Yesterday Elon Musk introduced the Tesla Supercharger. The Tesla Supercharger is an electronic station like a gas station that can fully recharge a Tesla car in 30 minutes. He plans to cover the US with these stations so it will be possible to traverse the US with a Tesla car.
The Supercharger stations are completely powered by solar energy and Tesla owners won't have to pay anything.
He already built these in parts of California and he says he will achieve full US coverage in the next 2 years. He plans to build more of these stations later in the rest of the world.
So if you own a Tesla car, you will be able to drive 100% green and free anywhere in the US. The only downside compared to a standard car is that recharging takes half an hour.
how can electricity be free and 100% green? wtf €: read more about it and it really sounds promising, especially the way how they promote their cars with the free electiricty at those stations
looks good. 3 hours is too little though. If they could double that, I'd be happy. But on long trips (say 12 hours), I don't really want to stop 3 times and wait 30 min.
that + what happens when theres a couple of cars ahead of you in the que? 1 and a half hour wait every 3 hours?
On September 27 2012 00:03 Excludos wrote: looks good. 3 hours is too little though. If they could double that, I'd be happy. But on long trips (say 12 hours), I don't really want to stop 3 times and wait 30 min.
that + what happens when theres a couple of cars ahead of you in the que? 1 and a half hour wait every 3 hours?
Not even if you won't pay for gas? For instance i drove for 700KM's in this weekend and spent 60€.. i wouldn't mind stopping for 1 hour in beetween and spare 60€ ...
This is great, even if it doesn't work it will push the technology and interest even further.. we do have to leave oil once and for all..
@ Excludos: I think everyone (edit: a lot of people anyways, not the guy above me) feels that way, I would think people who can afford a Tesla just have another vehicle available.
Tesla always sounds very impressive, then you look up their finances.
This seems like a waste of money since they are literally losing millions every month. They are losing twice as much as they were this time last year. I have almost no faith in Elon Musk' ability to actually make this thing profitable.
On September 27 2012 00:03 Excludos wrote: looks good. 3 hours is too little though. If they could double that, I'd be happy. But on long trips (say 12 hours), I don't really want to stop 3 times and wait 30 min.
that + what happens when theres a couple of cars ahead of you in the que? 1 and a half hour wait every 3 hours?
That, and the fact if you just wanted to use the car for a commute but the nearest supercharger was 50 miles away...
On September 27 2012 00:03 Excludos wrote: looks good. 3 hours is too little though. If they could double that, I'd be happy. But on long trips (say 12 hours), I don't really want to stop 3 times and wait 30 min.
that + what happens when theres a couple of cars ahead of you in the que? 1 and a half hour wait every 3 hours?
Not even if you won't pay for gas? For instance i drove for 700KM's in this weekend and spent 60€.. i wouldn't mind stopping for 1 hour in beetween and spare 60€ ...
This is great, even if it doesn't work it will push the technology and interest even further.. we do have to leave oil once and for all..
I'm all for it. But I don't want to make my 12 hour journey a 20 hour journey just yet. How many cars do you think enter a city gas station pr half hour right now? Even with 20 of these pumps, you'd be waiting hours and hours in queue.
The biggest problem with electric cars right now is that we're going backwards in convenience, not forward. And in today's society, thats what people look for the most. Having the electricity be free is certainly a good step towards that, but waiting forever to fill up your car every 3 hour is not.
I still think this is a good step forward though. Like you said, it should push the technology even further even if it doesn't work. Hopefully they'll be able to address these problems in the future.
Bumping this due to a major update from Elon Musk:
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the company will be tripling its supercharger coverage throughout the country at the D11 Conference today. By the end of this year, Musk expects that it will cover most of the metropolitan coverage, allowing electric car owners to drive coast to coast, from Los Angeles to New York City.
The technology was developed because traditional charging happens too slowly, so they made something that was quick to charge, Musk said. The chargers are available in California and on the East Coast today, but the company plans to heavily expand coverage by the end of the year.
Musk was planning on announcing the expansion of the network on Thursday, but gave the office at the conference a bit of a sneak peek a day ahead. A map of the new superchargers should be available at the announcement, but it should give increased coverage in existing metropolitan markets, as well as coverage throughout the country. That will enable electric car owners to drive cross-country, from Los Angeles to New York City, Musk said.
20 minutes is a long time to hold up a spot at a station. Imagine Tesla cars become popular; then waiting for a spot at one of these stations would take longer than charging it. Although it would make for an interesting meetup spot for all the Tesla travelers.
On June 01 2013 11:42 Najda wrote: 20 minutes is a long time to hold up a spot at a station. Imagine Tesla cars become popular; then waiting for a spot at one of these stations would take longer than charging it. Although it would make for an interesting meetup spot for all the Tesla travelers.
Bathroom breaks, getting something to eat then drive another 350 miles or w/e the limit is. Not too bad.
On June 01 2013 11:42 Najda wrote: 20 minutes is a long time to hold up a spot at a station. Imagine Tesla cars become popular; then waiting for a spot at one of these stations would take longer than charging it. Although it would make for an interesting meetup spot for all the Tesla travelers.
Bathroom breaks, getting something to eat then drive another 350 miles or w/e the limit is. Not too bad.
I think he just means you are taking up a charging station for 20 minutes, so that's a spot nobody else can use The cars would have to get quite popular for that to be an issue though haha.
Charging stations like this are probably the best investment the company could make right now, getting an infrastructure in place now will make them a much more viable alternative in the future, especially when battery lives are increased.
On June 01 2013 11:49 SnipedSoul wrote: Doesn't really fast charging completely ruin battery service life? It would suck if you needed a new set of batteries every couple of years.
Not on tesla's cars they are designed to take it, also their batteries i think have a 7 year warranty on it i believe.
On June 01 2013 11:42 Najda wrote: 20 minutes is a long time to hold up a spot at a station. Imagine Tesla cars become popular; then waiting for a spot at one of these stations would take longer than charging it. Although it would make for an interesting meetup spot for all the Tesla travelers.
Bathroom breaks, getting something to eat then drive another 350 miles or w/e the limit is. Not too bad.
I'm not sure if they would parallel gas cars, and so be equivalent to how busy gas stations are if scaled up. Because unlike gas powered cars you just don't let it set overnight i'm sure anyone who owns a tesla has a way to change their car overnight on a regular basis.
On June 01 2013 12:14 iTzSnypah wrote: Meh I think they should just miniaturize nuclear reactors and hook it up to a peltier... No need for recharging stations ever.
The Supercharger stations are completely powered by solar energy and Tesla owners won't have to pay anything.
Sounds nice, for about 8-10 hours per day, depending on the season. For the other 14-16 hours in the day, where is the energy going to come from? And what about northern states that have 6 months of winter? Even less sunlight then. Going to have to have more than solar if you want 100% "green" energy. What about when it is a cloudy day? Tesla owners are just stranded at the "Supercharger" station?
Sorry, but as someone studying electrical engineering, the fawning over these incredibly inefficient and intermittent power sources like solar and wind really bothers me. They are not the panacea the green crowd thinks they are.
The Supercharger stations are completely powered by solar energy and Tesla owners won't have to pay anything.
Sounds nice, for about 8-10 hours per day, depending on the season. For the other 14-16 hours in the day, where is the energy going to come from? And what about northern states that have 6 months of winter? Even less sunlight then. Going to have to have more than solar if you want 100% "green" energy. What about when it is a cloudy day? Tesla owners are just stranded at the "Supercharger" station?
Sorry, but as someone studying electrical engineering, the fawning over these incredibly inefficient and intermittent power sources like solar and wind really bothers me. They are not the panacea the green crowd thinks they are.
Didn't he say it's connected to the power grid feeding more energy on average than used by the cars themselves? So if it's "cloudy" the energy could be drawn from other sources on the grid, but overall there will be more net solar energy created than used. Solves the 24/7 issue nicely.
I really don't see how this idea is a winner. So you go on a road trip with an electric car, what do you do when you get to your hotel? You bring an extension cord and run it to your car to charge it up overnight? It is my belief that people that own a tesla are the same crowd that own a Prius. They are not poor by any means. They probably have another gas powered car besides their Tesla. So if they want to go on a road trip why would they trade in the reliability of their gas powered car for their Tesla just to save a few bucks on gas? I guess maybe if the inconvenience of having to charge your car every so often and search maps for charging stations is part of the "adventure" then that might entice them. I'm not seeing it.
The Supercharger stations are completely powered by solar energy and Tesla owners won't have to pay anything.
Sounds nice, for about 8-10 hours per day, depending on the season. For the other 14-16 hours in the day, where is the energy going to come from? And what about northern states that have 6 months of winter? Even less sunlight then. Going to have to have more than solar if you want 100% "green" energy. What about when it is a cloudy day? Tesla owners are just stranded at the "Supercharger" station?
Sorry, but as someone studying electrical engineering, the fawning over these incredibly inefficient and intermittent power sources like solar and wind really bothers me. They are not the panacea the green crowd thinks they are.
Batteries in the station store energy would be the obvious answer.... it works just like emergency telephone boxes on the side of the road. Solar panel on top to get energy when it can and battery pack somewhere to store energy for times when a solar panel isn't enough. Also winter doesn't mean pitch black, solar panels will still work although not at well on cloudy days, also for areas where sun is less reliable you can still connect it to the grid, even work out a station without any ability to store energy and it just puts energy back into the grid when no one is there and takes energy when there is no sun.
On June 01 2013 12:51 BlackJack wrote: I really don't see how this idea is a winner. So you go on a road trip with an electric car, what do you do when you get to your hotel? You bring an extension cord and run it to your car to charge it up overnight? It is my belief that people that own a tesla are the same crowd that own a Prius. They are not poor by any means. They probably have another gas powered car besides their Tesla. So if they want to go on a road trip why would they trade in the reliability of their gas powered car for their Tesla just to save a few bucks on gas? I guess maybe if the inconvenience of having to charge your car every so often and search maps for charging stations is part of the "adventure" then that might entice them. I'm not seeing it.
Not really an electric motor is far more reliable then a internal combustion engine. You just have to plan out your road trip carefully choosing the right rout/ right areas to spend the night. I'm sure there are hotels that have electric charging stations in their parking lot. Hell if target can have them in the front i'm sure other business can.
Didn't he say it's connected to the power grid feeding more energy on average than used by the cars themselves? So if it's "cloudy" the energy could be drawn from other sources on the grid, but overall there will be more net solar energy created than used. Solves the 24/7 issue nicely.
The estimates of putting back more energy into the grid may work for Southern California, but I guarantee you there will be no net gain in New York State or Montana. If it is connected to the grid it's a different story. I think it is a much better idea to be connected to the grid anyway, for much of the U.S. I don't think it would be possible to do it without taking from the grid often. Especially if Teslas start selling more and the demand for recharging goes up.
On June 01 2013 12:54 semantics wrote:
Batteries in the station store energy would be the obvious answer.... it works just like emergency telephone boxes on the side of the road. Solar panel on top to get energy when it can and battery pack somewhere to store energy for times when a solar panel isn't enough. Also winter doesn't mean pitch black, solar panels will still work although not at well on cloudy days, also for areas where sun is less reliable you can still connect it to the grid, even work out a station without any ability to store energy and it just puts energy back into the grid when no one is there and takes energy when there is no sun.
No in winter the sun is actually physically bombarding us with less energy, that's why it's winter and everything dies. Combine that with an average solar panel efficiency of 13% and you get piss poor performance on cloudy days and in winter. Batteries would be costly, and I doubt in most northern states that enough excess would be produced to satisfy demand for recharging during the remaining 14 hours of the day, especially if Teslas start to sell more. However, now that I know it is connected to the grid, it is a moot point.
No in winter the sun is actually physically bombarding us with less energy, that's why it's winter and everything dies. Combine that with an average solar panel efficiency of 13% and you get piss poor performance on cloudy days and in winter. Batteries would be costly, and I doubt in most northern states that enough excess would be produced to satisfy demand for recharging during the remaining 14 hours of the day, especially if Teslas start to sell more. However, now that I know it is connected to the grid, it is a moot point.
I really don't know where your hate is coming from. Musk is not at all proposing that we switch away from traditional fuel sources. These supercharging stations just happen to be sourced by solar while connected to a grid. It is not like these charging stations are going to suddenly change the energy portfolio in every state in the U.S. In addition, depending on how many stations are located in sunny states, the number of panels at each station, and the type of fuel it's locally replacing, this whole operation could generate a net energy gain. Tesla is such a niche car company, and even those who buy Tesla, I imagine only a small proportion would want to take a cross-country road trip, I feel like this hardly matters.
And even if this all fails, Musk just spent private money to build public infrastructure. There's literally very few things not to like about this plan.
I'm going to do a bit of math here. In the following video (from earlier in the thread) you get a good look at a charging station, and I'll estimate the dimensions of the panel is 5m x 10m = 50m^2.
According to this map, my location in NY receives about 4 kWh per m^2 per day. In other words, a charging station is getting about 50*4 = 200 kWh per day.
According to Tesla's website, their batteries are typically a 60 kWh or 85 kWh. In order to almost fully recharge such batteries, you only get ~3 cars charged per day.
On June 01 2013 14:49 micronesia wrote: I'm going to do a bit of math here. In the following video (from earlier in the thread) you get a good look at a charging station, and I'll estimate the dimensions of the panel is 5m x 10m = 50m^2.
According to this map, my location in NY receives about 4 kWh per m^2 per day. In other words, a charging station is getting about 50*4 = 200 kWh per day.
According to Tesla's website, their batteries are typically a 60 kWh or 85 kWh. In order to almost fully recharge such batteries, you only get ~3 cars charged per day.
What am I missing?
I'm sure it's like an "overall" thing. Some areas won't produce as much solar power as others but since this is all across the United States it'll be looked at from an overall value not just a specific area. Plus the more they scale means more stations; the more stations means that more of them won't be used all the time so the stations would just be generating power while they are idle. At least I'm assuming that's their idea of it, not sure i don't work for tesla haha. Overtime it seems like a great idea. They are going to have a ridiculous time with technical difficulties since I'm sure the standard mechanic on one of those things is going to need to be a "bit" more highly trained than the average gas station mechanic haha
A lot of people here have very poor understanding of current battery technology. If we had batteries good enough to store enough solar energy for non-sunny times, we wouldn't need these stations in the first place.
