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Tesla wants to be your renewable energy everything

Tesla wants to be your renewable energy everything

By on Jun 24, 2016 5:04 amShare

Elon Musk — future Mars settler, founder of Tesla – stepped into the solar business earlier this week with Tesla Motor’s $2.5 billion bid to buy SolarCity, the top home solar company in America.

Shareholders from both companies still have to approve the deal. And if they do, Tesla promises the results will be awesome. Musk says that he never wanted Tesla to be just a carmaker. Buying SolarCity will turn Tesla into a company that will sell you an electric car and the power to charge it. “This would start with the car that you drive and the energy that you use to charge it, and would extend to how everything else in your home or business is powered,” Tesla wrote in its company blog.

Then Wall Street frowned. The day after the announcement, Tesla’s stock slumped 10 percent, and Morgan Stanley cut its rating on Tesla’s shares.

So what gives? Does Wall Street not have the vision to get with Musk? Is the most futuristic car company in America about to drive off a cliff?

Here are a few ways of looking at it:

This whole thing is really a family drama.

Lyndon Rive, SolarCity’s co-founder and CEO, is Musk’s cousin. Is there some kind of family power struggle taking place? According to Eric Weishoff, founder of Greentech Media, Rive “didn’t sound happy enough for a man that just got $77 million dollars wealthier.” And why should Tesla buy Solar City when the two companies have been collaborating on batteries for half a decade now?

Tesla’s stock is sinking because Wall Street doesn’t get Silicon Valley.

Tesla was born in the startup culture of Silicon Valley, where it’s all about taking bold stands and getting big or going home. In Silicon Valley, companies eat other companies for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and late-night snack.

Worriers, however, have good reason to wonder why Tesla wants to get into the solar business so badly when it has 375,000 pre-ordered Tesla Model 3s that it’s supposed to be making. There’s the also the example of Sun Edison, an actual energy company that went bankrupt after a massive company-buying spree.

This smushing together could actually work, because, you know, synergy!

Tesla’s current clientele is, to put it mildly, loaded. Three-quarters of Model S buyers make more than $100,000 a year. It’s entirely possible that they are exactly the kind of people who might wander into a showroom, order a car, and impulse-purchase an entire solar installation to go along with it.

Solar City sells 100,000 solar installations a year to a wide demographic. If the price of the Tesla Model 3 manages to drop from the current sticker price of $35,000 and keep dropping, it’s imaginable that SolarCity’s current customers could be persuaded to choose a Tesla for their next car.

What we really need are lots of little Teslas, not a bigger Tesla

It’s been clear for a long time that Musk is a crazy dreamer of the Steve Jobs variety. But building a big company, even a really cool big company, cannot get America to low-carbon car heaven alone. The Big Three automakers — GM, Ford, and Chrysler — arose out of a Cambrian stew of automotive experimentation in the workshops of Detroit. Many have made the point (including me) that three still wasn’t enough to create the kind of competition that the American automotive industry needed to avoid getting its ass kicked by automakers in Germany and Japan.

This sale — if it goes through — might lead to great things. But what the world really needs are many Teslas, enough to create a large ecosystem of entrepreneurs working on cars, batteries, and solar. We need this a lot more than we need to buy solar panels from a car company.

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Tesla wants to be your renewable energy everything

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Oil and gas are a bad bet, warns Canadian government group

Oil and gas are a bad bet, warns Canadian government group

By on May 31, 2016 5:40 pmShare

One of the world’s largest fossil fuel producers is on the verge of cleaning up its act.

In coming years, Canada can expect a switch from oil and gas to renewables, according to a draft policy report from a government group. Even more importantly, the report notes, Canada should expect some of its oil to likely “remain in the ground.”

Sound familiar? That phrase just so happens to mimic the rallying cry of the U.S. environmental movement.

The dose of reality for Canada’s tar sands industry comes from Policy Horizons Canada, which provides advice to the federal government on emerging policy issues. CBC News obtained the report via an access to information request.

“It is increasingly plausible to foresee a future in which cheap renewable electricity becomes the world’s primary power source and fossil fuels are relegated to a minority status,” the report reads. It urges against investment in new oil and gas infrastructure projects, calling them “high risk” for becoming unprofitable. Electric cars like Tesla even made an appearance in the report, with forecasts showing that cars that use lithium-ion batteries would become affordable sooner than previously expected.

