They have a new portable charger that Consists of a flatbed trailer with a megapack and 10 charging stations. Apparently, it can charge 100 cars before needing to be charged itself. I expect the mobile charger is more of a test platform for the megapack than anything else but it's amazing to watch the Tesla infrastructures evolve. The first thing I thought of with the portable charger is remote charging stations where it would be extremely expensive to bring in a transmission line. The second place it could be great is special events.
As we can see in that video, some charging stations getting pretty full during peak holiday periods. They would need to roll out those portable stations a lot over the xmas holidays. Having too many Teslas on the road is a good problem to have.
Tesla can add capacity to the Supercharger network by upgrading existing infrastructure to V3. They have started doing this in California to reduce congestion. A V2 to V3 upgrade increases capacity by 67%. Recent videos of Taycan charging on Ionity show that Porsche has a very sleight edge in charge speed. Both the 3 and Taycan can charge at a limit of 250KW. Both will only hold that limit for a very short time but the Porsche holds the limit for longer. I'm confident this is because of the more capable Porsche battery cooling system. When you consider that both cars have under 100KWh battery packs and both cars take about an hour to fully charge, you can see they are averaging below 100KW of charge power. Far more concerning than bragging rights is that both cars crank up pack cooling to maximum shortly after starting to charge with high current. Pack heat is the limiting factor. The charge cables and connectors get very hot. Porsche was bragging about 350KW charging but that's ridiculous. With current batteries and cooling systems, 250KW charging is already too fast. The race to fast charging is going to come down to internal pack resistance. Consider that 99% efficient charging still yields 8500 BTU of waste heat. Real world is closer to 97% so that is 25,500 BTU of waste heat. That is literally the output of a small furnace.
Are the trucks on the market yet? As previously stated, SoCal is swarming with Teslas, but no truck sighting yet.
There have been a on-road few truck sightings of the only Tesla truck in existence (prototype that was at the unveiling). It is scheduled for production in 2022. Meanwhile, there are a lot of Model Y on the road. Small scale production is scheduled for this month. Construction of a 6th general assembly line is also scheduled to begin this month.
GM making a battery play of some sorts. I'm way out of my league in fathoming what this means for EVs in general or, more specifically, Tesla. General Motors and LG Chem announce battery cell JV
LG has excellent battery technology and is frequently cited as having the best batteries by people who pretend Tesla doesn't exist. This is an excellent move by GM. I assume they will jointly fund a battery plant and GM will contract to buy all or most of the supply from the plant at a low price. LG has a nearly risk free investment, GM secures a supply of cells for their cars, and everyone is happy as long as there are no production problems by LG and GM is able to market enough cars to utilize the contracted supply. This is what Tesla did with Panasonic but Panasonic was to scale to 35GWh and Panasonic scaled only into the mid 20GWh range and wanted additional investment. That's when Tesla became extremely aggressive about producing their own cells.
If the typical Model-3 coal-burner re-charge has a range of 254 miles and a similar ICE car gets 25 mpg, then 2 of these will provide that range: How convenient and efficient is that? And 1 of these will recharge 900 ICE vehicles:
@Onepoint272 has triggered food for thought in my head that hasn't been there before. And there is plenty of empty space up there for thought. If the charging stations are run with fossil fuel how are we saving the planet? That question is for the tree huggers and save the planet types, not those looking at Tesla as an investment only. If there is a finite amount of fossil fuel, it is good that we are thinking about alternative energy. That does seem logically wise at this point in time. Can somebody give me one could reason why nuclear energy is not a good alternative?
Nuclear energy is expensive and dangerous but it makes sense in some situations. Meanwhile, Chinese locals are telling us car carriers have been leaving GF3 fully loaded. While not official, it seems very likely the sales approval has come through for GF3.