On June 01 2013 14:49 micronesia wrote: I'm going to do a bit of math here. In the following video (from earlier in the thread) you get a good look at a charging station, and I'll estimate the dimensions of the panel is 5m x 10m = 50m^2.
According to this map, my location in NY receives about 4 kWh per m^2 per day. In other words, a charging station is getting about 50*4 = 200 kWh per day.
According to Tesla's website, their batteries are typically a 60 kWh or 85 kWh. In order to almost fully recharge such batteries, you only get ~3 cars charged per day.
What am I missing?
I'm sure it's like an "overall" thing. Some areas won't produce as much solar power as others but since this is all across the United States it'll be looked at from an overall value not just a specific area. Plus the more they scale means more stations; the more stations means that more of them won't be used all the time so the stations would just be generating power while they are idle.
But, 3 cars a day is a drop in the bucket. In a sunnier region it would be higher, but only like 4 cars a day. Something seems off entirely.
Based on what I'm seeing, the solar panels would only account for a tiny percentage of all charging. In other words, these would just be free charging stations running off the local electric grid, except for those first few cars of the day. It is not a viable model at all. There is something wrong.
I don't get the haters really. Of course with current figures it's inefficient and not sustainable - if it was, everyone would be doing it already. Investing money into this means more opportunities to further develop the technologies used, attract more manpower and resources to further the whole matter of electric cars AND solar power - both of which have potential for greatness. It's like the fusion power project they're working on in France - it won't replace current power sources in it's first iteration, but there's a good chance it will pave the way for something good. We should be happy there are people in the world willing to.commit their capital to something like this really.
On June 01 2013 15:47 Salazarz wrote: I don't get the haters really. Of course with current figures it's inefficient and not sustainable
I can't speak for others, but what is being presented (unless I made a mistake somewhere in my rudimentary analysis) does not make any sense. If someone is advertising a network of sun-powered charging stations, then it's not being a hater to ask for clarification on how they get enough solar power to actually charge the cars that plug in to them.
edit: I want to clarify that the speaker in the video in the OP is stressing the fact that these charging stations would be powered entirely by solar (net). My analysis shows this is not reasonably possible, by a long-shot. Am I missing something or is he completely full of shit?
On June 01 2013 15:47 Salazarz wrote: I don't get the haters really. Of course with current figures it's inefficient and not sustainable
I can't speak for others, but what is being presented (unless I made a mistake somewhere in my rudimentary analysis) does not make any sense. If someone is advertising a network of sun-powered charging stations, then it's not being a hater to ask for clarification on how they get enough solar power to actually charge the cars that plug in to them.
You aren't trying to figure out how Tesla's system works, you're making things up based on your personal idea of how you think a solar charging network should work. Then you wave your finger at a company with thousands of smart employees and go "I bet you never thought of more cars going to a supercharger in a day than that particular supercharger's solar power capacity can handle!" Because you saw a picture of a solar panel and thought you could eyeball its dimensions?
That is similar to Lord Kelvin seeing a picture of the Wright Brothers' plane and going "It looks like the wings are maybe 5 meters by 10 meters, now assuming they're made of solid oak I don't think they can produce enough lift to also carry the weight of the engine and a grown pilot." How do you know the dimensions of one charging station because you saw a picture of it? The cars are 5 meters long, but maybe the canopy extends 7 meters for shade or comfort in the rain? How do you know the canopy only 2 car lengths wide? Is the charging station you saw a picture of representative of an average charging station? What's the average demand for charging on a given day? How many cars? What's the average amount of power per car? How much power do drivers want on an average day? Remember a 50% charge is 20 minutes. And people do their own charging at home.
Obviously not every watt is going directly from the sun to the battery given that there are superchargers that have no solar panels whatsoever. The claim is that the stations generate more power than the cars use in a year. The fact that you don't have insider access to Tesla's margins doesn't mean the math doesn't add up. In the meantime we can all enjoy the free supercharging for life that, regardless of your New York Times level criticisms, the company is providing.
On June 01 2013 14:49 micronesia wrote: I'm going to do a bit of math here. In the following video (from earlier in the thread) you get a good look at a charging station, and I'll estimate the dimensions of the panel is 5m x 10m = 50m^2.
According to this map, my location in NY receives about 4 kWh per m^2 per day. In other words, a charging station is getting about 50*4 = 200 kWh per day.
According to Tesla's website, their batteries are typically a 60 kWh or 85 kWh. In order to almost fully recharge such batteries, you only get ~3 cars charged per day.
What am I missing?
The fact that solar panels are nowhere near 100% efficient
They also use very rare materials atm and only really exist due to a false economy that is heavily subsidised.
huge potential breakthrough ... could possibly double existing efficiencies to 50% .... so really the 43% was an ideal experimental figure ... probably more like 30% currently if you average out the differences from opposing hype.
On June 01 2013 15:47 Salazarz wrote: I don't get the haters really. Of course with current figures it's inefficient and not sustainable
I can't speak for others, but what is being presented (unless I made a mistake somewhere in my rudimentary analysis) does not make any sense. If someone is advertising a network of sun-powered charging stations, then it's not being a hater to ask for clarification on how they get enough solar power to actually charge the cars that plug in to them.
You aren't trying to figure out how Tesla's system works, you're making things up based on your personal idea of how you think a solar charging network should work. Then you wave your finger at a company with thousands of smart employees and go "I bet you never thought of more cars going to a supercharger in a day than that particular supercharger's solar power capacity can handle!" Because you saw a picture of a solar panel and thought you could eyeball its dimensions?
That is similar to Lord Kelvin seeing a picture of the Wright Brothers' plane and going "It looks like the wings are maybe 5 meters by 10 meters, now assuming they're made of solid oak I don't think they can produce enough lift to also carry the weight of the engine and a grown pilot." How do you know the dimensions of one charging station because you saw a picture of it? The cars are 5 meters long, but maybe the canopy extends 7 meters for shade or comfort in the rain? How do you know the canopy only 2 car lengths wide? Is the charging station you saw a picture of representative of an average charging station? What's the average demand for charging on a given day? How many cars? What's the average amount of power per car? How much power do drivers want on an average day? Remember a 50% charge is 20 minutes. And people do their own charging at home.
Obviously not every watt is going directly from the sun to the battery given that there are superchargers that have no solar panels whatsoever. The claim is that the stations generate more power than the cars use in a year. The fact that you don't have insider access to Tesla's margins doesn't mean the math doesn't add up. In the meantime we can all enjoy the free supercharging for life that, regardless of your New York Times level criticisms, the company is providing.
You seem to have missed the entire point of my post. I'm not sure why, but this seems to be becoming an extremely polarizing and controversial issue like discussing religion or guns on TL.
I did an estimation based on the information available. The video clearly states that they are able to produce more power than the cars use, but don't provide any evidence. I'm saying it seems like this can't be the case, and perhaps the guy in the video is misrepresenting the system entirely (not that I'm a scientific genius and the company is a bunch of morons). I'm completely open to an explanation of how they do it, or how my estimations/figures/calculations were wrong. What I'm not open to is being verbally assaulted by you because I'm questioning what we are being fed. If you don't have the ability to explain to me how one of these stations can produce sufficient energy to power the cars that come to it, on average, then perhaps you should defer to someone who can (and who I invite to weigh in on this).
I was extremely excited when I thought that this topic was about Nicola Tesla, and then really sad when it was just about some lame car riding the awesomeness of Tesla.
On June 01 2013 15:47 Salazarz wrote: I don't get the haters really. Of course with current figures it's inefficient and not sustainable
I can't speak for others, but what is being presented (unless I made a mistake somewhere in my rudimentary analysis) does not make any sense. If someone is advertising a network of sun-powered charging stations, then it's not being a hater to ask for clarification on how they get enough solar power to actually charge the cars that plug in to them.
You aren't trying to figure out how Tesla's system works, you're making things up based on your personal idea of how you think a solar charging network should work. Then you wave your finger at a company with thousands of smart employees and go "I bet you never thought of more cars going to a supercharger in a day than that particular supercharger's solar power capacity can handle!" Because you saw a picture of a solar panel and thought you could eyeball its dimensions?
That is similar to Lord Kelvin seeing a picture of the Wright Brothers' plane and going "It looks like the wings are maybe 5 meters by 10 meters, now assuming they're made of solid oak I don't think they can produce enough lift to also carry the weight of the engine and a grown pilot." How do you know the dimensions of one charging station because you saw a picture of it? The cars are 5 meters long, but maybe the canopy extends 7 meters for shade or comfort in the rain? How do you know the canopy only 2 car lengths wide? Is the charging station you saw a picture of representative of an average charging station? What's the average demand for charging on a given day? How many cars? What's the average amount of power per car? How much power do drivers want on an average day? Remember a 50% charge is 20 minutes. And people do their own charging at home.
Obviously not every watt is going directly from the sun to the battery given that there are superchargers that have no solar panels whatsoever. The claim is that the stations generate more power than the cars use in a year. The fact that you don't have insider access to Tesla's margins doesn't mean the math doesn't add up. In the meantime we can all enjoy the free supercharging for life that, regardless of your New York Times level criticisms, the company is providing.
You seem to have missed the entire point of my post. I'm not sure why, but this seems to be becoming an extremely polarizing and controversial issue like discussing religion or guns on TL.
I did an estimation based on the information available. The video clearly states that they are able to produce more power than the cars use, but don't provide any evidence. I'm saying it seems like this can't be the case, and perhaps the guy in the video is misrepresenting the system entirely (not that I'm a scientific genius and the company is a bunch of morons). I'm completely open to an explanation of how they do it, or how my estimations/figures/calculations were wrong. What I'm not open to is being verbally assaulted by you because I'm questioning what we are being fed. If you don't have the ability to explain to me how one of these stations can produce sufficient energy to power the cars that come to it, on average, then perhaps you should defer to someone who can (and who I invite to weigh in on this).
You're entirely basing your calculations on a single supercharger in a single day even though its been mentioned numerous times by Elon Musk and by people in this thread that these are connected to the Solar City grid. And I think Elon also mentioned in a year, not in a day. Let's not mention that not many people own Tesla's at this point... let alone go on daily road trips with them.
On June 01 2013 15:47 Salazarz wrote: I don't get the haters really. Of course with current figures it's inefficient and not sustainable
I can't speak for others, but what is being presented (unless I made a mistake somewhere in my rudimentary analysis) does not make any sense. If someone is advertising a network of sun-powered charging stations, then it's not being a hater to ask for clarification on how they get enough solar power to actually charge the cars that plug in to them.
edit: I want to clarify that the speaker in the video in the OP is stressing the fact that these charging stations would be powered entirely by solar (net). My analysis shows this is not reasonably possible, by a long-shot. Am I missing something or is he completely full of shit?
The Solar Power Grid/Net, that accumulates and distributes the solar energy is the answer. Also we don't know if this grid is not being populated by the Solar Power Cells located outside from the real charging stations. E.g. the stations should be located near the roads, but its not a bad idea to build a large solar power plant outside of the roads and connect it to the grid ...
As a guy said above, we may find some holes in the concept today, but that's all infrastructural flaws, which could be solved by adding more stuff (so time+money).
On June 01 2013 15:47 Salazarz wrote: I don't get the haters really. Of course with current figures it's inefficient and not sustainable
I can't speak for others, but what is being presented (unless I made a mistake somewhere in my rudimentary analysis) does not make any sense. If someone is advertising a network of sun-powered charging stations, then it's not being a hater to ask for clarification on how they get enough solar power to actually charge the cars that plug in to them.
You aren't trying to figure out how Tesla's system works, you're making things up based on your personal idea of how you think a solar charging network should work. Then you wave your finger at a company with thousands of smart employees and go "I bet you never thought of more cars going to a supercharger in a day than that particular supercharger's solar power capacity can handle!" Because you saw a picture of a solar panel and thought you could eyeball its dimensions?
That is similar to Lord Kelvin seeing a picture of the Wright Brothers' plane and going "It looks like the wings are maybe 5 meters by 10 meters, now assuming they're made of solid oak I don't think they can produce enough lift to also carry the weight of the engine and a grown pilot." How do you know the dimensions of one charging station because you saw a picture of it? The cars are 5 meters long, but maybe the canopy extends 7 meters for shade or comfort in the rain? How do you know the canopy only 2 car lengths wide? Is the charging station you saw a picture of representative of an average charging station? What's the average demand for charging on a given day? How many cars? What's the average amount of power per car? How much power do drivers want on an average day? Remember a 50% charge is 20 minutes. And people do their own charging at home.
Obviously not every watt is going directly from the sun to the battery given that there are superchargers that have no solar panels whatsoever. The claim is that the stations generate more power than the cars use in a year. The fact that you don't have insider access to Tesla's margins doesn't mean the math doesn't add up. In the meantime we can all enjoy the free supercharging for life that, regardless of your New York Times level criticisms, the company is providing.
You seem to have missed the entire point of my post. I'm not sure why, but this seems to be becoming an extremely polarizing and controversial issue like discussing religion or guns on TL.
I did an estimation based on the information available. The video clearly states that they are able to produce more power than the cars use, but don't provide any evidence. I'm saying it seems like this can't be the case, and perhaps the guy in the video is misrepresenting the system entirely (not that I'm a scientific genius and the company is a bunch of morons). I'm completely open to an explanation of how they do it, or how my estimations/figures/calculations were wrong. What I'm not open to is being verbally assaulted by you because I'm questioning what we are being fed. If you don't have the ability to explain to me how one of these stations can produce sufficient energy to power the cars that come to it, on average, then perhaps you should defer to someone who can (and who I invite to weigh in on this).
You're entirely basing your calculations on a single supercharger in a single day even though its been mentioned numerous times by Elon Musk and by people in this thread that these are connected to the Solar City grid.
Can you explain what this means? Where are the actual panels located that provide the power to charge the car? From what I can tell, it's mostly not going to be from the physical station. If it's coming from other sources that could just as easily have been connected to the town's main power grid, then I don't see the advantage of routing power from solar panels to car chargers over just routing power from solar panels to anything else.
And I think Elon also mentioned in a year, not in a day.
If we average things out, whether we do our calculations to the day or to the year doesn't matter.
Let's not mention that not many people own Tesla's at this point... let alone go on daily road trips with them.
I don't see the relevance, so it's a good thing you didn't mention it.
