Musk's so-called gigafactory may soon become an existential threat to the
100-year-old utility business model. The facility will also churn out stationary battery packs that can be paired with rooftop solar panels to store power. Already, a second company led by Musk, SolarCity Corp. (SCTY), is packaging solar panels and batteries to power California homes and companies including Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT)
The existential threat is a lot more to Tesla.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing laser drivers and controllers jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
Audi claims they have mastered every aspect of H2 technology. Toyota is mass producing H2 fuel cell vehicles.
Even with a low round trip efficiency, H2 will probably do better than batteries in many applications, i.e., big rigs.
Bret Cahill
Nonsense. Hydrogen is expensive to make, transport, and store. Fuel cells have been almost-ready for prime time for over 100 years.
Gasoline is $2 a gallon in some places now.
Gasoline and diesel engines work great. They are not problems that need to be solved.
What do you drive? Electric? Hydrogen?
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing laser drivers and controllers jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
Disagree, in light of the fact that they are poisoning our water table to get it.
That's mostly propaganda and faked videos.
The big well-water hazards are natural arsenic and ag runoffs.
Energy is necessary and dangerous. How many people will die, washing the dirt off the solar panels on their roofs?
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing precision measurement jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
That's an interesting question, deaths from falls cleaning solar panels. In Germany there many more solar panels per capita installed on private homes than in the USA. It would be nice to know how many injuries are attributable to solar panel cleaning there since the big push in Germany to get the solar panels installed. Lots of people pay to get their roofs cleaned but not that often, maybe once a year in areas where lots leaves and branches land on roofs. And people tend to put off that kind of thing because the payoff doesn't seem that great. But occluding dirt is much more widespread than occluding leaves and branches, and the effect of the dirt is easy to see when comparing clean panels to dirty ones so the incentive to keep that part of the roof clean is high even where no trees are present. I have vertigo and so should never climb a ladder more than a few feet because my balance is so bad. Nevertheless my wife has chewed my ass a few times because I was on the roof fixing or cleaning something. And I'm cheap. And not unique. So I can see a bunch of cheapskates like me up on their roofs cleaning panels to make a little more money and falling off. Eric
Not sure how Ralph Nader feels about this but the number of deaths from developing renewable energy should be pro rated to match those from steam.
Say 5800/yr died from boiler explosions and coal mining accidents when the population was one billion.
With 8 billion people on the planet the acceptable number of deaths from washing solar panels and falling off wind turbines should be 8 X 5800 = 46,400/year.
Sound reasonable?
Bret Cahill
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