Tesla Gigafactory... the Future of the Battery

The Tesla Gigafactory, have you heard of it? If you haven't, odds are by the end of this week, you will!

Tesla CEO and genius, Elon Musk, is at it again - this time aiming to revolutionize the energy utility sector of this country and possibly the world. Musk has, for years, been turning industries on their heads. 

As creator of PayPal (where he earned his fortune) he changed the way online buying and selling was done. No longer needed were credit cards or ACH transfers, this was a fast, easy, safe way to transfer money online for goods purchased initially on eBay and now essentially everywhere on the internet.

He also turned his sights on the newly privatized space industry. As NASA closed its doors, someone needed to fill the gap. Musk and SpaceX have stepped up nicely. After years of development and testing, SpaceX recently became the first private space company to successfully dock with the International Space Station. They will be delivering supplies and tools to the ISS while the Russians continue to use their rockets to transport the astronauts. 

So after Musk has transformed Outer Space and CyberSpace,  he is turning his attentions to... Battery Space? Enter the Gigafactory. A joint venture spearheaded by Musk and Tesla Motors, his electric car company, Tesla Gigafactory will look to revolutionize the Lithium-Ion battery space globally. Gigafactory is reportedly looking to produce upwards of 30 gigawatts of batteries per year when fully operational. Those batteries would be used to power all of Tesla's motor vehicles along with a new product line aimed at Residential (and soon to be small commercial) properties for storage of Solar Power. Once up and running, and assuming they actually achieve the 30 gigawatts per year worth of batteries they claim they can produce, according to Musk,“We are talking about something that is comparable to all of the lithium-ion battery production in the world in one factory."

So how does this change everything? Utility companies around the world battle spikes in power usage, most often in evening between 4-7pm when people arrive home from work and put all of their systems to work. That also happens to be when the sun is going down and the solar panels on the roofs of these homes are no longer producing energy. Power produced during the day had been fed back into the grid, but now the house is drawing all the power and then some back. With this surge in usage, the systems of the power companies are always strained. Enter the Tesla Home Battery (my name, not theirs). With a Home Battery connected to your solar panels, it would charge itself with all the power the panels draw in throughout the day and store that energy until it is needed in the evening. Homes would still be connected to the grid for excess power needs but the batteries could be programmed to use all their power during the most expensive time periods effectively bringing down the drain from utilities and also ensuring any power taken from the grid is purchased at the lowest price point.

Long term, if Musk's predictions are correct, the Gigafactory and the 2-3 more he intends to build in the US will effectively dive bomb the price of Lithium-Ion batteries and make the Residential Home Battery so effective, people could use them to collect enough solar energy to completely run their home and also store power in case of emergency black outs, as the power would come from the panels on the roof, not from a main grid system that could fail and go offline.

Currently, the Gigafactory's location is TBD. But people in the know, people following developments closely, have predicted the announcement will come this Thursday, July, 31st, as Tesla announces its earnings to Wall Street. There has been rumor that this ground breaking in Reno is the first site that has been chosen as Gigafactory 1. There are also plans being put together for a location in Stockton, Ca and Phoenix, Az. Musk has said that he would go as far as breaking ground on up to 3 locations in order to take precautions against any local or construction problems at any one site.

Gigafactory will also produce all its own power onsite with newly built solar panels & wind turbines. A Net Zero factory.

I am going to revisit this topic after Thursday's announcements, if any. But I think this is going to be an ongoing fascinating development in our region, in our country and in our world as we see a massive shift from fossil fuels to a cleaner future of energy production.

Cheers

TJ

Solar Farms, harnessing our most powerful and abundant natural resource

Here in the lovely Southwest United States there is one thing we have an abundance of - sunshine. While we are already leading the nation in utilizing Solar Power, there is still so much we can do.

Recently I learned of a government initiative in Singapore, an entire country smaller than New York City. With a population of almost 5.5 million people on a small set of islands in SE Asia, space is at a premium and like everywhere else, its residents need power. In order to provide this power, the government of Singapore is looking toward a new technology - floating solar fields.

