#Tesla’s announcement earlier this week of the "Terafab", its own chip fab (?!) in Austin, touted as “the largest ever”. Claims #SpaceX now launches 90% of global mass to orbit and has now landed rockets 500 times. #Elmu calls his orbital data centers "AIsat" and says that each is 100kW (“minisat”), with 1MW hoped for, and that’s what the Terafab is for: producing a terawatt of compute per year, 50x current global production. They want to River-Rouge it, with mask making, chip fabrication, packaging, and test under one roof, for logic or memory (but maybe not Flash?). He points out that on-orbit insolation is 5x what it is on the ground (if you’re in a sun-synchronous orbit I guess) and you don’t need glass or framing to protect the cells. A render of a mass-driver launch of something from the moon draws cheers.
on 02026-04-11#HN comments on #solar #energy #pricing pointing out that #Scott-Helme’s setup is amazingly overpriced, in part because of #Tesla and predicting a “bloodbath in that market in the next years”. Also £25420 for three 13.5kWh Powerwalls is £628/kWh or US$840/kWh (my calculations) while actual #pricing of #batteries are US$60/kWh and UL-listed 16kWh prebuilt battery packs are US$3300 (US$210/kWh). “scarecrowbob” reports, “I am writing this off grid, using about 15kwh of #batteries and a $1200 (6kw) inverter. My entire system puls [plus] panels and racking those panels, plus wiring some un-powered shacks was about $10k.” “jstsch” reports, “Just received a 15kWh battery from China. A ‘Humsienk’. Combined it with a GroWatt SPA3000TL-BL inverter. Total price, 1600 euros. So close to the magical 100 euros per kWh. Driving it with some interesting combinations of Raspberry PI’s and serial interfaces and custom written Go code, but it works... :)” “Dylan1312” confirms. 1600€ is US$1900, so that’s US$125/kWh, less than a sixth of the Powerwall price. Meanwhile, “bob1029” says, “The rooftop solar game in Texas is strongly into scam territory.”
on 02026-01-13#Scott-Helme computes that his #UK #solar #energy setup (three #Tesla Powerwalls for £25420 and a £13940 Perlight #Enphase #photovoltaic array of 4.2kWp, which is US$18753 or US$4.46/Wp, roughly 45 times current wholesale solar module #pricing) saved him £3078 in 02025, which at £39360 would be a 7.8% return on investment during that year. But he only had “export capabilities” for 7 months, and he anticipates that the ROI would have been 9.2% if he’d had it all year. No thoughts on what the ROI will be when utility-scale solar drops the cost of grid power and eliminates his export capabilities.
on 02026-01-13#news on the #EU imposing 35.3% punitive import #tariffs on electric vehicle (EV) imports from #China earlier this year on top of the 10% standard import duty (and I suppose VAT). China ended its joint-venture rule in 02022, maybe due to #Tesla, while the EU is maybe enacting it as a way to, in effect, drop the tariffs. This #video (by #EV-Insight) is pure irrelevant stock-footage filler. #politics #EVs
on 02024-11-26#video taking apart some #Tesla motors and discussing how their #manufacturing is done. The motors have a lot of electromagnetic poles, like hundreds of poles, on the three-phase stator, although they do gear the motor down to the wheel. There are cooling channels through the stator. The rotors seem to be permanent-magnet type with laminates (electrical steel?) and carbon fiber wound around them presumably to keep them from coming apart. The laminates give you almost no flux outside the rotor except at 12 spots around the circumference where there’s a gap comparable to the size of the poles on the stator. The magnets are actually quite small compared to the whole rotor.
on 02024-09-22#video from a year ago on the economy of #China, including the C919 narrow-body jet made by #Comac (established 02008), BYD’s #EVs and the Shanghai government’s support for #Tesla, the NVIDIA A100 and the petaflops Biren BR100 (fabbed in 7nm like, supposedly, the A100) and how the export controls block TSMC from making it (I guess this video is from July 02023, before the #HiSilicon Mate60 processor demonstrated SMIC’s 7nm capabilities), Nike vs. Anta (which has apparently bought Fila and Wilson), CATL vs. mostly other Chinese EV battery companies, supercomputers (mentioning the 02015 export controls), bullet trains (there's a World Bank map at 45'25" showing how Urumqi is connected), “metaverse” (pointing to pre-publication approval requirements on games), and space tourism with CAS Space. Says that in 02022 China had 173 supers on the #TOP500 list vs. 128 in the #USA, making their recent withdrawal rather momentous, and that #cryptocurrency transactions were banned there in 02022.
on 02024-09-10#Tesla claims its #self-driving-car autopilot has “better than human” performance. Well, that’s hardly surprising when it requires constant human supervision.
on 02016-07-07#Tesla drivers are training a #machine-learning autopilot for their now #self-driving cars — providing A MILLION MILES A DAY of training data. I’m imagining Elon Musk saying, “Bite me, Google.”
on 02015-12-07