I somehow doubt Goverments and big Oil company's will just let this go. Both make tons of money from either taxes or drilling ofc. Neither can or want to miss anything of it.
It's a great dream project though, props for Tesla.
On June 01 2013 15:47 Salazarz wrote: I don't get the haters really. Of course with current figures it's inefficient and not sustainable
I can't speak for others, but what is being presented (unless I made a mistake somewhere in my rudimentary analysis) does not make any sense. If someone is advertising a network of sun-powered charging stations, then it's not being a hater to ask for clarification on how they get enough solar power to actually charge the cars that plug in to them.
edit: I want to clarify that the speaker in the video in the OP is stressing the fact that these charging stations would be powered entirely by solar (net). My analysis shows this is not reasonably possible, by a long-shot. Am I missing something or is he completely full of shit?
The Solar Power Grid/Net, that accumulates and distributes the solar energy is the answer. Also we don't know if this grid is not being populated by the Solar Power Cells located outside from the real charging stations. E.g. the stations should be located near the roads, but its not a bad idea to build a large solar power plant outside of the roads and connect it to the grid ...
As a guy said above, we may find some holes in the concept today, but that's all infrastructural flaws, which could be solved by adding more stuff (so time+money).
So are you implying that they have built separate infrastructure ... a grid .. specifically for solar power?
That would be dumb. Have you got any idea how expensive that infrastructure is? Any power generated by 'green' means will be outweighed by the power lost in transmission of energy.
petrol and coal account for ovetr half of us energy output. 8% is renewable .. of that a *tiny* fraction will be solar.
By the way i have a perpetual motion machine ... it makes more energy that there is available. I use it to turn lead into gold.
Anyway hasn;t it been shown that the costs of making the parts for electric cars is currently far more damaging than alternatives simply due to the fact that petrol engines are *really* efficient ... and given that most power is generated from petrol and energy storage is really inefficient also transmission from generation to consumption in cables which being remarkably efficient is still going to be less efficient than simply producing it in situ. it should be a no brainer that right now its not economically viable.
Don't get me wrong i am all for nuclear and viable green energy over fossil fuels. But it has to actually be viable. burning a finite resource is silly. Fossil fuels have a lot of other potential uses besides burning.
On June 01 2013 15:47 Salazarz wrote: I don't get the haters really. Of course with current figures it's inefficient and not sustainable
I can't speak for others, but what is being presented (unless I made a mistake somewhere in my rudimentary analysis) does not make any sense. If someone is advertising a network of sun-powered charging stations, then it's not being a hater to ask for clarification on how they get enough solar power to actually charge the cars that plug in to them.
You aren't trying to figure out how Tesla's system works, you're making things up based on your personal idea of how you think a solar charging network should work. Then you wave your finger at a company with thousands of smart employees and go "I bet you never thought of more cars going to a supercharger in a day than that particular supercharger's solar power capacity can handle!" Because you saw a picture of a solar panel and thought you could eyeball its dimensions?
That is similar to Lord Kelvin seeing a picture of the Wright Brothers' plane and going "It looks like the wings are maybe 5 meters by 10 meters, now assuming they're made of solid oak I don't think they can produce enough lift to also carry the weight of the engine and a grown pilot." How do you know the dimensions of one charging station because you saw a picture of it? The cars are 5 meters long, but maybe the canopy extends 7 meters for shade or comfort in the rain? How do you know the canopy only 2 car lengths wide? Is the charging station you saw a picture of representative of an average charging station? What's the average demand for charging on a given day? How many cars? What's the average amount of power per car? How much power do drivers want on an average day? Remember a 50% charge is 20 minutes. And people do their own charging at home.
Obviously not every watt is going directly from the sun to the battery given that there are superchargers that have no solar panels whatsoever. The claim is that the stations generate more power than the cars use in a year. The fact that you don't have insider access to Tesla's margins doesn't mean the math doesn't add up. In the meantime we can all enjoy the free supercharging for life that, regardless of your New York Times level criticisms, the company is providing.
You seem to have missed the entire point of my post. I'm not sure why, but this seems to be becoming an extremely polarizing and controversial issue like discussing religion or guns on TL.
I did an estimation based on the information available. The video clearly states that they are able to produce more power than the cars use, but don't provide any evidence. I'm saying it seems like this can't be the case, and perhaps the guy in the video is misrepresenting the system entirely (not that I'm a scientific genius and the company is a bunch of morons). I'm completely open to an explanation of how they do it, or how my estimations/figures/calculations were wrong. What I'm not open to is being verbally assaulted by you because I'm questioning what we are being fed. If you don't have the ability to explain to me how one of these stations can produce sufficient energy to power the cars that come to it, on average, then perhaps you should defer to someone who can (and who I invite to weigh in on this).
You're entirely basing your calculations on a single supercharger in a single day even though its been mentioned numerous times by Elon Musk and by people in this thread that these are connected to the Solar City grid.
Can you explain what this means? Where are the actual panels located that provide the power to charge the car? From what I can tell, it's mostly not going to be from the physical station. If it's coming from other sources that could just as easily have been connected to the town's main power grid, then I don't see the advantage of routing power from solar panels to car chargers over just routing power from solar panels to anything else.
On June 01 2013 15:47 Salazarz wrote: I don't get the haters really. Of course with current figures it's inefficient and not sustainable
I can't speak for others, but what is being presented (unless I made a mistake somewhere in my rudimentary analysis) does not make any sense. If someone is advertising a network of sun-powered charging stations, then it's not being a hater to ask for clarification on how they get enough solar power to actually charge the cars that plug in to them.
You aren't trying to figure out how Tesla's system works, you're making things up based on your personal idea of how you think a solar charging network should work. Then you wave your finger at a company with thousands of smart employees and go "I bet you never thought of more cars going to a supercharger in a day than that particular supercharger's solar power capacity can handle!" Because you saw a picture of a solar panel and thought you could eyeball its dimensions?
That is similar to Lord Kelvin seeing a picture of the Wright Brothers' plane and going "It looks like the wings are maybe 5 meters by 10 meters, now assuming they're made of solid oak I don't think they can produce enough lift to also carry the weight of the engine and a grown pilot." How do you know the dimensions of one charging station because you saw a picture of it? The cars are 5 meters long, but maybe the canopy extends 7 meters for shade or comfort in the rain? How do you know the canopy only 2 car lengths wide? Is the charging station you saw a picture of representative of an average charging station? What's the average demand for charging on a given day? How many cars? What's the average amount of power per car? How much power do drivers want on an average day? Remember a 50% charge is 20 minutes. And people do their own charging at home.
Obviously not every watt is going directly from the sun to the battery given that there are superchargers that have no solar panels whatsoever. The claim is that the stations generate more power than the cars use in a year. The fact that you don't have insider access to Tesla's margins doesn't mean the math doesn't add up. In the meantime we can all enjoy the free supercharging for life that, regardless of your New York Times level criticisms, the company is providing.
You seem to have missed the entire point of my post. I'm not sure why, but this seems to be becoming an extremely polarizing and controversial issue like discussing religion or guns on TL.
I did an estimation based on the information available. The video clearly states that they are able to produce more power than the cars use, but don't provide any evidence. I'm saying it seems like this can't be the case, and perhaps the guy in the video is misrepresenting the system entirely (not that I'm a scientific genius and the company is a bunch of morons). I'm completely open to an explanation of how they do it, or how my estimations/figures/calculations were wrong. What I'm not open to is being verbally assaulted by you because I'm questioning what we are being fed. If you don't have the ability to explain to me how one of these stations can produce sufficient energy to power the cars that come to it, on average, then perhaps you should defer to someone who can (and who I invite to weigh in on this).
You're entirely basing your calculations on a single supercharger in a single day even though its been mentioned numerous times by Elon Musk and by people in this thread that these are connected to the Solar City grid.
Can you explain what this means? Where are the actual panels located that provide the power to charge the car? From what I can tell, it's mostly not going to be from the physical station. If it's coming from other sources that could just as easily have been connected to the town's main power grid, then I don't see the advantage of routing power from solar panels to car chargers over just routing power from solar panels to anything else.
And I think Elon also mentioned in a year, not in a day.
If we average things out, whether we do our calculations to the day or to the year doesn't matter.
Let's not mention that not many people own Tesla's at this point... let alone go on daily road trips with them.
I don't see the relevance, so it's a good thing you didn't mention it.
What if they have fields of solar panels? Why are you so suspicious about this not adding up?
I really doubt a company as big as this would lie to people about free charging just to get car sales. I assume that's your main worry?
As for lying it wont be lying ... it will be simply omitting some VERY important background pieces of information. His intent is not to tell you the truth it is to sell cars. Do you often trust car salesmen?
He never claimed to be telling the truth, he cis engaged in marketing and will be using ideal figures with cherry picked data to inflate them by ignoring things like actual available solar energy, storage issues, conversion efficiency.
He will be relying on using less than the % of solar powered produced so he can say anythign exctra he uses is generated from solar.
There is a hell of a lot of wiggle room when people are not in court.
The fact is the sun spits out a certain amount of energy per m2 on the ground - ignoring clouds, seasonal diffeences, humidity, wind evaporation, condensation points. If he is claiming to produce more energy than his energy source has there should be no arguments that he is talking shit. Its a simple fact unless he has broken incredibly fundemental laws of physics that have stood the test of a looooong time.
You do not need to be anything to see that if i give you one thing ... you cannot make it into more without adding something external to it.
On June 01 2013 15:47 Salazarz wrote: I don't get the haters really. Of course with current figures it's inefficient and not sustainable
I can't speak for others, but what is being presented (unless I made a mistake somewhere in my rudimentary analysis) does not make any sense. If someone is advertising a network of sun-powered charging stations, then it's not being a hater to ask for clarification on how they get enough solar power to actually charge the cars that plug in to them.
You aren't trying to figure out how Tesla's system works, you're making things up based on your personal idea of how you think a solar charging network should work. Then you wave your finger at a company with thousands of smart employees and go "I bet you never thought of more cars going to a supercharger in a day than that particular supercharger's solar power capacity can handle!" Because you saw a picture of a solar panel and thought you could eyeball its dimensions?
That is similar to Lord Kelvin seeing a picture of the Wright Brothers' plane and going "It looks like the wings are maybe 5 meters by 10 meters, now assuming they're made of solid oak I don't think they can produce enough lift to also carry the weight of the engine and a grown pilot." How do you know the dimensions of one charging station because you saw a picture of it? The cars are 5 meters long, but maybe the canopy extends 7 meters for shade or comfort in the rain? How do you know the canopy only 2 car lengths wide? Is the charging station you saw a picture of representative of an average charging station? What's the average demand for charging on a given day? How many cars? What's the average amount of power per car? How much power do drivers want on an average day? Remember a 50% charge is 20 minutes. And people do their own charging at home.
Obviously not every watt is going directly from the sun to the battery given that there are superchargers that have no solar panels whatsoever. The claim is that the stations generate more power than the cars use in a year. The fact that you don't have insider access to Tesla's margins doesn't mean the math doesn't add up. In the meantime we can all enjoy the free supercharging for life that, regardless of your New York Times level criticisms, the company is providing.
You seem to have missed the entire point of my post. I'm not sure why, but this seems to be becoming an extremely polarizing and controversial issue like discussing religion or guns on TL.
I did an estimation based on the information available. The video clearly states that they are able to produce more power than the cars use, but don't provide any evidence. I'm saying it seems like this can't be the case, and perhaps the guy in the video is misrepresenting the system entirely (not that I'm a scientific genius and the company is a bunch of morons). I'm completely open to an explanation of how they do it, or how my estimations/figures/calculations were wrong. What I'm not open to is being verbally assaulted by you because I'm questioning what we are being fed. If you don't have the ability to explain to me how one of these stations can produce sufficient energy to power the cars that come to it, on average, then perhaps you should defer to someone who can (and who I invite to weigh in on this).
You're entirely basing your calculations on a single supercharger in a single day even though its been mentioned numerous times by Elon Musk and by people in this thread that these are connected to the Solar City grid.
Can you explain what this means? Where are the actual panels located that provide the power to charge the car? From what I can tell, it's mostly not going to be from the physical station. If it's coming from other sources that could just as easily have been connected to the town's main power grid, then I don't see the advantage of routing power from solar panels to car chargers over just routing power from solar panels to anything else.
Let's not mention that not many people own Tesla's at this point... let alone go on daily road trips with them.
I don't see the relevance, so it's a good thing you didn't mention it.
Uh, the supercharger stations themselves and the panels ontop of homes, businesses, and other buildings.
I don't see how the number of Tesla owners and those owners that go on roadtrips is not relevant to this. Isn't it obvious that Elon is able to make such a statement is because these stations are hardly going to be used or do you honestly think that there's a significant amount of Tesla owners that goes on daily roadtrips to use more power than the Supercharger and Solar City grid can generate?
Are you seriously asking people on an internet forum to give you "scientific proof" of how this thing can work? Like, what the heck.
Solar power CAN be a viable alternative energy source, it has plenty of drawbacks but there's a reason why despite stiff competition from fossil-based energy it still has place in modern world. The more money is invested into alternative energy sources NOW, the smoother global economy can transition out of fossil-based energy production when the wells do run dry - which they will, it's a question of when, not if.
There's really no reason for people like you and me who have virtually no understanding about the actual technology behind this to question whether it is possible or not - it's not like the guy is trying to sell a scam to you or something. Of course it's something you might concern yourself with if you plan on buying a Tesla car in nearby future, but something tells me you aren't so...
It's really in the same vein as investing money into space programs, pretty much. It isn't commercially viable as of this moment - but it has potential, and it's very silly to discount it as "impossible" simply because it isn't sustainable with the tools available right now. The more people work on things like this, the faster the tech can be refined, streamlined, and made financially sound.
On June 01 2013 15:47 Salazarz wrote: I don't get the haters really. Of course with current figures it's inefficient and not sustainable
I can't speak for others, but what is being presented (unless I made a mistake somewhere in my rudimentary analysis) does not make any sense. If someone is advertising a network of sun-powered charging stations, then it's not being a hater to ask for clarification on how they get enough solar power to actually charge the cars that plug in to them.
You aren't trying to figure out how Tesla's system works, you're making things up based on your personal idea of how you think a solar charging network should work. Then you wave your finger at a company with thousands of smart employees and go "I bet you never thought of more cars going to a supercharger in a day than that particular supercharger's solar power capacity can handle!" Because you saw a picture of a solar panel and thought you could eyeball its dimensions?
