Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "GAME CHANGING Aussie Gigafactory deploy advanced US battery tech" video.

Sorry if I am going to be a spoiler in this but Viking is playing a hype game. Yes this would be great for Australia IF IT HAPPENS. I am a Melbourne born lad and WOULD LOVE TO SEE this happen. I am also an engineer and I have 30+ years of experience in control systems, automation and robotics. I worked in the manufacturing sector for over a decade including in Melbourne but have spent most of the last 20 years in the mining and resources sector. There are some things to this that have me very concerned especially since the collapse of the Sun Cable project near Darwin. That project had a well credentialled team and backing of 2 billionaires AND IT STILL COLLAPSED. There are some monstrous issues with power generation and distribution around the world AND THERE ARE NO SIMPLE FIXES TO ANY OF IT. So here's my list of things to be cautious about. 1) Why is Viking claiming that NOT using Nickel or Cobalt awesome when Australia produces both? We are the 3rd largest producer of Cobalt, 5th biggest Nickel producer with the 2nd largest reserves of both. So how is NOT using what we have in abundance a good thing? What has Russia or China got to do with any of that? 2) David Collard might be a local Geelong boy who's done very well in New York and made partner at PwC but his degree is in accounting NOT ENGINEERING. There is NOTHING that says he knows anything about manufacturing. I'd expect any body with his sort of background to know there is a huge undersupply for batteries and energy storage. They should also be able to work out there is NOT enough lithium supply to do both the cars and stationary storage. That's NOT and Australian thing that's a world thing. 3) Recharge Industries has NOT PRODUCED ANY BATTERIES ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD. That's one thing Viking has right, they are a start-up. That's not necessarily a bad thing but it is something people should be aware of. 4) Citing Robyn Denholm as an authority on ANYTHING is not wise. Go and look up the Channel "Common Sense Skeptic" here on YouTube. She was sued by the Tesla shareholders over the Solar City fiasco and ended up settling out of court with them. CSS goes through her court testimony and its pretty clear she's nothing but a professional boardroom sitter. She's very good at getting appointed company boards. 5) The Recharge CEO Rob Fitzpatrick also has NO obvious EXPERINCE in manufacturing but sits on or advises many company boards. His LinkedIn page shows 14 in just the last 10 years and he is still on several along with Recharge. I am warry about this with good cause having been burned on a couple of start-ups and watched other engineers get burned on start-ups. I'm NOT saying don't work for these people or get involved. Just realise that even with billionaire backers projects can fail and fail in the blink of an eye. Just look at what happened with Sun Cable.
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@blackknight4996 Collard is promoted as a successful PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) guy. Just today one of their ex-people was caught leaking confidential government information back to PwC. That's before we get to the subject that PwC are one of the worlds "Big 4" auditing firms who OK all the tax avoidance of major corporations around the world. Being successful at PwC might mean anything from shyster to outright thief.
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@sdfswords We actually have a combination of several things including parts of the English caste system. We don't lack entrepreneurship at all. We have all 3 basic types. 1) Scam artists who want to take all your money; and 2) Narcissists who actually have something but still want to take all your money; and 3) The incredibly rare who not only have something BUT WANT to take others along for the ride. Like everywhere else in the world we have too many of the first 2 kinds and very, very few of the 3rd. Australia's biggest issue is the insane concept that economists know what they are talking about. Its NOT a matter of what's the missing magic, but a case of what's the shite in the system. 1 Word -> Economists. We have taken the worst stupidity of the clown brigade out of places like Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge and the LSE. Like in other countries, they have levelled chunks of our industrial base, smashed our energy industries, destroyed our river systems and effectively nuked our housing sector. One of our worst is an Australian born Harvard educated clown who did EXACTLY the same thing to our rivers & water systems as one of his fellow Harvard clowns did to the Texas energy sector. You know the most energy rich state in the world where children freeze to death in their beds because they don't have the energy to warm their home. We also imported a Yale to head the economics department at one of our top Universities. She's an outright sociopath as well as a fraud and liar. How economics is practised and how its taught is going to be one of the biggest shitfights of the next few years and maybe one of the biggest ever.
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Its called BASA - Basic Australian Stupidity and Arrogance. Our business executives are insanely stupid and insanely arrogant. So long as they get their bonuses they don't give a damn about the rest of the country. About 20-30 years ago we used to talk a lot about "value adding" but the execs found it was better to value add in China than here. FYI - I'm a Melbourne boy but did my degree at U. Illinois where one of the real founders of Tesla went and 2 of the 3 YouTube founders went as well as Marc Andreessen who helped create the first proper Web Browser - Netscape. Our current Australian economy is a lot like SoCal where its just easier to value add in Texas or Mexico like the car companies or in China like Apple do. Just like there's a push in America we also need to bring a lot of our manufacturing and supply chains back home. I call COVID "Acid Flu" because it stripped away a lot of economic grime and crap and showed what was underneath. This one looks and sounds good but there's a couple of things to be very cautious about. the biggest issue is NONE of the senior people on this seem to have any experience in manufacturing. I'm an engineer whose worked in manufacturing and that's NOT good. The Cobalt and Nickel Viking raves about is stupid because we are the 3rd biggest supplier of cobalt and 5th biggest in Nickel and have the 2nd largest reserves of both. How can NOT using what we have lots of be good?
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