Gigafactory announcements have been trending in recent months, with plans for at least 10 new plants revealed in the last six months. Half a dozen have been planned in the last month alone.
In Germany, for example, the Daimler subsidiary Accumotive laid the foundation for a $550 million plant designed to take annual lithium-ion battery production from its current level of 80,000 units up to around 320,000.
And Energy Absolute, of Thailand, reportedly has plans for a $2.9 billion factory in Asia, with an annual production capacity of 1 gigawatt-hour per year, scaling to 50 gigawatt-hours a year by 2020.
Meanwhile, a consortium including Boston Energy and Innovation (BEI), Charge CCCV, C&D Assembly, Primet Precision Materials and Magnis Resources confirmed it will build a 15-gigawatt-hour-a-year plant on IBM’s former Huron Campus manufacturing site in New York.
BEI, Charge CCCV, C&D Assembly and Magnis Resources are also working with Eastman Kodak Group to build a similarly sized plant near Townsville in Queensland, Australia. The backers have said the plant could create around 7,000 jobs.
More recently a company called Energy Renaissance has lifted the lid on plans for a factory in Darwin, in Australia’s Northern Territory, with a production capacity of a gigawatt-hour of batteries a year.
The most aggressive gigafactory plans, however, remain with the company that came up with the concept. Tesla’s Elon Musk has said he will announce “probably four” new gigafactories this year. One has long been slated for Europe, and another has been confirmed to be in the works in Shanghai, China. ...
An array of lithium ion batteries will be connected to the Hornsdale wind farm, which is currently under construction in SA. It will look like a field of boxes, each housing Tesla commercial-scale Powerpack batteries. The array will be capable of an output of 100 megawatts (MW) of power at a time and the huge battery will be able to store 129 megawatt hours (MWh) of energy so, if used at full capacity, it would be able to provide its maximum output for more than an hour.
The company now makes two all-electric models: the Model S sedan and Model X sport utility vehicle. The Model 3, which is slated to start at $35,000 before options or incentives, is the culmination of Tesla’s 15-year-quest to reach mainstream consumers with a smaller, more affordable electric car. The Model 3 price tag is in line with the industry’s average new-car transaction price of $34,442 in June, according to Kelley Blue Book. ... The company delivered 25,051 vehicles in the first quarter and aims to make 500,000 in 2018 and 1 million in 2020. Tesla is expected to release second-quarter sales figures Monday.
Showing a concept photo of a house with a Tesla in the driveway, Powerwalls on the side of the house and a solar glass roof, Musk talks about his vision for the home of the future. Most houses in the US, he says, have enough roof area for solar panels to power all the needs of the house. “Eventually almost all houses will have a solar roof,” he says. “Fast forward 15 years from now, it’ll be unusual to have a roof that doesn’t have solar.”
And to store all that electricity needed to power our homes and cars, Musk has made a huge bet on lithium-ion batteries. Moving on to a discussion of the Gigafactory, a massive diamond-shaped lithium-ion battery factory near Sparks, Nevada, Musk talks about how power will be stored in the future.
“When it’s running full speed, you can’t see the cells without a strobe light,” Musk says as a video of the factory pumping out Li-ion batteries plays behind him. Musk thinks we’ll need about 100 such factories to power the world in a future where we don’t feel guilty about using and producing energy, and Tesla plans to announce locations for another four Gigafactories late this year. “We need to address a global market,” Musk says, hinting that the new factories will be spread out across the world. ...
Sustainable energy will happen no matter what, out of necessity, Musk says. “If you don’t have sustainable energy, you have unsustainable energy … The fundamental value of a company like Tesla is the degree to which it accelerates the advent of sustainable energy faster than it would otherwise occur,” he says.
But becoming a multi-planet species isn’t inevitable. “If you look at the progress in space, in 1969 we were able to send somebody to the moon. Then we had the space shuttle, which could only take people to low-Earth orbit. Now we take no one to orbit. That’s the trend — it’s down to nothing. We’re mistaken when we think technology automatically improves. It only improves if a lot of people work very hard to make it better.”
Production of the tiles will begin at Tesla’s Fremont solar plant in California and then shift this summer to its new factory in Buffalo, New York, with additional investments from Tesla’s partner, Panasonic. Musk said initial sales will be limited by manufacturing capacity. As production ramps up into 2018, sales will begin in the UK, Australia, and other locations, along with the introduction of sculpted terracotta and slate versions of the solar roof.
