Posted on 05/01/2015 11:11:05 AM PDT by Brad from Tennessee
Late Thursday, the glitzy electric car company Tesla Motors, run by billionaire Elon Musk, ceased to be just a car company. As was widely expected, Tesla announced that it is offering a home battery product, which people can use to store energy from their solar panels or to backstop their homes against blackouts, and also larger scale versions that could perform similar roles for companies or even parts of the grid.
For homeowners, the Tesla Powerwall will have a power capacity of either 10 kilowatt hours or 7 kilowatt hours, at a cost of either $ 3,500 or $ 3,000. The company says these are the costs for suppliers and don’t include the cost of installation and a power inverter, so customers could pay considerably more than that.
The battery, says Tesla, “increases the capacity for a household’s solar consumption, while also offering backup functionality during grid outages.” At the same time, the company said it will producing larger batteries for businesses and utility companies — listing projects with Texas-based Oncor and Southern California Edison. . .
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
“I forgot about that, once this type of storage becomes normal, then blackouts and peak prices will become out of date for the consumer, with the added benefit of back up power.”
But if everyone is charging their batteries at night, wouldn’t that become the “new” peak hours?
Thank You Pelham! This was this jist of my earlier post #9
The solution is relatively simple. They should use Lithium Iron (LiFePO4) batteries. They are much more stable, less prone to thermal runaway. They do weigh a little more than LiIon or LiPO batteries but are still lighter than NiCd, Nimh, or Lead acid batteries.
'Safer packaging' isn't going to help much, because something that will actually contain a lithium fire is going to add so much to the bulk and weight of the package so as to eliminate the weight and size advantages that LiIon and LiPO give.
Not even close.
Charging batteries isn’t going to equal the peak hours of manufacturing, offices, homes, and businesses, and 100+ degree days.
Similar ideas might be a little hydro power generator one could install in water pipes....water flows and store the resultant energy in the batteries. Not much energy but a gooo gimmick.
Yeah, I wouldn’t want a bank of lithium batteries inside my house unless they are built in such a fashion that they cannot catch fire. And at this point I don’t know if that it is possible.
The two Teslas that caught fire did so when stray road metal pierced the battery and shorted it. I could see some unattended young kid playing carpenter and managing to drive a nail into the family’s home lithium battery pack. Or me drilling a hole and not checking to see where the bit would end up....
“Keep with the auto, Tesla. You gotta a good thing going there in my opinion.”
Tesla’s business model is built on selling “green credits” to other companies. The cars cost a lot more than what they are selling for. Tesla makes its profit on the credits. So if the US government ends the green credit game the car part of Tesla will cease production.
If that were to become the case, the power company would address the problem by adjusting the differential between the day and night rates. That, of course, would affect the homeowner's payback calculation. The homeowner would have to ask why he has the battery? To save on electric rates? To act as a power-outage backup? Or to store the output of his humongous solar array (a separate economic question) for when he actually needs the energy?
There is economic value to load-leveling. It costs real money for the power company to fire up the gas turbines when the load rises. But is it better to let the power company load-level, possibly using the industrial version of Tesla's battery? Or is it better to incent the consumer to do it via different peak and off-peak rates? I suspect it's more efficient to leave it to the power company. They know when the peaks occur and how much they cost. The rate differential can supply the investment in storage technology.
Good find. I didn’t know the actual numbers, just the outline.
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