Lol there's a direct comparison between fixed embedded costs in a cartel and dynamic cost in a competitive one? Just wow.

Distribution and transmission costs are sunken in gas price, soyboy, where distribution and transmission costs for electricity increase relative to useage.



And that cost will be passed on to electricity consumers. So what year in the 26th century will ev cars be less expensive than gas ones, again?

Again, see above. Transmission and distribution costs are pretty much fixed, low, and reflected in gas price. Transmission and distribution costs for electricity are a separate cost altogether (for the consumer) and they increase relative to consumption. Increasing power distribution capability by a couplefold will positively, no question, increase electricity price a couple fold.



I mean this is partially right I guess, except for the fact that peak load is mostly supplied by hydrocarbon and base load by renewable sources like nuclear, so the wastage you're talking about isnt wastage at all. Evs aren't going to suck up 'base load wastage', they will just raise the base and peak loads altogether.

Think of base load like the minimum turning of electricity turbines to keep the grid energized. Prime movers are more efficient at rated speed, so running them at low speed is 'thermally wasteful.' But since base load is, as far as possible, met by renewable energy sources and peak load by hydrocarbon (since it's faster to run up to operating speed) evs will simply burn more hydrocarbon unless upstream energy sources are also altered.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/judeclem...tural-gas/amp/

Of course what even this journalist leaves out is that as demand for coal/NG etc increase, so does increase in those commodities price as they are of scarce supply, and thus, another vector of increasing electricity price.

I didnt even consider other factors like nuclear plants getting old enough to be retired, etc. So much for twoplustwos master rhetorician.

Probably but all major polarizations like this seem to have the same "logic vs religion" feel to them

Could you elaborate on this?

I used to like Elon a lot but his descent into madness is making him less likeable.

Tesla I would like to see succeed more than fail but I'm just very doubtful at this point they can ultimately make it.

SpaceX is so cool that it's hard to not like Elon for me. Anyone who takes major risks in starting seemingly impossible businesses and finds a way to be successful gets a lot of points with me.

Agreed. He deserves credit for his crazy energy, his never-give-up drive, and his grandiose no-barriers thinking, and for giving hope and meaning to a generation of cucks. And he hired smart hungry rocket scientists who did all the good work and gave them money and freedom. All commendable.

He's a great startup guy or pop science educator or creative process reworker or PR guy (before the drugs) or sales executive. He's incompetent at anything else. Totally unsuited to a car manufacturing business. He's basically levels above his Peter Principle in running Tesla.

SpaceX has had adults take over and run everything once it went past the startup stage. Musk is just the company mascot to rally the team while the smart/capable people do the work and run things. If Tesla had done the same they might be ok - carmaking is way harder than rocket making.

A cuck is born every minute.

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3

I would take EIA's info over AFDC's, and you can see the breakdown is more precise in the above link than in yours. Though I don't think splitting hairs over 5–6% is worthwhile, so I don't know why you bothered bringing it up. Both your source and mine contradict your statement that I originally highlighted, where you say we would just be burning the same amount of hydrocarbons to power EVs. Now you say we would burn less than 70%.

Also of note for your discussion with TS, this is from the same web page that you linked:

"...[E]xisting U.S. electricity infrastructure has sufficient capacity to meet about 73% of the energy needs of the country's light-duty vehicles."

So we wouldn't have to build any new plants even if over half of consumer vehicles were replaced with EVs. Consider how increasing ride-sharing and smart-grid tech will contribute as well, and it seems probable that the plant expansion will be a very minor issue, even well after Tesla has become a $5 trillion company/bankrupt.

Because electricity is transmitted in high voltages along the grid, and must be stepped down to deliver low, single phase current to residential homes, that means a boatload more infrastructure for residential and commercial from lower voltage transmission lines to transformers and phase reducers than industrial, which can internally step down say 4160v to 480v 3 phase AC which is what most industrial equipment runs on. This cost is relative to your individual useage. So as your useage increases, the more you're personally paying on your electricity bill not just for kwh but for transmission and distribution costs as well. More infrastructure means more maintenance and more cost. For something like battery chargers, you have to convert single phase AC to DC. I'm not sure but I'm assuming the same for Tesla etc, which means rectifiers and other equipment needed, which increases power cost for the consumer even more. For more loading for millions of electric vehicles, the cost of natural gas/coal/fuel will certainly go up, and you will pay for it.

