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 ...
Not seeing it. It’s just a big, wall-mount li-on battery. Um, okay.
OK, this MAY be a slight improvement.
What is the life expectancy of these batteries, Down to 80% capacity?
I assume that they are some sort of lithium chemistry since TESLA just spent billions on a lithium battery plant.
But the lead-acid AGM batteries that I have been using in my solar system for the last six years currently cost about $2200 for me to add 5.376 KWH of capacity.
I’m not seeing anything earth shaking here, since unlike in vehicles, the weight of batteries doesn’t much matter in a solar installation.
I’ll have to do some more research, but I’m not gonna get all excited yet.
Given that the EPA is trying to shut down a third of our electricity base load generating capacity and replace it with unicorn fart powered wind turbines and the power of hope, having something to keep the lights on when the power gets weak is important.
Examples of existing technologies.
http://www.treehugger.com/clean-technology/toshiba-unveils-home-battery-systems-back-power.html
http://www.wholesalesolar.com/backup/4400-watt-home-battery-backup-system.html
While these two systems were developed for solar, they work with the grid also.
This is huge.
The ability to store power at off peak production hours and then use that power during on peak hours can be a huge benefit to our power production systems
Sounds like a lot of money for a mere 10 kw-hrs.
It could dramatically reduce time required to charge an electric car.
Might be useful in Michigan if the energy deregulation law passes. Having a whole house battery backup will come in very handy during the rolling blackouts.
:Fire...remember...Just saying!
Same here. No big deal. How would it deal with a one-week power outage? No, it won't.
I've got a power generator and plenty of gasoline (stored in the tanks of several cars). One time there was a storm here that knocked out power in our neighborhood, and the utility took over a week to restore power. Good luck getting by on battery power. With my generator, I can easily run my fridge, washer and dryer as well as everything else.
I did a little research on this not long ago and it can actually be a real game changer.
It can benefit the power companies as well.
Elon Musk is no fool.
He understands the economics of this venture and is convinced they can produce these batteries at cost that is substantially lower than the current batteries being built.
He, and his engineers, basically redesigned the battery and how it is built.
Do a little digging on his “Giga-Factory” in Nevada.
I think his onto something.
Look at any photo of a Turd World South American city. See the water tanks? Why, you ask does a city with a municipal water system have this? Because they only put pressure on the system one hour a day or so. Ask any one that works with these systems what protects the water from ground water contamination. Pressure. Add to that people actively pumping water out of the system and no wonder you get I’ll drinking their water. Wait until our power systems are energized for a few hours a day.
By the way, one CAN run a generator on firewood. Syngas. Most of the private vehicles in Europe ran on it in WW II.
The coming revolution in energy storage? Or very explosive fires that burn down your house and the neighbors.
For short outages, it could be a good solution for a house to keep some lights on and the fridge cold. I would rather invest in a generator powered by LP or NG to run heat, lights, sump pumps, refrigerators, etc. for a hour or a week, it wouldn’t matter.
Any business with mission crucial equipment already has a UPS system in place tied to a backup generator for longer outages.
I think this is a great idea, whose cost effectiveness will improve over time.
I know a brilliant backwoods engineer who installed his own solar system with a huge rackload of lead-acid batteries so he could run his house off-grid for 3 days. Hardly anyone could do this, due to the custom engineering, the inefficiency of the batteries relative to modern lithium technology, the space required, and the modest life of the car batteries.
Distributed storage combined with increasingly efficient solar could be a real game changer, as it gets around the big problem solar presents of intermittent energy supply (no energy after dark or in very cloudy weather).
I highly doubt that Musk’s system will be economic at first. It will be a green status luxury, like the Tesla cars. But, there’s a chance that if the solar cells become 2X more efficient, and the batteries become more energy dense and longer lived, that this could (didn’t say definitely will) become a very significant initiative.
But as a load reducer for the main utilities, they would would work nicely, picking up the household load in the evening, and recharging in the off hours
It’s for solar-energy-producing homes. The problem is that solar-energy production peaks at noon, but demand peaks at 3PM. That means that utility companies still have to build nuclear power plants, etc., for peak, so the noon-time energy isn’t worth that much to them. For now, homeowners have been trying to sue or legislate the utility companies into buying energy they don’t need.
A “huge, wall-mount li-ion battery” would mean being able to sell your energy at peak demand times, utilities may be willing to spend massive amounts for it. Such a system might pay back users in a matter of just a couple of years.
How can there be an energy shortage? We have all of these hideous wind-turbines everywhere just spinning into the wind. Don’t they make up for all of the pronounced shortages?
Let say it enables you to sell 10 KW-hrs more to the utility per day. At 12 cents/KWH, that’s $1.20, or only about $438/yr. Right?
Wrong. That 12 cents is based on *average* cost of electricity, pro-rated by the utility. The utility’s cost swings wildly through the day. It could be worth 25 cents, or, in California, several times more.
Then, of course, on top of that, you get the value of a backup generator, by giving you the storage capacity to make your solar heating work at night.
And while you’re at it... that puts you completely off the grid, without even having to buy fuel.
If he tries enough big things, with all this hype everything he does gets, eventually something might actually stick.
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