The tempered glass in Tesla’s tiles is designed to conform to the toughest durability standards for both roofs and solar products, according to Tesla. The roof itself is guaranteed to outlast your home, while the power production of the solar cells is covered under a 30 year warranty, according to the company’s website. Glass, as Musk likes to point out, has a “quasi-infinite” lifetime, though the underlying solar cell will degrade over time.
Tesla’s basic premise is to make solar ownership more attractive and affordable by eliminating the need to install both a roof and solar panels. Tesla will manage the entire process of solar roof installation, including removal of existing roofs, design, permits, installation, and maintenance. The company estimates that each installation will take about a week.
Bloomberg has a look at the rapid fire construction of large energy storage projects in California, declaring "Three new plants in California show how lithium-ion storage is ready to power the grid" - Tesla’s Battery Revolution Just Reached Critical Mass.
Three massive battery storage plants—built by Tesla, AES Corp., and Altagas Ltd.—are all officially going live in southern California at about the same time. Any one of these projects would have been the largest battery storage facility ever built. Combined, they amount to 15 percent of the battery storage installed planet-wide last year.
Ribbons will be cut and executives will take their bows. But this is a revolution that’s just getting started, Tesla Chief Technology Officer J.B. Straubel said in an interview on Friday. “It’s sort of hard to comprehend sometimes the speed all this is going at,” he said. “Our storage is growing as fast as we can humanly scale it.”
Elon Musk is in something of a tough spot at the moment, serving on 2 of Trump's advisory committees while having a customer base that is predominantly liberal in outlook. As a result, he is starting to cop some heavy criticism from the likes of AlexSteffen
My view he is probably taking the correct course of action at this point - his businesses are helping to create the long term solutions we need and if he isn't openly criticising Trump they may continue to grow during this new era of protectionism (with all of them manufacturing in the US and employing US workers). With some luck he may even find himself in a position of influence over time (and in the meantime he isn't being completelysilent about contentious issues).
Yesterday Elon Musk stunned us (and just about everyone else) by tweeting in support of Rex Tillerson, former CEO of ExxonMobil and likely Secretary of State under the Trump administration. Musk’s public image is that of a tycoon using his influence to innovate towards a techno-utopian future powered by clean energy and complete with human cities on Mars. What could he possibly have in common with a mogul who made his fortune sucking the Earth’s resources dry? We asked him. And today he answered.
The Gigafactory has been activated. Hidden in the scrubland east of Reno, Nev., where cowboys gamble and wild horses still roam—a diamond-shaped factory of outlandish proportions is emerging from the sweat and promises of Tesla CEO Elon Musk. It’s known as the Gigafactory, and today its first battery cells are rolling off production lines to power the company’s energy storage products and, before long, the Model 3 electric car.
The start of mass production is a huge milestone in Tesla’s quest to electrify transportation, and it brings to America a manufacturing industry—battery cells—that’s long been dominated by China, Japan, and South Korea. More than 2,900 people are already working at the 4.9 million square-foot facility, and another 4,000 jobs (including temporary construction work) will be added this year through the partnership between Tesla and Panasonic.
By 2018, the Gigafactory, which is less than a third complete, will double the world’s production capacity for lithium-ion batteries and employ 6,500 full-time Reno-based workers, according to a new hiring forecast from Tesla.
The NYT has an article pointing out that if Donald Trump wants to bring jobs back to the US, he should look at the job creation that Elon Musk is doing at Tesla, SolarCity and SpaceX - Want to Bring Back Jobs, Mr. President-Elect? Call Elon Musk.
President-elect Trump has spent a lot of time talking about how he plans to reinvigorate the manufacturing sector, repeatedly telling the public on the campaign trail, “We are going to bring back jobs that have been stolen from you.” And yet the group of business luminaries he named on Friday to advise him on “job creation” — which included Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, Robert Iger of Disney and Mary Barra of General Motors — was missing a key name: Mr. Musk, the real-life Tony Stark behind Tesla, the electric car company; SolarCity, the solar power provider; and SpaceX, the rocket company.
Mr. Musk, 45, is arguably the one person in the nation more responsible than anyone else for generating a vision for the re-emergence of manufacturing in the United States en masse. And he is revered among most of his peers here in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. In the last decade, Mr. Musk has created nearly 35,000 jobs among his various enterprises — and most of those jobs are classic manufacturing ones. His Tesla Gigafactory, a 5.5-million-square-foot battery factory under construction outside Reno, Nev., is expected to employ 6,500 people in manufacturing jobs by 2020.
After the factory is complete, 95 percent of the parts contained in Tesla vehicles will be made in the United States. His company’s leading-edge advances have pushed the entire auto industry to innovate, with rivals seeking to copy many of Tesla’s best features.