It's been mentioned before, that Tesla currently eats its power costs because literally no one would buy an ev if they didnt, because it would be absurdly more expensive to operate one at the present time without subsidies, etc.

The point is, it's not so cut and dried as 2+2s preeminent rhetorician makes it out to be. Ev cars will certainly be more cost efficient in a vacuum, but the claim they will be overall less costly than gas cars is dubious at best. Even the claim they will be more environmentally friendly is dubious.

What? It says right there that it has the ability to meet only 73% of the countries light vehicle needs. Even if that's talking about unutilized power the grid would still have to be augmented by 37%. That's an absolutely enormous investment. Were talking trillions of dollars. For what? To burn methane instead of gasoline?

Not only that, even though burning methane in a gas turbine or boiler is less dirty than gasoline you'd have to burn way more of it to get the same energy output since there's less energy in a methane molecule than a gasoline one. So it may pollute even more than gasoline.

Yea I pretty much agree with all of this.

I'd only add that I was pretty much buying into the hype up until maybe 24ish months ago, give or take a few months. I mean SpaceX had recently landed a booster on a ship at sea, and had substantially lowered the cost to deliver goods to space (at least in my lifetime from a US perspective); Tesla AutoPilot seemed to be humming along and the Model S was super rad. Sure there were a few chinks in the armor, but on the whole it was super exciting.

The problem with hype is you have to constantly out do the last seemingly impossible/great whatever thing you were hyping. (It's a little like why I can't watch certain movie franchises anymore. /derail) Eventually your exponential hype machine becomes so detached from the finite real world that it all comes crumbling down. We're well past that point with ElonHype.

And on some level it's super depressing.

What? Methane has the highest energy output per unit of CO2 of all the fuels, which is the metric that matters. You have it exactly backwards. You have pretty much everything backwards. It's quite amazing.

Today we learn:

- DoJ has a criminal probe on Tesla.
- SEC referred Tesla to the DoJ to open the criminal probe
- Tesla admits that the probe has been ongoing for a month
- No 8-k filed in the interim regarding the probe
- Bankers urge Tesla to recruit managers to share operational duties with Elon
- Tesla's BOD supposedly consulting with Alvarez & Marsal, the same group that helped Lehman through its Chapter 11

For us, these events represent a historical moment in the annals of corporate governance and an epic embarrassment to the capital markets.

For Elon Musk and Tesla's Board of Directors, it was Tuesday.

As ASAP correctly notes with respect to the events revealed today that would normally crater any other company 20%+, Tesla is back to about where it was when the CAO resigned and the market has yawned it off, so it is a big nothing burger.

Stock price uber alles. Stock price, bro! This is fine. Please BTFD.

It all seems surreal in a way

Stock price may be ok, but the bonds/credit default swaps are trading like it's nearly Enron. That market seems to be sharper, we'll see in january when the next big bond payment is due.

We do need an Elon-dog-in-fire-meme "this is fine" - gotta be out there already.

Link to Alvarez & Marsal? Google has nothing.

Unsubstantiated rumor, but the account is a research firm that has been pretty darn accurate about other stocks so....

Lol that's like saying the sky is blue. Methane is CH4 so of course per unit it's going to create the least amount of CO2. It only has one carbon atom in its structure.

It has the LEAST amount of useable energy per molecule of its particular hydrocarbon family.

You going to address the increase in cost of scarce primary resources with increase in demand and the repercussions on downstream economic incentives or just continue to bull**** your way through life like you bull**** your way through 2+2 threads?

You've yet to address a single challenge to your assertions with anything but baseless rhetoric.

You're getting so defensive that you're making no effort to understand or think critically about this. The discussion is the cost of owning an EV and the cost of having to expand energy infrastructure to accommodate the increased market share of EVs in the coming decades. Your own link says that if 73% of consumer vehicles—a HUGE number that you don't seem to think EVs will constitute for at least 30 years—were suddenly EVs, our plants would be able to handle the increased electricity demand TODAY. No costly expansion needed. You act as though the fact that 100% of vehicles can't be replaced with EVs today without expanding power plants proves your point that EVs won't be preferred to ICE vehicles thirty years from now.

