Tesla has finished building the biggest battery in the world | Hacker News Reader

Tesla has finished building the biggest battery in the world

mashable.com

40 pointscaiobegotti53 comments

Am I the only one who is completely fed up of this "cult of personality" mentality in tech and tech-related media?

The article itself is not that bad, but the title here on HN makes it look like he built the damn thing himself. I know everybody is smart enough to understand that there were tons of people involved, but why put Elon Musk instead of, idk, Tesla.

I don't have any problem with any single article on Musk/Jobs/you name it but on aggregate it makes me slightly mad.

EDIT: I'm not trying to take anything away from Musk. He is a very succesful person for many good reasons.

Yeah same, I love the guy and that's not to disrespect all his involvement but I feel like using "Tesla" in the title would be more respectful for everyone's work...

Edit: Title has been amended on their website, thanks Mashable!

Elon Musk is a brand, it is only coincidental that he happens to be a real person as well.

So if I'd given you the Elon Musk brand 20 years ago and thrown the man in a Gulag, we'd still have Tesla electric cars, SpaceX rockets and solar roof tiles now?

Well, for Tesla, that depends on whether Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning would have gotten funding from someone else. Musk wasn't the founder you know.

I know, but the only reason he took over was because they both bailed or got pushed. I suppose it's possible he was behind that, but he must at least have had the backing of the rest of the board and it seems unlikely they'd do that for nothing.

I believe they were pushed out because the Roadster (Tesla's first car) was late and that put the company at risk. It's a bit ironic because every other car Tesla built was also late, and the company has taken on a lot more risk since then.

> "Musk/Jobs/you name It"

Actually, I believe only those two receive such treatment. Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook and current Apple innovations are always attributed, correctly, to the companies.

I see this as the result of a conscious intention by both Jobs and Musk.

To be fair though, if Tesla build say a giant electic powered jet airplane next year, it will happen because Elon Musk decides he wants an electric jet airplane, not because John Doe in the Tesla workshops is really good a welding.

Some people really do make that much of a difference. If none of the other people at SpaceX had existed in 2002 when Elon decided to build the company, so he'd had to hire all different people, there's a pretty good chance we'd still have reusable orbital booster rockets by now.

That's the opposite of being fair. Making decisions (such approving a new, ambitious project) is not doing the work.

Any good manager will make sure that credit goes to the people doing the work. Though it's difficult because the there are so many people involved. The people at the top tend to get too much attention and credit for structural reasons and it's an uphill battle to prevent this.

The only difference being made in your story is that Elon Musk is the one holding the capital.

The beauty of capitalism. Inovation will happen only when it aligns with the whims of those sitting on piles of money.

Think about the fact that SpaceX only exists because Musk wants to go to Mars. What if he had instead decided to retire in Hawaii?

IMO Above average smart people feel better about themselves, if they keep thinking to themselves that there aren't any obscenely smart successful people that can make decisions and produces results that they could have produced only by being part of a large group. Because if they didn't, then their lack of success would have been attributed to them not being lucky or not being at a right place/time, not that they themselves simply are just not as good as they thought they are.

I think that your reasoning can be applied to a lot of people, independently from the "above average smart" condition. Still, I believe that one can both recognize Musk's abilities and give due credit to the people in the company.

As for being at the right place/time, I hope you agree with me in saying that success is a mix of hard work and luck. But again, this is not the point of my first comment.

Btw, I had a hard time understanding what you wrote so forgive me if I got the wrong meaning out of it.

So the headlines for such endeavours should be 'big group of people built a thing'. We all know Musk didn't build this thing himself with a screwdriver. Nobody is confused on that point. This is all just complaining for the sake of technically having half a point some people will join in with you to help complain about it.

The headline should be "Company X build thing Y". As for the rest, it's like, you know, your opinion. This being HN, I'll end it here.

That's orthogonal to my argument though, isn't it?

I'm just saying that he didn't build the thing himself. He decided to do it and did whatever he does at Tesla, then a lot of smart people worked like crazy to finish by the deadline.

Stretching it a bit (maybe too much): think of going to war. The President gets to decide it, but when you win you don't say "President X won the war". Yet a single soldier is likely as replaceable as a factory worker (before I get more hate, I know they are different but I hope you get my point).

The corrollary to that would be that if you have a terrible general leading an army that takes them to the wrong battlefield, issues the wrong equipment and puts the artillery on a position where it's poorly defended and the whole battle is a massacre, really when it comes down to it, it was the soldiers that lost it because they didn't fight hard enough.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen a ‘thousands of little people actualy did all the work’ post on HN and it gets really old. Yes. We know. We’re little people too. Yawn.

Yes.

> not because John Doe in the Tesla workshops is really good a welding.

As a counterpoint, the idea and concept of the now-successful HondaJet light jet was developed by a then-mid-level Honda engineer, Michimasa Fujino.

It took nearly two decades for the idea to take form but at least there was capacity for the organisation to evolve an idea from bottom-up.

Right, so without Fujino it wouldn't have gone anywhere.

My point isn't that welders are crap, it's that when you have a product that exists because of the singular ambition, drive and vision of a single individual pushing a company to achieve their goal, take that individual out of the picture and there's really nothing left but an undistinguished mob of people. That applies to Fujino just as much as to Musk. I say this as a lifelong card carrying member of the mob of people.

The original title of the article had been changed. The one I used here was in fact the original one they chose.

