Tesla Needs Faster Battery Production to Reach Terafactories

Jordan Giesige of the Limiting Factor has described how Tesla will announce progress to the Terawatt-hour factories.

He describes going from 150 Gigawatt-hours of batteries per year from a fully built out Nevada factory to a Terawatt-hour.

Increasing energy density in batteries and reducing the size of parts of the battery lines in factories would increase production capacity up to about 240 Gigawatt-hours.

The main increase will need to come from increasing the speed of battery production.

Increasing the speed of battery production by 4 times would be key to achieving Terafactories.

Jordan believes that Tesla will reveal version 1 of the Roadrunner battery production system with a 2X production speed increase.

The speed increase will come from tabless production and using dry-cell batteries that remove the time-consuming drying steps. There will also be changes to packing of batteries and batteries could be made larger.

The increased speed will also reduce the cost per kwh of batteries to $99/kwh with double the production speed and $88/kwh if speed is quadrupled.

Tesla will roll-out faster battery production at its new Texas factory and possibly Gigaberlin.

The Shanghai expansions and Nevada facility will likely see later changes factory lines.

SOURCES- Limiting Factory, David Lee Investing
Written by Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com (Brian owns shares of Tesla)

10 thoughts on “Tesla Needs Faster Battery Production to Reach Terafactories”

  1. You are bringing up a different issue. However you deal with it, picking one year as the "per time" amount is no better than any other time from that perspective. So if the power is *on* 90% of the time, just say that. If it is only 20% of the time, say that. Or, give the total for the time period, per the time period, just use the same time period so I can do the math in my head. Life of project, 10 years, one year, 77 days, all ok by me. One divided by one, to get the effective power, which you correctly say will not always be 100% in ideal sunlight or wind conditions. Just don't give Wh per year!

  2. But this assumes that the power is constant over the whole year.

    This assumption is not quite true for big, base load, power plants. And not even close to true to other sources like solar, wind, or many hydroelectric systems.

    Hence the assumption that the nameplate power output already gives you the information about how much energy is made per unit time is just not valid.

    The whole point the nuclear people are trying to make is that a 1 GW nuke plant might be producing 1GW 90% of the time, so you get 0.9 GW.years.
    But your 1GW wind farm might only manage 0.5 GW.years, or 0.2, or whatever depending on the exact site and weather.

  3. More broadly, W supplies what you want already, energy per time. Power. You may often need energy amount, for the bill, KWh is usu, or the total for the life of the plant, or the life of the bond to finance it. But the fact that one can figure the power from the info given does make it the way to *give* the power. Unless you are trying to fool unwary politicians as to the *size* of your nuke.

  4. Definitely. As you learned in grade school, when you have a fraction with the same thing top and bottom, you remove that stuff so people can see what you are talking about. edit: and half the time, newscaster will say stuff like, this plant will power 100 houses, per year. edit: now if the power itself is times year, rather than h as usu stated, to get energy, then perhaps. A 1 GWy works for me. As energy, not power. So 1GWy per y is the power. Then, even I can do the math in my head. Why do it? You either have total energy, or power. Don't mix the concepts.

  5. Are you implying that there is something wrong with measuring nuclear power (or any other power source) in terms of energy produced per year?

  6. I wonder about Tesla's continued use of small cylindrical cells. I see that that was what was available at start of car production, and I understand that the small cells are easily cooled, or warmed.
    The cost of the battery pack should be tesla's main concern at this point. I argue that the current chemistries used by tesla do not lend themselves to cheap battery packs. Not only is there the cobalt, but all the gluing with heat transfer, spot welding terminals, cooling tubes, but the battery pack is completely uneconomical to repair, other than the controll components. Bad cells can't be replaced.
    What's needed is a chemistry that is as safe as LiFePo but as energy dense as that of currently used cells. Cells large enough that the pack would have one cell, or two in paralell as many times in series as you want voltage. The cells would be diode bypassable, and monitored as they are now, and flagged for replacement.
    If the battery pack is easily serviced, your cells would not need to be so perfect, and therefore cheaper to make.

  7. When comparing batteries to H, the H fuel cell is like the electric control of the battery, and the H tank is like the battery. Thinking of the fuel cell as a battery will throw the comparison off, as it does not need to get bigger to make more range. Only the tank does, which is easier than more batteries by far.

  8. "Gigawatt-hours of batteries per year" looks like the strange way nuke *power* is sometimes stated, energy produced, per year, but here it is correct and clear, as the thing produced IS energy (storage), the capacity of the battery. How much energy per year is *stored* depends upon how much it is used, not only how big it is.

  9. Yep. I must say, the Tesla investor days and quarterly earnings calls are to me now what Christmas was to me when I was a kid. So much interesting stuff comming; announcement of in house battery production? A new form factor? New price targets? The plaid power train?

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