06 Friday Oct 2017
Posted | October 6, 2017 4:00:46 | Economics
Tesla founder Elon Musk claims to be able to fix what ails Puerto Rico, with his battery technology. He says his battery solution can scale up.
Heck, if scalability is no issue, let’s power the world.
Not so fast: What’s the cost?
Will Musk’s $250,000 donation foot the bill for 3.5 million homes without power?
More specifically, how many homes will $250,000 power? In what timeframe?
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
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The Tesla man is going to convert Puerto Rico’s ordinary tax payer cash into a model S. Watch millions of their tax money take off like a model S never to be seen again.
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Who gave him permission to go around the Clinton Foundation?
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Sounds like he’s looking for more government handouts to fund his pyramid scheme
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+1000
Can Elon Musk even tie his own shoes without a billion dollar taxpayer handout? Unlikely
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“Sounds like he’s looking for more government handouts to fund his pyramid scheme”
Or else he’s looking for more government handouts to fund his pyramids.
Surely Musk could build the pyramids of Giza far better than the ancients of Egypt did, provided that sufficient funding can be secured.
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You know what’s good for the planet?
Moar batteries……
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How do they charge them with no electricity?
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They’ll harness hurricane power
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Typical Musk imitation of P.T.Barnum…What are the batteries for? In fact,batteries at a utility are only useful when the grid fails. How long will they provide power? Less than a day, at the most…
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Solar?
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If the hot air generated by Elon Musk could be captured, it could power the entire USA for a decade. Now, that’s a renewable energy source.
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A total nut case.
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He’s a con man who has weaseled billions in taxpayer hand-outs.
And his “slight omissions” of material information to Tesla shareholders would have landed someone with less political connections in prison. At the very least, another company committing the same omission of facts would have been barred from issuing ANOTHER $1.5 billion in new debt to securities markets.
Time to hold Musk to the same laws as everyone else.
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Indeed. But you have to hand it to the guy. I thought his fraudulent scheme would have been rumbled a long time ago.
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Does he want us to subsidize it? If so using a disaster to benefit oneself and company is a wolf in sheeps clothing.
One thing that never changes is human behavior.
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Everyone is missing the bigger picture.
We simply need to BELIEVE strongly enough, without doubt or reservation, and our dreams will come true……with enough government backing, that is.
We all tend to be so small minded.
Soon we will be able to sit in our semi-comfortable cubical size efficiency “home” viewing infinite amounts of government approved politically corrected content on our robotic Chinese manufactured device while our productive quotient is being met by wholly corporate owned “assets” that assure us they only exist to serve us.
Benevolent caring ownership….aka. Utopia.
What could possibly go wrong…..short of possibly the battery on my phone catching fire??
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Musk reckons he’s about to power South Australia.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-09-29/elon-musk-tesla-world-biggest-battery-reaches-halfway-mark/9001542
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30,000 homes is all there is in South Australia?
Nice to see that the savior didn’t forget to ask for government subsidy.
The same thing could have been achieved by cheap lead acid batteries a century ago, but we had to wait for expensive lithium batteries from a self-proclaimed genius to make it happen. People deserve what they get.
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30,000 homes and no industry. Try running a single magnesium smelter off of that battery pack, and see how long you’ll have power.
Solar with battery backup, is a good way to power homes. At least in climates like Puerto Rico and South Africa. Not because it is the cheapest nor most efficient way to do so, but because being self sufficient in energy renders people less dependent on big government and their cronies at big utility companies.
But for a home to be self sufficient in energy, it needs to be built to some semblance of a standard. Rather than the junkpile shacks that are being passed off as “million dollar” houses in our current credit and zoning dystopias; where the whole goal is to ensure people go as deeply in debt as possible, for as little house as possible. With the difference going into the pockets of well connected, utterly useless, purely rent seeking leeches and their enablers in government.
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Musk was obviously the weird loser kid in grade school who sat alone at lunch thrumbing through old copies of Popular Mechanics.
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That must have been the only time when he didn’t ask for a hand out from the government.
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“powered by elon’s musk[tm]”
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And where will the electricity to charge the batteries come from? PR infrastructure is totaled.
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Everybody knows batteries come with electricity already in them. I just bought some Eveready yesterday.
Silly people.
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🙂
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9 volt, or AA’s?
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mostly CR123a lithiums for tactical lighting systems and 1032’s for my dogs blinky collars!
