While that' one way you can look at it, another is that hopefully this region should now be less prone to power outage related downtimes. I wonder if they are an issue currently though.
If you don't want experiments going on around your servers you better host them in your own data center. Amazon is guaranteed to be running many experiments in all of their data centers (and not just with power, with the actual server hardware!).
I'm intrigued at the backup possibilities, because we live in a forested area of the northeast where outages are common during storms. But at 3Kw a single unit isn't large enough to power our entire home, and I didn't see a figure for how long it can operate at peak load. If I need two then we're getting closer to the cost of a natural gas fired generator. This analysis, of course, is completely ignoring the environmental benefits.
I was thinking the same as I watched it. I was wondering if there were some technical issues to explain the slow start of his speaking part and if he might have been frazzled from whatever happened behind the scenes.
He was the same at the Dragon 2 launch. I get the impression that he doesn't rehearse for these events much, probably because he's probably got much more important things to work on.
One of the best orators I've ever heard was a CFO / COO of a company I've worked for. I was in awe of how great his delivery was, how he had great comedic timing, and how empathic he seemed to be with his audience.
Turns out, from people who worked with him, he was a complete imbecile, and completely incapable of getting anything done.
I'll take the substance over the sizzle any day of the week.
He's not the smoothest or most polished by any means. But he grabbed my attention and kept it from the first moment, because it's sincere and informative. I didn't feel like I was an anonymous member of an audience in front of a multi-billionaire. I felt like I was at a small gathering of nerds where one of them was enthusiastically telling me about his latest cool project.
Apple is often considered to set the standard for these sorts of events. I've been watching Apple's announcements since long before they were cool again, and I enjoy them a great deal. But I'll take Musk's halting sincerity over Steve Jobs or Tim Cook's empty polish any day of the week.
According to http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=97&t=3 the average U.S. home uses 10,908 kWh/year, so this would be enough to keep the home running at full load for about 8.4 hours. Not bad.
If you took steps to reduce consumption (avoiding using heavy demand appliances like electric ovens, etc.) it would last a lot longer. With a little care, you could probably run for a couple of days on one of these, particularly if you had LED lights, etc.
Due to the fairly low peak power draw the battery supports (3 kW) you would have to avoid using those heavy appliances anyway, especially simultaneously.
It would be interesting to see what is the daylight vs. nighttime usage. And if you can daisy chain these batteries. Seems like a few would be needed to ensure for high usage days if you wanted to be largely self-sufficient.
Tesla doesn't own most of the patents related to the Gigafactory. They're licensing the battery technology and manufacturing techniques from Panasonic.
A lot of the stuff Tesla is saying about this is quite weird. (In the press kit and in Musk's live stream.) For example, the first sentence of the press kit:
> The world currently consumes 20 trillion kWh of energy annually. Enough energy to [...] supply energy to a nuclear power plant for 2,300 years.
Am I missing something, or is that an entirely bizarre comparison to make? What does this even mean?
> Batteries are not a source of energy. They store energy. (You'd be surprised at how many people don't grasp that.) Talking about how many batteries we need to power the world without talking about where that energy is coming from is silly.
I'm not sure why you got such a weird impression. In his talk he clearly states that the power would be coming from solar energy. He even explained how much space you'd need for solar arrays and batteries if you want to provide the entire United States with power day and night (the biggest need for batteries).
He also mentioned there is utility for the battery to be used with your powergrid but the big win is using it with solar energy.
$3,500. That's crazy good for your average household, on par with natural gas backup generators with half the logistics. I might just be ordering sooner rather than later given some of the grid instabilities in my area over the past year, and through the mid-term in preparation for a solar switch here in Chicago.
While Elon might not be the best orator, you can easily derive his authenticity and belief in the product by virtue of his delivery. You can't do that with accuracy in the canned and carefully rehearsed.
Playing the margins in my home would probably save $25/mo against a $100/mo charge, I'm spitballing.
Our local utility here in Chicago, ComEd, is starting to roll out to the population what flux in energy usage actually means on a granular basis (hourly, daily, monthly, seasonally) while offering incentives to change their consumption patterns.
I too have ComED (Schaumburg). From midnight to 5am daily, I can get power for 1 cent/kwh. If I were to shift all of my consumption to that time period, its effectively free.
I've been on ComEd RRTP for 6 years now and I've been wanting a nicer way to shift load or arbitrage price drops.
The Telsa device, as others have mentioned, seems like a rebranded solar storage device. I suppose the intelligence would be in the inverter/grid cutout mechanism anyway.
This system would run my home for about 8 hours in the winter and 4 in the summer before emptying, so I would need a lot more smarts in the box to try and anticipate price spikes without running out.
> This system would run my home for about 8 hours in the winter and 4 in the summer before emptying, so I would need a lot more smarts in the box to try and anticipate price spikes without running out.
Most new grid-tie inverters can be controlled from a computer either over IP or a serial interface; you could fairly trivially control the flow of power by polling your electric provider's website (I scrape the RRTP API for current and future pricing data every 60 seconds) and commanding your inverter based on that.
I don't have a lot of experience with those inverters. How many cycles do you drop when switching over?
My first idea was to create a system that watched the immediate price as well as the day ahead AND the weather forecast to try and predict the best time to stay off the grid, but that's a little too ambitious.
My current idea is to grab my 5-minute history over the last year or two and model it against a simple buy-low-sell-high threshold. It should at least tell me how much the system would save each month.
(BTW about your earlier post, even if supply is 1c/kWh, there's still the delivery charge and taxes. I think supply needs to drop to something like -3.5c/kWh before the juice is "free". It's happened only once or twice in my history with the system.).
$3500 doesn't include the inverter or transfer switch. Transfer switch is maybe $200, and it's not clear what the inverter might cost. It's a nontrivial part, since it would be responsible for daily cycle estimation and cost optimization.
For $3300 you can get a 17 kW generator with inverter and transfer switch [0], which will run for days on a house-sized propane tank. At my house in the woods, we do sometimes get multi-day power outages after storms. Though, to be fair, you need a concrete pad and 30 square feet to install the generator.
It doesn't seem like a competitive backup system, but load shifting is still appealing.
Some people (like me) are simply unwilling to keep using carbon-based sources of energy. At some point it just feels awful to be contributing to such a terrible problem. I'm counting the days till I can sell my worn out petrol car and get an electric car. If I had a home and dollars, I'd want one of these batteries.
Yes the real breakthrough tech needed is a new battery! Which hopefully Tesla is on track to develop,because as is, electric cars are just not scalable.
People say that, but from what I've heard there is plenty of lithium in the world to increase use 20% every year for 30 years before we need to get more creative in how we mine it. That's a huge total increase and means that electric cars totally are scalable.
Do you have information supporting the idea that electric cars aren't scalable? My understanding is that they definitely are scalable.
Charging is where the scaling problems come in. If everybody in your neighborhood plugs in their Tesla at their home at night and/or at their office during the day, it will likely cause brownouts and blackouts in areas with grid service that's already marginal for current demand. Hence Musks's interest in load-shifting technology.
Utilities have existing techniques for distributing that load. They already work with smelters and other large power users to coordinate their power demands.
In some places utilities are offering discounted electricity prices if the car charging infrastructure is hooked up to their smart metering/control system. This allows the company to signal when cars should start/stop charging.
There's no reason they can't work with car makers to introduce two way signalling between the charging infrastructure and the grid - the car can tell the grid that it needs to use X kW by Y time, and the grid can communicate the current permitted load.
Potentially with some option for the customer to pay a premium to charge immediately at a higher rate.
You're assuming a world where 80% of the people already have an EV. You don't think most of those people will also have solar panels and battery backups at home (from which to charge the car at night).
it isn't so much how many people charging, its the ability of people to charge where they live and the lack of ability to truly quick charge the battery.
As in, damn the kids left the car unplugged and I have to work. even thirty minutes at a super charger is not a good solution.
So it comes down to a compromise, a good range extender technology and batteries for the majority of driving. That until truly faster charging can be achieved with house hold wiring.
> As in, damn the kids left the car unplugged and I have to work. even thirty minutes at a super charger is not a good solution.
I don't see this as something to worry about - it's just a household habit problem. Pretty much every new device introduces some, and people quickly adapt to use the device properly.
The argument is silly. The kids could also forget (or just not bother) to put gas in the car and leave it on empty. Yet strangely we manage to make do with gas-powered cars.
There is definitely enough lithium in the world to increase the production of lithium-ion EVs. From how I understand it it though, it is unlikely that lithium-ion EV could replace every car currently running in the world.
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2010/ph240/eason2/
Whether or not batteries are "clean" seems to be a matter of opinion. My understanding is that lithium mines aren't inherently unclean, but many current lithium mines are unclean. The idea is that it is good to support bad tech, since public pressure could ensure it is clean. That's unlike fossil fuels, which can never be clean. All that is just hearsay though, I can't confirm its accuracy.
Still, some might say that carbon pollution and groundwater pollution are different problems. One may decide the trade off between one and the other is worthwhile.
I feel like a backup generator is the last place where I would make my decisions based on the environment. I mean how long is it actually going to be active? Also batteries aren't exactly environment friendly either.
