see how well this solution works - I'm sure it will not please everyone.

I have USS on my 2018 Model 3, but I'd be happy for them to become vestigial if their functionality can be eclipsed. If they can somehow do a higher-resolution video-to-depth process (or simply store it at higher resolution) as things are closer to the vehicle, then they could perhaps give a clear view of things like where the curb or better yet the small separate curb in front of the curb (I'm sure there's a technical name for these) that you can't see once you get close...

As far as musical odes to First World Problems, I prefer the relevant MC Frontalot track.

 

[BioSehnsucht]

Nuclear and batteries do two completely different things. You can’t compare them based on electricity delivered. Where do people think the electricity to charge the batteries comes from? Sure, some from wind and solar but ALSO from nuclear.

Obviously you just connect some batteries to some batteries, free energy! /s

 

[BioSehnsucht]

I am confused.. what does it mean by "batteries produced 3.02 GW" ?

Aren't they storing energy created by other sources such as Nuclear, coal, gas, solar and wind ?

Could be the thinking is set in terms of "non-rechargable" batteries (I.e., a fistful of AA alkaline batteries), which are produced, and discharge once (technically, you CAN recharge alkalines, but ...), so are consumed like a fuel. Very last century thinking.

 

[Buckminster]

Well, let me just say that I don't want the trading day to end.

Sold my first call options for months today betting that the SP won't be above 197.5 at the end of next week. You're all welcome...

More info at this thread for those interested in options (beware; you can lose your shirt!):

Wiki - Selling TSLA Options - Be the House

 

[AndrewZ]

Let's just set the record straight on IBM.

IBM is more than 111 years old and its market cap is still 112.8B. It's still the 115th most valuable company in the world. That's not exactly oblivion. We should hope Tesla looks that good after 111 years.

Yeah valuation is one thing, now lets calculate the amount of cash paid out to investors even just through dividends since they started (from what I can tell) in the mid '90s

 

[SOULPEDL]

People on here have real jobs? Hmmm. I thought you all owned mountains and islands and were using your Starlink to chime in between margaritas ..

Since my last post, I soldered 19 FCC radio modules onto a dongle.
I come here to stretch. Still no pay...
(Edit: 18, missed one.)

 

[Ogre]

Let's just set the record straight on IBM.

IBM is more than 111 years old and its market cap is still 112.8B. It's still the 115th most valuable company in the world. That's not exactly oblivion. We should hope Tesla looks that good after 111 years.

If I’m alive to be worried about Tesla’s market cap after the ~85 years it’ll take Tesla to get there, I don’t know that I’ll care.