Despite Musk's positioning on the topic it really feels like a bailout of his other investments. Does anyone have information regarding the time of the shareholder vote on the merger? Given that Musk and co. will abstain, there might be a reasonable chance that it will not go through.

Some people are indeed naive enough to be every word that comes out of his mouth. However, you are correct - this was a bailout that screws TSLA shareholders, plain and simple. SCTY was arguably heading towards bankruptcy.

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/05/11/solarcity-i...

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-06-22/analyst-slams-tesla...

it will go through. if you didn't like the deal, you sold the stock. they have a lot of the same large investors, that have already approved the deal, such as fidelity.

Tesla was down 12% upon announcement of the deal. I guess if your crystal ball didn't tell you this value-destructive deal was coming, you got screwed.

> I guess if your crystal ball didn't tell you this value-destructive deal was coming, you got screwed

Non-professionals shouldn't act in the short-term market anyways, at least not if they can't afford to lose 100% (or even more, like Uli Hoeness, who screwed up with leveraged deals).

Just invest in long term - in my opinion Tesla and SpaceX are decent bets. Both won't go under the bus any time soon, I'd rather be concerned about fossil fuel stocks.

One day price bump doesn't matter. If it regains the 12% in a week, to a long term investor it destroyed 0 value.

"If" is the key word that you used. Nothing in the future is promised. See what long term holders of Valeant have to say..it goes both ways. The only thing that is certain is that the stock lost 12% of its value in a single day over acquisition/poor corporate governance concerns. That would be alarming to me as a long term shareholder.

A long-term shareholder that is worried about an announcement day bump must be new to the stock game, or not that good at it.

You're only screwed if you sell. Why would you sell a volatile growth stock during the dips?

The biggest problem for Tesla is battery cost. They have to increase the production to drive down the price, so they want to leverage SolarCity to sell more Powerwalls. Tesla can use solar panels for supercharger stations where grid electricity is not available. You can create a new product or solution etc. etc. There is quite a lot of synergy.

You may be underestimating the power draw of supercharger stations. My model X pulls 200-300Amps of 400V power at a supercharger station with 8-12 stalls.

That is over 80,000watts per stall.

Just to clarify -- it does not maintain that power. It will quickly ramp up to that on empty-ish batteries (320 amps at 320 volts is max that I know of) and maintain that until the battery is ~50% full. It will then ramp down and charge more slowly. While I can make lots of guesses as to why they charge in this way I don't know for sure on any of them.

This is how Lithium batteries are charged - CC/CV. You first have constant current stage, then as the battery fills up you shift into constant voltage stage where the current is gradually reduced until the battery is full.

However CC/CV change doesn't normally happen at 50%, but further down the charging cycle. It may be that Tesla throttles the current ahead of time due to thermal constraints of the charging system.

Which is quite an incentive to save on electricity as much as you can, I'd think.

10kW array would be at least 600 sqft, so that will be a lot of commercial real estate.

The state/feds should stop subsidizing utility solar and incentivize covered parking lot panels. Prettier than lots and putting the energy where the cars are.

But the stalls work in pairs. They all can't deliver 80kw simultaneously. Ever wondered why sometimes you only get 100A? Because your neighbor, who got their first, gets first dibs on the power, and you get the leftovers.

I've never actually experienced this. I believe the 320 amp / 320 volt charging is for emptier cars... I've plugged in at a 100% full charger and gotten full power charging.

As you know, the fuller your battery gets, the less current it draws.

If your neighbor was already at the end of their charge cycle, then they will be drawing relatively little, and you'll get the full current.

I found this description of a 'typical' supercharger setup:

"The eight bay setup takes a 12kV, 750kVA feed from the utility, steps it down to 480V three phase on site, pushes that into 2000A switchgear which feeds four (one for each pair of bays) SuperCharger units at 480V/200A."

Eh. Is solar really currently a viable alternative that can power superchargers?

Technically, it's primarily a DC source. Batteries are a DC sink. It actually seems to make a lot of sense to charge the latter from the former.