There is technology that has been developed in Southern France and is currently being tested that would allow for large solar farms to be constructed and placed in reservoirs and other fresh water areas inlets to provide power for nearby municipalities. This has benefits both for the power and water elements. The Solar panels will be able to move thereby always having optimal positioning for solar collection. The panels as well as the cables carrying the collected power will be kept cool by the water, thereby losing minimal power to thermal loss. Also for future adaptations of this solar array, the platforms themselves could be modified to collect wave current power if the fields were put into the ocean or protected bays.

For the water, the solar panels protect the surface of the water from the sun. This vastly lowers water loss to evaporation which will be crucial moving forward specifically here in the arid SW. What little water we do get, we cannot afford to lose to those 100 degree afternoons throughout our endless summers.

Imagine, if you will, something like what is pictured below floating around a couple of coves in Lake Mead, Lake Powell, the LA Reservoir, and countless other water collection facilities in SW. Image the power that could be pulled in year round for our cities in Inland CA, AZ, NV.

Creative solutions like these need to be presented to our newly minted DWP Board, Mayor Garcetti, Gov Brown and all the other officials of our great state that are constantly looking for ways to bring power to our Green State without burning more fossil fuels. We have the solar technology, why not put it to work??

Thanks for listening - Email, Tweet, Facebook message your local Energy/Water supplier and tell them we are in need and there are solutions out there yet to be explored.

Cheers

TJ

OC Fair Musical Acts

No rantings and ravings today. I love going down to the OC Fair each year to watch one of my favorite country acts at the Pacific Amphitheater after indulging on some terrific (terrible) Fair Fare!

Check out the link below for the full list of OC Fair musical guests and if you need something to do and have a couple hours to drive to OC, its always a great time!

OC Fair Musical Lineup

Cheers

TJ Franco

Why America should strive to be like China

Yes, you read that title correctly. And no, I am not high. It isn't exactly as broad as the title may imply, but in this one particular instance, I am so thrilled with what China is trying to do, that I couldn't help myself.

China does so so many things wrong. Human rights, child labor, antiquated reproductive policy, questionable banking practices... the list goes on and on. But there is one thing they do better than any country on earth thanks to their quasi-pseudo-Deomcratic-Capitalistic-Communism --- Infrastructure. Nowhere on planet earth can you get a massive infrastructure project built faster and with less red tape than in China.

The current project I want to talk about is called the Phoenix Towers in the provincial capital of Wuhan.

That is not a sci-fi scene from a movie. That is the architects rendering of the Phoenix Towers upon completion. The taller of the two will be the new tallest building on earth at approx 1 kilometer high (3,281ft). That is impressive, but not what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about are the ingenious amount of sustainable and environmentally friendly aspects to these buildings.

Sitting on their own island, the pair of towers will be home to photovoltaic panels and air pollution scrubbing filters on its exterior. They will have biomass boilers located at their base to turn waste back into power. There will be wind turbine near the top of the taller tower. There is rainwater harvesting, evaporative cooling for building temperature control as well as water filtration that will sustain both towers using nearly 100% recycled water. They will have hydroponic gardens grown in "green walls", located inside the exterior glass of the structure, these living walls will feed the spherical restaurants made to look like planets orbiting the towers, as well as keep the building cool by filtering the sunlight. There is a thermal chimney at the taller buildings center which harnesses the warmth of the earth and the biomass boiler to warm the building in the winter. Architects hope the building will be 100% Net Zero, they will produce all of the power they need, as well as extra power for the surrounding area.

At the base the towers will host different streets meant to mimic other countries around the world. Japan Street. France Street. These will be home to restaurants and other retail establishments. The towers will undoubtedly have a mix of commercial, residential and hotel units within.

If all goes according to plan, the towers are slated for completion in 2018. At that point they will be the tallest buildings on earth, but with such a focus on sustainability that hopefully the world community will celebrate this type of architecture and it will become the new normal for all buildings going up. There is no reason not to incorporate this into building design of the future.

These are just cool:

Cheers

TJ

Can Millenials afford a Home?

