I'm still trying to figure out why everyone, including Deutsche Bank, seems to think the Tesla Battery is such a great deal at $3500 for 7kwh.

I can buy 18 35Ah 12v AGM batteries, plus 0 AGW conductors, for about $1350. That's 7.5kwh for $1350.

What exactly defines the "good deal" argument I keep seeing?

Are you going to fully discharge that 7560kWh lead-acid system every day?

No, you are not. You are actually going to buy five times as many batteries and work in the 20% of the storage range which is suitable for continual cycling. So that's 90 batteries off the bat, or about $6750, almost double the cost of the Powerwall, not including the ancillary equipment you haven't budgeted for to bring your batteries into the same league as the Powerwall.

You still need the battery room to install them in, and the fire protection system to put out electrical or chemical fires when things go wrong.

The Powerwall includes thermal and fire containment (the batteries are swimming in gel), the Powerwall also takes care of the "battery room" issue by storing the battery in a container on the wall.

For those with greater power requirements, there are rack mounted power cells, again with thermal and combustion mitigation already in place.

The integration and packaging is why everyone is excited about these batteries at this price.

Those AGM batteries have at best around a tenth of the life expectancy in equivalent charging cycles.

Lead acid batteries don't last as long, and suffer much more from large depth of charges, meaning you need to replace them 2-3x more often. This doesn't just have a cost to it financially, but also environmentally.

It also means that if you want your batteries to last, you can reduce your depth of charge by purchasing excessive capacity. This way instead of discharging 100% of X capacity, you can discharge 50% of 2X capacity, and this lower discharge depth makes the battery last longer. Which means you tend to have to buy a lot more capacity than li-ion.

Beyond that, look at it like any system. e.g. do you want 4 small fridges that give you x liters of volume, or one large fridge that gives you 4x liters of volume for a slightly higher price? Do you want 10 harddrives that give you 100gb each for $250, or would you buy a $300 1 TB drive?

There are non-financial reasons to go for simplicity, something that works out the box, plug and play. Especially for consumer grade equipment. Beyond that, Tesla's solutions offers some integrated solutions e.g. concerning fire hazards that you'd need to do yourself otherwise. And lastly, it appears batteries benefit from economies of scale. Their battery is already for sale today, and considering the factory they're building, it's quite exciting to see how cheap batteries will get by 2025, but that's a different story.

Your AGM batteries are Lead Acid. Tesla Powerwall is a LiOn Battery System, designed for 10 years. Implies somewhat more than 10 kWh "actual" in order to deliver 10 kWh, day-in, day-out for 10 years, and avoid deep discharge. The value is greater efficiency, great life span.

The price for the 10 kWh model is basically 50% of what everyone was expecting, which is what has everyone excited. You don't often see a 50% drop in price in systems that are this closely followed.

this one just works?

Agreed that deflation is terrible. I hate paying lower prices for goods and services. Thankfully we have central banks to fight the scourge of lower prices.

I, on the other hand, love lower wages, higher real debts, and problems with planning.

Deflation is terrible. We can largely blame deflation for WWII.

Could someone explain the market reaction here?

When rates are lowered, it puts both competitve pressure and supply pressure on the currency. This can be seen in all historical interest rate cuts. You cut rates to weaken, and raise rates to strengthen.

And yet, this CUT in rates is leading to a BID for CHF.

As they say in Geneva, WTF?

My guess is it's to do with the relative state of the Euro. This move by the Swiss bank is effectively a vote of no confidence in the ECB being able to resolve the weakness there, so even though going into CHF is bad, it's judged to be less bad than sticking in EUR.

The interest rate has not been the main method of controlling the exchange rate in this case. There was an artificial CHFEUR peg maintained by selling Francs and buying Euro-denominated assets.

There are two things happening with opposite effects: releasing the peg and cutting rates. Since the CHF is strengthening, we know that releasing the peg is having a stronger effect than cutting rates.

You are probably being downvoted because every single Abrahamic religion advocates violence and killing as a response to blasphemy in the basic holy texts. It's an issue of facts, not offense.

So basically, they are better on every possible front, and the technology has existed for a while?

Yet, LWR is still the dominant design. So, what's the catch? There's clearly something preferable about Uranium LWR that causes their dominance, no?

When nuclear research was first being developed, it was for the specific purpose of building the bomb. When the war ended, and the industry switched to civilian applications, they decided to go with Uranium because they had already worked out many of the issues.

Still, the US Airforce wanted a nuclear-powered bomber shortly after the Navy showed their nuclear sub and before ICBM's deprecated "end-of-days" long-range bombers. A water-contained reactor wouldn't work in an airplane, so they funded the development of the MSR (molten-salt-reactor).

Unfortunately, when they shuddered the project after the implementation of practical ICBMs, industry politics discredited MSR's in favour of the reactor-types we have now.

After fukushima, a grassroots campaign has been undertaken to resume research of MSR's as a replacement of fossil fuels for scalable carbon-free energy creation. If you are interested, you can get a great overview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9M__yYbsZ4

> Unfortunately, when they shuddered the project after the implementation of practical ICBMs, industry politics discredited MSR's in favour of the reactor-types we have now.

So essentially what you're seeing is the result of decades of regulatory capture of the NRC by the nuclear industry.

I think the missing factor is that there are massive regulatory hurdles in the way of testing new designs, no?

... well, yeah: placing massive hurdles in the way of potential competitors and their technologies is about half of the premise of regulatory capture...

It's amazing how the state of things may look like a local maximum depending on the root of the research path.

In light-water reactors, the highly radioactive part of the system is very simple. It's a core of metal fuel rods and support structure, some control rods, and water. All the plumbing complexity is external, and it's on water, which isn't hard to handle.

