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The size of BYD's factory

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Re: The size of BYD's factory

#181

Post by CPLX »

hackernewds wrote: post #161
mrtksn wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with the west is that it’s already developed. Everything in the west is a bit like the European automobile industry, it’s highly refined for what it is and we expect to milk it for some time to come. Same thing happened with the financial institutions and internet infrastructure - those who had the early versions of it established early ended up lagging behind once the technology was superseded. The poore…

strongly disagree. the West has almost no manufacturing capability or labor force (at an affordable rate) at the moment. it's almost unsustainable even for a small business to be paying $20 an hour in some cities let alone run large factories

This is a ridiculous statement. The west has absolutely staggering manufacturing capacity.

China has more. And the trends are in the wrong direction, to be sure. But Germany and the US, among many others, have tremendous capacity.

Re: The size of BYD's factory

#182

Post by pixelatedindex »

hackernewds wrote: post #156
toomuchtodo wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With China's real estate sector stagnating (because they've built enough housing for future demand to an excess, broadly speaking), all of that capacity is moving towards clean energy manufacturing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025 https://thediplomat.com/2024/04/how-china-became-the-worlds-...

China scaling and efficiency is really something else. it seems they've latched on to something that works better than even democracy and capitalism

> it seems they've latched on to something that works better than even democracy and capitalism

Wouldn’t this just be plain old fashioned authoritarianism? America can latch on to this too, and we might based on how the Trump admin turns out.

Re: The size of BYD's factory

#183

Post by tomcam »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #120
JKCalhoun wrote: post #79

Wild, fascinating, frightening.

It's great news in the sense that this new energy storage and EV production capacity is (part of) our best chance to avoid catastrophic outcomes from climate change. It's terrifying because we (in the West) can't seem to motivate ourselves to do anything like this on the same timescale, and nations that suffered similar disparities in industrial capacity (not to mention energy production) haven't done well in the pas…

Of course we can motivate ourselves. But they're acting like we did in the 1800s through the mid 1900s. They just build anywhere no matter what. They have no interest in dealing with environmental concerns. The officially released pollution levels in China are mind-boggling and they still do not represent how bad it really is.

You think US manufacturers wouldn't be delighted to just buy a few hundred acres land and start building stuff? They'd do it in a heartbeat. For better and for worse, it is not a level playing field. Conforming to government regulations over here is stifling for a 100-house development in Arkansas, but it's almost impossible in California, Illinois, or New York. Now imagine what it's like to build a huge factory. It is nearly impossible to get permission, and inspections, endangered wildlife concerns, waste removal, etc. handled in under 5-10 years.

Re: The size of BYD's factory

#184

Post by harrall »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #120
JKCalhoun wrote: post #79

Wild, fascinating, frightening.

It's great news in the sense that this new energy storage and EV production capacity is (part of) our best chance to avoid catastrophic outcomes from climate change. It's terrifying because we (in the West) can't seem to motivate ourselves to do anything like this on the same timescale, and nations that suffered similar disparities in industrial capacity (not to mention energy production) haven't done well in the pas…

The bread and butter of progress is competition and I think a lot of American companies “won” like Boeing or Intel in the 90s and no one else could compete.

Unfortunately winning is disastrous because it makes you complacent.

Perhaps the most flagrant and dumbest example is Internet Explorer 6.

I do not approve of raising tariffs on foreign vehicles because it will dull our edge in the long term. Protectionism is a short term bandaid.

Re: The size of BYD's factory

#186

Post by ImaCake »

skybrian wrote: post #179
zokier wrote: post #153

It's 2024, we can do better than blurry horribly blown out pictures these days. Check for example https://mapper.acme.com/?ll=34.39719,113.94792&z=15&t=SL&mar... for cleaner shot of the site (zoom in few notches for extra details). Google Maps annoyingly cuts half-way through the factory site. edit: that ACME mapper image looks to be from mid-2023, in more recent imagery the construction on the east side has been com…

When you zoom out far enough in ACME mapper, the factory disappears. (I'm guessing that's an older image.)

Yep, pretty common for different zoom levels to be different time points. ACME is using plane photography for its high zoom images. You could try zoom.earth for hourly/12hourly satellite imagery.

Re: The size of BYD's factory

#187

Post by seanmcdirmid »

bobthepanda wrote: post #173
hackernewds wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China scaling and efficiency is really something else. it seems they've latched on to something that works better than even democracy and capitalism

They’re certainly good at building. Actually utilizing that capacity is something else entirely; there are factories less than ten years old shuttering due to overcapacity. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/business/china-auto-facto... And the rush to subsidize more capacity is a big contributor to local government debt burdens in China, which is estimated to leave Chinese debt to GDP at 117%.

China’s debt load fluctuates if you consider just the central government, local governments, and SOEs owned by either the central or local governments. Then you have private sector debt. SOEs are where a lot of china’s shadow debt comes from (localities ask SOEs they control to fund public projects of their own books), this is what pushes China’s debt load over 100%.

Re: The size of BYD's factory

#188

Post by throwawaymaths »

richardw wrote: post #155
brcmthrowaway wrote: post #83

Can the west compete?

Any big grouping can compete if there’s enough will. Look at how eg Russia has rejigged much of its war machine during the Ukraine war. Look at how Ukraine has turned themselves inside out to compete. At some level of pressure, countries transform. How much will it take? Is simple economic pressure enough? Can eg Europe gather enough of its massive educated population to transform? In economic competition, as with po…

There is a sense in which China has made a sucker of itself, too. China has some serious internal economic structure issues and it remains to be seen how long those issues and the downstream problems it creates are sustainable.

For an example, remember the amazing speed of construct demonstrated by the Chinese government building covid quarantine facilities? Hundreds of square miles of em across every province. They're all gone now.

Re: The size of BYD's factory

#189

Post by Archelaos »

moffkalast wrote: post #176
Archelaos wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To my knowledge the largest factory in the world is BASF Ludwigshafen (Germany) with 10 km². Here is an aerial photo: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:LudwigshafenBASF2017-0... Followed by Volkswagen Wolfsburg (also Germany) with 6.5 km². Seems the BYD factory is competing with it for rank #2.

I don't think BASF really counts, it's more of a factorio district and not one single insanely large building.

I was refering to the size of the factory premises = land + buildings.

It seems we need diffrent categories for a ranking: premises vs. base area of the buildings vs. floor area of the buildings vs. largest building per base area vs. largest building per floor area, etc. And then we would need to clarify what counts in each case ...

Anyway, I live about 20 km from BASF and it is quite an impressive sight, especially at night. Here is a photo: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Fackelschein_des_Steam... However, the red lights are probably an artefact of the camera; typically the lights looks rather bluesh in reality. And the photo was shot with a 400 mm lens: the television tower in the foreground is more than 4 km away from the factory, the house at the left about 3 km.

Re: The size of BYD's factory

#190

Post by throwawaymaths »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #120
JKCalhoun wrote: post #79

Wild, fascinating, frightening.

It's great news in the sense that this new energy storage and EV production capacity is (part of) our best chance to avoid catastrophic outcomes from climate change. It's terrifying because we (in the West) can't seem to motivate ourselves to do anything like this on the same timescale, and nations that suffered similar disparities in industrial capacity (not to mention energy production) haven't done well in the pas…

> our best chance to avoid catastrophic outcomes from climate change

The US and EU are long off-peak carbon emissions (emissions even decreased during the Trump administration I, even using a trendline ignoring COVID). The biggest emitter right now is China, and it's emissions are growing not shrinking, and a considerable amount of that (including 90% of the worlds new coal plants) goes to projects like this.

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