That is similar to Lord Kelvin seeing a picture of the Wright Brothers' plane and going "It looks like the wings are maybe 5 meters by 10 meters, now assuming they're made of solid oak I don't think they can produce enough lift to also carry the weight of the engine and a grown pilot." How do you know the dimensions of one charging station because you saw a picture of it? The cars are 5 meters long, but maybe the canopy extends 7 meters for shade or comfort in the rain? How do you know the canopy only 2 car lengths wide? Is the charging station you saw a picture of representative of an average charging station? What's the average demand for charging on a given day? How many cars? What's the average amount of power per car? How much power do drivers want on an average day? Remember a 50% charge is 20 minutes. And people do their own charging at home.
Obviously not every watt is going directly from the sun to the battery given that there are superchargers that have no solar panels whatsoever. The claim is that the stations generate more power than the cars use in a year. The fact that you don't have insider access to Tesla's margins doesn't mean the math doesn't add up. In the meantime we can all enjoy the free supercharging for life that, regardless of your New York Times level criticisms, the company is providing.
You seem to have missed the entire point of my post. I'm not sure why, but this seems to be becoming an extremely polarizing and controversial issue like discussing religion or guns on TL.
I did an estimation based on the information available. The video clearly states that they are able to produce more power than the cars use, but don't provide any evidence. I'm saying it seems like this can't be the case, and perhaps the guy in the video is misrepresenting the system entirely (not that I'm a scientific genius and the company is a bunch of morons). I'm completely open to an explanation of how they do it, or how my estimations/figures/calculations were wrong. What I'm not open to is being verbally assaulted by you because I'm questioning what we are being fed. If you don't have the ability to explain to me how one of these stations can produce sufficient energy to power the cars that come to it, on average, then perhaps you should defer to someone who can (and who I invite to weigh in on this).
You're entirely basing your calculations on a single supercharger in a single day even though its been mentioned numerous times by Elon Musk and by people in this thread that these are connected to the Solar City grid.
Can you explain what this means? Where are the actual panels located that provide the power to charge the car? From what I can tell, it's mostly not going to be from the physical station. If it's coming from other sources that could just as easily have been connected to the town's main power grid, then I don't see the advantage of routing power from solar panels to car chargers over just routing power from solar panels to anything else.
And I think Elon also mentioned in a year, not in a day.
If we average things out, whether we do our calculations to the day or to the year doesn't matter.
Let's not mention that not many people own Tesla's at this point... let alone go on daily road trips with them.
I don't see the relevance, so it's a good thing you didn't mention it.
Uh, the supercharger stations themselves and the panels ontop of homes, businesses, and other buildings.
I don't see how the number of Tesla owners and those owners that go on roadtrips is not relevant to this. Isn't it obvious that Elon is able to make such a statement is because these stations are hardly going to be used or do you honestly think that there's a significant amount of Tesla owners that goes on daily roadtrips to use more power than the Supercharger and Solar City grid can generate?
panels on homes generally dont actually contribute to power unless they ahve appearded in the last few years ... they are used to heat water usually.
Those panels do not produce excess power as the households consumption will be far higher ... they are to supplement in order to reduce bills ... peopel with solar panels dont get their energy bills wiped out and then recieve money from power companies you know.
How many times are you going to count the energy produced by green means?
So far you have power companies claiming the same bit of power (because they buy it from home owner to supplement their figures), home owners (despite selling it so they can show off their green peen) adn now tesla (bceause they need your money) ... thats 1 watt of power being counted 3 times. Talk about terrible accountancy.
On June 01 2013 18:22 Salazarz wrote: Are you seriously asking people on an internet forum to give you "scientific proof" of how this thing can work? Like, what the heck.
Solar power CAN be a viable alternative energy source, it has plenty of drawbacks but there's a reason why despite stiff competition from fossil-based energy it still has place in modern world. The more money is invested into alternative energy sources NOW, the smoother global economy can transition out of fossil-based energy production when the wells do run dry - which they will, it's a question of when, not if.
There's really no reason for people like you and me who have virtually no understanding about the actual technology behind this to question whether it is possible or not - it's not like the guy is trying to sell a scam to you or something. Of course it's something you might concern yourself with if you plan on buying a Tesla car in nearby future, but something tells me you aren't so...
It's really in the same vein as investing money into space programs, pretty much. It isn't commercially viable as of this moment - but it has potential, and it's very silly to discount it as "impossible" simply because it isn't sustainable with the tools available right now. The more people work on things like this, the faster the tech can be refined, streamlined, and made financially sound.
the only problem with the investing money argument is that it doesn't really apply in tesla car case. Investing woudl be implying research .. which they are doing. But their main aim is to monetise electric cars.
the investment argument would go into funding companies that are researching materials directly. Personally id rather invest in some state run scheme or via awards program ... similar to space x program and competitions - not to a commercial entity whos mission is to make share holders happy.
There are lots of reasons to question electric car technology because right now you are not helping the environment you are making it worse.
As for the impossible part ... im sorry but you cannot make something out of nothing. Its not about possible or impossible its about not living in make believe land. There is no point attempting to rationalise it, that is pure sophistry - in relation to the available power that is. I grant you that solar is the way forward - however the materials we are using for it are incredibly expensive energy wise to produce so i don't see it happening in next 20 years. Right now money should be going into thorium or something similar that is already proven and has had designs refined due to prior success.
You guys might want to consider the possibility that Micronesia isn't a Bond villain attempting to increase the value of his arctic real estate by hastening the onset of global warming. Maybe he was just asking a question?
On June 01 2013 15:47 Salazarz wrote: I don't get the haters really. Of course with current figures it's inefficient and not sustainable
I can't speak for others, but what is being presented (unless I made a mistake somewhere in my rudimentary analysis) does not make any sense. If someone is advertising a network of sun-powered charging stations, then it's not being a hater to ask for clarification on how they get enough solar power to actually charge the cars that plug in to them.
You aren't trying to figure out how Tesla's system works, you're making things up based on your personal idea of how you think a solar charging network should work. Then you wave your finger at a company with thousands of smart employees and go "I bet you never thought of more cars going to a supercharger in a day than that particular supercharger's solar power capacity can handle!" Because you saw a picture of a solar panel and thought you could eyeball its dimensions?
That is similar to Lord Kelvin seeing a picture of the Wright Brothers' plane and going "It looks like the wings are maybe 5 meters by 10 meters, now assuming they're made of solid oak I don't think they can produce enough lift to also carry the weight of the engine and a grown pilot." How do you know the dimensions of one charging station because you saw a picture of it? The cars are 5 meters long, but maybe the canopy extends 7 meters for shade or comfort in the rain? How do you know the canopy only 2 car lengths wide? Is the charging station you saw a picture of representative of an average charging station? What's the average demand for charging on a given day? How many cars? What's the average amount of power per car? How much power do drivers want on an average day? Remember a 50% charge is 20 minutes. And people do their own charging at home.
Obviously not every watt is going directly from the sun to the battery given that there are superchargers that have no solar panels whatsoever. The claim is that the stations generate more power than the cars use in a year. The fact that you don't have insider access to Tesla's margins doesn't mean the math doesn't add up. In the meantime we can all enjoy the free supercharging for life that, regardless of your New York Times level criticisms, the company is providing.
What the hell? lol he's just saying at face value it doesn't make sense to him and has put up some rough numbers to explain why.
Nothing wrong with saying "I don't understand, please explain"...
What a disaster Teslas should be still in the r&d phase which i think is ok to be subsidized, not in production because of some ridiculous money poured into rolling out the product and the supporting infrastructure.
Don't care. I'm not stopping for 30 minutes every 3 hours at best to charge. I spend most of my time on the road and I don't have time for that bs.
Talk to me when Electrics charge in the same time it takes me to fill up a tank of gas, get at least 400miles of range using AC/heat/Radio (you know normal things) and oh yea, Actually produce less pollution to create then they ever actually save. Until then, EV's are just for people who want to believe they are doing something good for the environment but actually aren't.
I don't know how it will work straight out, but laying out infrastructure for future sounds like a good plan, especially if price of oil starts rising.
On June 01 2013 14:49 micronesia wrote: I'm going to do a bit of math here. In the following video (from earlier in the thread) you get a good look at a charging station, and I'll estimate the dimensions of the panel is 5m x 10m = 50m^2.
According to this map, my location in NY receives about 4 kWh per m^2 per day. In other words, a charging station is getting about 50*4 = 200 kWh per day.
According to Tesla's website, their batteries are typically a 60 kWh or 85 kWh. In order to almost fully recharge such batteries, you only get ~3 cars charged per day.
What am I missing?
The fact that solar panels are nowhere near 100% efficient
They also use very rare materials atm and only really exist due to a false economy that is heavily subsidised.
huge potential breakthrough ... could possibly double existing efficiencies to 50% .... so really the 43% was an ideal experimental figure ... probably more like 30% currently if you average out the differences from opposing hype.
Solar cells are made (for the most part) with silicon and silicon compounds. Unless you also think computer parts "exist due to a false economy that is heavily subsidized," I'm going to say that you don't know anything about the technology.
On June 01 2013 21:38 Dekoth wrote: Don't care. I'm not stopping for 30 minutes every 3 hours at best to charge. I spend most of my time on the road and I don't have time for that bs.
Talk to me when Electrics charge in the same time it takes me to fill up a tank of gas, get at least 400miles of range using AC/heat/Radio (you know normal things) and oh yea, Actually produce less pollution to create then they ever actually save. Until then, EV's are just for people who want to believe they are doing something good for the environment but actually aren't.
Well, for me, the 30 minutes every 3 hours is pretty fine if it means free travel.
This would be really cool if instead of doing a half hour car charge, they instead did a battery exchange station. You pull up, pay a small fee (and I mean small, they could even start out doing this for free until it becomes common) for a battery change, they replace your battery with a fully charged one, and you're off in a minute or two. They then take the battery you just dropped off and charge it with their solar powered station (it doesn't matter anymore if it takes them a full half hour to charge it).
Can someone explain to me how this would work when it's cloudy or at night? None of the stuff people have been saying makes any sense. There are no batteries that good (obviously, otherwise why even have the stations), there is no solar grid (huh?) and excess energy can't be stored in the main grid since solar energy companies are in direct competition with utilities companies.
On June 01 2013 22:11 Whitewing wrote: This would be really cool if instead of doing a half hour car charge, they instead did a battery exchange station. You pull up, pay a small fee for a battery change, they replace your battery with a fully charged one, and you're off in a minute or two. They then take the battery you just dropped off and charge it with their solar powered station (it doesn't matter anymore if it takes them a full half hour to charge it).
That's what i always tought should be a valid solution.
Imagine they built the car in that in mind, it could take just a few minutes to change.
Better yet is if you never really own any battery, you would just pay for the refill and be on your way.
On June 01 2013 22:14 Feartheguru wrote: Can someone explain to me how this would work when it's cloudy or at night? None of the stuff people have been saying makes any sense. There are no batteries that good (obviously, otherwise why even have the stations), there is no solar grid (huh?) and excess energy can't be stored in the main grid since solar energy companies are in direct competition with utilities companies.
Solar energy is ALWAYS stored on the main grid. If you go out right now and buy solar panels for your home, you can sell your excess energy to the power company and get a check each month in the mail. Now the technology is nowhere near cheap enough for this to be worth it for normal people, but i see no reason why this company can't run solar farms that produce energy in excess to what they pull off the grid if it maintains their green image.
On June 01 2013 22:14 Feartheguru wrote: Can someone explain to me how this would work when it's cloudy or at night? None of the stuff people have been saying makes any sense. There are no batteries that good (obviously, otherwise why even have the stations), there is no solar grid (huh?) and excess energy can't be stored in the main grid since solar energy companies are in direct competition with utilities companies.
Liquid metal batteries have an efficiency of 70-90%, but can't be used in cars due to their liquid nature, size, and operating temperature.
By looking at the long term plan for these types of stations in the video, it seems very impractical.
I live in Toronto Canada, the closest charging station looks like it's 150km away to the east and west. And you have to charge every 3 hours? How is that even useable in daily life? I have to drive for about 1.5 hours to power up and drive back 1.5 hours. That's 3 hours of driving to get a charge....the stations are way way too sparse.
They should plan to put all stations in urban areas first before going to a national level.
On June 01 2013 22:40 viletomato wrote: By looking at the long term plan for these types of stations in the video, it seems very impractical.
I live in Toronto Canada, the closest charging station looks like it's 150km away to the east and west. And you have to charge every 3 hours? How is that even useable in daily life? I have to drive for about 1.5 hours to power up and drive back 1.5 hours. That's 3 hours of driving to get a charge....the stations are way way too sparse.
They should plan to put all stations in urban areas first before going to a national level.
You charge up at home normally. You use these stations if you're going out of town.
30 minutes isn't too bad-- but if the car starts to get too popular there won't be enough solar power per station to power cars. The stations themselves would need some sort of storage device, which would get quickly depleted if they're constantly used. Curious to see how this pans out.
On June 01 2013 22:40 viletomato wrote: By looking at the long term plan for these types of stations in the video, it seems very impractical.
I live in Toronto Canada, the closest charging station looks like it's 150km away to the east and west. And you have to charge every 3 hours? How is that even useable in daily life? I have to drive for about 1.5 hours to power up and drive back 1.5 hours. That's 3 hours of driving to get a charge....the stations are way way too sparse.
They should plan to put all stations in urban areas first before going to a national level.
You dont need a station to give the vehicle battery. You can simply plug it into a standard socket and it will charge around 60 miles an hour. Its not that impractical at all. Hotels having outlets for customers is very common these days too.
I see-- obviously having an outlet makes sense.
but charge around 60 miles an hour? what does that mean?
Every hour of charging, gives you 60 miles of driving range.
My dad just got one of the new Model S, and it's damn sexy and fun to drive. Charging it overnight is ridiculously simple, and with a driving range of ~260 miles any of the nearby charging stations work out quite well if you want to travel longer distances.
On June 01 2013 21:38 Dekoth wrote: Don't care. I'm not stopping for 30 minutes every 3 hours at best to charge. I spend most of my time on the road and I don't have time for that bs.
