New Tesla battery could power your home, and maybe the electric grid too
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These batteries aren't going to power your home at night, nor should they as electricity rates at night are dirt cheap (comparatively) when people aren't at work, in factories and in bed sleeping.
These batteries are going to be performing grid marketplace arbitrage and some governments and utilities are providing amazing incentives to do so. (Currently the incentives require the batteries to be tied to solar.)
There are two pieces of your electricity bill (I'm simplifying here) 1) the electricity charge (EC) and 2) the transmission charge (TC). The EC is calculated by how many kWh you use during each (peak/off-peak) period of the day and the TC is calculated by your max grid demand during your largest 15 minutes for the month.
Tesla Batteries are not just about the batteries, the system calculates how to remove kWh demand from peak hours by pulling power from batteries and then recharging during off-peak hours. This covers the EC cost reduction.
To reduce TC costs the system calculates your peak load over the given month and tries to turn it from a "mountain range" (with many peaks) to a "platou". You pay your TC for the tallest mountain for the month. At first the system doesn't know that much about your usage profile and will just focus on the largest peak demand 15 minute intervals. Then over time it will learn more about your usage patterns and slowly platou your grid demand.
At the end of the day it is going to be much more cost effective and efficient to have a distributed grid with thousands of solar arrays and batteries than build out large billion dollar gas fired turbines or even wind turbines.
Let's take a Tesla S battery. It costs $30,000 [1]. It has a capacity of 85KWh, which lasts 265 miles. [2] The battery is down to 80% life after 100K miles [3], which is 377 cycles.
Say you fill up the battery at 5 cents/KWh and sell it at 20 cents/KWh. You've made $12.75. After 377 cycles, you've made almost $5000. You still have life in those batteries, but they are going to keep on getting worse, and the efficiency of energy in/energy out will start falling as well. Once you hit 40% they are probably useless. You might be able to run that $5000 two or three more times before you hit that.
You could only barely use the batteries to prolong their life. But you spent $30,000 on them! That's a lot of capital costs for something that isn't doing anything. And Li-Ions will gradually lose capacity even if you don't use them and store them in ideal conditions.
There are certainly efficiencies of switching from a car-bound battery to a stationary battery, although a lot of people posting on this page are talking about hooking up a car to do price arbitrage.
[1] http://my.teslamotors.com/it_CH/forum/forums/battery-replace... and watch how hard it is for the guy to get an answer
[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=tesla+car+battery+capacity&o...
[3] http://www.plugincars.com/tesla-roadster-battery-life-study-... don't just read the headline
E.g. http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/organic-battery-hailed-as-...
I assume the primary issue now is cost, but if you can decouple the reaction -> electricity engine from the reactants to a greater degree, then it sounds attractive? I imagine increasing storage tankage is a much easier problem to solve than increasing energy density.
You could smooth out the peaks in my home demand with probably just 10kW. Perhaps smooth out many of my neighbours peaks with 50kW. But my point is that there are no hard bounds that the battery needs to satisfy, unlike in a car when you have to supply the drive current or sink the brake current. You can tune a home battery's charge/discard cycles for maximum battery life rather than maximum performance. I don't have data for how much difference that would make to battery life, but I would guess it may be significant.
Tesla estimates about 300 miles per charge at 60 MPH (300/60 = 5 hours)
http://my.teslamotors.com/goelectric#range
so if you get 5 hours out of 85 kw, that means you're using about 17 kW per hour
I really don't understand why this idea seems so popular with e.g. politicians.
I don't think there is any doubt that the number has come down significant. I'm sure you are aware that Tesla is building out a huge battery plant, significantly increasing lithium batter production ability, this will absolutely bring batter prices down.
I would be extremely surprised if their own internal numbers show a pay-off time of longer than 3 to 5 years. It's not like Tesla doesn't have people who get into the numbers, as the numbers are the only thing that is going to sell.
I still don't know if the numbers would work out though.