With capacity for 73% of consumer cars to be supported by our current grid, and the efficiency improvements in renewables over the coming decades, and the increase in ride sharing, and the gains from smart-grid advances, it's probable that we won't need any significant powerplant buildout to accommodate the replacement of ICE vehicles with EVs. We're 73% of the way there and we haven't even been trying. Imagine what it'll look like in the timeframe that you and TS are talking about EVs becoming the norm in.

As you know, methane is less than a third of energy production, and losing share to renewables. But yes, trading gas for methane would reduce costs and have huge reductions in pollution, both at the source, and by moving the source miles away from where people are breathing.

I already addressed that it was indicative of a big lack of understanding for you to bring this point up that more CH4 is required than octane for the same Watt output. What anyone cares about is the cost per MWh, or from an environmental standpoint, the CO2, PM, SO2, and NOx per MWh. Nobody cares about the number of molecules in their soup or cupcake—the calories are what is relevant. CH4 gives cleaner energy... per unit of energy. If you respond telling me, "Yes, but you have to use more of it," that will be the end of this conversation.

The main reason I chimed in was to point out that you don't work in the energy sector, a claim that you've been coy about not addressing. I don't work in energy either, although I have to deal with people who do on a regular basis, and it was immediately obvious to me that this is not your professional arena.

Writing a bunch of high school level chemistry babble doesn't cover your completely false and ignorant statement.

You don't rise to the level of making coherent observations, so there's little point in continuing. For comparison, Spurious does...

WTF does "scarce primary resources with increase in demand" mean? Power plants and lines aren't scarce. Right now, electricity demand grows every year far more than electric cars will impact it. By your stupid reasoning, the price of electricity must be soaring by now. In China, it must be $1,000,000 per kWh by your dopey reasoning; they've been building plants and transmission/delivery at breakneck speed, far faster than EVs ever will, quadrupling their energy production and delivery in 11 years. Demand bro! Sunk costs! Economics says the price must soar (just ignore the supply side and revenue/capex to fund it).

All "challenges" have been met. Nothing you say is sane. Sorry bro. Try to get to Spurious level of commentary at least.

The revenue shifting from gasoline to electricity and the forward capex to build that out is what funds it without increasing prices...like every other industry. The shift is sufficiently slow that there's no demand shock. just like the 1-6%/year electricity demand increase in every country without increasing prices. The notion that other electricity consumers will subsidize EVs is false. The notion that EVs won't be cheaper to build than ICE within 5 years is false. I don't know what's left to argue. I hate greenies and green power and all that wasteful bull****, but EVs are a clear area where the technology is superior on every level - cost, waste, energy efficiency, quality of product, etc, etc.

Looks like I ended the day too early!

We also have:

Goldman Sachs and Silverlake hit with SEC subpoenas:


Elon Musk has engaged an accounting malpractice attorney to represent him:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/18/b...epartment.html

AH only down 1%. Stock price uber alles!

So this is a serious investigation then. They're not screwing around. The SEC would also have referred to DOJ for criminal prosecution, they considered it a serious enough example of stock fraud to warrant immediate criminal investigation long before their own investigation was complete.

Odds Tesla's DOJ PR brushoff is true? 0%?

i don't think their statement is much more than the standard 'we're being investigated and are cooperating fully'-jibberjabber every company puts out.

i'd want to be in that room when he first talks to his attorney about the tweet.

Im not reading DoDN posts


I can book a win there right?

I mean read the article yourself. It agrees with me in entirety.

1. Shifting gasoline consumption to NG and coal consumption.
2. INCREASES total SOx and NOx emissions but moves them away from cities (so sweet I guess.) But decreases CO and volatile emissions
3. Increases power demand by many factors which without smart useage will drastically increase the cost per kwh
4. Notes the increased transmission and distribution requirements as well as plant maintenance outages

So yes, it could technically supply 73% of light vehicles (avg 33 miles per day---also lol) with electricity but it would cost an absolute fortune without base expansion, smart useage meters etc etc etc

In other words everything I said was correct.