Im not really well versed in energy generation - do you have an estimate how many solar panels would be needed to power one supercharger at full capacity?

A couple acres? No joke. To generate the 50-80,000watts necessary for each stall you will need city-blocks worth of solar. If it's cloudy or at dawn/dusk, more. If you want to charge cars during the day and night, triple the number of panels and get some massive batteries.

Say 120 watts per m2. 80,000/120 =~ 650m2. That's the ideal. Then for dawn/dusk, 1200m2 and triple that to run it at night ... 3600m2 ... just shy of the 4050m2 in an acre. But even that is 3600m2 perpendicular to the sun not on the flat ground. To get that 3600m2 in the real world (not on the equator) you will have to spread the panels out on a much larger lot (much depends on the location and time of year). If I were buying land, I'd estimate 2-2.5 acres for solar per stall.

This is ridiculous. People aren't charging 100% of the time, and even when in use, the chargers burst to 80kW, but they don't average 80kW. All you need are some batteries to level the load. Assuming 20kW average, and stall being used 20% of the time, that brings your calculation down to 4,000/120 =~ 33m2. Accounting for night and bad weather, let's quadruple that to 133m2. That's about a quarter of an acre for EIGHT stalls.

I skipped many other multipliers that negate any error in the needed wattage per stall. Top of the list: latitude. Demand will be constant throughout the year, but solar output can be radically different depending on the season. Then, is the horizon flat? If it isn't, then you aren't getting as many hours of sun. Then whether the panels are fixed or sun-tracking (tracking is better but require more space/maintenance). Tracking rigs are also much less space efficient when the sun is low. They end up shadowing each other for much of the day. Access roads, setback from obstructions (treelines) panel output degrading over time, energy losses in/out of batteries ... there are scores factors to undermine the per-acre efficiency of small solar farms located near to consumers. Imho tesla would do far better by building large solar farms in perfect locations and hooking them into the public grid. Panels at the charging stations can be the window dressing.

Just a clarification-- the chargers burst to that 80kW range but they don't maintain it. Typical charging is closer to the 10-20kW range.

In addition people are not constantly charging.

Budgeting solar is like chopping firewood for winter. You cut as much as you think you need. Do that again. Then the whole process again.

There are so many factors that can diminish the amount of power available at a particular location that the only reasonable thing to do is overbuild. Imagine a line of teslas at an upstate New York charging station. They cannot get to work without power. But it's raining. And it's winter. And it's 6am. And that treeline has grown a foot higher, pushing dawn back an hour. You cannot have too many panels.

Lots of them. A few hundreds, I think. Viability may depend on site. But if there's space nearby for a reasonable array, there doesn't seem to be any reason not to use it no matter how small it gets (any size will result in savings), unless your electricity is dirt-cheap, or the place is so infrequently used that for a significant portion of the time, nobody is charging (which would waste a portion of the local generation and worsen the ROI).

Space X has purchased $225 million in Solar City bonds. Elon Musk has a 21% stake in Solar City (he is also buying $65 million in Solar City bonds, half of their most recent offering).

Funny, but inevitable. Musk was asked specifically if Tesla would takeover SpaceX or vice versa in a tesla conference call and he said no, but it is really inevitable. Without some creative accounting through shifting investor cash and grants from one company to another Solar City has no future, and that then goes for Tesla as well.

i thought solar cells are dirt cheap, because China can produce them at very low cost?

Part of some half-arsed rescue attempt. Solar City doesn't have much life left to it on its own and it needs some creative accounting to stay afloat.

While they have about $16 billion in Model 3 orders. So to actually sell so many cars, they need to invest a lot to get the production going. Part of that is the Gigafactory, but also the production line and of course, the parts for those cars have to be bought, before the cars can be made and sold. So the next quarters will see a lot of more spending that has to be balanced with the future Model 3 revenue.

The SolarCity acquisition is certainly risky, but there are large business overlaps as other posters have described.

In addition to the article itself, there are multiple, thorough discussions that attempt to answer your question over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12405092

Interesting question, considering buying someone like Saft would make more sense in their current position.

Most likely lack of options.