The Millenial Generation, defined as anyone born from 1980-2000, has an uphill battle to climb. I know everyone thinks that they have a particular challenge to face that no generation in history has ever had, and I am sure in their own unique way, everyone has a point. Since I am a Millenial myself, I am going to run with it!

Today I am going to focus on one aspect of the Millenials life and see how it is really effecting everyone, of all ages - Housing.

Millenials really came of age in the beginning and then in the height of the Great Recession. While we are technically now out of recession for more than 4 years, it has been a SLOW recovery - the slowest of all time after any sizable recession. The US recovered from the Great Depression faster than we are recovering from the Great Recession.

That is not good news when you are in your early 20's, fresh out of college, looking for a job, a spouse, and a home. That was the norm for the Greatest Generation and the Baby Boomers, both our predecessors. If they did go to college, which many didn't, they finished, got married and started a family in their first little slice of the American dream. They then spent the rest of their life paying into that piggy bank we call equity, in the largest investment the majority of people ever make in their life. You pay the mortgage each month, you own a bit more of the house. You want a bigger house, you use the equity from the sale of your smaller house to get the bigger one. If you are smart, once your kids are grown and gone and you want to retire, you use all that equity over the years, downsize to a smaller and easier to maintain home and take that chunk you made from paying down your houses as a nest egg for retirement.

So where do Millenials stand? We emerged from college, which is now nearly mandatory in the entry level job market, with tens of thousands of dollars of debt to find no gainful employment. Our country was laying people off. Public spending ground to halt. Government at the local, state and federal levels were all shrinking. No jobs! Many Millenials became boomerang kids, moving back in with their parents after graduating from school. Some went on to get Master's degrees because what else could they do? They knew how to go to school, there were no jobs, why not go to school a couple more years and ride it out?

Now Millenials are starting their lives and starting their careers in close to six figures of debt, automatically disqualifying them from obtaining a home loan based on limited income (entry level job) and overwhelming monthly debt (student loans). Add to that the cultural shift in marriage to a later age and the delay of starting a family, and no one is buying homes!

Ok, so Millenials can't buy a home, why is that a big deal? There are a number of reasons:

1. Building new homes creates jobs. Construction jobs. Architecture jobs. Insurance jobs. All the blue collar trades (plumbing, HVAC, painting, etc), plus the planning, design, marketing, raw materials, and banking jobs that go along with a new home and what it takes to get it made and sold. It is said that building one average single family home creates 3 jobs that didn't previously exist.

2. Boomers have no one to sell to. If the Boomers are being responsible, and moving out when their kids have left the nest and started families of their own, they will sell their 3-5 bedroom house and downsize to something easier the maintain and cheaper to afford while they move into their hard earned retirement years. Can't happen if the boomerang kids are still in their childhood rooms. Can't happen if there are no buyers on the market to purchase the homes because they cannot obtain a home loan.

3. Building that Equity. The equity position in your home is like a huge piggy bank that you are forced to pay into the first of every month. You pay your mortgage and in doing so, you own a larger and larger piece of your home. Want to make improvements 5 years in? Great. Refinance, take out some equity and put it directly into updating a kitchen or bathroom. Makes your home worth even more, you didn't have to pay anything out of pocket, and now if/when you are ready to sell, your home is in a better position to sell quickly. No home for Millenials means that savings account starts much much later. Anyone who has ever talked to a banker or read an article on savings knows, in every possible case under the sun, the earlier you start, the easier it is. Period.

Covering the plight of the Millenial will probably be something I come back to time and again.  Since I myself am a Millenial, it isn't hard to find data, personal stories, friends that are going through this themselves. Among all the other problems that Millenials face, this one could be the most personal to each and every one.

Cheers

TJ

Happy Birthday, America!

Happy Birthday, America! You look great for 238!

On July 4, 1776 a declaration was sent from Philadelphia, PA, the then capitol of the fledgling 13 colonies. It was sent to King George III in jolly old England and it was on. From that moment for the next seven years, Americans fought perilously for independence and sovereignty from Britain. We won.