The island of Ta’u in American Samoa, more than 4,000 miles from the United States’ West Coast, now hosts a solar power and battery storage-enabled microgrid that can supply nearly 100 per cent of the island’s power needs from renewable energy. The microgrid is made up of 1.4 megawatts of solar generation capacity from SolarCity and Tesla and six-megawatt hours of battery storage from 60 Tesla Powerpacks. The whole thing took just a year to implement.
Due to the remote nature of the island, its citizens were used to constant power rationing, outages and a high dependency on diesel generators. The installation of the microgrid, however, provides a cost-saving alternative to diesel, and the island’s core services such as the local hospital, schools and police stations don’t have to worry about outages or rationing anymore.
Tesla owner Jason Hughes captured a narrow miss in his car using a rear-mounted dash cam, showing the moment a Prius coming up from behind clearly didn’t notice that he’d stopped to turn left into a parking lot.
The distracted Prius driver realizes late that he’s going to plow into the Tesla, and makes a turn toward the curb to avoid it. But by the time he’s reacted, the P85D is actually already clear of the danger zone, something Hughes attributes to his car’s instant acceleration, which comes from its electric motors’ ability to provide torque instantly, unlike in a fossil fuel-burning vehicle.
Last week, Tesla Motors revealed it would begin charging new Tesla EV drivers a “small fee” to use its network of Superchargers, a change it said would be used to fund an expansion of that network. This week, the Californian EV maker is already making good on that promise in Australia, with the announcement of three new Supercharging stations along Australia’s south and east coasts; two between Sydney and Brisbane and one between Melbourne and Adelaide.
While there are nuances to the claim made in this headline, it is technically true since Tesla announced that it turned a profit of $22 million last quarter while the US oil industry managed to lose $67 billion last year due to its inability to stomach lower gas prices, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).
I think it’s something to consider in this new political climate following the election of Donald Trump.
Notwithstanding any potential ulterior motives to favor fossil fuels or the fact that Trump doesn’t believe in man-made climate change, it’s important for the upcoming new Trump administration and GOP-controlled Washington to start looking at Tesla and other upcoming cleantech ventures as important middle-class American job creators and sustainable businesses. ...
When the US oil industry lost $67 billion in 2015, it also slashed close to 100,000 jobs during the same period. All the while, more Americans now work in the solar industry than the extraction of oil, gas, or coal. ...
On the other hand, Tesla has been adding jobs with now over 18,000 employees worldwide and the majority are in the US. At the Fremont factory alone, Tesla employs over 6,000 people and it plans to bring that number up to 9,000 to support its latest expansion plans. The electric automaker is also investing in the Gigafactory in Nevada, where it plans to employ over 6,000 workers.
Tesla also announced that they will be creating Tesla Advanced Automation Germany after buying German engineering company Grohmann Engineering, a leader in highly automated methods of manufacturing.
Musk confirmed that Tesla plans to choose a location for ‘Gigafactory 2’ in Europe next year and he added that the factory will combine both the production of batteries and complete cars. It’s an interesting development considering the Gigafactory concept was originally only supposed to manufacture battery cells and packs, but we recently learned that Tesla is planning drive system production lines at the Gigafactory 1 in Nevada. Now it looks like Tesla will take it a step further and vertically integrate the entire production process in one plant – for the ‘Gigafactory 2’ at least.
Tesla is also noting that their commercial / utility energy storage product, the "Powerpack" is "gaining momentum".
EVER THE SHOWMAN, Tesla CEO Elon Musk took to the stage at Universal Studios in LA this evening promising to make solar sexy. To that end, he unveiled a range of textured glass tiles with integrated solar cells that are nearly indistinguishable from conventional tiling, along with a sleek update to the company’s energy-storing Powerwall.
A couple hundred invited guests, mostly Tesla owners, ooh-ed and ahh-ed as Musk revealed that a row of suburban American houses on Wisteria Lane—the old set of Desperate Housewives—were all, in fact, topped with solar roofs. Each house’s old roofing material had been stripped away, and replaced with one of four new styles of solar tile. From the street, it was virtually impossible to tell; the roofs retained a variety of traditional looks, from textured slate shingle to terra cotta tile. ...
The solar roofs are designed to be used with the Tesla Powerwall. Version 2.0, which Musk also unveiled today, is a bright white rectangle, and flatter than the first version, which Tesla released in April 2015. It will cost $5,500 for 14kWh of storage and 7kW peak power draw. That’s enough to power a four bedroom house for a day.