That may well be how you feel, but lately I feel like any burning of petrol is just disgusting (though I still do it as I cannot afford alternatives at the moment). I want to completely divest from fossil fuels, even for intermittent use. That's as much for the social value of saying "yeah I don't use fossil fuels and it's great" as it is for the environmental impact. I want to try all this tech to be an early adopter and help people prove it out to the rest of the world.
You might want to reevaluate any moral position you have where a significant basis of your values is the ability to brag about them. I would be fairly disgusted if someone said a significant amount of the reason they're so devout in their religion was so they could boast about it with their peers.
I didn't read the GP comment as "bragging" so much as wanting to be an existence proof that it's possible to live a modern life without (directly) burning any dinosaurs.
> that may well be how you feel, but lately I feel like any burning of petrol is just disgusting (though I still do it as I cannot afford alternatives at the moment).
LOL. that's some serious self-delusion. some of the best i've ever seen in the wild.
the alternative to fossil fuels is free -- just don't use them. your feet are free. bikes are almost free and subsidized in many cities.
the reason you use it is not because you "can't afford the alternative" but because you find the convenience and utility quite high, i.e. WORTH THE COST, compared to walking your ass around town and going cold in the winter, just like everyone else.
fundamentally this is a problem of economics, not of really really really wanting to do the right thing.
How do you think every data center in the world is backed up for power? Diesel generators. You'd have to quit using the internet until a different power backup method is adopted.
Fumes from backup generators are problematic without the environmental considerations: they're seldom-run and often minimally maintained, and there are exhaust-gas fatalities most winters.
That's crazy cheap. The closest competitor which comes into my mind is probably SMA Sunny Boy Smart inverter with lithium battery, costing more than double while offering only 2 kWh of energy (but includes a solar inverter).
It's not crazy cheap at all. The incumbent technology here is flooded lead-acid, a proven solution used everywhere from telco COs to forklifts to off-grid cabins for over a century. Industrial FLA batteries (the top grade, longest-lasting, etc.) retail for somewhere around $250 per kWh, and typically have warranties ranging from 7 to 10 years. We don't know exactly what the differences are between Tesla's two offerings, but even if we assume that the 10 kWh model is rated for continuous deep cycling for 10 years (their language suggests it may not be), we would still have to justify the $350 per kWh price tag. The other model comes in at $428. So this is somewhere around 50% more costly than existing solutions with a similar expected life span. The limitation of 2 kW continuous power is also a major drawback relative to FLA solutions, which can typically provide at least 200 A (around 10 kW at 48V, much more at the higher voltages the Tesla unit operates at). Since the Li-ion battery is maintenance-free, a better comparison might be AGM or other VRLA technologies, which are slightly more expensive than FLA, but still less expensive than the Tesla units.
Since no inverter, grid-tie transfer relay, or charge controllers are included in this unit, those will all be additional costs just as they would with any other batteries. And it appears you will be limited to a few inverters and probably a micro-inverter PV design; this is purely a grid-tie-only design. Existing battery technologies can do all of that, but they also give you much broader flexibility for other applications and system designs.
I'm not sure why I would want this. I'd be paying above the odds for some serious design constraints and limitations I wouldn't otherwise have. Tesla seem to be taking a very different approach from their launch of the Roadster, which was a super-premium offering at a super-premium price. This is a modest offering at a premium price in relative terms, but low enough in absolute terms to appeal to people who aren't well-versed in the field. Their success will probably depend on installers deciding it's easier to just take people's money and sell them the Tesla than to educate their customers and give them the best value available. Not a bad gamble, for Tesla.
I meant "crazy cheap" as lithium-based product, i.e. compared to other lithium chemistry storages. Sure, lead-acid technology still offers better capacity/price ratio, but lithium chemistry has many advantages especially when used as domestic energy buffer for sun: longer lifespan (more cycles) in daily use, more peak power, wall mountable / lighter, etc.
I don't think most households (in the US at least) could run off a single unit. You would need three units, and they would only give you 1 days capacity, compared to a natural gas generator which could keep running indefinitely.
I have four rack-mount uninterruptible power supplies that provide battery backup to my workstations and servers in my house. My curiosity here is whether this Tesla battery pack will obviate those UPSs, providing automatic and immediate in-line switching to battery whenever there is an interruption.
That alone would be compelling at this price.
Edit: Incidentally, when I submit the reservation form, there is no confirmation.
That would be determined by the inverter, not the batteries. And yes, almost all grid-tie inverters will serve your load with a switching time fast enough that computer equipment would continue running.
But they could now, and most deep cycle lead acid batteries are flooded, not sealed, which means they have to be ventilated to prevent hydrogen explosions hazards. Not so with Tesla's offering.
My point is that Tesla isn't really doing anything really unique here. Sure, they're giving it more press than anyone really has before, but the products aren't especially cheap, innovative or special.
> Sure, they're giving it more press than anyone really has before
Ahh! But that's the most important part! Elon's portfolio companies are a pieces of an incredible future machine, all working together. Solar City is able to draw on Tesla's batteries, Tesla was able to draw on SpaceX for some of its engineering capabilities.
Tesla made electric cars sexy. Now, its making energy storage sexy. Clearly, marketing is important, and will be necessary for convincing the world a clean energy future is the right direction.
What about the power wall for utilities. I haven't heard of any other similar offerings. That seems even more important than the home based ones. Plus open sourcing designs to the gigafactory. Hey Branson want to step up and build one on your side of the pond?
only 2kW? 2kW is enough to power any residential, single-family house for 95-98% of the time; you only need (a little bit) more than that at very short (few minutes) peak intervals - when heating up an oven, or some cycles of doing laundry. A second unit would provide that headroom, and otherwise (when the extra $5k for a second unit is prohibitive) you could still draw from the grid for peak loads and just not run an oven and washing machine at the same time during grid blackouts.
It does require a 21st century house - led lighting (but it's 2015 - who still uses incandescent except for those places where you don't turn on the lights more than 4 times a year anyway?), energy-conscious appliances, moderate need for A/C (sane insulation and ventilation, localized and intelligently controlled A/C needs - i.e. no 'bring all room in my 3000 square feet sheet rock and tin roof house down to 75 degrees when it's 110 degrees outside'). But whoever doesn't have that, has options to start reducing their bills that are much better than buying energy packs.
LED's are available in various color temperatures, including 2700K (commonly referred to as 'warm white' which is basically the temperature of incandescent). It's true that the dollar-bin Chinese LED's have all sorts of bad characteristics that used to be associated with all things LED - pale color, bad spread, bad (or no) dimming capabilities, etc.
It's 2015 though - take a 20$ Philips Master LED for example (I decided upon those for myself so I looked into them more heavily; I have about 20 in use now, with another few boxes in my basement awaiting installation). The GU10 socket halogen-replacement version is available in 3 temperatures and 3 spread bundles, has a 20k burn hour rating (vs 1-2k for incandescent!) and can be dimmed very well using a 50$ leading edge electronic dimmer.
I'm no tree hugger - even purely economical (apart from the convenience of not having to replace lamps every year), in 2015 it doesn't make any economic sense to buy incandescent (in those places where it's possible to buy them at all...) for all purposes where the light is used on a 'regular' basis (more than an hour a day or so).
Of course it does require an initial 'investment'. But one that would be spread over 1 or 2 years - the normal replacement cycle of incandescent bulbs. Throwing out working incandescent bulbs to replace them with LED is not rational either, of course.
Color temperature is nowhere near everything. Or rather, it would be, were LEDs actually anywhere near a blackbody in terms of radiation output over the visible spectrum. But they aren't. Nowhere near.
There is no every-day use case where the difference in light perception from an incandescent bulb is different, or even distinguishable without measurement, from an LED bulb. Feel free to try it yourself in a light studio, or otherwise, please cite any studies with modern lamps that conclude that the 'light quality' (by whatever metric) of an incandescent bulb is higher (that is, 'higher' as in 'makes a material difference for normal use cases', not 'in the lab using our spectrometer we measured a difference').
As always, there are people (analogous to 'vinyl produce a richer sound' idiots) who have 'opinions' on light quality, but well, we all know what they say about 'opinions'. In 2015, it's plain nonsense to take 'light quality' as a reason not to use LED light for domestic purposes, full stop.
The subjective experience of a home lit with incandescents is very different than one lit with LEDs. I don't care if the color temperature is the same. Things just look different. The bulbs cast their light differently.
There may not be a difference in "light quality", photons are photons, but if you convert a home from one to the other things will look different, and you may prefer one way or the other.
And don't forget about fixtures that were designed to work with clear incandescent bulbs for aesthetic reasons. LED bulbs will look downright hideous in those even when the lights are off.
There are people who like how vinyl sounds better because they like the hiss and the pops, not because they fall for audiophile silliness. The same holds for lighting.
Yes, but being unwilling to spend 1 day adjusting to a different look is a pretty silly reason to continue to run a bunch of spaceheaters in your house that, as a byproduct, happen to produce some light.
In my experience, while it's true its hard to find the right LEDs, it's certainly not impossible. Try some out - you might be surprised. The biggest challenge is that most of what's sold as "warm white" is nothing of the sort, and you might not be able to pick the cheapest LEDs if you're picky about the colour.
