The Tesla Giga Factory, and the overlooked realities.

a reply to: pfishy

Tesla has great ideas. But his battery vision is stupid. For starters, it won't fix the grid. What needs to be created is surplus energy from wind and solar. This energy needs to be stored with more efficient flow battery technology.

Our grid is vulnerable. Putting a few killowatts into homes with powerpacks, is a bandaid on sinking ship.

Larger reserves of flow battery centers would better protect the grid. We can't export energy on demand until we have significant storage.

I like Tesla, I like his vision. But for the big picture, we need to rebuild the grid entirely. His cars are also good ideas, but it would make more sense to utilize larger battery powered trucks in urban areas for transport than to produce sedans for families.

If diesel trucks in inner cities were phased out to take electric trucks, these large distribution centers could have charging stations and power packs. Thousands of idling diesels out of the city would make a huge difference.

All in all I think Tesla is more or less a visionary, but an overvalued company with no practical vision.

a reply to: Umberto

Our grid is vulnerable for several reasons. And while you're right about storage/flow centers would help, especially for areas that rely mostly on temperamental sources (wind, solar), we also need to spend billions hardening our generating plants/systems, transmission lines, substations and end-user supply transformers and lines from EM overload. Whether it's another massive solar storm like the Carrington Event, or an EMP attack by a hostile actor or nation, our energy infrastructure is still extremely vulnerable to overload and system burnout from this sort of event.
And as well as those systems, our telecommunications infrastructure is vulnerable as well. From broadcast and relay stations to cell towers and the phones themselves. Our critical response systems rely on repeaters and devices that aren't generally shielded from these either. The military and Federal Government have made inroads toward this issue, and most modern critical battle systems and equipment (planes, armored vehicles, command centers, field radios) are hardened against this mostly. But much of the corresponding civil infrastructure isn't. The communication networks, radios, computers and vehicles of most local and state first responders and emergency services are still incredibly susceptible to EM damage. And building the storage/flow centers with any battery system and not hardening it as part of the initial construction design juat means it will have to be retrofitted later, at considerably more cost and human hours than having built it that way in the first place.
I've got a theory that N. Korea is so happy with their recent missile test "failures" because they actually didn't fail. They got high enough to deploy a 15-30 KT nuclear device into the upper atmosphere, which is all they need for an EM strike that could cripple most of the Western Pacific, including S. Korea, Guam, Japan, Taiwan, and maybe even Hawaii.