The summoning mode reminds me of the car "Kit" in the old TV series Knight Rider. Apparently Tesla are looking to train the machine intelligence that operates the vehicle using real-world driver behaviour data captured over the coming months before rolling out the software to customer vehicles.
Tesla released a video demonstration of a Model X equipped with its latest self-driving sensor suite, which is going into Tesla’s vehicles right now, and using the most advanced version of the software, which will be pushed to owners gradually throughout the coming year. The demo shows the Model X self-driving around Palo Alto, near Tesla’s headquarters. ...
Tesla CEO Elon Musk says that “when searching for parking, the car reads the signs to see if it is allowed to park there, which is why it skipped the disabled spot.”
When you have to get back to your car, of course, Tesla will not make you try to find it. You can tap ‘Summon’, like the current feature in ‘Tesla Autopilot 1’, but with the new hardware suite Musk says that “it will eventually find you even if you are on the other side of the country” instead of the 39 feet the first generation Autopilot can travel.
Tesla Motors has proposed construction of 4.6 million square feet of new space next to its electric vehicle factory in Fremont, a move that could create 3,100 new jobs and would nearly double the size of its existing auto plant.
Elon Musk has a great blog post up outlining Tesla's updated plan for the future - Master Plan, Part Deux.
From the point of view of this blog, Musk is the most important person on the planet as he's been the most successful at accelerating development of 3 of the 4 pillars of the clean energy economy - electric vehicles, energy storage and (to a lesser extent) solar power.
The first master plan that I wrote 10 years ago is now in the final stages of completion. It wasn't all that complicated and basically consisted of:
Create a low volume car, which would necessarily be expensive
Use that money to develop a medium volume car at a lower price
Use that money to create an affordable, high volume car
And...
Provide solar power. No kidding, this has literally been on our website for 10 years.
The reason we had to start off with step 1 was that it was all I could afford to do with what I made from PayPal. I thought our chances of success were so low that I didn't want to risk anyone's funds in the beginning but my own. The list of successful car company startups is short. As of 2016, the number of American car companies that haven't gone bankrupt is a grand total of two: Ford and Tesla. Starting a car company is idiotic and an electric car company is idiocy squared.
Also, a low volume car means a much smaller, simpler factory, albeit with most things done by hand. Without economies of scale, anything we built would be expensive, whether it was an economy sedan or a sports car. While at least some people would be prepared to pay a high price for a sports car, no one was going to pay $100k for an electric Honda Civic, no matter how cool it looked.
Part of the reason I wrote the first master plan was to defend against the inevitable attacks Tesla would face accusing us of just caring about making cars for rich people, implying that we felt there was a shortage of sports car companies or some other bizarre rationale. Unfortunately, the blog didn't stop countless attack articles on exactly these grounds, so it pretty much completely failed that objective.
However, the main reason was to explain how our actions fit into a larger picture, so that they would seem less random. The point of all this was, and remains, accelerating the advent of sustainable energy, so that we can imagine far into the future and life is still good. That's what "sustainable" means. It's not some silly, hippy thing -- it matters for everyone.
By definition, we must at some point achieve a sustainable energy economy or we will run out of fossil fuels to burn and civilization will collapse. Given that we must get off fossil fuels anyway and that virtually all scientists agree that dramatically increasing atmospheric and oceanic carbon levels is insane, the faster we achieve sustainability, the better.
Here is what we plan to do to make that day come sooner:
Integrate Energy Generation and Storage ...
Expand to Cover the Major Forms of Terrestrial Transport ...
Autonomy ...
Sharing ...
So, in short, Master Plan, Part Deux is:
Create stunning solar roofs with seamlessly integrated battery storage
Expand the electric vehicle product line to address all major segments
Develop a self-driving capability that is 10X safer than manual via massive fleet learning
Enable your car to make money for you when you aren't using it
Elon Musk is also getting attention by announcing a sped-up production schedule that calls for a half-million electric vehicles per year by 2018 (advancing from 2020). Bloomberg noptes - "For a company that delivered just 50,658 vehicles in 2015, the ramp looks like a hockey stick".
There has been a lot of speculation about why Elon does the opposite of "over promising and under delivering" when it comes to announcing release dates, with one observer describing it thusly - "It goes something like this: People do paradigm-shifting work only when they're under tremendous pressure, so the key is to ensure deadlines are always impossible. This could help explain why Musk has never launched a product on time, yet no one seems able to keep up with him. It drives Wall Street nuts."
Whenever I see photos of the Gigafactory landscape I always wonder if Walter White is wandering around in the wastelands beyond...
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