There are LED bulbs with very high CRI scores now. Before those existed it did indeed make sense not to switch to CFL or LED. (Though halogen/xenon make more sense than pure incandescent.)
I thought so too until I discovered the Philips Corepro bulbs. I replaced every single bulb in my house with them last year. They're a massive improvement on the CFLs we had before. The only thing that took some getting used to was the lack of light shining upwards - ie illuminating the ceilings.
(I know this reads like a sales pitch but I am genuinely just a fan)
I don't like the "warm" light from LEDs, either, which is 2700-3000K. However, now I use 4500K "natural/neutral light" LEDs. I can't describe how much nicer it is than incandescent light.
It's "sunny middle of the day" light. It's brilliant and I love it. I could never use anything else now. Just make sure it's 4500k.
> only 2kW? 2kW is enough to power any residential, single-family house for 95-98% of the time
You obviously don't live where it's hot. I live in Houston, TX and while I rarely run the A/C right now, in another month it's going to run on average 15 minutes per hour, every hour, for 3-4 months straight. Highs in the low 90s to high 100s and lows in the 80s (F).
I have 2.5 tons of A/C which is pretty moderate. The condenser draws something like 3kW with an 8kW surge and the furnace fan is another 500 watts. I live in a fairly modest house compared to a lot of people, I'm sure there are places that 5 tons is more common.
In California where humidity isn't really a problem and it tends to cool off more at night and there's nearly always great solar, this seems like a great solution. But don't forget that not everywhere in the world is the target market. There are some places that are very different in terms of electrical consumption.
I guess that my phrasing of "any residential house" is a bit unfortunate, and that 'the majority of all residential houses' would have been better, but that doesn't take away from the fact that with one extra of these units + 10k Wp of solar panels, you could power your AC's with power to spare to be stored in the battery pack, which you can then use to power the AC at night. Many people use AC's as a counterpoint to 2kW battery packs, whereas actually it's one of the more appropriate cases to use solar panels combined with (relatively) cheap local storage for nighttime consumption!
How much is your power bill in summer? Must be $300+, going on 500 during the hottest months? At that rate, you'll make back the $20k + $10k that 10k Wp + 2 of these batteries would cost you in what, 5 to 7 years? Add financing costs and you'll be at breakeven in 10 years, not counting possible government grants.
> How much is your power bill in summer? Must be $300+, going on 500 during the hottest months? At that rate, you'll make back the $20k + $10k that 10k Wp + 2 of these batteries would cost you in what, 5 to 7 years?
No, here in Houston we've got "deregulated" power in a completely reasonable way. One company owns the lines and handles recording the meters. They charge about $0.015/kWh for this. Then there are about 100 companies that offer electricity in a multitude of different ways. I'm paying $0.08/kWh delivered to my "door" so my worst months are only $150 or so.
Your idea is a nice one, except that I would need more panels and at least 2x the batteries/inverters. If I need 3kW CONSTANT to run the AC then 3kW PEAK doesn't do me any good.
> but that doesn't take away from the fact that with one extra of these units + 10k Wp of solar panels, you could power your AC's with power to spare to be stored in the battery pack
Not really. Look I know Tesla is awesome, and solar is awesome. I'm interested in both. But the economics really aren't here yet in Houston because of how cheap power is, because there's not a state owned utility screwing us bigtime. Houston has a lot of problems to be sure but power prices aren't one of them.
It's a really strange paradox that, in places where it gets very hot during the day, we're drawing tons and tons of energy from the grid to cool the house precisely at the time of the day when even more energy is pouring down on us freely from the skies.
Seriously, A/C is basically Universe's most heavy-handed hint that we should use more solar.
Open sourcing the patents to build fully solar-powered electrical grids around the will be a paradigm shift in the power structures of the world. I expect from today onward there will be a full-scale attack from those who stand to lose because of the reduced dependency on oil.
As someone who avoided the startuposphere so that I could focus on climate change activism and pricing carbon, seeing Elon Musk implore the world to avoid winning a Darwin Award was so incredibly rewarding and validating.
He will most certainly be fought tooth and nail, but he has allies.
> I expect from today onward there will be a full-scale attack from those who stand to lose because of the reduced dependency on oil.
Maybe. But remember we don't have the technology yet to completely move away from fossil fuels. The biggest issue I know of is making Airplanes electric which so far has not proven really feasible (as far as I can find anyway). This solves a huge chunk of issues but there are still plenty more before we can claim we have the technology to completely transition.
Elon has been working on an VTOL electric jet. He references his desire to fully develop it often. Obviously, he is extremely busy, but he says he will try and work on it at some point.
Zepplins can be run with very minimal environmental cost. They are slower, though.
Airplanes are extremely energy-hungry and carbon-intensive. Just one intercontinental round trip can put as much carbon per person into the air as a half a year of driving, assuming you have a new-ish car. And yes, this is after dividing the total emissions by the number of passengers.
An intercontinental round trip is in the range of 10-15k miles, right? That's a plausible mileage for 6 months of driving, sure. Would match up with my understanding that fuel use for planes per passenger-mile is about the same as for cars with just a driver.
The big difference, of course, it that it takes a lot less time to travel that many miles in a plane. But on a per-passenger-mile basis they're no worse than non-carpooling cars. Admittedly a low bar.
As I recall, Musk says that if you can double current energy densities, electric airliners become feasible. That could happen in some decades.
If that doesn't happen (or if he's underestimating what it takes), then I figure the solution for air travel will be synthetic fuels. Synthetic fuels are not very good right now simply because it takes a lot of energy to make them, but if energy is cheap and abundant because, say, the world is covered in solar panels, it's less of a problem.
1. As already posted, no, coal does not produce most of the electric power. It does dominate other sources though. The problem with your rejoinder is it assumes the past, not the future generation fleet. Musk's goal is to enable renewable generation, eliminating coal.
2. There are no particularly toxic materials in the batteries. Landfills accept discarded lithium batteries as regular waste. While lithium is not currently economical to recycle, by the time the industry is as large as the lead-acid battery market (a very toxic product chain) it will be just as easy to recycle lithium.
3. What toxic materials are you referring to? I'm not aware of anything that stands out, especially compared to coal mining, or tar sands production, etc. Lithium mining in particular is a very similar process to the one that produces table salt from salt flats. The biggest problem is the use of water in areas that are very water-poor, ie the Atacama desert.
4. Silicon is non-toxic and inert. There are some hazards associated with dust particles during production, but those are easily handled by proper manufacturing processes. Perhaps you were thinking of thin-film solar panels, which may use e.g. Cadmium? They're less common and seem unlikely to displace silicon PV in the near future.
I might spend $480 on electricity per year. I can't see this thing having an ROI within its lifespan. I also don't have solar panels, and have a very reliable power grid. Any reason I should consider buying one?
Yep. I had electric water heater (60A @ 120v) and still use a small electric AC unit (12A). And I still can't find anything that matches incandescent or halogen lights (I'd pay a lot for real, bright, warm lights, not the ugly yellowish fluorescent, or the weird off-white LED stuff - some LEDs are getting close, but not good enough for residential). Electricity costs were over $480 some months.
This is Guatemala, where I don't trust the grid much. I ended up buying ~$1000 worth of portable battery backups (UPS) and plug them in wherever I need it, but they need replacing every couple of years.
It'd be much simpler to have a simple battery pack, although I'm not sure this would handle the load.
IIRC, that's because of the silly way (given Hawaii's abundant solar and geothermal resources) in which most electricity is generated in Hawaii: burning imported fossil fuels. If the local renewables were fully exploited, I can't think of a reason for costs to be so high.
You're right! Hawaii's utility is fighting against solar installations, and I see Tesla's energy solution coming in to push the uptake of solar installs in Hawaii.
You don't have to wait on the utility for their approval if you're not connected to them.
The island layout doesn't help either. The geothermal resources are all on the Big Island, and that's also where it would be easier to install large-scale solar facilities. But the main energy usage is on Oahu, and there isn't an inter-island power grid.
We spend over $2,000 per year and it's just me and my girlfriend. From the sounds of it you have either very good rates or perhaps a frugal lifestyle? Either way it's impressive.
I think it depends on local weather. We spend about $600 on electricity and $600 is gas per year for 4 people in the Bay Area. And this is with an older water heater and furnace in an old house with moderate insulation. We would replace the heater, furnace and improve the insulation before even considering solar ourselves.
+1 to first upgrading your home. I live in the Bay Area but in a tightly sealed late 90's 1600 sqft house. No A/C. Recently upgraded our furnace and water heater to high efficiency models, and now spend about $400/year electricity, $400/yr for gas. Even accounting for the warmer winter this year, the gas savings was about 14%. There are pretty good incentives in the Bay Area for home energy upgrades if you do multiple at once: https://www.bayareaenergyupgrade.org/program-overview
But that's not impressive at all; all these numbers really depend on what that electricity is being used for. Our heat and hot water are not electric. AC doesn't get used much, since we're far enough north (Massachusetts) that it's not a big deal. So that leaves lights, electronics, and the stove/microwave/vacuum...
