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This is bigger than any Apple deal. THINK BIGGER. Apple might or might not invest in the Gigafactory to reduce the cost of their lithium battery component of
by startupfounder 13y ago
This is bigger than any Apple deal. THINK BIGGER.
Apple might or might not invest in the Gigafactory to reduce the cost of their lithium battery component of their hardware by 30%, but tesla is thinking bigger.
I first thought that Apple should buy Tesla, but my thought process has changed and I think this discussion between Apple and Tesla is short sighted, it's a means to an end.
Don't think of Tesla as only a car company. 35GW of battery production per year is a huge amount of electricity storage potential.
The USA uses ~1,000GWh of electricity per year, much of this is baseline power needs, but more of this is peak power caused by time of use and heat spikes. We build 1GW power plants all the time to take care of these peaks in power demand. When the price of electricity hits a certain real-time price these natural gas plants turn on, produce the high value electricity and then turn off when the price falls back down.
But why is the electric motor so much better than a combustion motor? Time. Torque is instant.
Elon thinks BIG, REALLY BIG!
This is a Distributed Peak Production Play. If I am correct then each year that the Gigafactory can produce an additional 35GW of storage potential, or 3.5% of the USA's generation capacity.
Each Tesla automobile is an internet connected, transportable, 85kW distributed instant peak power plant and when you put 500,000 new powerplants on the road each year for 10 years you have just cut peak power and completely disrupted the Global Energy Industry by creating 350GW, 35% of the USA's annual demand, and its distributed redundant energy system.
Elon loves redundant distributed systems, Falcon9 has 9 Merlin engines, Tesla's battery packs, Solar City's distributed solar, etc.
Don't believe me? Just wait 10 years.
- pirateking 13y agoI believe you alright. It is fairly obvious the Tesla automobile is a Trojan Horse for much bigger strategy. Even if it originally wasn't planned that way, it most obviously can be, so why not? The strategy you describe sounds very realistic, and there are likely even grander metagames when you take into account SolarCity and SpaceX.
- bfe 13y agoHe's already started marketing Tesla battery stacks with SolarCity panel systems.[1] The Gigafactory could drive major growth in that program. 1. http://www.solarcity.com/pressreleases/218/SolarCity-Introduces-Energy-Storage-for-Businesses.aspx http://www.solarcity.com/pressreleases/218/SolarCity-Introdu...
- morsch 13y ago> The USA uses ~1,000GWh of electricity per year That's off by several orders of magnitude. Wikipedia says ~4100 TWh/year, Wolfram Alpha ~3900 TWh/year. It's also 35 GWh of battery production, not 35 GW (which seems obvious in retrospect but I just spent 10 minutes trying to wrap my head around how the 35 GW figure could fit in). A 1 GW power plant -- which incidentally is quite large -- generates (if run at capacity) 365 * 24 = 8760 GWh per year. So, not 3.5%, but roughly 0.001%. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=electrical+energy+used+in+us+in+GWh%2Fyear http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=electrical+energy+used+... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States
- DVassallo 13y agoI grew up in a small country of 400K people, which in 2012 generated 2.2GWh of power. [1] This is very easy to calculate, since the country has only 2 power plants, and the electricity grid is completely isolated. [2] I was astonished to realize that the battery output of 4 weeks from the gigafactory would power my native country entirely from batteries for a full year! [1] Page 2: http://www.nso.gov.mt/statdoc/document_file.aspx?id=3743 http://www.nso.gov.mt/statdoc/document_file.aspx?id=3743 [2] https://www.enemalta.com.mt/index.aspx?cat=2&art=5 https://www.enemalta.com.mt/index.aspx?cat=2&art=5
- gizmo686 13y ago>The USA uses ~1,000GWh of electricity per year That sounds off. A quick search suggests that the USA has ~1,000GW of capacity. [1]http://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_04_03.html http://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_04_03.html
- fudged71 13y ago>Each Tesla automobile is an internet connected, transportable, 85kW distributed instant peak power plant I've thought about this for quite some time now. It's pretty neat that your files could follow you wherever you go. Driving a large hard drive is much better bandwidth than storing your files for retrieval in "the cloud"
- ajcarpy2005 13y ago>But why is the electric motor so much better than a combustion motor? Time. Torque is instant. I don't know if I parsed this sentence correctly but what came to mind was grid-storage batteries connected to very large flywheels[1] driven by electric motors. And once the flywheel is spinning, short pulses of energy will keep it rotating at high speed. I think this type of setup could prolong the life of the batteries. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_energy_storage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_energy_storage