Thanks to General George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and so many others, we live here today in still the greatest free nation on planet Earth. We are far from perfect, but it is that imperfection that we continue to struggle with today, together as Americans, defending the inalienable rights that our Forefathers fought and died for, that continues to make this country great today.

Today, more than any other, I am proud to be an American. Have a great, happy, and SAFE Fourth of July!

Cheers

TJ

PS - For a complete list of GREAT celebrations and fireworks - Click Here & Enjoy!

Being WaterWise LA - Part Deux

Ok so I got on a bit of a roll earlier in the week when I was talking about the current state of water, or lack thereof, in CA. Farmers are being forced to grow less and less. Reservoirs are depleted nearing all time lows - WE ARE IN TROUBLE.

Since that has not quite hit home with us everyday consumers yet, no one has really taken note. I mean it is impossible to read anything in the LA Times, MSN, CNN, anywhere really... without hearing something about the drought, and usually about the extreme drought here in the West.

So what are we going to do about it?!? Are there any programs put in place to help us navigate a sticky situation like this? Anybody telling us what we can do to help?

Let me start on a State level. Gov. Jerry Brown is using this opportunity to push his agenda to build two gigantic tunnels from the Sacramento/San Joaquin Delta in NorCal all the way down here to us thirsty desert dwellers. The plan is slated to cost $15 billion and each tunnel is going to be about as wide as a two-lane highway. Proponents say it will stabilize the flow of water from the north to the fertile farm lands of central California all the way to us hot and thirsty SoCal'ers.

Opposition for this plan, and its overarching project - the Bay Delta Conservation Plan - comes mostly from northern California residents who think most of the water goes to this:

Instead of this:

California depends on its water for nearly $45 Billion in agricultural output each year.

So good ole' Gov. Brown is trying to dig some big ass tunnels down the middle of the state (probably directly under the tracks for his ridiculous bullet train) to bring water to SoCal. But what can we SoCal'ers that give a damn do down here right now to save water?

Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP) offers a few incentive programs to lower our water consumption as residential consumers. Install low flow toilets, water saving washing machines, moisture sensing sprinkler systems, rain barrels for water collection? Here's your rebate.

Want to go a step further and take the lawn out completely?? DWP is offering $2.00/square foot of turf removed. Get money back and put in a beautiful hardscape instead:

The point is, there are abundant opportunities to save water. Wash a full load of clothes or dishes. Water the lawn less or take it out completely, wash the car less often, take shorter showers. Whatever your solution, everything helps. We all need to take action before our beautiful slice of paradise looks like this, permanently:

Go to http://www.bewaterwise.com/ for more.

Cheers

TJ

Restoration Hardware, an awful waste?

If you have ever purchased anything from Restoration Hardware and not opted out of their mailer, then you recently came home to quite the surprise! A 17 pound, 3,300 page mailer in the form of 9 separate "source books."

Is this the ultimate expression of waste? I mean how many people don't even look at the magazines that come in once a month from RH and its competitors like Crate and Barrel, Pottery Barn, Pier 1 Imports and the like?

According to CEO and chief strategist, Gary Friedman, these source books will actually cut down 70% of what RH usually uses on paper in its monthly mailers. Since this is a once a year mailing blitz with beautiful books meant to be kept sitting on the coffee table, was it worth it?

Pundits and social media'ers aplenty are aroar at receiving the books or even the notion of sending them. Environmentalists have their knickers in a twist. The Sierra Club is probably having a coronary.

Personally I find it hard to accept in my mind that this is cutting back. It is an enormous waste of paper for the majority of people who will inevitably throw it in the trash without ever even looking at it. I will be watching to see how much other RH paraphernalia arrives in the coming months. As soon as I see even one more magazine, I am revisiting this post to blast them. If nothing comes, I will have to revisit and sure up my thoughts.

For now, I thought Jim Cramer from CNBC making Friedman bicep curl the mailers was a delightfully hilarious touch (fast forward to 0:56 to see him start).
CEO Bicep Curls his own Mailer

Cheers

TJ