Those who believe in science understand that electric cars would pollute less than internal combustion engines, even if they were 100% charged by electricity made with coal. From memory, I believe Kentucky uses the most coal per kilowatt at 70% so, even in the worst case, battery electric vehicles are significantly cleaner. Curiously, the states with the highest percentage of coal use are the poorest states. Even those states are moving away from coal because there are cheaper ways to produce energy. If we were starting an energy system from scratch, we wouldn't use coal anywhere. I will expand on the nuclear option, since it's topical to Tesla. Where it works, solar is the cheapest form of energy. In some places, like the American mid-west, wind is the cheapest form of energy due to the lower solar fraction. Hydro is never the cheapest but it makes a lot of sense in northern, mountainous regions where the solar fraction is relatively low and there is a lot of running water. There are areas, like North Dakota, where nuclear makes a lot of sense. Nuclear would be grossly inefficient, as the only source, but it can be adequately efficient for base load. North Dakota could probably do well with nuclear, a bit of natural gas, wind, and battery storage. A large boiler, driven by coal or nuclear energy, can take 48 hours to come up to full output. It's a big kettle that takes time to boil. To generate enough power to handle the highest peak, that coal or nuclear facility would have to generate enough heat to handle the highest usage spike, all of the time. It would be grossly inefficient. Coal and nuclear make sense as base load. If usage varies between 1.8 and 3.5 gigawatts, coal or nuclear can run at 1.8GW level and deliver 100% of the energy they produce. At one time, we would just set a mountain of coal on fire and pull whatever energy we liked from it but there was also a time when we didn't know if atoms were real or where the sun went at night. There is a better way. Until recently, natural gas was the obvious choice for "peaker" production. Natural gas can be extremely efficient. More recent natural gas power plant designs can spool up to nearly full production in 20 minutes. In this way, an NG power plant can be turned off over night and powered back up for the morning load. It is a far more efficient way to produce electricity. A simple cycle natural gas power plant uses a gas turbine to drive a generator. This is the least efficient natural gas production and it is significantly more efficient than a gasoline engine. Most NG production uses combined cycle. They still use a gas turbine and generator but they produce about two thirds of their power from heat recovered from the turbine. In other words, a simple cycle NG power plant wastes about 2/3 of it's energy. The simple cycle NG power plant still makes sense, in some corner cases, but they have mostly gone away. Time to spool up: Coal -> 24~48 hours (will never be able to throttle to handle daily peaks and low energy use times) Natural gas -> Most can produce useful amounts of energy in 15 minutes Batteries -> Can literally provide full power on one cycle of a power wave and not provide a single joule of energy the next What happens when load is too high for a base load or peaker load: Coal or nuclear are used to fuel a boiler. The boiler drives a turbine. The turbine drives a generator. It's a simple equation of putting 1MW of energy into the turbine and getting 850KW of energy out of the generator. What happens if 900KW of load is placed on the generator? ..... the answer that surprises no one is: the generator slows down. A power grid running at 60 Hz, that is overloaded, will slow down to a lower frequency. In this condition, there are three outcomes: remove load, increase energy into the grid, or the grid will crash. In 2016, South Australia was seeing extreme frequency deviations, prior to their power outages. They simply couldn't handle the transient demands. After installing the largest battery in the world, grid frequency was stabilized. Interestingly, this allowed coal and nuclear plants to run a tiny bit more efficiently. Does anyone recall the bitching and moaning of the power production folks in South Australia, prior to the Tesla battery coming online? They were smearing it as being useless, a total waste of money, etc. It turns out, it solved their frequent power blackouts and made more money than originally projected. That battery in South Australia, by the way, going to expand by 50% next year.