Talk to me when Electrics charge in the same time it takes me to fill up a tank of gas, get at least 400miles of range using AC/heat/Radio (you know normal things) and oh yea, Actually produce less pollution to create then they ever actually save. Until then, EV's are just for people who want to believe they are doing something good for the environment but actually aren't.
yeah..they're putting money into a technology that is still developing and helping to advance it so that eventually it WILL achieve all of the things you stated, meanwhile you bitch and moan about how said technology is crap.
Yeah man, people who buy electric cars are HUGE assholes.
On June 01 2013 22:11 Whitewing wrote: This would be really cool if instead of doing a half hour car charge, they instead did a battery exchange station. You pull up, pay a small fee (and I mean small, they could even start out doing this for free until it becomes common) for a battery change, they replace your battery with a fully charged one, and you're off in a minute or two. They then take the battery you just dropped off and charge it with their solar powered station (it doesn't matter anymore if it takes them a full half hour to charge it).
that sounds like a ton of extra wear and tear on the battery connections
Being skeptical is good of course, but I had two thoughts:
1) this seems like a wise investment given that once the station pays for itself, it will simply be generating free energy which can be sold if it is not used by cars
2) it doesn't necessarily have to be snake oil: the only direct payment for the consumer is the car. If this bothers you, you simply do not have to buy an all electric car. It's not like they're asking 50-60$ for each charge and that you're being subjected to an expense that you will have to cover if they prove to be incompetent.
As people have pointed out, the existence of this technology and infrastructure is a positive thing and especially so since it will cost the taxpayer nothing: it's all private investments. Musk also owns other companies which can help subsidize the cost of this one until it becomes profitable. I say good luck to him
On June 01 2013 22:11 Whitewing wrote: This would be really cool if instead of doing a half hour car charge, they instead did a battery exchange station. You pull up, pay a small fee (and I mean small, they could even start out doing this for free until it becomes common) for a battery change, they replace your battery with a fully charged one, and you're off in a minute or two. They then take the battery you just dropped off and charge it with their solar powered station (it doesn't matter anymore if it takes them a full half hour to charge it).
Ehhh, have you SEEN how big these batteries are? That's simply not practical without waitstaff.
And to all the people talking about how this will be inconvenient if electric cars become a big thing: well, in that case there will be the funding to build more of these, no? Unfortunately, because it's a free service, supply and demand can't do it on its own, so we have to wait for Tesla/government to build them, but if they are needed, someone will end up making them.
That electricity is free at the moment because electric cars represent such a small portions of cars in the USA. Just you wait once more people start using them. ^^
I actually predict that electricity prices will skyrocket once electric cars become more common and fossil fuels are used less and less.
On June 01 2013 23:52 Incognoto wrote: That electricity is free at the moment because electric cars represent such a small portions of cars in the USA. Just you wait once more people start using them. ^^
I actually predict that electricity prices will skyrocket once electric cars become more common and fossil fuels are used less and less.
Even if they decide to ask money for recharging, it's still going to be much less than your regular gasoline fee even when electricity prices go up as you say.
On June 01 2013 14:49 micronesia wrote: I'm going to do a bit of math here. In the following video (from earlier in the thread) you get a good look at a charging station, and I'll estimate the dimensions of the panel is 5m x 10m = 50m^2.
According to this map, my location in NY receives about 4 kWh per m^2 per day. In other words, a charging station is getting about 50*4 = 200 kWh per day.
According to Tesla's website, their batteries are typically a 60 kWh or 85 kWh. In order to almost fully recharge such batteries, you only get ~3 cars charged per day.
What am I missing?
The fact that solar panels are nowhere near 100% efficient
They also use very rare materials atm and only really exist due to a false economy that is heavily subsidised.
huge potential breakthrough ... could possibly double existing efficiencies to 50% .... so really the 43% was an ideal experimental figure ... probably more like 30% currently if you average out the differences from opposing hype.
Solar cells are made (for the most part) with silicon and silicon compounds. Unless you also think computer parts "exist due to a false economy that is heavily subsidized," I'm going to say that you don't know anything about the technology.
with just 10 seconds worth of effort. You can say whatever you like, that's kinda the problem doesn't make you right. I read about shit and change my opinions based on what i read. When i disagree with someone i go and check that they arnt talking shit before i go and tell them they are wrong.
The problem you face is that even if they rely 99% on something lik ewater that is readily available if you cant get the 1% part that makes them efficient you are fucked.
IE solar panels are replacing dependency of one finite resource on another - arguably far more scarce. And please don't post back going on about one of them disagreeing with me ... i am well aware ... its called a balanced view.
Just look at neobydium ... also a rare earth metal .. eerything uses it. Thats the problem. There is plenty whilst there isnt giant demand.
On June 01 2013 15:47 Salazarz wrote: I don't get the haters really. Of course with current figures it's inefficient and not sustainable
I can't speak for others, but what is being presented (unless I made a mistake somewhere in my rudimentary analysis) does not make any sense. If someone is advertising a network of sun-powered charging stations, then it's not being a hater to ask for clarification on how they get enough solar power to actually charge the cars that plug in to them.
You aren't trying to figure out how Tesla's system works, you're making things up based on your personal idea of how you think a solar charging network should work. Then you wave your finger at a company with thousands of smart employees and go "I bet you never thought of more cars going to a supercharger in a day than that particular supercharger's solar power capacity can handle!" Because you saw a picture of a solar panel and thought you could eyeball its dimensions?
That is similar to Lord Kelvin seeing a picture of the Wright Brothers' plane and going "It looks like the wings are maybe 5 meters by 10 meters, now assuming they're made of solid oak I don't think they can produce enough lift to also carry the weight of the engine and a grown pilot." How do you know the dimensions of one charging station because you saw a picture of it? The cars are 5 meters long, but maybe the canopy extends 7 meters for shade or comfort in the rain? How do you know the canopy only 2 car lengths wide? Is the charging station you saw a picture of representative of an average charging station? What's the average demand for charging on a given day? How many cars? What's the average amount of power per car? How much power do drivers want on an average day? Remember a 50% charge is 20 minutes. And people do their own charging at home.
Obviously not every watt is going directly from the sun to the battery given that there are superchargers that have no solar panels whatsoever. The claim is that the stations generate more power than the cars use in a year. The fact that you don't have insider access to Tesla's margins doesn't mean the math doesn't add up. In the meantime we can all enjoy the free supercharging for life that, regardless of your New York Times level criticisms, the company is providing.
You seem to have missed the entire point of my post. I'm not sure why, but this seems to be becoming an extremely polarizing and controversial issue like discussing religion or guns on TL.
I did an estimation based on the information available. The video clearly states that they are able to produce more power than the cars use, but don't provide any evidence. I'm saying it seems like this can't be the case, and perhaps the guy in the video is misrepresenting the system entirely (not that I'm a scientific genius and the company is a bunch of morons). I'm completely open to an explanation of how they do it, or how my estimations/figures/calculations were wrong. What I'm not open to is being verbally assaulted by you because I'm questioning what we are being fed. If you don't have the ability to explain to me how one of these stations can produce sufficient energy to power the cars that come to it, on average, then perhaps you should defer to someone who can (and who I invite to weigh in on this).
You're entirely basing your calculations on a single supercharger in a single day even though its been mentioned numerous times by Elon Musk and by people in this thread that these are connected to the Solar City grid.
Can you explain what this means? Where are the actual panels located that provide the power to charge the car? From what I can tell, it's mostly not going to be from the physical station. If it's coming from other sources that could just as easily have been connected to the town's main power grid, then I don't see the advantage of routing power from solar panels to car chargers over just routing power from solar panels to anything else.
And I think Elon also mentioned in a year, not in a day.
If we average things out, whether we do our calculations to the day or to the year doesn't matter.
Let's not mention that not many people own Tesla's at this point... let alone go on daily road trips with them.
I don't see the relevance, so it's a good thing you didn't mention it.
What if they have fields of solar panels? Why are you so suspicious about this not adding up?
I really doubt a company as big as this would lie to people about free charging just to get car sales. I assume that's your main worry?
I'm more confused than worried. If all of these stations (except for the one in the video) are set up next to huge fields of solar panels, then the numbers add up better, although there still are issues with that. However, I don't think this is the case.
I am 'so suspicious about this not adding up' because it doesn't make sense. As someone else said, it's as though they are advertising a perpetual motion machine... there is nothing wrong with questioning it. There might be a perfectly valid explanation, and we are entitled to it... but it wasn't in the video in the OP. I admit I have not been following Tesla closely so I could be missing info they have released at some point, and am open to anyone who can point it out. In the meantime, I'm going to go with my first post in this thread over people saying things like "don't worry about it."
On June 01 2013 15:47 Salazarz wrote: I don't get the haters really. Of course with current figures it's inefficient and not sustainable
I can't speak for others, but what is being presented (unless I made a mistake somewhere in my rudimentary analysis) does not make any sense. If someone is advertising a network of sun-powered charging stations, then it's not being a hater to ask for clarification on how they get enough solar power to actually charge the cars that plug in to them.
You aren't trying to figure out how Tesla's system works, you're making things up based on your personal idea of how you think a solar charging network should work. Then you wave your finger at a company with thousands of smart employees and go "I bet you never thought of more cars going to a supercharger in a day than that particular supercharger's solar power capacity can handle!" Because you saw a picture of a solar panel and thought you could eyeball its dimensions?
That is similar to Lord Kelvin seeing a picture of the Wright Brothers' plane and going "It looks like the wings are maybe 5 meters by 10 meters, now assuming they're made of solid oak I don't think they can produce enough lift to also carry the weight of the engine and a grown pilot." How do you know the dimensions of one charging station because you saw a picture of it? The cars are 5 meters long, but maybe the canopy extends 7 meters for shade or comfort in the rain? How do you know the canopy only 2 car lengths wide? Is the charging station you saw a picture of representative of an average charging station? What's the average demand for charging on a given day? How many cars? What's the average amount of power per car? How much power do drivers want on an average day? Remember a 50% charge is 20 minutes. And people do their own charging at home.
Obviously not every watt is going directly from the sun to the battery given that there are superchargers that have no solar panels whatsoever. The claim is that the stations generate more power than the cars use in a year. The fact that you don't have insider access to Tesla's margins doesn't mean the math doesn't add up. In the meantime we can all enjoy the free supercharging for life that, regardless of your New York Times level criticisms, the company is providing.
You seem to have missed the entire point of my post. I'm not sure why, but this seems to be becoming an extremely polarizing and controversial issue like discussing religion or guns on TL.
I did an estimation based on the information available. The video clearly states that they are able to produce more power than the cars use, but don't provide any evidence. I'm saying it seems like this can't be the case, and perhaps the guy in the video is misrepresenting the system entirely (not that I'm a scientific genius and the company is a bunch of morons). I'm completely open to an explanation of how they do it, or how my estimations/figures/calculations were wrong. What I'm not open to is being verbally assaulted by you because I'm questioning what we are being fed. If you don't have the ability to explain to me how one of these stations can produce sufficient energy to power the cars that come to it, on average, then perhaps you should defer to someone who can (and who I invite to weigh in on this).
You're entirely basing your calculations on a single supercharger in a single day even though its been mentioned numerous times by Elon Musk and by people in this thread that these are connected to the Solar City grid.
Can you explain what this means? Where are the actual panels located that provide the power to charge the car? From what I can tell, it's mostly not going to be from the physical station. If it's coming from other sources that could just as easily have been connected to the town's main power grid, then I don't see the advantage of routing power from solar panels to car chargers over just routing power from solar panels to anything else.
And I think Elon also mentioned in a year, not in a day.
If we average things out, whether we do our calculations to the day or to the year doesn't matter.
Let's not mention that not many people own Tesla's at this point... let alone go on daily road trips with them.
I don't see the relevance, so it's a good thing you didn't mention it.
Uh, the supercharger stations themselves and the panels ontop of homes, businesses, and other buildings.
Aren't those panels used to provide power to those homes, businesses and other buildings? Usually, those panels are producing less power than the building uses, anyway. At peak sunlight if everything in the building is turned off, usually there is a small surplus that is re-inserted to the power grid and the owner gets reimbursed a little by the power company... but I'm not aware of a major surplus that requires specialized storing methods which are benefited by setting up nearby car-charging stations.
I don't see how the number of Tesla owners and those owners that go on roadtrips is not relevant to this. Isn't it obvious that Elon is able to make such a statement is because these stations are hardly going to be used or do you honestly think that there's a significant amount of Tesla owners that goes on daily roadtrips to use more power than the Supercharger and Solar City grid can generate?
So if I understand you correctly, these stations are all being built (at pretty great expense despite what the speaker in the video said) so that they can be used 3 times a day, and provide ~$15 dollars of charge? Unless the usage is that low, it doesn't really matter how low the number of Tesla owners are, as all of my concerns hold (until someone addresses them besides attacking me for it). By the way I don't think ownership is even that low since I've seen them driving around near me. I don't have numbers on that, however.
On June 01 2013 18:22 Salazarz wrote: Are you seriously asking people on an internet forum to give you "scientific proof" of how this thing can work? Like, what the heck.
No, I'm asking for an explanation of how this is even remotely workable.
Solar power CAN be a viable alternative energy source, it has plenty of drawbacks but there's a reason why despite stiff competition from fossil-based energy it still has place in modern world. The more money is invested into alternative energy sources NOW, the smoother global economy can transition out of fossil-based energy production when the wells do run dry - which they will, it's a question of when, not if.
There's really no reason for people like you and me who have virtually no understanding about the actual technology behind this to question whether it is possible or not - it's not like the guy is trying to sell a scam to you or something. Of course it's something you might concern yourself with if you plan on buying a Tesla car in nearby future, but something tells me you aren't so...
It's really in the same vein as investing money into space programs, pretty much. It isn't commercially viable as of this moment - but it has potential, and it's very silly to discount it as "impossible" simply because it isn't sustainable with the tools available right now. The more people work on things like this, the faster the tech can be refined, streamlined, and made financially sound.
Personally, I didn't come into this thread to discuss how viable solar power is in and of itself.
Regarding: "There's really no reason for people like you and me who have virtually no understanding about the actual technology behind this to question whether it is possible or not - it's not like the guy is trying to sell a scam to you or something."
I consider this an absolute terrible attitude to have in a discussion.
On June 01 2013 18:35 frogrubdown wrote: You guys might want to consider the possibility that Micronesia isn't a Bond villain attempting to increase the value of his arctic real estate by hastening the onset of global warming. Maybe he was just asking a question?
