Future of Faraday Future’s Nevada manufacturing plant looking bleak

Faraday Future pro type

“No company has had such an experience, a simultaneous time in ice and fire. We blindly sped ahead, and our cash demand ballooned. We got over-extended in our global strategy. At the same time, our capital and resources were in fact limited.”

— Jia Yueting, head of Faraday Future and other businesses, in memo obtained by Bloomberg News

Gullible Nevada lawmakers in a special session in 2015 on blind faith alone agreed to dole out $215 million in tax abatements and credits to entice Faraday Future to build an electric car factory at Apex in North Las Vegas, though at the time it did not even have a prototype vehicle. The prototype it has since unveiled appears to have only one seat.

The state also promised $120 million in infrastructure that includes water, rail and road improvements that may include widening I-15 and improving the freeway interchange near the Apex industrial park.

Bloomberg reports that Nevada Treasurer Dan Schwartz is still balking at issuing bonds needed to advance the project due to doubts about Jia’s ability to raise funds — doubts expressed by Jia himself — but Schwartz’s office wasn’t available for comment outside of normal business hours.

Bloomberg also said Jia’s memo “singled out the car division for its profligacy, saying it had already spent 10 billion yuan in early development.”

The LA Times reported two weeks ago that Faraday Future hasn’t been paying its bills and still owes on a $75 million performance bond to the state of Nevada.

The newspaper quoted Schwartz as saying, “My questions are all about how they finance this. … I’m afraid it will never be financed and implode in the middle.”

He noted, “The stock is worth [about] half of what he started with.”

 

Killing birds to save birds

We have been warned that we must replace all our carbon spewing fossil fuel power plants with renewable ones to save the planet from bird killing global warming.

That’s why they built the thermal solar power plant in the Mojave near Ivanpah. It’s three 40-story, water-filled towers are the focal point of thousands of mirrors, thus turning the water to steam to generate power in the same way those fossil fuel plants do, but without the carbon spewing.

As reported earlier, those superheated focused sun rays are killing birds by the thousands, and things haven’t changed.

The LA Times reports that the plant is killing 6,000 birds a year and no one has any idea how to mitigate the slaughter.

But that’s OK because it isn’t spewing carbon, right? It turns out as much as 30 percent of the power produced by the plant comes from heating the boilers with natural gas.

Insects and birds being incinerated by focused rays of the sun at Ivanpah power plant. (LA Times photo)

 

 

Never let the facts get in the way of getting the paper out

I’m not sure what the deadline is these days for the Sunday edition of the Las Vegas paper’s opinion section, but the facts in one column were a bit dated.

The paper carried a front page LA Times story about the Oregon campus shooting that reported the gunman killed nine and wounded nine before killing himself. Previous news accounts said he was killed by police but that was updated about 1 p.m. Saturday with a coroner’s report.

On the cover of the Viewpoints section the political columnist reported the gunman killed nine and wounded seven “before being gunned down by police.”

If that isn’t enough, the online version of the column posted just after midnight had a third version, saying the gunman killed 10 and wounded seven without ever saying who killed the gunman — accurate as to the number killed by the gunman.

I think it was Yogi Berra who once bragged that he gave every reporter a different account of events so that each would have an exclusive. Maybe it was in honor to Yogi. That’s the ticket.