If the report’s takeaways stand, it means a big turnaround for a country that was until recently all-in on fossil fuels. Canada is the world’s fifth largest producer of oil, providing an estimated 6 percent of global energy supplies.

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Oil and gas are a bad bet, warns Canadian government group

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Tesla’s labor controversy shows that a green job isn’t always a good job

Tesla’s labor controversy shows that a green job isn’t always a good job

By on May 17, 2016Share

Last spring, a worker installing pipes in the roof of a Tesla Motors shop in Fremont, Calif., slipped and fell three stories onto a concrete floor. He broke both legs, and was concussed so badly that he drifted in and out of consciousness in a San Jose hospital for days.

In the hospital, the worker, Gregor Lesnik, asked for a lawyer. He was part of a crew of about 140 workers who had been brought over on a temporary B1 visa from Eastern Europe by a Slovenian construction company. According to Lesnik, he was paid less than $5 an hour — half the current California minimum wage, and a fraction of the going rate of $52 an hour for similar work in the area. The crew worked 10-hour shifts, six or seven days a week, with no overtime pay.

Lesnik’s accident was a reminder of a very old problem — just because a job is better for the environment, doesn’t make it better for the person who has it. Without strong labor standards, new green jobs can be just as dangerous and exploitative as the old ones they’re meant to replace. Treating workers poorly also risks the political goodwill that has brought the industry so many subsidies and tax breaks over the years.

Tesla told the San Jose Mercury News — which broke the story over the weekend — that Lesnik’s injuries and wages weren’t the company’s responsibility, because he wasn’t an employee. Tesla had hired a German company, Eisenmann, to build the new paint facility, and Eisenmann hired a Slovenian company, Vuzem, to provide the labor. “Mr. Lesnik was injured when he allegedly failed to wear the proper safety harness provided by his employer,” Tesla told the Mercury News. Other men on the Vuzem crew confirmed Lesnik’s story — long hours, working on weekends, no overtime pay — though they were more experienced, and made closer to $10 per hour.

This isn’t the first time Tesla’s use of contractors has caused controversy. Since the article was published, however, Tesla and its founder Elon Musk have promised to make things right.

“We are taking action to address this individual’s situation and to put in place additional oversight to ensure that our workplace rules are followed even by sub-subcontractors to prevent such a thing from happening again,” the company wrote on its blog. “Assuming the article is correct, we need to do right by Mr. Lesnik and his colleagues from Vuzem.”

Tesla’s blog post said representatives from the state’s occupational safety agency investigated the incident and cleared the company of any responsibility. “As far as the law goes, Tesla did everything correctly,” the company said. The sad thing is, they appear to be right.

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Tesla’s labor controversy shows that a green job isn’t always a good job

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More than 100 years of car evolution could reveal where the industry is going next

More than 100 years of car evolution could reveal where the industry is going next

By on 6 Apr 2016 6:05 pmcommentsShare

Unless you’re a couple of crusty old white guys, the future of cars is looking pretty bright. Affordable electric cars are about to hit the market, self-driving cars are practicing their not-hitting-people skills, sleek 3D-printed cars are becoming a thing. And in a world that desperately needs to be more efficient and rely less on fossil fuels, this is all promising news.

But predicting the future of technology is always hard and often leads to egg-covered faces and tarnished reputations. The former chair of IBM, for example, once famously said that “there is a world market for maybe five computers.” And boy does that guy have about a billion eggs on his face right now.

Fortunately, a new (yet to be peer-reviewed) study on arXiv.org offers a way to predict where our technologies are going by first looking at where they’ve been. The study, led by researchers at UCLA, presents an evolutionary model for technology, and with the automobile as a case study, suggests that “electric and hybrid cars may be experiencing the early stages of a radiation event, with dramatic diversification expected in the next three to four decades.”

The model includes data on 3,575 cars made by 172 manufacturers between 1896 and 2014. It considers each car model a distinct species whose first and last years of production mark its origin and extinction, respectively. It thus offers a rate of “species” origination and extinction over time, allowing the researchers to analyze the effects of outside factors like GDP, oil prices, and market competition on the size and diversity of species types.

Not surprisingly, they found declines in origination in 1933, during the Great Depression. They also found declining extinction rates in 1935, again corresponding to the Great Depression, and in 1960, when the “Big Three” automakers (General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler) hit their peak.