My parents, on the other hand, are in the DC area, electric AC, heat, hot water. They're spending probably triple what you are on electricity.
Anyway, point is counting just electricity spending is typically comparing apples and oranges. You want to include the natural gas or oil or whatever else people are using for heat if you want to get numbers that are even remotely comparable.
I think it depends on your house size and whether you have a pool, etc. When we lived in an apartment, we spent $40-50/mo on utilities total.
I have a family of 5 in a small home and we spend $1200/yr in pricey CA (rates start at 16c/kWh going up to 35c). We don't run AC (whole house fans/attic fans), and use room heaters in winter.
I'm going to install a 9kW solar grid on my roof in the next couple of months - capital cost is ~$40K USD. Without the Power Wall, I'd be selling power back to the utility at around $0.10 / kWh, and buying it back at $0.09 / kWh in the evenings. The Power Wall will also let me endure grid outages as well (you can't run your house on your solar panels directly).
I'm really curious about what the end-user cost is going to be for one of these batteries, after distributor markup and utility company rebates. Would be interesting to see if it pays for itself over the 10 year lifespan of the batteries.
Is it really worth it if it really takes 10 years to break even (and that's the lifespan as you mentioned)? That's like giving someone a 10 year 0% interest loan.
Maybe you're better off buying a bunch of Tesla stock with that money if you think they'll stick around that long.
If you're only looking at it from a financial perspective, it may not be "worth it" (I haven't done the math).
But if you want to pay a little to be able to have reliable power from unreliable sources, then it could be "worth it". It may save you zero dollars over ten years, but during that time you're provided the service from this system.
But even if the life time cost for the energy is the same, if you can afford the initial payment, why wouldn't you do it? Especially if there are other advantages to the newer technology?
> But even if the life time cost for the energy is the same, if you can afford the initial payment, why wouldn't you do it? Especially if there are other advantages to the newer technology?
There's an opportunity cost. You'd have to weigh the lost gains you could make elsewhere to the advantages.
$40K for 9kW solar sounds really expensive, I advice you to shop a bit or consider Solar lease. I have a 10 kW plant from SolarCity installed in late 2013. It is a prepaid 20 year lease, meaning I own the electricity and they own the panels, and the total cost (including installation, pv, inverters) to me is about 10K.
You seem to be getting a 1 cent more for the electricity, so your only motivation for this must be to have a back-up. But the 7kW powerwall is daily cycle, it may be a OK backup but not beyond a day or two.
Where I live (WA state USA), there are some crazy tax incentives here for solar. Rough math:
1. 30% rebate on federal income tax, so that's $12K back in the first year.
2. $0.54 / kWh WA state energy production credit which is capped at $5K / year. The estimated power production of a 9kW array over 1 year should get me pretty close to $5K back. The production credit expires in June 2020, which means that best case I get $25000 back from the state.
Without factoring in energy cost savings, I nearly break even in 5 years. Energy cost savings are somewhere in the neighborhood of $1200 / year with solar.
If the only rationale was energy savings, it's not a good investment. However, the tax incentives make it very attractive indeed.
> 9kW solar grid on my roof in the next couple of months - capital cost is ~$40K USD
That's crazy expensive. My parents just installed 5kW last month in Australia for $10k AUD (and the government rebated them $5k AUD) so their out-of-pocket was $5k, or $1k / kW, fully installed, including the inverter.
The maximum temperature will be an issue here in Australia. In a typical place where it will be mounted, i.e. the garage, the temperatures will readily get over 40, close to 50 during summer.
I could see this also being a problem in places like Nevada and Arizona in the USA.
I think the minimum temperature will actually be a larger problem for the U.S. There's a lot of states where it easily gets colder than -4 F throughout winter, but the max will be a problem too.
110°F is going to be a problem even in SoCal potentially.
Though, I guess you could somewhat justify using solar power for cooling the battery when the temperature gets excessive. Presumably you'd be getting peak power at the same time you get peak temps.
-4F is definitely not that low, but at the same time when the house is heated, garage is going to get some of that heat as well.
If your garage is getting to 50°C you've got a major insulation problem! Where are you located?
In both cases if min and max operating temperature are an issue it may be best to install in an FIP enclosure and use ducting to keep the enclosure and an optimal temperature.
In many houses, the garage is outside of the insulation; the garage itself has very little insulation between itself and the outdoors, and there's lots of insulation between the garage and the "habitable" parts of the house.
My garage door faces the southwest meaning it gets hit by the sun for a good chunk of the day. It easily gets to 120F during a Houston summer in there.
Can anyone speak to what that could power? Could I run a load of laundry with it? How about dry it afterwards? Here in Italy people mostly take advantage of "solar power" by hanging clothes to dry, but just to get an idea of what the battery could run.
To put it in perspective: in Florida, in the summer, using a 4ton very old/inefficient AC in a 2000sqft house in 100 degree summer weather, electric oven, refrigerator, washer/dryer and all other household stuff. I would burn about 3kw / hr in the middle of the day. So in theory the 10kwh would power a extreme case like this for ~3hours, and 9 of them could do it for ~27hrs. So yes you could do everything you would normally do with household electricity with this.
Moving to geothermal heat pump for the AC would drastically drop your peak power consumption.
As a fellow (part-time) Florida resident, I'd encourage you to send a comment in to the Florida Public Service Commission:
"The Florida Public Service Commission (FPSC) staff is gathering information regarding
enhancing development of solar technologies in Florida. To this end, we encourage individuals,
businesses, and utilities to provide input on demand-side and supply-side policies and programs,
and any other information that would be useful to the FPSC.
Comments should be limited to 20 pages, excluding attachments.
The comments are due to
Lee Eng Tan via e-mail at LTan@psc.state.fl.us on June 23, 2015 by 5:00 pm. Please note that
comments provided to the FPSC will be public record and will be posted to the FPSC’s website."
I'm not aware of any consumer level ACs that draw that kind of juice. Given 10¢/kwhr (for easy math) that would still cost $1.20/hr or ~$8xx in electricity per month just for the AC.
One thing that might go overlooked: Load shifting could, in theory, lower electric bills such that there's ROI without solar panels.
---
Edit for why: On-demand power is expensive. "Spinning up" additional power during the day is more expensive than having certain types of power generation running all the time. In theory, pumping power into a battery at night during non-peak hours will cost less than consuming directly off the grid during the day.
I'm forgetting all the details of energy economics, but IIRC there would also be far less emissions by having consistent load on the grid all day long. Something about the ones we "spin up" also being the worst for the environment.
If what you say is true, then with better economies of scale and longer investment horizons, utilities would quickly erase any peak-vs-non-peak arbitrage opportunities.
Different entities have different risk profiles, and utilities are extremely conservative. It will probably be profitable to load shift for several years before utilities start to do it on their own. And even then, it may take quite some time before there's enough battery capacity for all the fluctuations to even out.
Utilities with electricity production are more conservative because they have technical limitation due to the infrastructure they run.
However, there is a bunch of companies that buy and sell electricity on the open market, so they have a direct financial interest to play with this arbitrage.
In the UK, another reader has calculated the best case scenario was profitability in about 10 years. (his numbers ring true to me, I calculated recently that there was no reason to take an economy 7 contract for my electricity usage using similar data) That's a lot of time even in the utility market. So if batteries not attached to solar panel are going to be profitable (in the UK), that would be a future generation.
> utilities would quickly erase any peak-vs-non-peak arbitrage opportunities.
Probably right around the same time they're no longer necessary, as the cost of distribute solar continues to plummet. Its actually truly amazing how quickly the price continues to drop for panels each year.
Great link. It's also amazing how Solar power generation falls significantly in the winter months. For instance, December output is less than 10% of June!
But you could run it on a combination of onshore wind, offshore wind, distributed solar, utility solar, and energy storage (ie Tesla's Utility Storage solution).
It's hard to wrap your head around all the challenges in energy. If you're REALLY good at it you can find some incredible arbitrage opportunities...see Enron.
Consider the power output characteristics of some common energy sources:
Gas, Nuclear, Hydro, Wind, Solar
Our "sustainable" sources of power - hydro, wind, and solar - are also the ones with the most irregular and unpredictable power output. This creates a problem, because even if there was enough cumulative power output from sustainable sources today, it most likely wouldn't align with our usage schedule.
So there are two solutions: 1) find a way to map the sustainable power output to our usage 2) find a way to store energy
Today, our most readily available form of energy storage is gas. We just put it in a container and burn it when we need to. "Spin it up," if you will.
An alternative to gas is a crazy network of Powerwalls. The hope is that, eventually, instead of spinning up gas turbines during peak demand, we can just draw from our Powerwall.
There was another alternative on HN recently. Basically a super-deep hole in the ground with super heavy object falling into it, but suspended by a rope. You run a motor to lift the object during off-peak hours, then let it fall and spin a generator during peak hours. I can't find it right now but I remember thinking they had a great name.
---
That said, power output is only part of the problem. If you're looking to factor the potential disappearance of arbitrage opportunities into your buying decision, you also need to consider the time until regulatory changes allow for perfect pricing, and the time until these Powerwalls have precise enough information to decide exactly when to draw from the grid versus the battery.
tl;dr: "quickly" is probably optimistic. We're a long ways away from economies of scale.