Most renewable energies are reliable, but over longer periods of time. With a way to store energy, and have it dormant in the grid waiting to be used, this creates the surplus needed so we can switch to solar and wind and be able to rely on output.
If you're coming up from a cold start, you're going to need to pre-heat the air, probably with electricity and/or natural gas. With this in mind, it's not so much that they don't generate power right away, it's that they don't generate enough power to overcome the cost of their initial inputs.
From a power plant perspective, you aren't "started" until your output power is larger than your input power.
A large scale hydroelectric, battery, or wind plant will be far more efficient than distributed energy in the home. Solar may benefit from capitalizing on under utilized residential real estate, but absent that incentive, a large solar plant will also be more efficient than a distributed per home grid due to standardized install and maintenance, larger inverters, and optimized layout (most home systems are non tracking).
Central systems are more efficient but also must lose efficiency to transmit the power over distance.
http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=105&t=3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission#Lo...
That's because of unpredictability of these power sources.
With centralized generation you can do hierarchical network, with smaller capacity further "downstream".
With distributed you need P2P network, and when some part of country has no sun and no wind - you need to be able to get that energy from other sources.
Distributed storage changes the game, but it depends on the costs.
6% includes ALL losses for the entire distribution infrastructure. I am explicitly not missing that.
You also have not cited any evidence supporting your claim, so I don't know why I bother.
Good luck!
I dont know where you are but my electric rate is the same night or not... I pay the exact same rate 24/7
I do not have demand based pricing which is reserved for business customers or persons consuming a crap load more power than I.
>>At the end of the day
the Power Companies are doing their level best to penalize home use Solar, they want to charge home owners through the nose if they "sell" power back to the grid eliminating any costs savings and in come cases making a roof top solar project more expensive than just buy power from the mafia err power companies.
Distributed non-grid power should be the goal, Grid power needs to be phased out.
At a previous job, we built a system for a company that prepared batteries through multiple charge/discharge phases. During a discharge, the power was pushed back onto the grid.
The major challenge was matching the waveform of the grid power (occasional spikes confusing the zero-crossing, drift on the timer elements etc.). If you don't, it reduces the efficiency of the power company's transformer leading to replacement with a larger one, or damage due to the excess heat. You can imagine they're going to recover that expense from somewhere (and you and your dirty sine wave are pretty clearly at fault).
I would expect the home systems to be less precise than our industrial client's equipment.
If the house temperature doesn't fluctuate wildly day to night, your scenario doesn't apply.
Plus you need a lot less heating.
I wonder if this would be a good time to define a standard low voltage plug for house hold use. An awful lot of modern electrical devices don't need 110VAC and end up wasting a lot of power converting AC to DC. I've seen replacements for wall sockets that combine a single AC socket with a few USB power ports. That's convenient, but USB wasn't designed as a power plug, it's just been co-opted for it. A well designed system of 24VDC or 48VDC would be a nice thing to have. Bonus points if it's a world standard. I'd also like a pony.
Supercomputers run on batteries for an entire day or more in our pockets. Powerful mobile gaming machines can be run from a USB socket. There has to be a way to cool me down in the summer without needing to cool my entire house (and watch as the cold air streams out underneath my door).
I had been thinking of getting one of those wires you put on the pipe to keep it from freezing but it's behind a wall and very hard to get too...
But I guess there's no room for improvement, which is why heated seats were never invented in cars, why hand warmers were never invented, why heated jackets don't exist, why we don't have ice packs, etc. Those things would be crazy and useless.
Edit: don't forget that AC is much more efficient than heating. With AC you are looking to change the temperature by at most 35 degrees and you are moving heat, so you are getting a multiplier there. With heating, you are heating from freezing or below for most places.
Its also incredibly efficient if you're using a geothermal system to pull cold out of the ground vs pushing heat into existing hot air with a compressor.
Literally every single person who commented on this has completely and 100% failed to read a single word I wrote. You're wrong, you're missing the point, and it seems like you're intentionally being obtuse.