More surprising was that the model showed that the rate of new species hitting the market had decreased fourfold between 1980 and 2014 and that extinction rates slightly outpaced origination rates during that time, meaning the market has gotten less diverse. At the same time, the average lifespan of models increased.

This happened, the researchers speculate, because certain designs began to dominate, and experimenting with new ones became too costly. The resulting market consolidation increased brand loyalty, stabilized cost of production, and made for safe investing. And it showed that market competition is more strongly correlated with species diversity than other factors like GDP or the price of oil.

Which brings us back to today. Electric vehicles haven’t gone through the decades of evolution that gas-powered cars have, which is perhaps why a relatively new brand like Tesla can come in with its shaky production schedules and unsteady financial standing and shake up the market. And in the coming decades, according to this research, we can expect more competitors to join Tesla’s Model 3 and GM’s Chevy Bolt before the market ultimately settles on dependable models and creativity in the industry declines once again.

By that point, though, we’ll surely be in the midst of a flying car diversity boom. That’s one tech prediction that will never die, no matter how many times it’s blown up in people’s faces.

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More than 100 years of car evolution could reveal where the industry is going next

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Tesla Meets the Real World, and the Real World Wins

Mother Jones

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OK, that’s enough about the poor. Let’s move on to stuff that upper-middle-class folks care about. Consumer Reports has been raving about Tesla electric cars for a while—so good it broke their rating system, scoring 103 out of 100!—and I’ve been wondering all that time what would happen after a couple of years when they started getting reliability data. Today I found out:

Consumer Reports withdrew its recommendation for the Tesla Model S — a car the magazine previously raved about — because of poor reliability for the sporty electric sedan….Consumer Reports surveyed 1,400 Model S owners “who chronicled an array of detailed and complicated maladies” with the drivetrain, power equipment, charging equipment and giant iPad-like center console. They also complained about body and sunroof squeaks, rattles and leaks.

“As the older vehicles are getting up on miles, we are seeing some where the electric motor needs to be replaced and the onboard charging system won’t charge the battery,” said Jake Fisher, Consumer Reports’ director of automotive testing. “On the newer vehicles, we are seeing problems such as the sunroof not operating properly. Door handles continue to be an issue.”

Ouch. Tesla stock, unsurprisingly, took a big tumble. But here’s an interesting question for you. I figure that there are probably fewer owners of the Tesla S who are moderately annoyed than there are people who are completely panicked because they rely on RushCard for all their money and can’t get to it. However, the former are rich and the latter are poor. Which story do you think will get faster and more sustained attention?

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Tesla Meets the Real World, and the Real World Wins

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Musk’s new Tesla gets extra credit in respected auto test

Musk’s new Tesla gets extra credit in respected auto test

By on 27 Aug 2015commentsShare

Today in break the internet news, the new Tesla P85D — an all-wheel drive version of the Model S — scored a 103 out of 100 in a Consumer Reports evaluation. For those of you keeping track, that’s an improper fraction. (And for those of you who really don’t have anything to do, it’s an improper fraction with a prime number in the numerator, so you can’t even reduce it to something more palatable.) Which is to say the new Model S is so good that Consumer Reports doesn’t even have the numbers to describe it.

What do you do when you’ve shown your metric to be incapable of capturing what you’re trying to measure? If you were Consumer Reports, perhaps you’d change the scale so the P85D scored a perfect 100. Which is what they did. Turns out these kinds of procedural tweaks can be pretty straightforward when we admit that everything is arbitrary and original intent can be outdated. (If only it was so easy to apply this logic to, say, the Second Amendment.) Bloomberg Business has the story:

“This is a glimpse into what we can expect down the line, where we have cars with the performance of supercars and the comfort, convenience and safety features of a luxury car while still being extremely energy efficient,” Jake Fisher, the magazine’s head of automotive testing, said in an interview. “We haven’t seen all those things before.”

Based on the P85D’s scores, Consumer Reports had to reassess how much to weigh things like acceleration, where the Tesla is as much as twice as quick as other vehicles, Fisher said.

“Once you start getting so ridiculously fast, so ridiculously energy efficient, it didn’t make sense to go linear on those terms anymore,” he said.

