“The battery-in-every-home idea—not only do I think it doesn’t make economic sense, I don’t think it’s necessary,” said Brian Warshay, an analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance. “Having a centralized grid is incredibly useful and incredibly efficient.”
The difficulty with our current power infrastructure is that there is no buffering at the consumption side. Because there is no buffering at the consumption side, the overall grid must be able to handle peak demand. That is, we must over-provision. With batteries everywhere, this isn't necessarily the case. In theory, we could all have generators, but we don't because they're noisy, smelly, and a maintenance hassle. But sticking a giant battery on the wall? I can see everyone having one, and big institutions having large arrays of them. I think that has the potential to fundamentally change our power grid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Sta...
Do you have any idea how many Li-Ion batteries would be needed to match the 30 GIGAWATT-hours of storage potential in the Bath County pumped storage plant?
The problem is that California didn't build enough of these 20 years ago. California has a couple of pumped-storage plants coming in... and as soon as they're built then net-metering will be even better for consumers.
In general, centralized storage at the utility-level will benefit from scale. Redox batteries will probably be cheaper and more efficient than Li-Ion batteries that Tesla is putting out.
And Pumped-Hydro is already much much cheaper, and has existed since the 60s.
Tesla's Superfactory could produce that. In about 12,000 years.
Even if the capacity's excessive by a few orders of magnitude, that's a hell of a lot of battery.
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/08/nation-sized-bat...
Assuming 56 kWh Tesla batteries. Half a million battery packs is 28 GWh of total storage capacity. That's the energy equivalent of 16,000 barrels of oil. Assuming a modest 30% Carnot thermal generation efficiency, you'd need 55,000 bbl of oil to actually generate that electricity.
Yeah, batteries are a hard sell.
If each battery is 2m x 3m or 6m in area, the Nation Sized Tesla Battery would cover 36,000 km^2, or an area 190 km on a side. Maybe we'll stack them.
(The actual measurements are smaller, around 1.5 x 2.5 m or so, so that's an overstatement.)
A buddy of mine working at ORNL claims there's interesting stuff on the storage front that's competitive with pumped storage, but can't say just what yet. I'm highly curious myself.
Maybe you could store enough energy to run your datacenter overnight. I'm speculating, but powering a chip fab or even a machine shop on batteries seems infeasible.
But, I agree that there is a major imbalance and generation/storage on the consumption side would help correct that. Reduced need for peak generation --> greater net efficiency.
The real market potential for batteries is not in those parts of the West where there is cheap, reliable mains. It's those places where the grid is unreliable enough that people with money would buy generators, or places where the grid is a tiny island (Hawaii, Orkney).
High-rise office and apartment buildings probably don't have space to store all those batteries. If you have a suburban home with a garage you can hang a battery on the garage wall, but if you live in a 20-story apartment building, where would you put it? I doubt that fire codes would allow putting huge lithium batteries inside every apartment. A large fraction of the U.S. population lives in this kind of densely-packed urban environment.
Moreover, any modern invention could be dismissed as toy/limited use for rich. E.g. Computers, mobile phones, cars... Next generation should be even more competitive.
Of course, the week+ outage is usually due to ungodly amounts of snow... sooooo solar may not be your friend then...
Flywheel Disel Engines for example will automatically turn on when the power goes out... using a Flywheel to regulate the power the moment energy goes out... while simultaneously being the automatic-startup mechanism for the generator.
It's not like a flywheel + generator is very expensive. There's still a lot of innovation possible in the generator space.
Natural gas generators could be a good option, but only in areas that have natural gas lines already which rules out a lot of rural areas where generators are probably going to be more important anyway.
927 kwh / month off grid solar system : http://www.wholesalesolar.com/solarpowersystems/large-home-7...
Cost : $20,172
Two of Elon's batteries: $7k
Total cost = $27,172
How the hell did they get $98k?
I think they intentionally tried to make that number look ridiculous. I wonder if this is more of ALEC's anti-solar bullshit.
Furthermore, the 10kWh Powerwall is not for solar or other daily applications; it's for backup.[1] A PV system needs to use the 7kWh batteries, thus requiring 9 for this system. That is $27,000 in batteries.
Now, on to the panels. The sizing of the system you posted indicates it assumes 5 Sun hours per day. Most of the US gets less than that; from the map on the site it looks like 4.3 is a good average for the US. Next, as the site clearly says when you run their off-grid calculator, you need to discount the Sun hours if you plan on using the system in the winter; they recommend knocking 1.5 off your yearly average. That drops most of the US to 2.8. That means the median house would need twice the number of solar panels in that set to cover all times of year.
Combined with the actual cost of Powerwall batteries, we are at $67,344. If you want to use the Pacific Northwest as your baseline (which someone opposed to solar would try to do) you approach the $98,000 for an off-grid system.
Oh look. It's $8k. So the total price is $28k.
62 kwh is over two full day's worth of electricity usage for the average US home. I actually think that's probably quite a bit more than you need. Two of Elon's batteries is 20kwh, which is about 2/3 of an average day's usage - enough to last most people the night, right?