Yeah I'm kind of embarrassed by my community right now.
Let's not mention that not many people own Tesla's at this point... let alone go on daily road trips with them.
I don't see the relevance, so it's a good thing you didn't mention it.
The supercharger network, due to its sparsity, is used for distance driving. Road trips. If you don't live near one, you don't need to drive to it unless you're taking a trip longer than the range of the car, in which case at least one of your waypoints needs to be a supercharger station. (In the future there will be more stations to meet a higher volume of Teslas being built, but charging should also get faster and range should improve. But the main point is distance driving and supercharging are related. In the near future the network will still be sparse, especially compared to gas stations.)
Remember the number 3-4 cars you came up with for being a station's daily charging capacity? That number - whatever your guess for it is - only makes sense if you have context for it. You have to compare it to how many people are really showing up at superchargers. It's not enough that the number seems low. It needs context, it's low relative to what? How many people use superchargers daily? Unfortunately, that number doesn't exist for people who don't work at Tesla. We don't have all the information. Now, when you don't have all the information, it's possible to make arguments for either (any) side because you can't resolve a question without all the information. That's fine, people disagree.
But you were not representing yourself as an open person when you said "what is being presented (unless I made a mistake somewhere in my rudimentary analysis) does not make any sense" (emphasis yours) "Something seems off entirely," "It is not a viable model at all. There is something wrong," or when you suggested either you were missing something or the CEO of Tesla was "completely full of shit."
Now, to really understand the situation, we have to estimate that other number. Wikipedia says a total of 9,650 Model S were sold by April. Tesla sells directly through reservations and it takes a little while, we'll say there are 10,000 on the road in the US and we know there's 8 charging stations. How many road trips does the average person take? Unfortunately, that information doesn't exist in general that I can find any more than it does for Tesla motorists specifically. I will give you 1 free novelty electric road trip on top of whatever other reasonable estimate we can think of. After that, keeping in mind the destination constraints of the 6 California SCs and the 2 East Coast SCs, how about 2 trips a year? So at 10,000 cars on the road we have an instantaneous average yearly road trips of 30,000. For one charge in either direction we'll say 60,000 charges a year.
What if we change the solar margins a little bit? Remember this is a growing infrastructure that Tesla will expand to accommodate demand. For instance, as 6 of the 8 charging stations are in California, we can bump up the solar figure to 5 kWh/m^2. What about the canopy, it looks like maybe 8 meters by 16 to me. Some are obviously bigger while some have no canopy. But let's just change the average guess a little bit. That's 8*16*5=640 kWh a day. The 20 minute charge is 50%. Some people have 60 kWh batteries and supercharging is standard for 85 kWh, so we'll say 40 kWh a charge. That's 640/4=16 charges per station per day. At 16 charges a day at 8 stations for 365 days that's 46,720 charges. I missed my goal of 60,000 charges and I won't change my numbers now, but do you see how being a little bit more charitable makes the margins plausible? Even 4 charges per day at 8 SCs is 11680 charges a year. That's less than an order of magnitude away from 60,000 charges. I don't see these numbers as negating the system's feasibility when we know the supercharger network is growing and considering we made up almost every one of these numbers (besides the battery capacity and the number of stations).
Remember, this is a company that when people said "your financing announcement is shit," they came back and said you're right, we've fixed it. They said people aren't buying our 40 kWh Model S, we're not going to sell an inferior product. They paid back their government loan what, 9 years early? When they announced the Model S, people said you won't be able to make that car. When they made the Model S, people said nobody will buy that car. When they bought the old Toyota factory to increase volume, people said you won't be profitable. When they became profitable and started building a supercharger network in secret... okay? When Elon Musk put his personal wealth behind the resale value of the Model S? This isn't a BP level company. There's very little to suggest this is all just a ploy to get Tesla to foot the bill for its customers' free supercharging. They only said they're going to size the solar systems to make more electricity than supercharging uses. That's admittedly a vague claim but it's about the long term plans of the company. So when we go to dig around with actual numbers to find out what he might specifically mean by that claim, we should be looking for specifics that make sense rather than jumping to the specifics that are least likely to be true and then saying Elon Musk's idea is impossible when it was really just a vague idea that we.
With the announcement of the supercharger network's tripling in size and their plans for further expansion I expect they can maintain electricity surplus, and if not they can come out and say "actually we fucked this up" like they have in the past.
On June 01 2013 22:40 viletomato wrote: By looking at the long term plan for these types of stations in the video, it seems very impractical.
I live in Toronto Canada, the closest charging station looks like it's 150km away to the east and west. And you have to charge every 3 hours? How is that even useable in daily life? I have to drive for about 1.5 hours to power up and drive back 1.5 hours. That's 3 hours of driving to get a charge....the stations are way way too sparse.
They should plan to put all stations in urban areas first before going to a national level.
They're not charging stations. They're supercharging stations. When you own an electric car, any outlet is a charging station.
On June 01 2013 22:14 Feartheguru wrote: Can someone explain to me how this would work when it's cloudy or at night? None of the stuff people have been saying makes any sense. There are no batteries that good (obviously, otherwise why even have the stations), there is no solar grid (huh?) and excess energy can't be stored in the main grid since solar energy companies are in direct competition with utilities companies.
Solar energy reservoirs have fundamentally different constraints than electric car batteries.Specifically, a solar energy reservoir doesn't have to power a motor to drive itself around. It doesn't have to be engineered to take a 50% recharge in 20 minutes. Further, almost all US states require power companies to buy your electric surplus. The reason is power companies are set up to be monopolies, and they're regulated accordingly. The only thing Elon Musk is claiming is that they are sizing the superchargers' solar systems to exceed charging demand.
The solar "grid" is so referred to I assume because it's a distributed way of harvesting electricity which is different from everyone being hooked up to a couple power plants. If your idea of a "grid" is having your own redundant and totally useless set of transformers and power lines, then no, there is no solar grid. All people mean by grid is it's a way of talking about the solar infrastructure.
On June 01 2013 23:52 Incognoto wrote: That electricity is free at the moment because electric cars represent such a small portions of cars in the USA. Just you wait once more people start using them. ^^
The electricity is free for a lifetime as per the Tesla website (and probably the contracts).
On June 01 2013 10:59 {CC}StealthBlue wrote: Too bad Tesla isn't working on battery swapping technology? As Better Place just went belly up.
On June 01 2013 22:11 Whitewing wrote: This would be really cool if instead of doing a half hour car charge, they instead did a battery exchange station. You pull up, pay a small fee (and I mean small, they could even start out doing this for free until it becomes common) for a battery change, they replace your battery with a fully charged one, and you're off in a minute or two. They then take the battery you just dropped off and charge it with their solar powered station (it doesn't matter anymore if it takes them a full half hour to charge it).
I've heard it mentioned a few times but that amount of extra batteries probably requires a bigger infrastructure than they have right now. Swapping is supposed to be faster than filling a tank of gas. But the company probably needs a quick way to charge the spent batteries a la the supercharger network.
On June 01 2013 21:38 Dekoth wrote: Talk to me when Electrics charge in the same time it takes me to fill up a tank of gas, get at least 400miles of range using AC/heat/Radio (you know normal things) and oh yea, Actually produce less pollution to create then they ever actually save. Until then, EV's are just for people who want to believe they are doing something good for the environment but actually aren't.
"Talk to me when cars cost less to fuel than it does to let a horse graze and get just as much range without me having to find someone who has petrol when I can just let my horse graze and oh yeah, can ford rivers and cross mountain ranges and still work in inclement weather and other bad terrain."
Okay, we will get back to you when the technology is just as convenient as it is now. In the meantime we are running out of fossil fuels so we have to make some kind of switch whether you're in the market for a new car now or not.
On June 01 2013 18:23 MrTortoise wrote: the only problem with the investing money argument is that it doesn't really apply in tesla car case. Investing woudl be implying research .. which they are doing. But their main aim is to monetise electric cars.
the investment argument would go into funding companies that are researching materials directly. Personally id rather invest in some state run scheme or via awards program ... similar to space x program and competitions - not to a commercial entity whos mission is to make share holders happy.
No, it's investing money because it's a company. Of course they have to monetize the cars, they exist in a marketplace where all the other cars are monetized already. You cannot make a world breakthrough in R&D. Technology doesn't work that way. You can't give a few million dollars a year to a few universities and wait until they come up with the magic answer to how humans are supposed to handle their energy, and then the next day we all switch to that system. Electricity, oil, cars, these are all HUGE infrastructures. Imagine if 30 years ago we had said as a society nobody gets to have a cell phone until we've perfected the iPhone 10 design.
Elon Musk is the primary shareholder of Tesla so it's not really a factor. If he's only doing what makes shareholders happy then he's doing what makes him happy.
I don't fucking understand how anyone can hate on this. It's fucking awesome, will decrease global warming by a ton in the future if everyone switches to electric cars.
Let's not mention that not many people own Tesla's at this point... let alone go on daily road trips with them.
I don't see the relevance, so it's a good thing you didn't mention it.
The supercharger network, due to its sparsity, is used for distance driving. Road trips. If you don't live near one, you don't need to drive to it unless you're taking a trip longer than the range of the car, in which case at least one of your waypoints needs to be a supercharger station. (In the future there will be more stations to meet a higher volume of Teslas being built, but charging should also get faster and range should improve. But the main point is distance driving and supercharging are related. In the near future the network will still be sparse, especially compared to gas stations.)
Yes, I believe that is clear from the explanations in the video, the map, etc. The people complaining there isn't a station near them are forgetting they can always charge the car up overnight at their home.
Remember the number 3-4 cars you came up with for being a station's daily charging capacity? That number - whatever your guess for it is - only makes sense if you have context for it. You have to compare it to how many people are really showing up at superchargers. It's not enough that the number seems low.
But it doesn't make sense to spend millions building stations if they are going to charge 3 cars per day, even if only 3 people want to use them each day. If it's a charitable effort coming from deep pockets... maybe it makes sense then.
But you were not representing yourself as an open person when you said "what is being presented (unless I made a mistake somewhere in my rudimentary analysis) does not make any sense" (emphasis yours) "Something seems off entirely," "It is not a viable model at all. There is something wrong," or when you suggested either you were missing something or the CEO of Tesla was "completely full of shit."
I don't see this as not representing myself as an open person. I'm specifically asking for people to explain how this works so I can understand it better. You are arguably the first person (including information below) to try to attack the issue itself, with your most recent post.
Now, to really understand the situation, we have to estimate that other number. Wikipedia says a total of 9,650 Model S were sold by April. Tesla sells directly through reservations and it takes a little while, we'll say there are 10,000 on the road in the US and we know there's 8 charging stations. How many road trips does the average person take? Unfortunately, that information doesn't exist in general that I can find any more than it does for Tesla motorists specifically. I will give you 1 free novelty electric road trip on top of whatever other reasonable estimate we can think of. After that, keeping in mind the destination constraints of the 6 California SCs and the 2 East Coast SCs, how about 2 trips a year? So at 10,000 cars on the road we have an instantaneous average yearly road trips of 30,000. For one charge in either direction we'll say 60,000 charges a year.
As I said earlier, even if the usage is very low, creating the network of gas-station-sized charging stations (land, construction, etc) still does not make any financial sense unless there is a huge amount of money to dump into this with no expectation of recovering it. That's not to mention that the whole point of endeavors like this is to grow the amount of people using these cars (and therefore going on roadtrips that require these stations).
What if we change the solar margins a little bit? Remember this is a growing infrastructure that Tesla will expand to accommodate demand. For instance, as 6 of the 8 charging stations are in California, we can bump up the solar figure to 5 kWh/m^2. What about the canopy, it looks like maybe 8 meters by 16 to me. Some are obviously bigger while some have no canopy. But let's just change the average guess a little bit. That's 8*16*5=640 kWh a day. The 20 minute charge is 50%. Some people have 60 kWh batteries and supercharging is standard for 85 kWh, so we'll say 40 kWh a charge. That's 640/4=16 charges per station per day. At 16 charges a day at 8 stations for 365 days that's 46,720 charges. I missed my goal of 60,000 charges and I won't change my numbers now, but do you see how being a little bit more charitable makes the margins plausible? Even 4 charges per day at 8 SCs is 11680 charges a year. That's less than an order of magnitude away from 60,000 charges. I don't see these numbers as negating the system's feasibility when we know the supercharger network is growing and considering we made up almost every one of these numbers (besides the battery capacity and the number of stations).
Yea if the panels are significantly bigger than I estimated, and if batteries only require a chunk of their rated full charge, that helps. The real question would be, on average, what are the specifications of a charging station, including its solar charging capabilities.
Remember, this is a company that when people said "your financing announcement is shit," they came back and said you're right, we've fixed it. They said people aren't buying our 40 kWh Model S, we're not going to sell an inferior product. They paid back their government loan what, 9 years early? When they announced the Model S, people said you won't be able to make that car. When they made the Model S, people said nobody will buy that car. When they bought the old Toyota factory to increase volume, people said you won't be profitable. When they became profitable and started building a supercharger network in secret... okay? When Elon Musk put his personal wealth behind the resale value of the Model S? This isn't a BP level company.
Personally I can't comment on the company as I haven't been following them in the headlines. I have nothing against them for what it's worth.
There's very little to suggest this is all just a ploy to get Tesla to foot the bill for its customers' free supercharging. They only said they're going to size the solar systems to make more electricity than supercharging uses. That's admittedly a vague claim but it's about the long term plans of the company. So when we go to dig around with actual numbers to find out what he might specifically mean by that claim, we should be looking for specifics that make sense rather than jumping to the specifics that are least likely to be true and then saying Elon Musk's idea is impossible when it was really just a vague idea that we.
How do you propose we scale these charging stations to be able to handle more volume as these cars hopefully become more popular? The only thing I can think of is creating huge fields of solar panels near the charging station feeding electricity into the station with extra going into the power grid. If this is what he means, I would prefer he specify it, as it creates many new questions.
With the announcement of the supercharger network's tripling in size and their plans for further expansion I expect they can maintain electricity surplus, and if not they can come out and say "actually we fucked this up" like they have in the past.
It would be great if they can accomplish what they said in the OP's video, but I think it's okay for us to question it. I don't like the attitude that we should just "wait and see if the fucked up or not, because they will admit it if they fucked up" when having a discussion about a new technology proposal on a forum. At least you (unlike some others) have tried to continue the discussion by pointing out ways the proposal can be viable.