The P85D — which has a starting price of $105,000 — is capable of hitting 60 mph in 3.5 seconds from stop. Which is pretty impressive for something with zero emissions. Or, you know, emissions that aren’t immediately obvious. All that electricity has to come from somewhere.

Three cheers for Tesla and its electrifying CEO Mr. Musk, though. Record breaking is often cause for celebration. Just wait ’til that Jetsons car hits the market.

Source:

Tesla’s New Car Is So Good, It Literally Broke the Consumer Reports Scale

, Bloomberg Business.

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Oceans 15


These first-time fishermen know all the best (and worst) parts of fishingAndrew and Sophie never planned to be commercial fishermen — but they tried it for a summer. Here’s what they learned.


How to feed the world, with a little kelp from our friends (the oceans)Paul Dobbins’ farm needs no pesticides, fertilizer, land, or water — we just have to learn to love seaweed.


This surfer is committed to saving sharks — even though he lost his leg to one of themMike Coots lost his leg in a shark attack. Then he joined the group Shark Attack Survivors for Shark Conservation, and started fighting to save SHARKS from US.


This scuba diver wants everyone — black, white, or brown — to feel at home in the oceanKramer Wimberley knows what it’s like to feel unwelcome in the water. As a dive instructor and ocean-lover, he tries to make sure no one else does.


Oceans 15We’re tired of talking about oceans like they’re just a big, wet thing somewhere out there. Let’s make it personal.

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People can’t get enough of Tesla’s new batteries

People can’t get enough of Tesla’s new batteries

By on 8 May 2015commentsShare

World’s chillest billionaire Elon Musk announced this week that demand for his new energy storage devices is “crazy off-the-hook.”

According to Bloomberg Business, Musk’s new home- and utility-scale battery business, Tesla Energy, has already received about $800 million in reservations — an impressive number, given that Musk just unveiled Tesla Energy a week ago. But Bloomberg warns that, for now, it’s just a number:

Before anyone gets too excited, it’s important to note the biggest caveat: reservations don’t necessarily convert to sales. That’s especially true for the home storage batteries sold under the name Powerwall. Anyone can go online and place a reservation, years in advance, with no money down and no commitment to buy. To reserve a Tesla Model X vehicle, by contrast, requires $5,000 up front. Tesla declined to clarify what constitutes a “reservation” for a business or utility-scale project.

Still, the buzz is encouraging. Since the whole point of Tesla Energy is, essentially, to hurry us to the day we can all live in a solar-powered utopia, it’s good to know that the demand for said utopia is high enough to sell out these new batteries through mid-2016. (To their credit, utility companies have also been working on better batteries; they just haven’t had much success — they also lack the charisma of Musk, a.k.a. the real life Iron Man.)

Here’s a taste of what that $800 million number includes:

The Powerwall home batteries designed to be paired with rooftop solar systems received 38,000 reservations, according to Musk’s comments during Wednesday’s earnings call.
Some customers order more than one battery, with an average reservation amounting to somewhere from 1.5 to two batteries. Musk described the total demand as “more like 50,000 or 60,000” batteries in early reservations. Let’s call it 55,000 batteries.
The Powerwall comes in two designs sold at different prices: $3,000 and $3,500 each. Let’s split the difference: $3,250 apiece.
Total Powerwall Orders So Far: $178.8 million.

[…]

Musk said the company has received 2,500 reservations for the commercial-scale batteries and that the typical installation comes with “at least 10 Powerpacks.” So that’s 25,000 units totaling 2.5 million kilowatt hours.
Musk used Twitter last week to disclose pricing for the Powerpack at $250 per kilowatt hour.
Total Powerpack Orders So Far: $625 million.

So most of the money has actually come from the commercial market. According to Bloomberg, Tesla has so far been working with Target, Amazon, Southern California Electrdic, and the Texas-based utility OnCor.

With such high demand, Musk said, Tesla could easily devote its entire Gigafactory — slated to open sometime next year, ahead of its original 2017 goal — to the storage devices. Unfortunately, he said, the company already promised two-thirds of the facility to electric vehicle batteries.

“We should try to make the factory bigger,” he added — probably with a wry smile and nonchalant shrug.

A bigger factory sounds great, Elon, but maybe keep the name Gigafactory — Yottafactory just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

Source:
Tesla’s Battery Grabbed $800 Million in Its First Week

, Bloomberg Business.

