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Comment by aerovistae | Hacker News Reader

I seriously doubt that they've spent 10 years in the industry and would read this comment and go "Wait, what?? Oh shit! We fucked up! Turns out nobody working here had any relevant expertise at all, and we were just guessing how this worked and how to design it! If only we'd talked to anyone who knew had even basic knowledge about solar panels before creating a factory to produce them!"

A more valid wording for this comment would be "I wonder how they altered the design to accommodate for the siphon effect the gap generated," instead of implying they have no idea what they're doing.

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> A more valid wording for this comment would be "I wonder how they altered the design to accommodate for the siphon effect the gap generated," instead of implying they have no idea what they're doing.

If you want a rewording that's closer to my original meaning, it'd be more like "I bet these were made with a cold climate, like that in the northern USA, in mind. They'd lose 10-20% efficiency in summer where I live."

Edit: Although that may not be a terrible thing, if they're overprovisioned compared with the inverter's maximum output so as to keep the inverter at full power for a larger proportion of the time. Depending on climate, you could probably balance out losses due to summer heat with losses due to reduced winter daylight, at least to a degree, giving more reliable year-round power.

At the end of the day - does it matter? People expect X output at $X price. If this meets that desire, they're fine. A lot of people would probably be just fine losing some power on hot days to not have something ugly on the roof of their house. For some things aesthetics DO matter - the roof of a house is one of them for most people. Cars tend to be another one as Elon is well aware of.

Northern USA. Cold climate. Yeah, like Chicago in July. Super cold.

But stuff like this happens all the time. Especially when designers have more say than engineers. Just look at the previous iPhone antenna issues or the samsung batteries.

> "Stuff like this happens all the time"

It just blows my mind that someone can create a successful space program from scratch and still people think "but he'll probably get tripped up by this tiny thing that even I noticed! Just waiting for company to go belly up."

You may also recall that Tesla had immense problems making car door handles that actually work reliably (and the same with the doors themselves), largely because they prioritized fancy aesthetics over sound engineering. If they've taken the same approach with their solar panels, this would be completely unsuprising.

They prioritized fancy aesthetics over simplicity, not over sound engineering. Unless you believe sound engineering is just never doing hard things.

The doors were new, they were complicated, they took time. I don't think they revealed any fundamental engineering weaknesses of the company, just a reminder that anything new is hard.

Were the seatbelt bolts new and complicated?

Is having the diff not rupture the fuel tank and set the car on fire new and complicated?

Is having the engine block not spontaneously catch fire new and complicated?

I love this game!

Your choice of analogy is revealing: these were problems at Ford, as near as I can tell. (The first sounds like the Pinto.) Show me Tesla-scale problems at BMW or Audi, and I might take Musk's hilarious claim that he'll bankrupt those companies a little more seriously.

You remind me of how Americans talk about how the US is the best country in the world, and then compare themselves to Nicuragua or Afghanistan or Somalia or thereabouts. Sure, you can beat the astonishingly dysfunctional, but how do you compare against your real peers?

(Disclaimer: Musk knows what he's doing in space, to say the least, even though his car company is astonishingly dysfunctional. I hope he has the sense to keep SpaceX and Tesla independent!)

You're probably very right on this one, but it probably pays to also remember that Elon Musk and his team are not infallible.

Without agreeing or not with your overall statement, I want to point out that this new type of panels have not been invented by Musk nor by his companies. It was invented by another company, that they then acquired.

Or perhaps they're too busy with the space program to be concerned about a detail like this :)

> It just blows my mind that someone can create a successful space program from scratch and still people think "but he'll probably get tripped up by this tiny thing that even I noticed! Just waiting for company to go belly up."

(a) Elon isn't all of SpaceX, there is a whole managerial and engineering infrastructure there, which is primarily motivated by scientific, not aesthetic, needs. So, they choose the best design based on their calculations.

These solar panels are clearly designed for looks, an important business consideration, so the idea that they may have knowingly traded off on the engineering/science side is a real possibility. That is a real decision people can make and none of the parents claimed the company was doomed. It may even be a decision that makes business sense and results in more sales. Many decisions about how houses are built are based on aesthetics and not engineering concerns, which is why they don't look like warehouses.

(b) even in engineering-based organizations, misaligned incentives can silence science-based concerns. NASA, an organization that also successfully created a space program and had some of the best engineers in the world, ignored repeated warnings from an engineer about a tiny thing that would have prevented the Challenger disaster.

>that even I noticed

It's even more mind-blowing that you think Musk is infallible, and that he's poring over the schematics of every in development.

If that's the case then eventually we should see or find a sound explanation for how these solar panels overcome that particular issue.

It's silly to act like something is above questioning because Elon Musk and Tesla are involved.

Hero worship to that degree is dangerous, blinding, and frankly a little scary to see on a site like HN.