If anyone has more information about the specifications of supercharging stations, please share them.
On June 02 2013 00:47 oBlade wrote: Remember the number 3-4 cars you came up with for being a station's daily charging capacity? That number - whatever your guess for it is - only makes sense if you have context for it. You have to compare it to how many people are really showing up at superchargers. It's not enough that the number seems low. It needs context, it's low relative to what? How many people use superchargers daily? Unfortunately, that number doesn't exist for people who don't work at Tesla. We don't have all the information. Now, when you don't have all the information, it's possible to make arguments for either (any) side because you can't resolve a question without all the information. That's fine, people disagree.
But you were not representing yourself as an open person when you said "what is being presented (unless I made a mistake somewhere in my rudimentary analysis) does not make any sense" (emphasis yours) "Something seems off entirely," "It is not a viable model at all. There is something wrong," or when you suggested either you were missing something or the CEO of Tesla was "completely full of shit."
Now, to really understand the situation, we have to estimate that other number. Wikipedia says a total of 9,650 Model S were sold by April. Tesla sells directly through reservations and it takes a little while, we'll say there are 10,000 on the road in the US and we know there's 8 charging stations. How many road trips does the average person take? Unfortunately, that information doesn't exist in general that I can find any more than it does for Tesla motorists specifically. I will give you 1 free novelty electric road trip on top of whatever other reasonable estimate we can think of. After that, keeping in mind the destination constraints of the 6 California SCs and the 2 East Coast SCs, how about 2 trips a year? So at 10,000 cars on the road we have an instantaneous average yearly road trips of 30,000. For one charge in either direction we'll say 60,000 charges a year.
What if we change the solar margins a little bit? Remember this is a growing infrastructure that Tesla will expand to accommodate demand. For instance, as 6 of the 8 charging stations are in California, we can bump up the solar figure to 5 kWh/m^2. What about the canopy, it looks like maybe 8 meters by 16 to me. Some are obviously bigger while some have no canopy. But let's just change the average guess a little bit. That's 8*16*5=640 kWh a day. The 20 minute charge is 50%. Some people have 60 kWh batteries and supercharging is standard for 85 kWh, so we'll say 40 kWh a charge. That's 640/4=16 charges per station per day. At 16 charges a day at 8 stations for 365 days that's 46,720 charges. I missed my goal of 60,000 charges and I won't change my numbers now, but do you see how being a little bit more charitable makes the margins plausible? Even 4 charges per day at 8 SCs is 11680 charges a year. That's less than an order of magnitude away from 60,000 charges. I don't see these numbers as negating the system's feasibility when we know the supercharger network is growing and considering we made up almost every one of these numbers (besides the battery capacity and the number of stations).
Let me rephrase the issue a bit: I grow strawberries in my garden and I'm offering a basket of free strawberries to people who walk past my house. Since I have magic strawberries I grow 5 baskets per day.
First of all by giving them away for free instead of selling them, I'm essentially losing money by simple opportunity cost. I could have sold those strawberries after all. Now in this specific case I'm not just offering 5 baskets per day, I'm saying: "I offer a free basket of strawberries to everyone who wants one and walks past my house" - If the number of strawberry baskets exceeds 5 I go beyond just losing money because I could have sold them instead but now I lose even more money per basket than before because I have to buy up strawberries somewhere else.
THAT'S what doesn't add up and makes zero sense. It's a business model that is unsustainable, even when I make the horribly wrong assumption that my first 5 baskets are "free" just because I'm too dumb to sell them. I still payed for the seeds, I still payed for the water, etc.
It's utterly irrelevant if 1 person, 10 person or 100 persons walk past my house and want strawberries. The only difference is that more people make me lose more money but there is never a point where I profit from it. The only possible scenario of profit is because I also sell a "strawberry eating machine" (the car) but then I'm trading one-time payments (buying the car) against a lifelong supply of a finite resource (energy).
On June 01 2013 11:49 SnipedSoul wrote: Doesn't really fast charging completely ruin battery service life? It would suck if you needed a new set of batteries every couple of years.
Not really mayne, if you consider all the gas savings. What turns me off (he he he) is the fact that the dang things cost 80k up front/pay plan, which means id be tempted to grab some kind of sweet Audi rs4 or something for that kind of cash, saying fuckit to the long term investment via gas savings.
On June 02 2013 00:47 oBlade wrote: Remember the number 3-4 cars you came up with for being a station's daily charging capacity? That number - whatever your guess for it is - only makes sense if you have context for it. You have to compare it to how many people are really showing up at superchargers. It's not enough that the number seems low. It needs context, it's low relative to what? How many people use superchargers daily? Unfortunately, that number doesn't exist for people who don't work at Tesla. We don't have all the information. Now, when you don't have all the information, it's possible to make arguments for either (any) side because you can't resolve a question without all the information. That's fine, people disagree.
But you were not representing yourself as an open person when you said "what is being presented (unless I made a mistake somewhere in my rudimentary analysis) does not make any sense" (emphasis yours) "Something seems off entirely," "It is not a viable model at all. There is something wrong," or when you suggested either you were missing something or the CEO of Tesla was "completely full of shit."
Now, to really understand the situation, we have to estimate that other number. Wikipedia says a total of 9,650 Model S were sold by April. Tesla sells directly through reservations and it takes a little while, we'll say there are 10,000 on the road in the US and we know there's 8 charging stations. How many road trips does the average person take? Unfortunately, that information doesn't exist in general that I can find any more than it does for Tesla motorists specifically. I will give you 1 free novelty electric road trip on top of whatever other reasonable estimate we can think of. After that, keeping in mind the destination constraints of the 6 California SCs and the 2 East Coast SCs, how about 2 trips a year? So at 10,000 cars on the road we have an instantaneous average yearly road trips of 30,000. For one charge in either direction we'll say 60,000 charges a year.
What if we change the solar margins a little bit? Remember this is a growing infrastructure that Tesla will expand to accommodate demand. For instance, as 6 of the 8 charging stations are in California, we can bump up the solar figure to 5 kWh/m^2. What about the canopy, it looks like maybe 8 meters by 16 to me. Some are obviously bigger while some have no canopy. But let's just change the average guess a little bit. That's 8*16*5=640 kWh a day. The 20 minute charge is 50%. Some people have 60 kWh batteries and supercharging is standard for 85 kWh, so we'll say 40 kWh a charge. That's 640/4=16 charges per station per day. At 16 charges a day at 8 stations for 365 days that's 46,720 charges. I missed my goal of 60,000 charges and I won't change my numbers now, but do you see how being a little bit more charitable makes the margins plausible? Even 4 charges per day at 8 SCs is 11680 charges a year. That's less than an order of magnitude away from 60,000 charges. I don't see these numbers as negating the system's feasibility when we know the supercharger network is growing and considering we made up almost every one of these numbers (besides the battery capacity and the number of stations).
Let me rephrase the issue a bit: I grow strawberries in my garden and I'm offering a basket of free strawberries to people who walk past my house. Since I have magic strawberries I grow 5 baskets per day.
First of all by giving them away for free instead of selling them, I'm essentially losing money by simple opportunity cost. I could have sold those strawberries after all. Now in this specific case I'm not just offering 5 baskets per day, I'm saying: "I offer a free basket of strawberries to everyone who wants one and walks past my house" - If the number of strawberry baskets exceeds 5 I go beyond just losing money because I could have sold them instead but now I lose even more money per basket than before because I have to buy up strawberries somewhere else.
THAT'S what doesn't add up and makes zero sense. It's a business model that is unsustainable, even when I make the horribly wrong assumption that my first 5 baskets are "free" just because I'm too dumb to sell them. I still payed for the seeds, I still payed for the water, etc.
It's utterly irrelevant if 1 person, 10 person or 100 persons walk past my house and want strawberries. The only difference is that more people make me lose more money but there is never a point where I profit from it. The only possible scenario of profit is because I also sell a "strawberry eating machine" (the car) but then I'm trading one-time payments (buying the car) against a lifelong supply of a finite resource (energy).
One of Tesla's obstacles is infrastructure. People are hesitant to buy electric cars while there aren't a lot of charging stations around. On the other hand, businesses are hesitant to build charging stations until there are a lot of electric cars around.
It's a catch-22.
So Tesla is trying to go around that by building a few charging stations themselves. You're right that they'll lose money on those stations, but they figure the confidence that the stations will provide consumers, along with the publicity will result in enough sales to offset those losses.
No one really knows if it will be worthwhile or not, but doing something at a loss to do more of something else at a profit is pretty common (see 'loss leader').
Now, to really understand the situation, we have to estimate that other number. Wikipedia says a total of 9,650 Model S were sold by April. Tesla sells directly through reservations and it takes a little while, we'll say there are 10,000 on the road in the US and we know there's 8 charging stations. How many road trips does the average person take? Unfortunately, that information doesn't exist in general that I can find any more than it does for Tesla motorists specifically. I will give you 1 free novelty electric road trip on top of whatever other reasonable estimate we can think of. After that, keeping in mind the destination constraints of the 6 California SCs and the 2 East Coast SCs, how about 2 trips a year? So at 10,000 cars on the road we have an instantaneous average yearly road trips of 30,000. For one charge in either direction we'll say 60,000 charges a year.
As I said earlier, even if the usage is very low, creating the network of gas-station-sized charging stations (land, construction, etc) still does not make any financial sense unless there is a huge amount of money to dump into this with no expectation of recovering it. That's not to mention that the whole point of endeavors like this is to grow the amount of people using these cars (and therefore going on roadtrips that require these stations).
What if we change the solar margins a little bit? Remember this is a growing infrastructure that Tesla will expand to accommodate demand. For instance, as 6 of the 8 charging stations are in California, we can bump up the solar figure to 5 kWh/m^2. What about the canopy, it looks like maybe 8 meters by 16 to me. Some are obviously bigger while some have no canopy. But let's just change the average guess a little bit. That's 8*16*5=640 kWh a day. The 20 minute charge is 50%. Some people have 60 kWh batteries and supercharging is standard for 85 kWh, so we'll say 40 kWh a charge. That's 640/4=16 charges per station per day. At 16 charges a day at 8 stations for 365 days that's 46,720 charges. I missed my goal of 60,000 charges and I won't change my numbers now, but do you see how being a little bit more charitable makes the margins plausible? Even 4 charges per day at 8 SCs is 11680 charges a year. That's less than an order of magnitude away from 60,000 charges. I don't see these numbers as negating the system's feasibility when we know the supercharger network is growing and considering we made up almost every one of these numbers (besides the battery capacity and the number of stations).
Yea if the panels are significantly bigger than I estimated, and if batteries only require a chunk of their rated full charge, that helps. The real question would be, on average, what are the specifications of a charging station, including its solar charging capabilities.
With the announcement of the supercharger network's tripling in size and their plans for further expansion I expect they can maintain electricity surplus, and if not they can come out and say "actually we fucked this up" like they have in the past.
It would be great if they can accomplish what they said in the OP's video, but I think it's okay for us to question it. I don't like the attitude that we should just "wait and see if the fucked up or not, because they will admit it if they fucked up" when having a discussion about a new technology proposal on a forum. At least you (unlike some others) have tried to continue the discussion by pointing out ways the proposal can be viable.
If anyone has more information about the specifications of supercharging stations, please share them.
I am definitely in favor of questioning, but from the perspective of Tesla it might seem like they aren't releasing information when to them it's just not that mysterious so they're not thinking about it.
The reason I halved the charge capacity in my estimate is that when you supercharge, the battery charges the first 50% faster, which is where the convenient 20 minutes number comes from. And also, charging is supposed to be most effective from around 25% to 75% I think. I think that's analogous to gas cars, you don't need to fill her all the way to the F when it's just making the car heavier but at low levels there are also factors of maybe traction and eventually fuel starving? I don't know. I know it's not recommended to charge to 100% because the car uses regenerative braking and also the battery health a little bit comes into play, but of course you can do it to 100% every time with no effect on the warranty.
On June 01 2013 11:49 SnipedSoul wrote: Doesn't really fast charging completely ruin battery service life? It would suck if you needed a new set of batteries every couple of years.
Batteries are under warranties that aren't affected by how much you use the superchargers, and the batteries themselves are proprietary like the supercharging technology. It's not like your run of the mill laptop battery. They're really trying to optimize batteries for cars.
About the money questions that I now see might be causing suspicion or maybe seems weird (micronesia and r.Evo): Again, we don't have access to Tesla's books. I do know there is a $2,000 fee for supercharger access in a 60 kWh Model S. Access is included for an 85 kWh Model S, so I assume the fee is also included in the price. Those revenues are probably stamped for the supercharger network. Buying a car now will help pay for the infrastructure to support the maybe $30,000 cars that we'll hopefully be seeing in a few years. It should also help demand. The other factor I know is that this guy isn't a 4pooler, he's a bona fide management zerg, and he really has long term strategies. You can't get people to stop buying Hondas if the only electric option you're offering them is a golf cart. The supercharger network, and range in general, is Tesla's contribution to a paradigm shift in the auto world. That's a shift that the CEO personally wants our species to have in his lifetime, and one that would be favorable to the company.
On June 01 2013 11:49 SnipedSoul wrote: Doesn't really fast charging completely ruin battery service life? It would suck if you needed a new set of batteries every couple of years.
Not really mayne, if you consider all the gas savings. What turns me off (he he he) is the fact that the dang things cost 80k up front/pay plan, which means id be tempted to grab some kind of sweet Audi rs4 or something for that kind of cash, saying fuckit to the long term investment via gas savings.
Yeah...I could almost buy a ZR1 for the price of a Model S.
Tesla cars are cool and all, but I wouldn't buy one. Not yet, anyways.
If the purpose of the stations is mainly to provide high-speed charging access in between major cities and the like, then that's fine, although the video is misleading if the solar power aspect of it isn't covering most/all of the charging now, or in the near future (car manufacturing aside, the power grid provides energy more efficiently than individual car engines). If they have figured out how to actually fuel all of this over solar power in a reasonable way, then that's awesome and I support them in growing this. I really do hope they come out with more particulars about their long-term plan with this.
