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Tesla fingers former Gigafactory hand as alleged blueprint-leaking sabotage mastermind

Jellied Eel Silver badge

Yes supply is uneven in your scenarion, but that isn't the full picture. Battery storage, like they are doing around the world evens out that supply, the ideal supply chain goes as follows:

Cheapest energy production > consumer.

But that's been distorted by hypemongers and vested interests. Renewables are great, providing you ignore the economics. So:-

Production: Wind, Wave, Solar. All intermittent that generate power when conditions are right, and can't be matched to demand. Unless you can introduce demand management, ie persuade people only to use their tumble driers when it's sunny/windy. A clothes peg is cheaper. Plus renewables are also expensive, and have a habit of either producing energy when demand is low, or not producing energy when demand is hight.

Tesla is of course in the Solar business having bought out friends & family at Solar City.

Storage: Storing electricity is expensive and inefficient. This is why EV's are expensive and battery packs cost more than ICE engines. Plus there are conversion losses, ie why batteries get hot while they charge. And grid-scale battery storage requires huge stacks of batteries that may only provide enough power for a few minutes.

But Tesla is of course in the business of supplying batteries.

Which also means Tesla's ecosystem demonstrates neatly the problems, ie cost and power output of their solar panels, which could give you an idea of how long it'd take your roof's worth of tiles to charge a Tesla battery. Or just a Powerwall, which doesn't hold anything close enough of a charge to fill a 100kWh car. And costs a small fortune, and is unlikely to ever offer any ROI. Other than feeling a bit green.

Basically grid-scale batteries are a solution to a problem renewables have created, and can't fix because they're fundamental to relying on wind, solar, waves etc rather than predictable gas or nuclear.

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