>Now, on to the panels. The sizing of the system you posted indicates it assumes 5 Sun hours per day. Most of the US gets less than that
$98k was in California right? According to this, Los Angeles gets 5.62. Manhattan gets 4.57.
http://www.bigfrogmountain.com/SunHoursPerDay.html
>it looks like 4.3 is a good average for the US
Why not pick 3.9 and assume that everybody gets as much as Fairbanks, Alaska?
[0] http://energy.gov/savings/residential-renewable-energy-tax-c...
Next - If I have a $500K+ house (modest, by Northern California standards), and for $10K I could get this sleek, hi technology, 10 year warranty battery that lets me more efficiently leverage my solar panels, plus potentially giving me some insurance against a grid outage? Hell, I'm first in line.
Now, does the Tesla Battery make sense, for 100% of the US Population, today? Of course not - but I don't think anyone has suggested that.
But this is where we start, and we improve from here.
Net-Metering from those who can afford rooftop panels can then store the energy centrally, and then offset the costs for the non-solar users in the rest of the neighborhood.
Which is true in some countries.
Once again a news outlet (deliberately) fails to see the long-term strategy for the sake of a click-baity nay-saying headline. Just like the Tesla vehicle itself, which is still outside the reach of 99% of Americans, the point is to aim for the luxury market first and through scale and process optimization gradually lower the price so that it is within the reach of most Americans.
The luxury market is why Tesla is now able to develop a mass market vehicle, why solar panels are reaching an inflection point where in many parts of the world it will no longer make financial sense not to have them, and why home batteries will eventually be in the reach of everybody.
You can buy batteries for your home, today, at a retail price half that of the Powerwall. With equal or greater energy storage, power output, and lifetime. There's no need to wait for Li-ion to become "within reach". It's a needlessly expensive technology and product attempting to displace cheaper, more capable solutions that have been available for years.
Their marketing sure is clever, though; they're already the only battery system that 98% of Americans have ever heard of! This is going to be a fascinating B-school case study in a year or two. It's one thing for Apple to convince people to pay a huge premium for its design, another entirely to convince people to pay twice as much for a noninteractive energy-storage device that sits in a basement or closet. I'm in awe. Luxury product indeed.
No kidding this isn't (currently) attractive for North American homes. If I recall correctly, they basically said that in the press conference, though I can't find the link now. They were expecting it to be more useful in places with lots of solar and dodgy electric grids, such as Australia.
Bloomberg also goes on and on about utility scale storage. They apparently didn't read the press kit, where Tesla talked about how they're doing just that.
Press Kit - http://www.teslamotors.com/presskit
It IS intentional. Pretty much everything said (and NOT said) on MSM is intentional.
That being said, electric companies aren't stupid. If / when solar power and batteries become ridiculously cheap, they will just switch over to solar and batteries.
Residential off-the-grid solar power will make sense in two markets: - Highly rural areas where it's very expensive to maintain power lines. - "Be prepared" cultures like Utah where people take pride in preparing themselves for Armageddon.
[1] http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/1.2-Trillion-Met...
There are many many people who spend money right now on generators as emergency power sources.
My parents are a great example of a perfect use case for this product. They live in the country, and have 5-6 significant power outages a year, usually in winter. They need a way to automatically deliver power to critical house systems: furnace, well pump, fridge, freezer. Right now they use a large portable generator, but that requires maintenance and a manual engagement. You also cannot leave it unattended for long periods of time. That basically ties them to their house in the winter months, making vacations difficult.
Lots of other markets for this type of thing too. If you have a horse or hobby farm, one of these things keeps the heat on in the barn when the power goes out.
It's a little different with batteries because they don't improve at the same rate tech products do, but they still improve and I think once Tesla gets a couple of those Gigafactories going the batteries will become more appealing to a wider range of customers.
It's also the same with electric cars - 95% of the people still don't want one, even if they had the money for it, because they don't want the range anxiety. Also aren't solar panels still more expensive than buying coal-produced electricity? Or it least it was in the past few years, yet people still installed solar panels.
The bottom line is Tesla only needs some "early adopter" customers to hold it over until the product is cheap/good enough for the mainstream market. And by the looks of it, whether it's in electric cars, solar panels or batteries, that seems to have worked pretty well.
How many people out there want to be an early adopter of a Lennox Air Conditioning unit? Or of a New, more efficient furnace? Or more efficient windows?
The fact remains: the Tesla Powerwall is a "home appliance". The process for buying a new home appliance is the same as any other. You run the calculations, you determine if the appliance saves you money in the long term, and if it does... you go for it.
that seems like it can't possibly be true.
I remember what I thought: How stupid someone could be. It does not make financial sense at all when it was so expensive.
Turn out I was the stupid one. This man created a company doing exactly what he had done in his house but for others and made a ton of money.
In some way he paid a cost for living in the future, and he understood the practical shortcomings and advantages of the new technology much better than anyone else, which made him succeed when others failed.
I don't think the Tesla batteries are a good way to lower your home energy costs, but I don't think I would factor in net metering as a reason why, at least not looking 5-10 years out.
This article makes a big point that in the residential/solar panel market the battery is marginal at the moment in most of the US where grid electricity is cheap. Ok, but so what?
1. No kids would be born. They do not make financial sense at all.
2. We all would be living in some nasty environment. Caring for the environment doesn't make much sense for companies.
3. Caring weak, vulnerable people doesn't make any financial sense at all.