If a space program that has been operating for 60+ years can trip up seemingly inane details, I gather Space X may be at risk of over-looking pertinent details, from time to time.

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/07/10/200775748/...

Bear in mind that "rocket science" is proverbial for a reason. Are you familiar with the THAAD (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_High_Altitude_Area_De...)? What convinced me that it wasn't just corporate welfare was the part where one of the tests failed because the target rocket exploded in flight, so the THAAD rocket couldn't even be launched.

In general, SpaceX seems to be much more competent and much better-run than Tesla. My guess from thousands of miles away is that Musk is just temperamentally better suited to space than to cars. Space exploration is in its infancy, still a bleeding-edge field where every product is more or less a one-off, while car manufacturing is mostly about logistics, quality control, and the effective management of routine in general. I get the impression that SpaceX is the most efficient of all companies and agencies involved in space, even though Tesla is a strikingly inept car manufacturer; I just hope Tesla doesn't drag SpaceX down with it into bankruptcy...

Relevant: http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/06/02/thank-god-for-comme...

So fucking relevant.

What are you doing on a message board if you think no one here has anything insightful to offer?

Tesla presented the best in class Powerwall for an unbelievable cheap price. Everybody said at that time: impossible. Elon said: "We have this number of orders." Actually, you never heard of any significant deliveries. Instead: "We have this new Powerwall 2". Already, the first version of Powerwall 2 is already dropped before deliveries happened. There is only marketing of single prototype large scale installations.

The same with the solar shingle. Everybody tells: too expansive because of the expansive installation requirements because of the connectors. A (few) single panels are easier to install. But still Elon claimed the solar shingle will be cheaper than regular before energy payback.

This Tesla press release at the time of the Powerwall 2 says quite clearly that 300 MWh of the first version had been deployed, or 46,000 units of the first Powerwall.

https://www.tesla.com/blog/gaining-momentum-tesla-powerpack

Are you accusing the company of lying? Do you have any source to your accusations here? Kind of seems like you're making some claims to fit your pre-existing agenda without researching it at all.

Fact checking:

— May 2015 Tesla announced: 38,000 Pre-orders for the Powerwall and 2,500 pre-orders for the Powerpack, which would equate to 25,000 Powerwall http://www.theverge.com/2015/5/6/8561931/tesla-38000-powerwa...

— According to your PR Tesla installed until October 2016 300 MW.

(38,000 + 25,000) by 7kW = 441MW (I know a rough calculation)

That means, the pre-orders where received in 1 week. All the pre-orders fulfilled means, they never sold anything in addition to those first movers _AND_ they did not sold/installed any Powerpack.

But as they installed also some large scale Powerpacks, that means they did not even fulfilled their pre-orders (or a significant amount got cancelled) _and_ they did not sold any Powerwall besides the pre-orders.

Just a nice reminder, do your own research and double check numbers. Don't believe in PR only.

EDIT: corrected the numbers

> Actually, you never heard of any significant deliveries.

> There is only marketing of single prototype large scale installations.

Really? Whoops:

November 2016: "Last month, Tesla confirmed that it delivered 300 MWh of batteries since launching Tesla Energy in May 2015. In the past 2 months alone, over 100 MWh of new Powerpack projects have been announced."

And

"Only a few weeks after announcing one of the biggest energy storage projects ever, Tesla Energy won again a massive energy storage contract. The automaker’s energy division will supply ‘Powerpacks’ to its energy storage deployment partner, Advanced Microgrid Solutions (AMS), for a major new project: a 7 MW / 34 MWh network of battery systems to support water treatment facilities of Irvine Ranch Water District (IRWD)."

https://electrek.co/2016/09/26/tesla-and-ams-win-another-maj...

And

"Tesla’s battery supply contract with Advanced Microgrid Solutions (AMS) is quickly proving to be accelerating the deployment of energy storage capacity. After announcing a major 34 MWh contract to deploy Powerpacks at water treatment facilities in California last month, AMS confirmed today that it will install new Powerpacks at buildings owned by Invesco."

https://electrek.co/2016/11/02/new-tesla-powerpack-2-project...

And of course the Edison deal

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-tesla-energy-storage-2...

And of course the Australia deal that is likely to happen

And

"Previous projects include a 12 MWh with Cal State University, another one for several office buildings in Irvine, and more recently, a 1 MW Powerpack system inside Morgan Stanley’s San Francisco skyscraper."

It's pretty obvious they're scaling the business extremely quickly compared to the history of how extraordinarily slow energy storage technology has moved.

Do not mix up Powerwall and Powerpack.

Powerwall (2) is the actual product you can hopefully buy and get delivered.

Powerpack is the actual product intended for large scale installation. But there, where only a few prototype projects. You can count them on one hand.

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