Edit: even Musk himself acknowledged that in a tweet — https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/933576358793318401 — so don't freak out over a poor choice of words that later got updated by the news site... I would be super happy to update it here if that was possible (or mods could do this, please?)

I tried to make it as clear as possible that my problem is not with this, or any other, single article :) I just happened to write it here because I've been thinking about it for a bit, read the article and wanted to see what people think about it.

Yes, we've updated the title here. We would've done it even if the article hadn't because “Elon Musk builds X” is indeed clickbait.

Not mentioned in the article - its capacity is 129 MWh. So, at full pelt it would output 100MW for an hour and 20 minutes... ish?

Which I think is about 120 peoples' worth of power. (correction 1MW is not 1KW, so 120,000!)

https://www.tesla.com/en_AU/blog/tesla-powerpack-enable-larg...

The worlds biggest battery is a lot smaller than imagined. I was expecting something the size of a data center

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Wind_Farm the battery can do 70MW for ten minutes and 30MW for three hours. They also say "capable of discharge at 100 megawatts" but that might be margin of safety.

I wonder if things are limited by cooling? Maybe the battery only has enough cooling to sustain 30MW of output and doing 70MW for ten minutes is all heat soak.

Yep, I am just taking the headline 100MW figure as the output.

I don't know what Australian electricity needs are, but we averaged 500 W over the last year in our 2-person household. This battery would be good for 10000 similar households for a day or 200000 households "for an hour and 20 minutes...ish".

I used UK per capita electrical energy per annum, translated to an average power usage = 0.8KW. 100/0.8 = 120 ish peoples' power use. So yep - off by a mere *1000!

Is that due to airco or electric heating? We have an average of 130W.

I'm impressed with the pace at which they delivered this. If only all government projects were this efficient.

100 days or it's free was the deal. The urgency was the arrival of summer and an ongoing spat between state and federal politicians.

I hope it's gonna make Australia more friendly to Tesla, they need some cash right now.

I am not sure about that (biggest battery in the world). This looks like a battery "pack" (an array of batteries connected in parallel/series). This looks like just a marketing thing to me, because there is nothing new or special about it. Just "the biggest".

Germany is also working on big batteries for years, but with a completely different strategy. A redox-flow battery with polymers and saline solution (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature18909) Here is a recent german article about it (http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/technik/brine4power-so-fu...)

This kind of batteries will hold 700 MWh.

Do you understand that the word "battery" means "array"?

Or the more polite variation: "'battery' actually means 'array', so it's being used appropriately in this case"

A battery is an array of cells.

The usage of "battery" is completely proper in this case, and it can be argued that the common usage is improper.

("prescriptive" vs "descriptive" rejoinder omitted for brevity)

I am not a battery expert by any means. But the article says:

> with 100 megawatts of capacity.

Isn't megawatts the measurement of power? Wouldn't Watt Hours be the measurement for capacity? Sometimes people use Apmere Hours also. Like the Chevy Bolt has 60 kWh of capacity.

That's a great point and the answer is that it has storage capacity measured in Watt Hours and it has a peak power supply capacity measured in Watts. Other comments have the details :-)

Turns out that power output is one of the most important measures for a battery.

On some applications it's even more relevant than capacity. (If you have an internal combustion car, take a look at its battery, odds are power is written in way larger letters than capacity.)

I'm Nitpicking, but it's a silly title. It should at least read, like "Elon Musk and his team built the biggest battery in the world".

I also don't think this is "one battery" - is a warehouse full of large pizzas the biggest pizza in the world?

Isn't a battery just a name for the collection of battery cells? Tesla's (the car) battery is composed from a lot of units that can store electricity.

Some RC batteries are just different cells/smaller batteries that are combined together in a nice package.

I think even the batteries in cell phones are composed from different components (some of which doesn't even store energy).

Yeah this occurred to me after posting that pedantry. You're right. Even consumer batteries can have multiple cells.

I think it's actually fair to call it "battery" instead of "batteries" from the outside the system behaves like one.

You can connect batteries to build what is effectively a bigger battery. Connecting pizzas, not very scalable.

that's still pricey at almost $400 per kwh of capacity... or about $0.2 per kwh of storage, several times the grid prices.

edit: I too can mix up GW and MW.

I was assuming 3000 cycles at 60% depth of discharge, which is what typical modern Li-Ion battery does, and an equivalent of 1800 full cycles. 129MWH over 1800 cycles is 232GWh, which is for $50M = $0.215 per KWh.

I would actually be very surprised if they only lasted for 500 cycles. Apple currently says their devices last 1000 cycles and Tesla is very careful with their batteries. They recommend not charging it below and above a certain percentage in their cars and it would surprise me if it was any different in their battery packs (though I believe they do not have such an option -- they just do it automatically). Furthermore, those packs have dedicated cooling and a low discharge rate, and are made for a lot of discharges (unlike iphones, which are made to be purchased every two to four years).

According to Wikipedia[0], the original Powerwall was rated for 1000-1500 cycles and it would suprise me if Tesla's new powerwalls are not better.

So, they should be even cheaper then your estimate, especially when you consider that they will probably be used well after the 20% capacity lose.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Powerwall#cite_ref-te201...

aww

he will charge it with his own personal energy)) Wonder where he takes so much enthusiasm from)

God, I read "biggest building in the world" .. I need to get my gigafactory obsession in check.

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