On June 02 2013 02:25 micronesia wrote: If the purpose of the stations is mainly to provide high-speed charging access in between major cities and the like, then that's fine, although the video is misleading if the solar power aspect of it isn't covering most/all of the charging now, or in the near future (car manufacturing aside, the power grid provides energy more efficiently than individual car engines). If they have figured out how to actually fuel all of this over solar power in a reasonable way, then that's awesome and I support them in growing this. I really do hope they come out with more particulars about their long-term plan with this.
I totally agree that the charging stations solar arrays aren't big enough to supply all the electricity consumed by the Teslas if they were the sole way the vehicle's recharged.
I guess that presenter's announcement may be valid (though misleading) because the average Tesla driver won't need to use the supercharging stations on a regular basis (unless they happen to live conveniently near one.) With a 260 mile driving range it seems much more convenient to go about your day and plug it in at night, losing yourself no time throughout the day.
So, the Teslas still consume more power than is produced by the supercharging stations, but that power mostly comes from the grid via their home garage plug while the supercharging is used on the rare occasional distance drive.
I really like this idea. It is nice to see more car companies to be thinking outside of the box and developing something that can run a car without using gas.
I would love to see a world where we are not so depended on oil and gas... think of how many issues/events could have been avoided world wide if we didn't need oil... On the other hand i wonder how the oil companies feel about this... "free to drive anywhere", seems legit.
For the record, all technological development that requires infrastructure of any kind follows an S shaped curve: people want technology X that happens to require infrastructure Y. However, they can't use X without Y, and Y doesn't exist yet, and people don't want to pay for a costly investment into Y until people are using X so they don't have an absurd time lag scale on a return on their investment. So it starts off ridiculously slow, then picks up massive speed as X and Y really get going, then eventually it peters out as it becomes commonplace.
Electrical cars and battery/charge stations are just one example of this.
On June 02 2013 00:47 oBlade wrote: Remember the number 3-4 cars you came up with for being a station's daily charging capacity? That number - whatever your guess for it is - only makes sense if you have context for it. You have to compare it to how many people are really showing up at superchargers. It's not enough that the number seems low. It needs context, it's low relative to what? How many people use superchargers daily? Unfortunately, that number doesn't exist for people who don't work at Tesla. We don't have all the information. Now, when you don't have all the information, it's possible to make arguments for either (any) side because you can't resolve a question without all the information. That's fine, people disagree.
But you were not representing yourself as an open person when you said "what is being presented (unless I made a mistake somewhere in my rudimentary analysis) does not make any sense" (emphasis yours) "Something seems off entirely," "It is not a viable model at all. There is something wrong," or when you suggested either you were missing something or the CEO of Tesla was "completely full of shit."
Now, to really understand the situation, we have to estimate that other number. Wikipedia says a total of 9,650 Model S were sold by April. Tesla sells directly through reservations and it takes a little while, we'll say there are 10,000 on the road in the US and we know there's 8 charging stations. How many road trips does the average person take? Unfortunately, that information doesn't exist in general that I can find any more than it does for Tesla motorists specifically. I will give you 1 free novelty electric road trip on top of whatever other reasonable estimate we can think of. After that, keeping in mind the destination constraints of the 6 California SCs and the 2 East Coast SCs, how about 2 trips a year? So at 10,000 cars on the road we have an instantaneous average yearly road trips of 30,000. For one charge in either direction we'll say 60,000 charges a year.
What if we change the solar margins a little bit? Remember this is a growing infrastructure that Tesla will expand to accommodate demand. For instance, as 6 of the 8 charging stations are in California, we can bump up the solar figure to 5 kWh/m^2. What about the canopy, it looks like maybe 8 meters by 16 to me. Some are obviously bigger while some have no canopy. But let's just change the average guess a little bit. That's 8*16*5=640 kWh a day. The 20 minute charge is 50%. Some people have 60 kWh batteries and supercharging is standard for 85 kWh, so we'll say 40 kWh a charge. That's 640/4=16 charges per station per day. At 16 charges a day at 8 stations for 365 days that's 46,720 charges. I missed my goal of 60,000 charges and I won't change my numbers now, but do you see how being a little bit more charitable makes the margins plausible? Even 4 charges per day at 8 SCs is 11680 charges a year. That's less than an order of magnitude away from 60,000 charges. I don't see these numbers as negating the system's feasibility when we know the supercharger network is growing and considering we made up almost every one of these numbers (besides the battery capacity and the number of stations).
Let me rephrase the issue a bit: I grow strawberries in my garden and I'm offering a basket of free strawberries to people who walk past my house. Since I have magic strawberries I grow 5 baskets per day.
First of all by giving them away for free instead of selling them, I'm essentially losing money by simple opportunity cost. I could have sold those strawberries after all. Now in this specific case I'm not just offering 5 baskets per day, I'm saying: "I offer a free basket of strawberries to everyone who wants one and walks past my house" - If the number of strawberry baskets exceeds 5 I go beyond just losing money because I could have sold them instead but now I lose even more money per basket than before because I have to buy up strawberries somewhere else.
THAT'S what doesn't add up and makes zero sense. It's a business model that is unsustainable, even when I make the horribly wrong assumption that my first 5 baskets are "free" just because I'm too dumb to sell them. I still payed for the seeds, I still payed for the water, etc.
It's utterly irrelevant if 1 person, 10 person or 100 persons walk past my house and want strawberries. The only difference is that more people make me lose more money but there is never a point where I profit from it. The only possible scenario of profit is because I also sell a "strawberry eating machine" (the car) but then I'm trading one-time payments (buying the car) against a lifelong supply of a finite resource (energy).
On June 02 2013 00:47 oBlade wrote: Remember the number 3-4 cars you came up with for being a station's daily charging capacity? That number - whatever your guess for it is - only makes sense if you have context for it. You have to compare it to how many people are really showing up at superchargers. It's not enough that the number seems low. It needs context, it's low relative to what? How many people use superchargers daily? Unfortunately, that number doesn't exist for people who don't work at Tesla. We don't have all the information. Now, when you don't have all the information, it's possible to make arguments for either (any) side because you can't resolve a question without all the information. That's fine, people disagree.
But you were not representing yourself as an open person when you said "what is being presented (unless I made a mistake somewhere in my rudimentary analysis) does not make any sense" (emphasis yours) "Something seems off entirely," "It is not a viable model at all. There is something wrong," or when you suggested either you were missing something or the CEO of Tesla was "completely full of shit."
Now, to really understand the situation, we have to estimate that other number. Wikipedia says a total of 9,650 Model S were sold by April. Tesla sells directly through reservations and it takes a little while, we'll say there are 10,000 on the road in the US and we know there's 8 charging stations. How many road trips does the average person take? Unfortunately, that information doesn't exist in general that I can find any more than it does for Tesla motorists specifically. I will give you 1 free novelty electric road trip on top of whatever other reasonable estimate we can think of. After that, keeping in mind the destination constraints of the 6 California SCs and the 2 East Coast SCs, how about 2 trips a year? So at 10,000 cars on the road we have an instantaneous average yearly road trips of 30,000. For one charge in either direction we'll say 60,000 charges a year.
What if we change the solar margins a little bit? Remember this is a growing infrastructure that Tesla will expand to accommodate demand. For instance, as 6 of the 8 charging stations are in California, we can bump up the solar figure to 5 kWh/m^2. What about the canopy, it looks like maybe 8 meters by 16 to me. Some are obviously bigger while some have no canopy. But let's just change the average guess a little bit. That's 8*16*5=640 kWh a day. The 20 minute charge is 50%. Some people have 60 kWh batteries and supercharging is standard for 85 kWh, so we'll say 40 kWh a charge. That's 640/4=16 charges per station per day. At 16 charges a day at 8 stations for 365 days that's 46,720 charges. I missed my goal of 60,000 charges and I won't change my numbers now, but do you see how being a little bit more charitable makes the margins plausible? Even 4 charges per day at 8 SCs is 11680 charges a year. That's less than an order of magnitude away from 60,000 charges. I don't see these numbers as negating the system's feasibility when we know the supercharger network is growing and considering we made up almost every one of these numbers (besides the battery capacity and the number of stations).
Let me rephrase the issue a bit: I grow strawberries in my garden and I'm offering a basket of free strawberries to people who walk past my house. Since I have magic strawberries I grow 5 baskets per day.
First of all by giving them away for free instead of selling them, I'm essentially losing money by simple opportunity cost. I could have sold those strawberries after all. Now in this specific case I'm not just offering 5 baskets per day, I'm saying: "I offer a free basket of strawberries to everyone who wants one and walks past my house" - If the number of strawberry baskets exceeds 5 I go beyond just losing money because I could have sold them instead but now I lose even more money per basket than before because I have to buy up strawberries somewhere else.
THAT'S what doesn't add up and makes zero sense. It's a business model that is unsustainable, even when I make the horribly wrong assumption that my first 5 baskets are "free" just because I'm too dumb to sell them. I still payed for the seeds, I still payed for the water, etc.
It's utterly irrelevant if 1 person, 10 person or 100 persons walk past my house and want strawberries. The only difference is that more people make me lose more money but there is never a point where I profit from it. The only possible scenario of profit is because I also sell a "strawberry eating machine" (the car) but then I'm trading one-time payments (buying the car) against a lifelong supply of a finite resource (energy).
Progress of humanity, stifled by greed.
A company that goes broke over trying to achieve "progress" isn't worth it either. Goodness of heart doesn't make investors happy nor does it let you expand properly to actually force big changes.
On June 02 2013 00:47 oBlade wrote: Remember the number 3-4 cars you came up with for being a station's daily charging capacity? That number - whatever your guess for it is - only makes sense if you have context for it. You have to compare it to how many people are really showing up at superchargers. It's not enough that the number seems low. It needs context, it's low relative to what? How many people use superchargers daily? Unfortunately, that number doesn't exist for people who don't work at Tesla. We don't have all the information. Now, when you don't have all the information, it's possible to make arguments for either (any) side because you can't resolve a question without all the information. That's fine, people disagree.
But you were not representing yourself as an open person when you said "what is being presented (unless I made a mistake somewhere in my rudimentary analysis) does not make any sense" (emphasis yours) "Something seems off entirely," "It is not a viable model at all. There is something wrong," or when you suggested either you were missing something or the CEO of Tesla was "completely full of shit."
Now, to really understand the situation, we have to estimate that other number. Wikipedia says a total of 9,650 Model S were sold by April. Tesla sells directly through reservations and it takes a little while, we'll say there are 10,000 on the road in the US and we know there's 8 charging stations. How many road trips does the average person take? Unfortunately, that information doesn't exist in general that I can find any more than it does for Tesla motorists specifically. I will give you 1 free novelty electric road trip on top of whatever other reasonable estimate we can think of. After that, keeping in mind the destination constraints of the 6 California SCs and the 2 East Coast SCs, how about 2 trips a year? So at 10,000 cars on the road we have an instantaneous average yearly road trips of 30,000. For one charge in either direction we'll say 60,000 charges a year.
What if we change the solar margins a little bit? Remember this is a growing infrastructure that Tesla will expand to accommodate demand. For instance, as 6 of the 8 charging stations are in California, we can bump up the solar figure to 5 kWh/m^2. What about the canopy, it looks like maybe 8 meters by 16 to me. Some are obviously bigger while some have no canopy. But let's just change the average guess a little bit. That's 8*16*5=640 kWh a day. The 20 minute charge is 50%. Some people have 60 kWh batteries and supercharging is standard for 85 kWh, so we'll say 40 kWh a charge. That's 640/4=16 charges per station per day. At 16 charges a day at 8 stations for 365 days that's 46,720 charges. I missed my goal of 60,000 charges and I won't change my numbers now, but do you see how being a little bit more charitable makes the margins plausible? Even 4 charges per day at 8 SCs is 11680 charges a year. That's less than an order of magnitude away from 60,000 charges. I don't see these numbers as negating the system's feasibility when we know the supercharger network is growing and considering we made up almost every one of these numbers (besides the battery capacity and the number of stations).
Let me rephrase the issue a bit: I grow strawberries in my garden and I'm offering a basket of free strawberries to people who walk past my house. Since I have magic strawberries I grow 5 baskets per day.
First of all by giving them away for free instead of selling them, I'm essentially losing money by simple opportunity cost. I could have sold those strawberries after all. Now in this specific case I'm not just offering 5 baskets per day, I'm saying: "I offer a free basket of strawberries to everyone who wants one and walks past my house" - If the number of strawberry baskets exceeds 5 I go beyond just losing money because I could have sold them instead but now I lose even more money per basket than before because I have to buy up strawberries somewhere else.
THAT'S what doesn't add up and makes zero sense. It's a business model that is unsustainable, even when I make the horribly wrong assumption that my first 5 baskets are "free" just because I'm too dumb to sell them. I still payed for the seeds, I still payed for the water, etc.
It's utterly irrelevant if 1 person, 10 person or 100 persons walk past my house and want strawberries. The only difference is that more people make me lose more money but there is never a point where I profit from it. The only possible scenario of profit is because I also sell a "strawberry eating machine" (the car) but then I'm trading one-time payments (buying the car) against a lifelong supply of a finite resource (energy).
This guys is a billionaire and owns another company that he is using to do the solar bullshit (pretty sure, too lazy to confirm that again) also using property already owned by other companys that allow him to use the area. When you are selling cars that can cost 100k, it is okay to set up an infrastructure that will allow you to sell a lot more of these babies. He also said somthing about making more energy than the cars would use, i wonder if he is going to sell that to the power company?
Look at micros short math on that last part. What I'm getting at is that it doesn't matter if he produces more or less than the cars use, he's making a net loss. Hell, it would be more profitable (and "green") to build a giant solar plant somewhere in a desert, feed that power into the grid and use the grid to power your "electric gas stations".
However, what they're trying to say in the video in the OP isn't that, they're trying to be like "Free energy look how awesome we are for the environment!" =/
A charging station was just put in the parking lot of my building. Pretty cool although there's room only for 2 cars currently lol. Not expecting a huge influx apparently.
I think this is an interesting bit of information. Supercharging is proprietary and the technology is high voltage/dangerous (remember Dreamliner battery fires, electricity can be messy) so we can't know exactly how other automakers would integrate with the supercharger network. But it's cool to hear Tesla is open to it.
On June 08 2013 02:44 Yurie wrote: Did anybody else read about the Bus trial in Geneva? That is something I think has more future than the Tesla idea currently has.
EPT
The cars would have to get quite popular for that to be an issue though haha.