Actually, hydro with reservoirs is not just very predictable, it's the least expensive source to turn on-off-half on demand, or even to run in reverse as a storage mechanism with some upgrades.
> There was another alternative on HN recently. Basically a super-deep hole in the ground with super heavy object falling into it, but suspended by a rope.
Both are basically the same concept as pumped hydro which has been in use for a long time... pump water up a hill when energy is cheap, let it fall down and turn a turbine when energy is expensive. And hey, if it rains, free energy!
The rail/hole in the ground approach have the advantage of taking up less land I suppose, but I suspect are less efficient.
I could do this today. With my current time-of-use electric rate, I pay an average of $0.25/kWh more for peak power than I do for off-peak [the differential is larger in the summer, smaller in the winter]. If I shift 8kWh per day, then I would generate positive ROI in less than five years.
Your edit is spot-on. Utilities typically use natural gas "peaker" plants to meet mid-day spikes in demand, while nuclear plants are better suited to running at a steady state.
Is 8kWh/day realistic? I'm curious, honestly wouldn't know.
Seems like that would be charging and discharging 80% of the 10kWh battery's capacity every day. Would that affect lifespan? Also, it would seem to render the device less useful as a battery backup system during most of the day, since it would be mostly depleted.
My home uses about 1000 kWh per month, so shifting 8kWh per day of my in-house demand is feasible. However, there's really no correlation with my usage, since I can just push and pull that power from the grid, as if I had a solar or wind generator.
Lithium batteries are fairly tolerant of deep discharge, but yes, I would expect that the pack would be worn out after max 7-10 years if used like this.
Yes, using the pack like this would make it much less useful for battery back-up, but where I live (SF Bay Area), I haven't had an outage that lasted longer than 2 hours since we moved into our house, and this would cover the basics (probably everything but A/C) for that time. You could always split the difference, for example using 4 kWh per day -- this would pay still give you 6kWh+ of backup power and let you get the battery at half off or better.
Economy 7 power is significantly cheaper in the UK than peak power. Charging overnight in the E7 period could save money long term depending on the lifetime of the battery.
I did a quick bit of calculation on this. Assuming you use 10KWh per day and a perfect battery:
Economy 7 KWh cost : 8.4p (Best deal I saw was 9.4 for me, but this was a figure on MSE)
Standard tariff KWh cost : 14.5p (Best deal I saw was ~12 for me, but this was a figure on MSE)
That'd be a £306/year cost on economy 7 and £530 on a standard, taking some more extreme figures.
A $3500 (~£2300) battery would then have a payoff time of about 10 years.
Using the other figures (9.4 and 12) gives a £95/year saving or a ~25 year payoff.
That's also assuming the batter is perfect, no extra costs in installation and you use exactly 10KWh per day. Economy 7 tariffs are about 22p/unit during the day so any overrun would quickly eat into savings.
I do think this is all very interesting, but with current offers in the UK it doesn't look too beneficial. However, if someone were to offer cheaper rates on a more granular level (rather than always midnight-7am) then this could work out better. Perhaps an energy company owned battery would be a good idea, they offer a flat rate back to you knowing they can smooth things out.
Oh interesting, I hadn't considered the aspect of charging overnight while it's cheaper. Of course, the moment it starts to get popular the energy companies will be eating that particular cake too, I'm sure. Sounds like right now there's not a huge margin anyway.
I guess the energy companies have a financial incentive to run a more consistent supply if it could reduce the peak load.
Just reminded me of a brilliant BBC documentary from a while back - The Secret Life of the National Grid. I think you probably have to piece it together from clips on youtube these days.
If you get 90% charge/discharge efficiency, you're multiplying the economy 7 tariff by 1/0.81 = 1.23456790 (so close) so it's more like 12.5 years, and a bit less compelling.
That is of course ignoring the other aspects, like battery backup for the house, better for the environment (?), the ability to do solar tie in, and any possible government incentives.
In the UK power cuts are very rare in most places (and generators are cheap), so it's not a huge advantage. The enviroment factor is at best tenuous due to 20% of energy stored lost as heat and high energy requirements for producing the batteries; and in any case unilateral green action makes no difference.
The solar tie in is quite nice, but current feed-in tariffs are huge in the UK (30p per kWh perhaps), so you're getting more out of paying it back than you would for storing.
Government incentives obviously change the calculations, but there aren't any at the moment.
You are planning to charge the thing overnight and use it exclusively during the day, nearly exhausting it each time?
The battery is going to wear out well before 10 years. If you oversize your battery so you are only pulling out half the charge in the battery[1], you can probably get 1500 cycles out of it[2]. That's still less than 5 years.
(This is a common pattern if you are trying to price-compare an electric car to a gas car. For the electric car, the electricity cost is a rounding error compared to the capital cost of the battery, so you can just about assume electricity is free, and worry instead about how long the battery will last.)
You will get a much bigger bang-for-the-buck by demand-shifting: if the biggest load is cooling your building in the heat of the day, run the A/C overnight to superchill a heat sink that can be accessed during the day. No battery installation needed.
[1] Toyota did this with the Prius. They purposefully did not use the full range of the battery because they wanted the battery to last 7+ years.
It comes standard with a 10 year warranty, with an optional 10 year extension. If they don't have different numbers than you, I don't see why they would even attempt that.
Warrantied to what, though. That you can still get 20% capacity levels in year 10, or that it will still turn on? This might be considered "normal wear and tear."
3000 deep cycles is really pushing what the industry knows to be state of the art.
Maybe they are just taking the economic chance that most people won't be deeply cycling these batteries, and planning to do replacements for those who actually put it through its paces.
That's a good question, and it makes a big difference.
> That you can still get 20% capacity levels in year 10, or that it will still turn on? This might be considered "normal wear and tear."
Given that you can optionally warranty it for an additional 10 years, I doubt it's nearly that bad. If people are confused as to how they how they hope achieve 10 years reliability, and they are willing to warranty 20 years, they must have something up their sleeves.
> 3000 deep cycles is really pushing what the industry knows to be state of the art
I suspect that the powerwall's true capacity is higher than it's rating, and it uses that reserve so it's not doing deep cycles, similar to another commenter's assertion to how the Prius gets it's 7+ year rating,
> Maybe they are just taking the economic chance that most people won't be deeply cycling these batteries, and planning to do replacements for those who actually put it through its paces.
I think a combination of most users not fully cycling every day, extra reserve capacity to keep it from deep cycling, and some subset of people not using failing warranty conditions may all contribute.
Doesn't this ignore completely the efficiency of the batteries? These batteries aren't ideal, you won't get out 100% of the energy that is put in. I don't know the efficiency rating, and I haven't done the math, but I suspect that the losses will cut into the savings significantly.
The page says >92% round trip efficiency. Since they also claim that they're selling them to utilities for exactly this purpose I'd guess it's theoretically possible and probably comes down to the pricing structure offered to consumers in your local area to buy and sell to the grid.
Can grid arbitrage and time-shifting solar co-exist? Some clever software might be able to predict your energy demand (e.g. based on seasons and past usage patterns) and your likely solar output (this time based on seasons and weather forecasts) and make the maximum use out of the battery.
I'm also wondering if the same software is going to be rolled out to Tesla's cars so that they act like Tesla Energy when plugged in overnight.
Big cities are prone to brown outs on hot days in the summer due to air conditioners. The 2003 European heat wave killed thousands1. I could imagine mayors mandating use of this kind of technology in apartment buildings. Let them charge overnight to offset peak usage. You'd cover 100 or more people at a time.
That's no longer really true. A/C units are in the past 10 years getting quite common in the hot parts of Europe now. In the '90s fewer than 10% of households had them in Italy or Spain, but that has jumped to nearly 50% now. People do use it a lot less, though: they are typically individual units, not central A/C, and only used for short periods on very hot days, not run continuously with a thermostat setting.
How well do you think these would work in RVs when paired with the number of solar panels that fit on top of an RV? Would this work well at burning man vs running a generator?
You'd have to calculate it and your expected power usage. You probably wouldn't be able to run AC on full all day without a massive solar array. Check out how big a 100w solar array is, how many of those can fit on your RV roof, and how much power your AC uses. You'd also need a big (and not 100% efficient) inverter. Also take heat and dust inefficiencies into account.
TL;DR you're better off going in on that industrial diesel 3-phase generator rental which comes on its own trailer.
589 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 295 ms ] threadOne interesting thing to note is the collaboration with Amazon...
AWS will be running a 4.8 megawatt hour pilot program with Tesla's batteries in the us-west-1 AZ (Northern California).
Hopefully this allows AWS and other hosting providers to use intermittent, renewable sources of energy more often.
EDIT: I'm guessing AWS will be using a cluster of 48 power packs (100 kilowatt hours each).
I wouldn't want any experiments going on around my main servers.
This looks more like a $6,000-$8,000 item once it's all up and running. Gonna have to run some math here to figure out the ROI.
Or, you could listen to music on your 250W sound system for 40h.
EDIT: Unless you mean it's limited to a 3 kw power draw - looks like it's 3.3 peak and 2 continuous.