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Batteries can be charged with electricity from solar panels, duh!
Considering how expensive it was to run the old and antiquated power grid, solar panels can’t work out worse than that. PR having lots of sunshine and wind too, it makes perfect sense to use them instead of expensive imported fuel.
This is is about not wasting a good crisis, and rebuilding better than before.
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Exactly! Everyone seems to be forgetting that Mush owns a solar power company also and that he is now also selling solar panels in the form of rooftop tiles. And what is one major thing that PR is missing right now? Roofs!
So Musk is probably planning to sell his rooftop tiles to PR citizens and businesses for solar power as they rebuild and include one of his batteries in every home, all at a discounted price.
This cranks up sales for the company and gets some free publicity.
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They can’t afford solar power. They have to fix their basic conventional power supply and grid first since solar requires virtually 100% backup (that’s why it’s unaffordable) since sun comes and goes. Oh, and forget batteries. They are outrageously expensive and would be in addition to very expensive solar panels.
Large scale solar or wind power is the answer anywhere: http://gulfcoastcommentary.blogspot.com/2017/06/large-scale-solar-wind-power-too-many.html
Musk’s “proposal” is 100% pie-in-the-sky thinking. It’s got to be “back to the basics” for PR and they can’t even afford that.
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Large scale solar power is NOT the answer anywhere: http://gulfcoastcommentary.blogspot.com/2017/06/large-scale-solar-wind-power-too-many.html
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..and most important, Puerto Ricans get electricity from a better grid than the one they had. Call it PPP. That’s wrong too now?
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Solar is not a bad choice for replacement maybe, but the idea that Tesla has some new edge to it all is not correct. OPZ batteries of similar capacity cost @ same and are reliable and durable, the rest of the system is standard solar installation, inverters etc.
So what he is trying to sell are li-on batteries for their… lack of occasional maintenance? Because they have a smart housing?
Add to that that they may cost three times advertised price
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601757/tesla-solarcity-success-depends-on-battery-technology-that-doesnt-yet-exist/
For that price (battery alone x 3) you can install a full small stand alone pv system that will give a good minimum of electicity except for heavy appliances, with 20yrs on all parts.
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one can’t help but wonder how solar panels will hold up to hurricanes and hail. And if they can’t even maintain wires on a pole, are they really capable of taking care of battery systems?
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From experience…for lead acid you just need to check water level every few weeks and maybe have an alarm/auto cut-off to not over-discharge them. Very rarely a clean and push an equalize button. You can mess with the voltage slightly for temperature, or have auto for that, or not bother even. Sounds easy, right? Over the space of years you can forget easily though… the sort of simple tasks that get overlooked.
I don’t know about professional arrays, but smaller domestic ones you just unscrew…one more thing to do. Hail I don’t know what solutions exist… must be some for areas where it rains golf balls, plastic sheet above?
Anyway, if you line up the panels correctly they act as spoilers for delicate garden plants in very strong winds, and in hurricanes as launch ramps for wildlife trying to find shelter 😉 .
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Check out the Tesla solar roof panels. They ain’t like the usual big blocks of glass. They look like actual roof tiles and are claimed to be 3X stronger.
https://www.tesla.com/solarroof
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i Have a slightly more practical solution. Run a long extension cord from MIAMI. PR just needs a conventional power grid constructed with current technologies . But just like the old power infrastructure they must keep it maintained .
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Zimbabwe has better credit than Puerto Rico.
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Hmmm! In South Australia, the plan is for nearly 3 square miles of batteries. Good thing that land is cheap in South Australia. They will be able to provide power for about an hour.
In Fairbanks, Alaska, there is reportedly a battery farm the size of a football field to deal with grid interruptions. It can power the city for about 10 minutes.
If batteries could be made cheaply enough (including the recycling cost), they would be very useful adjuncts to nuclear power plants — by taking care of diurnal variation in demand while allowing the nuke to run steadily at its most efficient rate.
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I go to Costco and see big kiosks full of disposable batteries and wonder….does everyone who buys them also then dispose of them in a hazardous site?
Sure they do.
And now we have lots of BIG batteries and more powerful and TOXIC batteries that can spontaneously catch fire, and our savior geniuses are building millions of them. Are we going to end up with old decommissioned oil tankers and cargo ships loaded with these things floating around in hopes of accidental sinking in some off the map place? Or just in our landfills draining into our water sources.
YUM!
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Hmmm three square miles of lithium batteries, what could possibly go wrong?