Most of the alternative reactor designs have more going on in the radioactive part of the system, or more difficult working fluids. This usually leads to trouble. Sodium-cooled reactors have sodium fires. Helium-cooled reactors have helium leaks. Pebble bed reactors have pebble jams. (The one in Germany is so jammed it can't be decommissioned.) Molten salt reactors have to pump radioactive molten salt around and run it through a chemical processing plant. In some designs that salt is a fluorine compound. Now you have all the headaches of operating a radioactive chemical plant.

Most power utilities don't want to operate a radioactive chemical plant.

I wondered what had happened to pebble beds. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_reactor

Most power utilities don't want to operate a radioactive chemical plant

This is a brilliant phrase, thankyou.

I have little more than a layman's understanding of the nuclear power landscape (I've read a decent bit and watched several talks, but that's about where it ends), but it seems to me that there are at least two reasons: 1) LWR reactors have been built for a long time, so they're very well understood (known risks are better than unknown risks) and the processes are already in place to bring them up. 2) Even though they're dominant, very few LWRs are built. There simply aren't many reactors being built of any kind, so it's unsurprising that the most common type (traditionally) is what we keep building.

> LWR reactors have been built for a long time, so they're very well understood (known risks are better than unknown risks)

After Fukushima, I don't think most people would agree the risks are well understood, at least as reflected in the actions of the nuclear industry and its regulators.

The NRC (and hence most of the world's regulators) uses a "design basis" approach to establish what emergencies reactors should be able to respond to safely without the release of radioactive materials. The design basis is supposed to quantify the known risks.

In 2011 we saw just how inadequate the design basis framework was. It failed to predict risks such as multiple systems failing simultaneously, emergency generators being flooded, the plant being cut off from external help, multiple meltdowns happening simultaneously, valves getting stuck open, and a litany of other things that actually happened, resulting in the level 7 accident we saw.

While the exact set of events that happened at Fukushima Daiichi is unique, similar accidents could happen in the US, or indeed anywhere (e.g. many reactors are downstream from major dams and could theoretically experience catastrophic flooding).

And just as the NRC's computer models deemed Fukushima impossible before the accident, the NRC has largely ignored the recommendations of its own near-term task force in how to improve the regulatory situation in the US after the accident.

It is up to us to demand that the nuclear power industry, which is wielding technology of massive destructive power at the behest of its shareholders, transform itself into the transparent, accountable industry we deserve.

LWR was chosen during the cold war because they wanted to make as much weapons grade fuel as possible.

Also because IIRC it made more sense on submarines.

LWR is what the Navy used, and the civilian designs were just based on that.

Yes. A debt crisis that the US is walking into almost exactly alike, but a decade behind. And nobody cares.

How adorable.

This isn't music, or anything like it. The article touches on the Millenials' refusal to learn anything below their chosen layer of abstraction to be a systemic risk to anything they build.

It's more akin to every bridge engineer not bothering with materials science or integral calculus because they know how to throw a bunch of trusses together than it is akin to every hipster on the planet learning to play Stairway to Heaven.

Everyone's knowledge is at some layer of abstraction. Very few people know all the details of every field connected to every other field. There's no reason the person who understands the details of band bending, the person who understands the details of Hindley-Milner type inference, the person who knows the ins and outs of the unified shader model in both OpenGL and Direct3D, and the expert in routing algorithms need to all be the same person, even if all their fields may ultimately play a role in one product. And bridge engineers, quantum physicists, automobile engineers, geologists, politicians, emergency rescue personnel, etc., all work together to keep your favorite bridge functioning smoothly and our understanding of the behavior around it progressing, with only a partial or even negligible understanding of the areas of expertise of each other.

Refusal to learn is no great virtue, but that one is specialized in their knowledge is no great vice either; the world is large and no one can wrap their arms around the whole thing. You grab a piece and trust your neighbors will help you out with theirs.

Blaming this on millenials rather than the training they receive by employers and professors is insane.

I would love to dig down into every nuance and detail. I don't have time for that because I'm working 60 hour weeks churning out deliverables to keep up velocity. My employers don't have time or budget for me to drill down into the details, they just want features and they want them yesterday.

My employers are not millenials. The VCs who fund my company are not millenials.

It's absurd to blame the most powerless group of people for this. Blame the powerful--the ones who dictate the work culture.

God, you people who don't understand silicon culture and polishing make me sick. A bunch of hipster poseurs who just want to play with their little "programs" without even understanding the wafers that make it all possible! Get a clue!

Maybe I have a lack of imagination, but what on earth could possibly be the failure modes of floor tile?

Cracking would be considered a failure. You can still step on it, but it looks bad, so you don't want that to happen. This can happen from prolonged stress, sudden impact, or expansion/contraction from thermal cycling. The surface becoming slippery or uneven due to wear, resulting in a tripping hazard. Discoloration. Flaking/crumbling. Debris becoming embedded. Chemical reaction with air, spilled liquids, or cleaning substances resulting in toxic fumes.

Keep in mind that cracked or loose tiles can be damaging to more than just cosmetics. If the surface is damaged, there is a higher risk of injuries (cuts, tripping, etc). If it's come loose entirely or in part you could slip on it, and so on.

The problem with ground coverings is that you generally expect it to be reliable and consistent if it looks like it should be. A single loose, chipped or cracked tile might be worse than an entire floor of them.

I had these on my roof until recently

http://www.certainteedshinglesettlement.com/

I would imagine the failure modes are similar. They are marketed and guaranteed for 30 years, you actually get like 5 years, whoops.

Bit of an aside, but oddly there seem to be two entirely different large shingle settlements within a few years. In addition to the one you linked, this one is currently in the process of settlement approval: http://www.roofsettlement.com/

Because the brainwashing of Western education is that the values of the Enlightenment are the only acceptable values.