First: I'm not a Tesla or Elon groupie. I think both have done an outstanding job that has accelerated the transition to EVs multiple years. But when I wrote my 1st book on EVs it was already inevitable (in my eyes). Tesla was 1 of dozens of companies making small batches of EVs.
Right now we see almost all car makers are getting in on the EV act and multiple new parties with deep pockets (e.g. in China) are joining the fray.
Tesla has a lead on many technological fronts and an incredibly talented and motivated team of engineers lead by a visionary.
So Tesla has a great future ahead of it. But I don't see why its feats could not be replicated by other companies. Especially since it has no patents to block others (and doesn't want to) and since it's stronger on vision and design than mass production.
With that out of the way, Jack Ricard makes an excellent point: it increasingly looks like buying people to publish misinformation about Tesla and shorting Tesla are weapons wielded with the purpose of manipulating the stock and bringing Tesla down.
He rightly points out that oil companies have multiple billions to gain for every DAY that the transition to EVs is delayed. And we know they are already paying for campaigns to discredit climate science, so why not buy some negative stories and short some stocks?
And car companies have a lot to win too when Tesla fails or EVs get delayed. And #dieselgate was a good reminder of the lengths they will go to in order to increase their profits.
It's also a good demo of how these things work. There was not one person deciding: let's cheat.
Instead all car makers lobbied for loopholes in the EU untill cheating was part of the game. They would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for the more adversarial role the EPA plays in the US. (I knew this was happening in 2014 from different test reports.)
So I would not be surprised if this conspiracy is basically the incumbents egging each other on to take down this uppity newcomer and getting more brazen at every lie they manage to distribute and more willing to invest in shorts as a cheap way (for them) of harassment.
It's even possible some incompetents in the SEC are so much part of this old boys network that they honestly believe Elon's tweets are worse transgressions than all the lies and that they write off the remarkable amount of stocks as a coincidence.
But if I had to get guess I would say there clearly is a pattern an some people 'on the inside' must be aware of this. It's high time a criminal investigation into these practices is started.
But I'm not a stock expert so what do you think? Pls let me knowxand pool knowledge!
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Grid congestion is THE bottleneck for economic growth and sustainability in the Netherlands.
But it doesn't have to be!
When we combine Dynamic Line Rating with Peak Shaving we could move three times more electricity with the current grid!
🧵
What is Peak Shaving?
Peak shaving means that you take measures to lower the peaks in electricity usage. Peaks are what limits use of a power line. In the example graph below you can see the demand is too high a few yours per week. But there is more than enough capacity overall
Adjusting only the 2.5% of electricity demand that causes the biggest peaks adds 25% of capacity.
Removing 17% of energy from the peaks (e.g. with dynamic pricing, batteries, smart charging, etc. etc.) provides 50% more capacity.
It IS true that EVs charging without any guidance will increase the evening peak. But if you just shut charge points off from 16:00 to 21:00, you get a HUGE peak at 21:00. Because at that moment everyone who arrived between 16:00 and 21:00 will start charging.
You can see this in a paper by my colleague Peter Hogeveen.
I though all grid operators allready accepted this when I did a project at @elaadNL about 10 years ago. It was the first interesting result that I got after I started with agent-based models. doi.org/10.1016/j.sega…
I LOVE this new post by my friend (and sometimes foe ;-) @MLiebreich on the five superheroes that might keep climate change below 2C while making us more affluent.
I think this is the biggest superhero of all. Michael rightly points out that "saturation theory" (saying the market for e.g. wind, solar, batteries and EVs will be saturated soon) is abused to make the consequences of exponential growth go away.
Superhero 2: Systems Solutions
He rightly points out that designing the system for new tech gives loads of possibilities to address challenges like the sun don't shining, the wind don't blowing and the grid needing reinforcements.
Politics is messy. Anti-war and anti-nuclear sentiments after the second world war made Germany strongly opposed to nuclear but eager to do good. Which favored renewables. And they had Herman Scheer.
The different experience in the US might be why nuclear is more popular there.
Scheers' pro PV policies increased the pace at which PV walked down the learning curve.
I would estimate that over 99.9% of scientists who actually study climate systems agree that it's a lot cheaper and easier to stop burning fossil fuels than to remove carbon dioxide.
Let's not make it an ad-hominem by assuming she craves the attention or gets paid for it. Maybe she's just worried and doesn't know better. My go-to reply in cases like this is: "never underestimate the power of incompetency".
So what does the science say?
First of all: nobody in the literature I know off (and I actually study this at the @TUeindhoven) assumes that it will be cheaper to remove carbon from the atmosphere than to stop burning fossil fuels. Thus all would agree that what she proposes is a waste of money.