So, it seems a little misleading to describe it as a "Tesla" fire:
"The 300MW battery project is being produced by French renewable energy giant Neoen..."
I mean, yes, Tesla made the batteries, but they were not the ones who were in charge of this installation. It's a little like describing a home fire by the name of the lumber company whose lumber is burning.
This is funny. If it was a successful installation, we would see headlines like "Tesla 300MW battery makes X millions a day". Now that there is problem, you want to shift away from Tesla?
You're implying that the people shifting positive stories towards and negative stories away from Tesla are the same people. You might be right, but that's one hell of an assumption.
More precisely, Panasonic made the batteries. Tesla assembled those batteries into packs. Neoen assembled those packs into an installation. And those are just the big headline companies we know about. For all we know, an independent forklift driver might have accidentally dropped that particular pack during shipping and didn't tell anyone.
Tesla is the high profile company here. It seems normal that if they get the big headlines for positive events rather than Neoen or Panasonic, the bad events are likely going to fall on them too. In this situation, the high profile company is incentivized to enforce high standards across the industry.
The alternative (getting all the positive PR to well-known companies and blaming lesser known companies for failures in a vertical industry) would create negative externalities.
I doubt there is any prospect of Tesla "enforcing high standards" for any third party company installing their batteries. Can you imagine a lumber company enforcing high standards in how their lumber is used? Or steel companies enforcing standards on how skyscrapers are made? Or server companies enforcing standards on how server farms get made? We'd call that a massive overreach and power grab, and rightly so. This is the kind of thing that led to the "right to repair" movement.
Lumber and steel are comodities. That means people don't really care about where they get their lumber/steel from; they only care about specific physical properties of the material they buy. Companies producing comodities are typically not high profile.
High profile company status typically comes hand in hand with a modicum of influence which can be used to craft restrictive contracts, or to avoid association with garbage-tier industrial partners.
And that preview is that they're not that bad. No deaths, no injuries as far as I can tell, and only 3 days to get under control. You can easily think of dozens of more deadly and environmentally damaging disasters associated with other energy sources. Solar/wind+batteries seem pretty appealing so far.
And to add to the "not that bad", it seems that the fire was quite contained with only one group burning and not propagating to the whole installation.
There has been numerous cases of battery fires with phones, cars, ... it's not uncommon.
This installation seems to have been planned quite well to prevent a massive disaster.
This is not so much a Tesla hardware issue as it is a lithium ion issue. Tesla's packs are not more or less dangerous than other lithium ion battery packs.
This is not true. There are different chemistries. Tesla hardware, as many others, requires an active cooling system because of the KNOWN thermal issues with involving cobalt. There are lithium ion batteries without cobalt, such as Simpliphi, that do not have any runaway heat issues and therefore do not require a any cooling system, but this lithium chemistry increases the cost.
Active cooling in lithium (or any chemistry) batteries exists to allow fast charging and discharging of the battery, as those actions produce heat. Without any cooling system, you're limited by the passive heat dissipation of the battery, which largely depends on the internal resistance. You can lower the internal resistance at the expensive of some other properties (mostly efficiency).
If you don't believe this is a problem in any battery chemistry, I challenge you to find a battery that does not heat up while being charged (they all do, due to thermodynamic inefficiencies). Thermal runaway in Lithium-ion specifically is largely an effect of the lithium decomposing as a result of large heat input (by a short or physical damage). Once this has occured the battery will go through several stages of burning.
The runaway heat issues, with the chemistries applied now, are mainly due to which other elements are involved. Cobalt is a huge factor.
It is true all batteries heat when charging, but this is not what I am talking about here. Simpliphi batteries do not require any cooling system because the chemistry is more thermally stable and does not have a risk of thermal runaway, even charging at high power. Tesla batteries have a cooling system not for the heat generated by charging alone, but because of the runaway thermal reactions involving cobalt.
That's fair, but also it feels like fear mongering by omission, because whatever happens at a battery plant, it's not nearly as bad as the fossil status quo. How many refinery explosions, oil spills, pipeline leaks, tanker fires, drilling mishaps etc etc have we dealt with? They all demonstrate uncontained release of chemicals and energy is ... bad. Batteries are less bad.
I think your analogy is a little off. It's a little more like describing a car fire (Chevy Bolt) by the name of the battery cell manufacturer (LG Chem) whose battery is burning. There's a lot more potential energy in battery cells than in lumber.
Burning wood has a energy density of roughly 10 MJ/kg. Lithium batteries have about 0.875 MJ/kg of electric energy. Lithium metal burns at about 43.1 MJ/kg. So yeah. By a factor of 4 at least.
Michael Burry of ‘The Big Short’ reveals a $530 million bet against Tesla (May 17 2021)
Tesla short-sellers lost $38 billion throughout the automaker's colossal 2020 rally (Jan. 1, 2021)
This seems complex.
All anyone shorting has to do is create a drop over a small period and they can make a lot of money. This has been done successfully before using social media.
If by 'That meme needs to die' you mean it's not healthy for a market at their level then I agree. They are using an army of people who are not very smart, also not good.
But their plan at a base level could work and they could get rich. Create a panic for a small period and get rich.
His foresight around mortgage backed securities is legendary. A genuinely brilliant mind with respect to financial instruments. If he ever points to another financial instrument and says it's fishy, you'd do well to listen to him. But this doesn't make one an expert in everything.
I wouldn't expect Burry's predictions of Tesla's future prospects to be any more reliable than Linus Torvalds predicting the future prospects of some novel financial derivative.
The meme that needs to die is referring to Tesla as $TSLAQ. The trailing Q indicates a company in bankruptcy.
The addition of Tesla to the S&P 500 means that bankruptcy is now much less likely than previously.
Huge amounts of money specifically track the S&P, and huge additional amounts of money "closet index". Index money flows into the stock market on a daily basis and creates price support for all S&P 500 stocks, including Tesla.
Create a panic for a small period and get rich.
I agree this is a viable strategy for betting against many stocks. But now Tesla has probably gotten too big for that strategy. I've tried to read Reddit WallStreetBets but there's so much noise. Smarter people than I undoubtedly can make money on the back of that army of "not very smart" people.
"The 300MW battery project is being produced by French renewable energy giant Neoen..."
I mean, yes, Tesla made the batteries, but they were not the ones who were in charge of this installation. It's a little like describing a home fire by the name of the lumber company whose lumber is burning.