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Comment by transcriptase | Hacker News Reader

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The free-market is proving your conspiracy theory wrong. Texas is also deploying absolutely massive amounts of batteries, and it's private investors doing it because it lets them deliver cheaper energy and profit.

Batteries are a cost-saving grid asset. Journalists are under-reporting this fact, not over-reporting.

Napkin. Batteries are $100 per KWH (say prismatic, 5000 cycles). So at $0.1 per KWH - say diff between high demand rate and the low demand - it takes only 3 years (1000 cycles) to break even. Practically a gold rush just a bit worse than crypto :)

It becomes even better if you add vertical integration optimization - i.e. your own solar farm in addition to your own battery farm.

Conspiracy theory? The company featured in this article literally raised money from investors to buy Tesla megapacks. Same as the rest.

But are they being improperly incentivised to do so by the state of California?

Why would Musk get any credit for this?

Who are all the developments buying the Tesla megapacks from? Who installs them and maintains them?

Musk was reported to have ordered the megapack project shut down after he found out about it. Which he only did after they already had prototypes sitting in the car park outside the building.

So lucky for him they ignored him and continued.

What? The only thing Musk has "contributed" to Tesla is firing the entire supercharger team because the executive in charge tried to fight for their jobs and the Cybertruck, one of the biggest flops in automotive history, and lying about FSD. He is honestly pretty bad at his job.

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