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People can’t get enough of Tesla’s new batteries

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Book Review: The Man Who Couldn’t Stop

Mother Jones

The Man Who Couldn’t Stop

By David Adam

FSG

After years of battling the irrational terror of catching a disease every time he touched a door handle, drank from a water bottle, or scraped his knee playing soccer, Nature editor David Adam earned the right to be annoyed when people called themselves “a little bit OCD.” The greatest strength of his book—part memoir, part scientific treatise on obsessive-compulsive disorder—is that it meets those dilettantes on their level: “Imagine you can never turn it off.” Adam’s personal insights, and case studies from the famous (Winston Churchill, Nikola Tesla) to the obscure (an Ethiopian schoolgirl who ate a wall of mud bricks), make that feat of imagination both possible and painful.

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Book Review: The Man Who Couldn’t Stop

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Tesla abandons its patents, aims to spur electric-car revolution

It’s open season

Tesla abandons its patents, aims to spur electric-car revolution

Tesla

Tesla, maker of the most critically acclaimed car ever, is going open source.

Every patent that the Silicon Valley electric-car pioneer has ever secured will now be available for any company in the world to use, free of charge.

“Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk wrote in a blog post published Thursday. “Our true competition is not the small trickle of non-Tesla electric cars being produced, but rather the enormous flood of gasoline cars pouring out of the world’s factories every day.”

“Given that annual new vehicle production is approaching 100 million per year and the global fleet is approximately 2 billion cars, it is impossible for Tesla to build electric cars fast enough to address the carbon crisis. … We believe that Tesla, other companies making electric cars, and the world would all benefit from a common, rapidly-evolving technology platform,” he wrote.

Following a conference call with Musk, The Wall Street Journal reported that hundreds of patents, covering everything from batteries to electric control systems, would be affected, helping to spur growth in an industry in which Tesla is a global leader.

Mr. Musk also hinted at another reason for the offer: achieving greater economies of scale. For example, Tesla’s patents for its vehicle Supercharging stations could be shared with other auto makers, which could help Tesla spread costs and more quickly make more stations available.

More manufacturers should use small battery cells, as Tesla does, Mr. Musk said. “That would be one thing I would recommend.” He has outlined plans to build a large battery factory, which he calls the gigafactory, to produce more battery packs in the U.S.

Tesla has “several hundred” patents related to all areas of its electric vehicles, Mr. Musk said, including batteries and electric control systems. Tesla isn’t worried a competitor could use its patents to undercut the company, he said.

Tesla’s business model doesn’t just emphasize the manufacture and sale of electric cars. The company is also a major producer of electric-vehicle components used by other manufacturers. Thursday’s announcement could help competitors move in on those sales, but Tesla apparently feels confident enough in its own capabilities to embrace, rather than fear, that potential threat.

“Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history has repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a determined competitor, but rather by the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world’s most talented engineers,” Musk wrote in his post. “We believe that applying the open source philosophy to our patents will strengthen rather than diminish Tesla’s position in this regard.”


Source
All Our Patent Are Belong To You, Tesla Motors
Tesla Motors Offers Open Licenses to Its Patents, The Wall Street Journal

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Lana Del Rey Cares Way More About “Intergalactic Possibilities” Than Boring, Old Feminism

Mother Jones

Famous singer-songwriter Lana Del Rey has a weird quote about “feminism” (and space exploration, I think) in the latest Fader cover story. Digest it here:

For me, the issue of feminism is just not an interesting concept. I’m more interested in, you know, SpaceX and Tesla, what’s going to happen with our intergalactic possibilities. Whenever people bring up feminism, I’m like, god. I’m just not really that interested…My idea of a true feminist is a woman who feels free enough to do whatever she wants.

Okay.

The 27-year-old singer joins a chorus of female celebrities, including actress Shailene Woodley, who distance themselves from feminism, or from describing themselves as feminists. This is strange to hear (whether the famous person is female or male), simply because your average dictionary is very straightforward about the definition of the term “feminism.” It is as follows:

The belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities.

It’s really that simple: Words have meanings. Maybe too many of us have, over the years, conflated the word “feminist” with “extreme, radical, militant, War-On-Men-waging individual?” I dunno. Anyway, Ann Friedman explains this general topic better than I ever could, and you should read her piece here.

(H/t Matt Zeitlin)

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