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Only a progressive could be so singularly retarded, as to believe centralized battery storage for an entire city grid is the right way to deploy a scarce, expensive resource.
Batteries are VERY useful backup devices at endpoints. Where end users see their cost,, and make decisions about exactly which pieces of power hungry equipment needs what level of protection, taking battery cost into consideration. Like a hospital backing up their ventilators, but not the Tesla Supercharger in some self absorbed surgeon’s reserved parking spot.
The “back up the grid” non-solution is the equivalent of not making any such prioritization. Despite one of the most salient features of batteries versus traditional means of storing power, is that their efficiency does NOT increase supralineraly beyond a fairly modest size.
So 100 batteries and 100 solar panels, 1 of each in each of 100 houses, are no less efficient, than one 100x size battery and one 100x solar panel sitting in a field somewhere. Which is critically different from, say, nuclear power plants, where economies of scale render highly distributed generation and provision prohibitively inefficient.
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Actually cheaper to have pv off grid… saves on grid costs…more reliable for not using grid also… a few backup components ( which are rarely if ever needed). I suppose the only point is that you cannot greatly over consume own domestic supply for a long period, but correct sizing usually gives slightly more than needed anyway….have to do a full realistic calculation first is all.
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+1
Including transmission losses, endpoint PV is likely more efficient as well.
But 150 years of indoctrinating people that “we” “need” a “system” for everything, is obviously paying off for those who benefit from “owning” and controlling those systems…..
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Naturally hot temperatures, salt in the air, and storm surge will shorten battery life or cause an explosion.
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Elon Musk is building Tesla Model 3’s by hand, which is why output was only ~400 out of the 1500 he promised.
When he isn’t delaying the Model 3, he is supposedly reinventing maglev trains, space travel, solar panels, and machines that go “ding!” when billions in taxpayer subsidies are available.
So far, the machines that go “ding!” when billions in taxpayer subsidies are available is the only thing that works as advertised. Elon Musk’s copy of course goes “ka ching!!!” when billions in taxpayer subsidies are available.
Puerto Rico’s power grid was systematically neglected for decades. Its NOT a hurricane problem, its another failed socialist economy.
Color me unimpressed that Elon Musk thinks he can weasel more taxpayer subsidies out of this
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wrong
260 units of Model 3 this quarter
This is ~3 each day
imagine being one of the 500,000 lemmings who gave Elon their hard earned cash as a deposit a few years ago.
Imagine being one of those lemmings and seeing the new Nissan Leaf, or BMW EVs, or the GM Bolt, or the Mercedes EV, or any manner of the dozens of PHEVs offered at any car dealer down the road.
Musk is a marketing genius and thank the good lord he shook up the automobile industry, but Tesla is destained to be a niche supplier of quirky art objects similar to Ferrari or Bentley or Bugatti.
Tesla will never even reach the unit volume of Porsche.
Toyota, GM, PSA, Ford, VW, Geely are going to roll out EVs by the millions in a couple of years. Musk will still be trying to produce 50,000 at NUMMI.
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Yes, but the competition has to make a profit, while Musk can survive on subsidies. So…
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@vooch — “wrong 260 units of Model 3 this quarter”
I had read it was 380, and I rounded up to be generous.
It doesn’t change the fact that Tesla is not a real car company, its ONLY a tool to collect taxpayer subsidies.
Even the niche “super car” manufacturers (Ferrari etc) produce a profit (or loss) on their own merits, not off taxpayer subsidies. Tesla would not exist but for taxpayer subsidies.
And I doubt EV will be much of a thing outside of gated communities — where tricked out golf carts already dominate (and cost half of what con-man Musk projects his model 3 will cost if it ever gets going).
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‘Hard Earned cash’
Anybody who is driving a Tesla is definitely not poor. Sure the model x and model 3 people are wannabes that tell the world how much they want to be part of the upper strata but don’t quite have the financial strength to do it. But they usually have enough cash to try out these new toys.
The landlord in Seinfeld captures the Tesla driver’s way of thinking, IMO.
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Yes, he thinks that or he will use Ruerto Rico to weasel out of his Australian commitment. He is a master of illusion and distraction. I the mean time you will pay the bill.
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Elon Musk is not your usual ‘Con Man’ because he actually believes the BS he is shoveling.
Thus he is more dangerous.
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EM has more vision in his little finger than all you cynical commentati put together. Society absolutely needs to subsidize futuristic science and tech.