In case there is another Tesla investor in here, I will share why the MegaPack matters. For traders, it doesn't. Tesla has been building large inverters for a few years. Tesla has been producing their PowerPack batteries for a bit longer. Why, then, integrate with the MegaPack? An energy storage project is a big deal. There is a ton of engineering, peer reviews, NERC certification (in some cases), and so on. The reason these projects are mentioned in the news and then come online 18~24 months later is because there is a lot of engineering, certifications, and red tape. This varies somewhat by region. As far as I know, the Tesla MegaPack is not certified for grid connection anywhere. If it was, they would be installed, already. I suspect the first installation will be in South Australia with the battery expansion at Hornesdale. Tesla is currently using MegaPacks bolted to flat bed trailers as portable 10 place charging centers. It's a great idea that probably wouldn't be economically feasible on it's face. I suspect Tesla is using this as a platform to load and endurance test the MegaPacks without connecting them to the grid. Grid connection is a different situation, with regard to red tape. Once the MegaPack is certified for grid connection, it will be a new ball game. There will still be red tape but nearly all of the engineering will be pre-packaged in the MegaPack. When there is a power issue, red tape cuts more easily. MegaPacks will enable small scale deployments, more than they will enable large scale. This is because the overhead to deploy will be significantly lower. In many cases, it simply isn't worth it to bring in an engineering team to design a battery system for a small town, as it's cheaper to spend a few million on a larger distribution line to that town. Remember: a distribution line has to be sized for peak usage. A town can have average usage far below a line's capability but require a new power corridor to handle peaks. In many cases, these small town power problems can be most efficiently handled with solar roofs and PowerWalls. We've already seen a lot of this "distributed storage" being deployed by power utilities. Few realize how expensive a power meter is. It isn't much more expensive to install a PowerWall, instead of a smart meter, and use the PowerWall as the smart meter, since it has that functionality. A good example of this is being done by Green Mountain Energy in Vermont. All of this will require software that can integrate into a power utility. Utilities aren't keen on sending someone out with an iPhone to obtain energy usage information. That's where Tesla's GridManager comes in. I've barely seen GridManager mentioned on the Internet but it is, by far, the most important key to Tesla's power production future. Demand vastly outstrips Tesla's supply for energy storage. With the MegaPack, it's going to get a lot more so. Like the automotive business, Tesla's Energy storage business is limited by the number of battery cells they can get their hands on. Battery cell production is at the core of Tesla's future. Meanwhile, battery production system engineers at Hibar are working around the clock while being stimulated with all of the cocaine and blow jobs they can handle. So, yeah,... you could say I'm bullish on Tesla.
Perhaps these last couple of posts illuminate why I don't pay much attention to folks who say the big auto makers will produce millions of EVs and put Tesla out of business. The battery cells are simply not available. The company with the most cells will steer the future of global energy. LG is a bigger threat, by far, to Tesla than GM. Tesla buys a lot of cells from LG, though. I'm sure Tesla is one of LG's largest customers.
One last post and I'll let my keyboard cool down. The parking lot on the pier that services Tesla's export needs to Asia is currently empty. This could be because a ship just left with all of the inventory or it could be related to Tesla inventory at GF3 starting ship from GF3 parking lots in wholesale quantities. Tesla is at $335.89, right now. It will be interesting to see what a week does to Tesla's market cap.
TESLA does a little more than,design-manufacture-sell electric cars. I believe they had the foresight to realize their infrastructure would be dependant on fossil fuels, and at somepoint could be converted to self sustaining systems as Demand increases. When I see cars waiting for a recharge in long lines it opens my eyes to the overall picture. FORD opened up their eyes, may I introduce the all new electric MUSTANG. For years everyone scoffed at the idea of electric cars, " Renault comes to mind". During this time "Treelon" and his team have slowly endured the test of time and built a warchest of tools to employ as needed. They realize TESLA will not become the dominant player in the field, keep in mind they are the pioneers in this industry. "These folks aint stupid" and have managed to put big auto on notice. I feel maybe that was the overall vision from the "clean energy" standpoint. The electric auto revolution cant remove the "footprint" but it treads lighter everyday.
Did I mention that site prep has started for another building at GF3? No, I don't suppose I did. Meanwhile, the battery plant is coming along very nicely. It appears the battery facility will be done this year.
I didn't realize how much better Electric cars are, until recently. Comparisons always give ICE vehicles massive disadvantages in every category by means of assuming the worst of BEVs and the best of ICE, and BEVs still came out on top. We are starting to learn BEVs are far better than guessed. Meanwhile, over in the ICE world, manufacturers will be forced to adopt opposed piston engines or die. All manufacturers will adopt them. Early on, legions of people (let's face it, I'm referring to a specific type of change resistant person) will declare it to be far worse, etc., etc., but the folks driving opposed piston engines will enjoy 50% more fuel efficiency, 70~90% reduction of emissions, and more power from a smaller package. I expect more longevity also, based on piston speed being halved. We need opposed piston ICE almost as much as we need BEV. People resistant to change are not going to enjoy the next decade. lol!
Oh my...... could you provide more color on this aspect of the business? On second thought no, please don't.