Turns out, from people who worked with him, he was a complete imbecile, and completely incapable of getting anything done.
I'll take the substance over the sizzle any day of the week.
He's not the smoothest or most polished by any means. But he grabbed my attention and kept it from the first moment, because it's sincere and informative. I didn't feel like I was an anonymous member of an audience in front of a multi-billionaire. I felt like I was at a small gathering of nerds where one of them was enthusiastically telling me about his latest cool project.
Apple is often considered to set the standard for these sorts of events. I've been watching Apple's announcements since long before they were cool again, and I enjoy them a great deal. But I'll take Musk's halting sincerity over Steve Jobs or Tim Cook's empty polish any day of the week.
If I pay for this do I have to plug this thing into my own electrical grid to keep charging it?
If you took steps to reduce consumption (avoiding using heavy demand appliances like electric ovens, etc.) it would last a lot longer. With a little care, you could probably run for a couple of days on one of these, particularly if you had LED lights, etc.
http://energymadeeasy.gov.au/bill-benchmark/results/3660/4
It would be interesting to see what is the daylight vs. nighttime usage. And if you can daisy chain these batteries. Seems like a few would be needed to ensure for high usage days if you wanted to be largely self-sufficient.
0. Tesla will open source its patents for the Gigafactory.
1. Elon thinks all the world's energy needs can be served with 2 billion Tesla GW powepacks.
2. Elon: "This is something we can do, need to do and should do."
It's over.
> The world currently consumes 20 trillion kWh of energy annually. Enough energy to [...] supply energy to a nuclear power plant for 2,300 years.
Am I missing something, or is that an entirely bizarre comparison to make? What does this even mean?
I'm not sure why you got such a weird impression. In his talk he clearly states that the power would be coming from solar energy. He even explained how much space you'd need for solar arrays and batteries if you want to provide the entire United States with power day and night (the biggest need for batteries).
He also mentioned there is utility for the battery to be used with your powergrid but the big win is using it with solar energy.
20,000,000,000,000 kWh = 20,000,000,000 MWh = 20,000,000 GWh / 8,760 hours/year ~= 2,283 GW average steady-state generation, globally.
A typical utility-scale nuclear reactor produces around 0.5 GW.
While Elon might not be the best orator, you can easily derive his authenticity and belief in the product by virtue of his delivery. You can't do that with accuracy in the canned and carefully rehearsed.
Our local utility here in Chicago, ComEd, is starting to roll out to the population what flux in energy usage actually means on a granular basis (hourly, daily, monthly, seasonally) while offering incentives to change their consumption patterns.
The Telsa device, as others have mentioned, seems like a rebranded solar storage device. I suppose the intelligence would be in the inverter/grid cutout mechanism anyway.
This system would run my home for about 8 hours in the winter and 4 in the summer before emptying, so I would need a lot more smarts in the box to try and anticipate price spikes without running out.
Most new grid-tie inverters can be controlled from a computer either over IP or a serial interface; you could fairly trivially control the flow of power by polling your electric provider's website (I scrape the RRTP API for current and future pricing data every 60 seconds) and commanding your inverter based on that.
My first idea was to create a system that watched the immediate price as well as the day ahead AND the weather forecast to try and predict the best time to stay off the grid, but that's a little too ambitious.
My current idea is to grab my 5-minute history over the last year or two and model it against a simple buy-low-sell-high threshold. It should at least tell me how much the system would save each month.
(BTW about your earlier post, even if supply is 1c/kWh, there's still the delivery charge and taxes. I think supply needs to drop to something like -3.5c/kWh before the juice is "free". It's happened only once or twice in my history with the system.).
For $3300 you can get a 17 kW generator with inverter and transfer switch [0], which will run for days on a house-sized propane tank. At my house in the woods, we do sometimes get multi-day power outages after storms. Though, to be fair, you need a concrete pad and 30 square feet to install the generator.
It doesn't seem like a competitive backup system, but load shifting is still appealing.
[0] http://www.costco.com/Honeywell-17-kW-Automatic-Standby-Gene...
In my clueless opinion these batteries should be used strategically in places where solar, wind, and hydro power are unavailable.
Do you have information supporting the idea that electric cars aren't scalable? My understanding is that they definitely are scalable.
In some places utilities are offering discounted electricity prices if the car charging infrastructure is hooked up to their smart metering/control system. This allows the company to signal when cars should start/stop charging.
There's no reason they can't work with car makers to introduce two way signalling between the charging infrastructure and the grid - the car can tell the grid that it needs to use X kW by Y time, and the grid can communicate the current permitted load.
Potentially with some option for the customer to pay a premium to charge immediately at a higher rate.
As in, damn the kids left the car unplugged and I have to work. even thirty minutes at a super charger is not a good solution.
So it comes down to a compromise, a good range extender technology and batteries for the majority of driving. That until truly faster charging can be achieved with house hold wiring.
I don't see this as something to worry about - it's just a household habit problem. Pretty much every new device introduces some, and people quickly adapt to use the device properly.
Still, some might say that carbon pollution and groundwater pollution are different problems. One may decide the trade off between one and the other is worthwhile.
You are conflating two senses of "clean" that are radically different in meaning and importance.
-- Fossil fuels are !clean in that they may destroy all life on earth via catastrophic climate change.
-- Lithium mines are !clean in that they present waste disposal challenges and some people find them "ugly".
It's like saying "your non–blood diamond is still a blood diamond because the jeweler got a papercut while handling the documentation".
You might want to reevaluate any moral position you have where a significant basis of your values is the ability to brag about them. I would be fairly disgusted if someone said a significant amount of the reason they're so devout in their religion was so they could boast about it with their peers.
LOL. that's some serious self-delusion. some of the best i've ever seen in the wild.
the alternative to fossil fuels is free -- just don't use them. your feet are free. bikes are almost free and subsidized in many cities.
the reason you use it is not because you "can't afford the alternative" but because you find the convenience and utility quite high, i.e. WORTH THE COST, compared to walking your ass around town and going cold in the winter, just like everyone else.
fundamentally this is a problem of economics, not of really really really wanting to do the right thing.
Kind of a straw man argument. They are still far more environmentally friendly than gas or coal.
If you're talking about being "disgusted" and wanting to completely avoid polluting at any cost, not so much. Sacred values and all that.
Since no inverter, grid-tie transfer relay, or charge controllers are included in this unit, those will all be additional costs just as they would with any other batteries. And it appears you will be limited to a few inverters and probably a micro-inverter PV design; this is purely a grid-tie-only design. Existing battery technologies can do all of that, but they also give you much broader flexibility for other applications and system designs.
I'm not sure why I would want this. I'd be paying above the odds for some serious design constraints and limitations I wouldn't otherwise have. Tesla seem to be taking a very different approach from their launch of the Roadster, which was a super-premium offering at a super-premium price. This is a modest offering at a premium price in relative terms, but low enough in absolute terms to appeal to people who aren't well-versed in the field. Their success will probably depend on installers deciding it's easier to just take people's money and sell them the Tesla than to educate their customers and give them the best value available. Not a bad gamble, for Tesla.
http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=97&t=3
That alone would be compelling at this price.
Edit: Incidentally, when I submit the reservation form, there is no confirmation.
It will get expensive by the time you actually have all the bits you need inside your house.
How is this better than deep-cycle batteries (with 20+ year lives) again? Why does it need to be slimline?
"so you don't need a battery room" - Elon Musk
1.9kW for USD$1,678.
My point is that Tesla isn't really doing anything really unique here. Sure, they're giving it more press than anyone really has before, but the products aren't especially cheap, innovative or special.
http://ironedison.com/12-volt-lithium-battery-for-solar
Ahh! But that's the most important part! Elon's portfolio companies are a pieces of an incredible future machine, all working together. Solar City is able to draw on Tesla's batteries, Tesla was able to draw on SpaceX for some of its engineering capabilities.
Tesla made electric cars sexy. Now, its making energy storage sexy. Clearly, marketing is important, and will be necessary for convincing the world a clean energy future is the right direction.
What this product has is much better luxury marketing, and as part of that much better user experience.
only 2kW? 2kW is enough to power any residential, single-family house for 95-98% of the time; you only need (a little bit) more than that at very short (few minutes) peak intervals - when heating up an oven, or some cycles of doing laundry. A second unit would provide that headroom, and otherwise (when the extra $5k for a second unit is prohibitive) you could still draw from the grid for peak loads and just not run an oven and washing machine at the same time during grid blackouts.
It does require a 21st century house - led lighting (but it's 2015 - who still uses incandescent except for those places where you don't turn on the lights more than 4 times a year anyway?), energy-conscious appliances, moderate need for A/C (sane insulation and ventilation, localized and intelligently controlled A/C needs - i.e. no 'bring all room in my 3000 square feet sheet rock and tin roof house down to 75 degrees when it's 110 degrees outside'). But whoever doesn't have that, has options to start reducing their bills that are much better than buying energy packs.
It's 2015 though - take a 20$ Philips Master LED for example (I decided upon those for myself so I looked into them more heavily; I have about 20 in use now, with another few boxes in my basement awaiting installation). The GU10 socket halogen-replacement version is available in 3 temperatures and 3 spread bundles, has a 20k burn hour rating (vs 1-2k for incandescent!) and can be dimmed very well using a 50$ leading edge electronic dimmer.