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Dude. You’re welcome to your beliefs but my belief is that you’re hanging out at the wrong blog.
Statists don’t tend to fare too well here. Government directed ‘investments’ are sheer lunacy – the free market is more than capable of working out what is needed and what’s not, what works and what doesn’t.
The moment renewables are economically viable the free market will be all over them like a rash. In the meanwhile, torching tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer money to ‘bring the future forward’ is an idea suited to the utterly demented and progtards.
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So you’re all for nixing NASA?
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Each member of “society” needs to subsidize whatever he feels like. Instead of having others rob them and their kids, to hand money to their favorite guru and illusionist.
Nothing wrong with Musk. He acts the way all billionaires should act: Go for long shots. Any old destitute can get behind and back things that makes sense, as the risk of loss is something he can afford to bear. When you’ve got billions, you darned well should go for moonshots that’s too risky for the rest, as you can afford to cover the inevitable 10 misses for every hit.
But forcing regular people just trying to make ends meet, to partake in the gambling, is never a good thing. No forcing of people ever is.
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Society needs science and should be willing to and does pay fo it to advance.
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Society needs lots of stuff. And has limited resources available to fulfill those needs.
Formally, “society” has no needs. Only sentient actors do. Meaning individual people. To the extent “society” can be said to have any needs, those needs are only a simple aggregate of the needs of the individuals comprising said society.
Every one of of those individuals have needs that are unique to them, at a given point in time. And each also has unique to them resources at their disposal, with which to meet those needs. Leading to each of them deciding how much of their limited resources to spend on each need, whether food, science or bingo, will lead to the best possibly outcome for each of them overall.
Not some dudes, who happen to be better armed than the rest, claiming all of you people “need” “Science” (which in practice means, all of you need to give me your money, so I can hand it to my buddy who calls himself a scientist), never mind that your firstborn is two minutes away from outright starvation, resulting from you lacking funds to feed him…..
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People unite in societies in order to achieve what one idividual can’t achieve alone. Science is one of those things, and mature people can agree about who cntributes how much.
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I’m tired of all the nonsensical and cynical comments.
Renewables are the future, and some of them are viable already. The price of solar panels are dropping like a stone, and wind power is gaining traction too. Natgas or nuclear is the best backup.
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See the IEA statistucs below. Lets see how Austrailia is doing too?
http://joannenova.com.au/2017/10/high-electricity-prices-in-australia-blamed-for-sharp-economic-slowdown/
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Never miss an opportunity to benefit from a disaster.
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No one ever wants to talk about molten salt thorium reactors. Almost seems like a “conspiracy”.
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Lots of people talk about them. None of the talkers ever do much but talk. Which should tell you something….
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Until PR is completely reliant on Musk’s batteries and solar panels for all electrical requirements and needs including fixing PR’s dismal electrical infrastructure (Musk did say “fix”), I’m going to go ahead and keep my bullshit flag flying.
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musk is looking to shore up his sham of a tesla business
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I can’t seem to find battery power on this chart?
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Solar panels repay their energy ‘debt’: study
December 6, 2016
https://phys.org/news/2016-12-solar-panels-repay-energy-debt.html
“The climate-friendly electricity generated by solar panels in the past 40 years has all but cancelled out the polluting energy used to produce them, a study said Tuesday.
“Indeed, by some calculations, the so-called “break-even point” between dirty energy input and clean output may already have arrived, researchers in the Netherlands reported.
——
So, only just recently have all of the solar panels ever made produced as much energy as the non-“renewable” energy used to make them.
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Then there is this part of the equation.
http://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2017/6/21/are-we-headed-for-a-solar-waste-crisis
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And this….
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/08/AR2008030802595.html
One reason the price of solar has come down because the Chinese suppliers of refined silicon don’t bother treating the waste (which is an energy intensive process). Instead, they dump the waste silicon tetrachloride around the plant, poising the land.
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We can always count on Elon Musk to find some new way to get on the front page of the news and razzle-dazzle us on any given day with some bold project.
It should be noted that Musk appears Teflon coated and he has suffered little fallout from promises and deadlines unkept, failure simply does not stick but seems to run off his back. The article below delves into his many projects and the hype surrounding him as he keeps a great many balls in the air.
http://brucewilds.blogspot.com/2017/10/elon-musk-continues-to-dish-out-old.html
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Y’all need to research his gigafactories.
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