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Comment by bimmer44 | Hacker News Reader

I'd guess that this sort of bulk wind power is going to increasingly find favour with the big utilities over time. They don't like thoughts about homeowners buying in to a future with Tesla powerwalls + roof solar at plunging costs (e.g. the situation in Hawaii [1]). Big offshore projects let the utilities supply clean electricity without decentralisation of the grid.

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/16/hawaii-solar-indust...

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You can see their position. The infrastructure isn't cheap to maintain, and if a lot of people move from on-grid to off-grid the costs don't decrease for them, they just have less revenue.

This wouldn't be so bad in places with non-profit power companies, but the for-profit power companies are going to feel some pressure.

Maybe the era of big grids should come to an end.

A neighborhood can share a neighborhood sized grid in a much cheaper way than an utility managing city-sized one. Even more if the only function of the grid is connecting into the nearby big battery and sharing some energy when one of the houses has a problem.

Not really. Offshore wind only production electricity 5% more of the time than onshore wind (see the capacity factors here: https://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation...) Offshore only slightly mitigates the problems with wind--ie. the unreliability. You still need a grid to balance supply and demand with wind.

I expect utilities will be big Powerwall customers.

I don't know who Tesla expects to sell to, but I agree that utilities could be very interested. They benefit from smoother demand more than just about anyone.

In many places, the utilities aren't allowed to charge different rates over time (or if they do, it has to be in the form of a discount/incentive vs. the single-rate price, it can't be punitive) even though power costs more to produce at some times. Smoothing out demand by pushing storage out to the edges of the grid seems like it would be a benefit to them.

I don't see how. The cost seems to be prohibitive for them.

It might make a little more sense for some consumers due to the excessively high retail rates for electricity in some regions.

One way would be the same sorts of regulations that have them paying to haul away old appliances.

Utilities need fast-reacting ways to deal with rapidly changing generation from sources such as wind and sun. Large users can get a big benefit from reducing their theoretical peak usage, reducing their grid connection charge. Both of these usages are economic today.

Utilities have to have excess capacity available to spin up instantly to meet demand. So you have to compare the cost and maintenance with a natural gas peaker plant. I think there is a place for Tesla's PowerPack to replace the least used peaker plants.

Tesla PowerPacks are already replacing three peaker plants (that I know of).

The more expensive the peaker, the faster the payback time.

*PowerPack (100kWh vs 7 kWh)

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