I'm no tree hugger - even purely economical (apart from the convenience of not having to replace lamps every year), in 2015 it doesn't make any economic sense to buy incandescent (in those places where it's possible to buy them at all...) for all purposes where the light is used on a 'regular' basis (more than an hour a day or so).
Of course it does require an initial 'investment'. But one that would be spread over 1 or 2 years - the normal replacement cycle of incandescent bulbs. Throwing out working incandescent bulbs to replace them with LED is not rational either, of course.
As always, there are people (analogous to 'vinyl produce a richer sound' idiots) who have 'opinions' on light quality, but well, we all know what they say about 'opinions'. In 2015, it's plain nonsense to take 'light quality' as a reason not to use LED light for domestic purposes, full stop.
There may not be a difference in "light quality", photons are photons, but if you convert a home from one to the other things will look different, and you may prefer one way or the other.
And don't forget about fixtures that were designed to work with clear incandescent bulbs for aesthetic reasons. LED bulbs will look downright hideous in those even when the lights are off.
There are people who like how vinyl sounds better because they like the hiss and the pops, not because they fall for audiophile silliness. The same holds for lighting.
Particularly if you ever use air conditioning.
(I know this reads like a sales pitch but I am genuinely just a fan)
It's "sunny middle of the day" light. It's brilliant and I love it. I could never use anything else now. Just make sure it's 4500k.
You obviously don't live where it's hot. I live in Houston, TX and while I rarely run the A/C right now, in another month it's going to run on average 15 minutes per hour, every hour, for 3-4 months straight. Highs in the low 90s to high 100s and lows in the 80s (F).
I have 2.5 tons of A/C which is pretty moderate. The condenser draws something like 3kW with an 8kW surge and the furnace fan is another 500 watts. I live in a fairly modest house compared to a lot of people, I'm sure there are places that 5 tons is more common.
In California where humidity isn't really a problem and it tends to cool off more at night and there's nearly always great solar, this seems like a great solution. But don't forget that not everywhere in the world is the target market. There are some places that are very different in terms of electrical consumption.
How much is your power bill in summer? Must be $300+, going on 500 during the hottest months? At that rate, you'll make back the $20k + $10k that 10k Wp + 2 of these batteries would cost you in what, 5 to 7 years? Add financing costs and you'll be at breakeven in 10 years, not counting possible government grants.
No, here in Houston we've got "deregulated" power in a completely reasonable way. One company owns the lines and handles recording the meters. They charge about $0.015/kWh for this. Then there are about 100 companies that offer electricity in a multitude of different ways. I'm paying $0.08/kWh delivered to my "door" so my worst months are only $150 or so.
Your idea is a nice one, except that I would need more panels and at least 2x the batteries/inverters. If I need 3kW CONSTANT to run the AC then 3kW PEAK doesn't do me any good.
> but that doesn't take away from the fact that with one extra of these units + 10k Wp of solar panels, you could power your AC's with power to spare to be stored in the battery pack
Not really. Look I know Tesla is awesome, and solar is awesome. I'm interested in both. But the economics really aren't here yet in Houston because of how cheap power is, because there's not a state owned utility screwing us bigtime. Houston has a lot of problems to be sure but power prices aren't one of them.
tl;dr Houston isn't California.
It's a really strange paradox that, in places where it gets very hot during the day, we're drawing tons and tons of energy from the grid to cool the house precisely at the time of the day when even more energy is pouring down on us freely from the skies.
Seriously, A/C is basically Universe's most heavy-handed hint that we should use more solar.
Of course, you could make a similar argument about needing artificial heat, but that's at least far more efficient!
Welp, I'll get right on telling 40% of the world that they're wrong, then.
https://tropicaldatahub.org/research-in-focus/people-and-soc...
Open sourcing the patents to build fully solar-powered electrical grids around the will be a paradigm shift in the power structures of the world. I expect from today onward there will be a full-scale attack from those who stand to lose because of the reduced dependency on oil.
First they ignore you.
Then they laugh at you.
Then they fight you. <--- WE ARE HERE
Then you win.
He will most certainly be fought tooth and nail, but he has allies.
Maybe. But remember we don't have the technology yet to completely move away from fossil fuels. The biggest issue I know of is making Airplanes electric which so far has not proven really feasible (as far as I can find anyway). This solves a huge chunk of issues but there are still plenty more before we can claim we have the technology to completely transition.
I'm excited for the possibility however.
http://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/design/power/siemens-e...
Airplanes are extremely energy-hungry and carbon-intensive. Just one intercontinental round trip can put as much carbon per person into the air as a half a year of driving, assuming you have a new-ish car. And yes, this is after dividing the total emissions by the number of passengers.
The big difference, of course, it that it takes a lot less time to travel that many miles in a plane. But on a per-passenger-mile basis they're no worse than non-carpooling cars. Admittedly a low bar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_aviati...
If that doesn't happen (or if he's underestimating what it takes), then I figure the solution for air travel will be synthetic fuels. Synthetic fuels are not very good right now simply because it takes a lot of energy to make them, but if energy is cheap and abundant because, say, the world is covered in solar panels, it's less of a problem.
What do you do with the batteries and the toxic materials inside when you're done with them (and how long do they last)?
What do you do with all the toxic materials produced during mining, refining, and production of batteries and materials?
How do you deal with these same issues as they affect solar panels, which are made of silicon?
No, that's not true. Most power comes from sources other than coal. Yes, coal is the largest single source but it is < 50% and decreasing every year.
2. There are no particularly toxic materials in the batteries. Landfills accept discarded lithium batteries as regular waste. While lithium is not currently economical to recycle, by the time the industry is as large as the lead-acid battery market (a very toxic product chain) it will be just as easy to recycle lithium.
3. What toxic materials are you referring to? I'm not aware of anything that stands out, especially compared to coal mining, or tar sands production, etc. Lithium mining in particular is a very similar process to the one that produces table salt from salt flats. The biggest problem is the use of water in areas that are very water-poor, ie the Atacama desert.
4. Silicon is non-toxic and inert. There are some hazards associated with dust particles during production, but those are easily handled by proper manufacturing processes. Perhaps you were thinking of thin-film solar panels, which may use e.g. Cadmium? They're less common and seem unlikely to displace silicon PV in the near future.
Water usage, along with the carbon emissions from the large diesel vehicles that are actually digging the stuff up.
This is Guatemala, where I don't trust the grid much. I ended up buying ~$1000 worth of portable battery backups (UPS) and plug them in wherever I need it, but they need replacing every couple of years.
It'd be much simpler to have a simple battery pack, although I'm not sure this would handle the load.
You don't have to wait on the utility for their approval if you're not connected to them.
But that's not impressive at all; all these numbers really depend on what that electricity is being used for. Our heat and hot water are not electric. AC doesn't get used much, since we're far enough north (Massachusetts) that it's not a big deal. So that leaves lights, electronics, and the stove/microwave/vacuum...
My parents, on the other hand, are in the DC area, electric AC, heat, hot water. They're spending probably triple what you are on electricity.
Anyway, point is counting just electricity spending is typically comparing apples and oranges. You want to include the natural gas or oil or whatever else people are using for heat if you want to get numbers that are even remotely comparable.
I have a family of 5 in a small home and we spend $1200/yr in pricey CA (rates start at 16c/kWh going up to 35c). We don't run AC (whole house fans/attic fans), and use room heaters in winter.
I'm really curious about what the end-user cost is going to be for one of these batteries, after distributor markup and utility company rebates. Would be interesting to see if it pays for itself over the 10 year lifespan of the batteries.
I just reserved one.
Maybe you're better off buying a bunch of Tesla stock with that money if you think they'll stick around that long.
But if you want to pay a little to be able to have reliable power from unreliable sources, then it could be "worth it". It may save you zero dollars over ten years, but during that time you're provided the service from this system.
There's an opportunity cost. You'd have to weigh the lost gains you could make elsewhere to the advantages.
You seem to be getting a 1 cent more for the electricity, so your only motivation for this must be to have a back-up. But the 7kW powerwall is daily cycle, it may be a OK backup but not beyond a day or two.
1. 30% rebate on federal income tax, so that's $12K back in the first year. 2. $0.54 / kWh WA state energy production credit which is capped at $5K / year. The estimated power production of a 9kW array over 1 year should get me pretty close to $5K back. The production credit expires in June 2020, which means that best case I get $25000 back from the state.
Without factoring in energy cost savings, I nearly break even in 5 years. Energy cost savings are somewhere in the neighborhood of $1200 / year with solar.
If the only rationale was energy savings, it's not a good investment. However, the tax incentives make it very attractive indeed.
More details on WA state incentives here: http://www.solarpowerrocks.com/washington/
That's crazy expensive. My parents just installed 5kW last month in Australia for $10k AUD (and the government rebated them $5k AUD) so their out-of-pocket was $5k, or $1k / kW, fully installed, including the inverter.
I could see this also being a problem in places like Nevada and Arizona in the USA.
Though, I guess you could somewhat justify using solar power for cooling the battery when the temperature gets excessive. Presumably you'd be getting peak power at the same time you get peak temps.
-4F is definitely not that low, but at the same time when the house is heated, garage is going to get some of that heat as well.
In both cases if min and max operating temperature are an issue it may be best to install in an FIP enclosure and use ducting to keep the enclosure and an optimal temperature.
In Canada, the temperatures dip well below -20C regularly, but not 10 feet underground they don't.
It takes months of sub-zero above-ground temperatures to even break the freezing mark and crack pipes that are 6 feet underground.
[1]: http://store.storeimages.cdn-apple.com/4572/as-images.apple....
"What if we could move the electricity grid off of fossil fuels" (Tesla)
vs
"Be prepared the next time the power goes out."(Solar City)
10 kWh $3,500 For backup applications
7 kWh $3,000 For daily cycle applications"
From http://www.teslamotors.com/powerwall
Maybe Solar City has been using the ones meant for daily cycle - that would make sense.
Can anyone speak to what that could power? Could I run a load of laundry with it? How about dry it afterwards? Here in Italy people mostly take advantage of "solar power" by hanging clothes to dry, but just to get an idea of what the battery could run.
could you (eventually) save time and money by using an electric dryer + solar power + battery as opposed to hanging out clothes?
As a fellow (part-time) Florida resident, I'd encourage you to send a comment in to the Florida Public Service Commission:
"The Florida Public Service Commission (FPSC) staff is gathering information regarding enhancing development of solar technologies in Florida. To this end, we encourage individuals, businesses, and utilities to provide input on demand-side and supply-side policies and programs, and any other information that would be useful to the FPSC. Comments should be limited to 20 pages, excluding attachments.
The comments are due to Lee Eng Tan via e-mail at LTan@psc.state.fl.us on June 23, 2015 by 5:00 pm. Please note that comments provided to the FPSC will be public record and will be posted to the FPSC’s website."
http://www.floridapsc.com/utilities/electricgas/solarenergy/...
---
Edit for why: On-demand power is expensive. "Spinning up" additional power during the day is more expensive than having certain types of power generation running all the time. In theory, pumping power into a battery at night during non-peak hours will cost less than consuming directly off the grid during the day.
I'm forgetting all the details of energy economics, but IIRC there would also be far less emissions by having consistent load on the grid all day long. Something about the ones we "spin up" also being the worst for the environment.
However, there is a bunch of companies that buy and sell electricity on the open market, so they have a direct financial interest to play with this arbitrage.
In the UK, another reader has calculated the best case scenario was profitability in about 10 years. (his numbers ring true to me, I calculated recently that there was no reason to take an economy 7 contract for my electricity usage using similar data) That's a lot of time even in the utility market. So if batteries not attached to solar panel are going to be profitable (in the UK), that would be a future generation.
Probably right around the same time they're no longer necessary, as the cost of distribute solar continues to plummet. Its actually truly amazing how quickly the price continues to drop for panels each year.
Considering the rate at which solar power is getting cheaper, I'd say a solar power based economy is within reach.
Chart here: Check out monthly/weekly energy production for 2014 https://www.energy-charts.de/energy.htm
Consider the power output characteristics of some common energy sources:
Gas, Nuclear, Hydro, Wind, Solar
Our "sustainable" sources of power - hydro, wind, and solar - are also the ones with the most irregular and unpredictable power output. This creates a problem, because even if there was enough cumulative power output from sustainable sources today, it most likely wouldn't align with our usage schedule.
So there are two solutions: 1) find a way to map the sustainable power output to our usage 2) find a way to store energy
Today, our most readily available form of energy storage is gas. We just put it in a container and burn it when we need to. "Spin it up," if you will.
An alternative to gas is a crazy network of Powerwalls. The hope is that, eventually, instead of spinning up gas turbines during peak demand, we can just draw from our Powerwall.
There was another alternative on HN recently. Basically a super-deep hole in the ground with super heavy object falling into it, but suspended by a rope. You run a motor to lift the object during off-peak hours, then let it fall and spin a generator during peak hours. I can't find it right now but I remember thinking they had a great name.
---
That said, power output is only part of the problem. If you're looking to factor the potential disappearance of arbitrage opportunities into your buying decision, you also need to consider the time until regulatory changes allow for perfect pricing, and the time until these Powerwalls have precise enough information to decide exactly when to draw from the grid versus the battery.
tl;dr: "quickly" is probably optimistic. We're a long ways away from economies of scale.
Or a train going up and down a hill...
http://www.aresnorthamerica.com/
Both are basically the same concept as pumped hydro which has been in use for a long time... pump water up a hill when energy is cheap, let it fall down and turn a turbine when energy is expensive. And hey, if it rains, free energy!
The rail/hole in the ground approach have the advantage of taking up less land I suppose, but I suspect are less efficient.
Now, vanadium-redox flow batteries... That's always been my pet large-scale energy storage. That or hydro.
Your edit is spot-on. Utilities typically use natural gas "peaker" plants to meet mid-day spikes in demand, while nuclear plants are better suited to running at a steady state.
Seems like that would be charging and discharging 80% of the 10kWh battery's capacity every day. Would that affect lifespan? Also, it would seem to render the device less useful as a battery backup system during most of the day, since it would be mostly depleted.
Lithium batteries are fairly tolerant of deep discharge, but yes, I would expect that the pack would be worn out after max 7-10 years if used like this.
Yes, using the pack like this would make it much less useful for battery back-up, but where I live (SF Bay Area), I haven't had an outage that lasted longer than 2 hours since we moved into our house, and this would cover the basics (probably everything but A/C) for that time. You could always split the difference, for example using 4 kWh per day -- this would pay still give you 6kWh+ of backup power and let you get the battery at half off or better.
Economy 7 KWh cost : 8.4p (Best deal I saw was 9.4 for me, but this was a figure on MSE)
Standard tariff KWh cost : 14.5p (Best deal I saw was ~12 for me, but this was a figure on MSE)
That'd be a £306/year cost on economy 7 and £530 on a standard, taking some more extreme figures.
A $3500 (~£2300) battery would then have a payoff time of about 10 years.
Using the other figures (9.4 and 12) gives a £95/year saving or a ~25 year payoff.
That's also assuming the batter is perfect, no extra costs in installation and you use exactly 10KWh per day. Economy 7 tariffs are about 22p/unit during the day so any overrun would quickly eat into savings.
I do think this is all very interesting, but with current offers in the UK it doesn't look too beneficial. However, if someone were to offer cheaper rates on a more granular level (rather than always midnight-7am) then this could work out better. Perhaps an energy company owned battery would be a good idea, they offer a flat rate back to you knowing they can smooth things out.
I guess the energy companies have a financial incentive to run a more consistent supply if it could reduce the peak load.
Just reminded me of a brilliant BBC documentary from a while back - The Secret Life of the National Grid. I think you probably have to piece it together from clips on youtube these days.
The solar tie in is quite nice, but current feed-in tariffs are huge in the UK (30p per kWh perhaps), so you're getting more out of paying it back than you would for storing.
Government incentives obviously change the calculations, but there aren't any at the moment.
The battery is going to wear out well before 10 years. If you oversize your battery so you are only pulling out half the charge in the battery[1], you can probably get 1500 cycles out of it[2]. That's still less than 5 years.
(This is a common pattern if you are trying to price-compare an electric car to a gas car. For the electric car, the electricity cost is a rounding error compared to the capital cost of the battery, so you can just about assume electricity is free, and worry instead about how long the battery will last.)
You will get a much bigger bang-for-the-buck by demand-shifting: if the biggest load is cooling your building in the heat of the day, run the A/C overnight to superchill a heat sink that can be accessed during the day. No battery installation needed.
[1] Toyota did this with the Prius. They purposefully did not use the full range of the battery because they wanted the battery to last 7+ years.
[2] http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_li...
3000 deep cycles is really pushing what the industry knows to be state of the art.
Maybe they are just taking the economic chance that most people won't be deeply cycling these batteries, and planning to do replacements for those who actually put it through its paces.
That's a good question, and it makes a big difference.
> That you can still get 20% capacity levels in year 10, or that it will still turn on? This might be considered "normal wear and tear."
Given that you can optionally warranty it for an additional 10 years, I doubt it's nearly that bad. If people are confused as to how they how they hope achieve 10 years reliability, and they are willing to warranty 20 years, they must have something up their sleeves.
> 3000 deep cycles is really pushing what the industry knows to be state of the art
I suspect that the powerwall's true capacity is higher than it's rating, and it uses that reserve so it's not doing deep cycles, similar to another commenter's assertion to how the Prius gets it's 7+ year rating,
> Maybe they are just taking the economic chance that most people won't be deeply cycling these batteries, and planning to do replacements for those who actually put it through its paces.
I think a combination of most users not fully cycling every day, extra reserve capacity to keep it from deep cycling, and some subset of people not using failing warranty conditions may all contribute.
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/Bring-on-the-ene...
I'm also wondering if the same software is going to be rolled out to Tesla's cars so that they act like Tesla Energy when plugged in overnight.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_European_heat_wave
TL;DR you're better off going in on that industrial diesel 3-phase generator rental which comes on its own trailer.