Sorry if this sounds snappy, but I've read and re-read my original post over and over again and I'm not seeing why everyone interprets it as me telling them AC and heat isn't necessary. Things like "It would be nice to re-think the necessity of AC, as well" and "There has to be a way to cool me down in the summer without needing to cool my entire house" don't mean "turn off your climate control", they mean "let's get better climate control".
Your comment is exactly the kind of thinking that I was arguing against. Right now we need AC and heat for the entire house. Just a few years ago, we needed gasoline to power our cars and just a few decades ago we needed a dedicated room to run a calculator.
I have a coat with a battery that heats up just the coat for when I'm outside in winter. Shrink it to a normal long sleeve shirt that you would wear inside anyway. That's a start. The point is, we need heat/AC now, but are they the best we could possibly do? And is forced air the best we can do?
If you are talking about a per-room system, latency becomes an issue. If I go from my bedroom to my bathroom, how long must I be in the room until the heat comes on? Moreover, won't turning heat on/off put a lot of strain on the system? This is not convenient. It's an actively worse system than what I have now. Additionally, I'll spend much more energy heating each individual room, unless I have insulated doors and inside walls: another huge expense.
If you are talking about everyone wearing electric coats and blankets and their AC equivalents, forget about it. First, you have to carry a battery pack and charge it every so often. Second, where you used to be able to just turn up the AC a bit and wear shorts, now you have to wear a spacesuit to not suffocate in the summer.
I think HVAC could definitely use innovation, and this goes beyond the really expensive geothermal systems or high efficiency condensers. Boring things like insulation and construction materials is what's going to make a huge difference here. Buildings with good insulation and little air exchange with the outside will use significantly less energy than those with poor insulation. Heating being the #1 consumer of energy in any given house, we need to trap it inside for as long as possible. Remember, it's much easier to insulate a wall that's not moving, sitting, bend, bathing, etc. than a human.
In short, I understand what you are saying, and I think that others on here do too. I simply disagree with it.
Look at it like this: in 2006, who thought that having phone that needed to be charged every night and was crazy expensive and ridiculously fragile was a good idea? Sure, there were some people who had a Palm or a Windows Mobile phone, but they weren't very good. Just like people have hand warmers and electric blankets, which are bulky, inconvenient, and not very good. The the iPhone came along and was slightly better, but better enough that people would take it seriously. Maybe something like the Nest fits that analogy. Then suddenly with a few small tweaks and a change of public mindset, everyone is carrying a 12-hour-battery-life, $700, all-glass smartphone in their pocket, to the point where PCs are being phased out and hardly anyone has a house phone anymore.
So what you're saying is, we need mainframes and house phones, but maybe we should have cordless phones and network those mainframes together, because the problem of making a smartphone is just too hard.
So no, I don't think you understand. You know what's not convenient? Walking out the door and having my face frozen off by -30F weather. Having an AC unit in the living room where the cold air never reaches my bedroom at night. Bundling up in the winter. Sticking to the leather in the summer. You want to talk about convenience? That doesn't sound very convenient at all. That just sounds lazy, because it's what we have now. Lazy is not the same as convenient.
Do you have a cell phone, or are batteries too inconvenient? With current HVAC systems, you only have them in your house, your office, or your car. I used to have a bag phone in my car that I could plug into the cigarette lighter. But now I can take my phone anywhere. Why can't I take my HVAC anywhere?
You mention that you have a coat with electric heating. Is that literally the only "personal HVAC" product you've found?
Not sure exactly how much more efficient it is, but it sure builds character. It also helps that the winters are not too bad, and the summers are only kind of too bad.
The proposal would be 48VDC (pretty standard for panels) to 120VAC 50Hz, back to 5 and 12 volt at the application, versus sending 12 and 5 volt around a house, call it 10x10 meter perimeter and pessimize the layout (some outlets go all the way around the house).
My strong sense is that the single-step conversion beats the three-step, but losses transmitting low voltage DC are substantial.
Also, I agree that the USB Power Delivery spec is a very good candidate for modern homes/vehicles.
If houses started coming with standardized low-voltage DC alongside the regular 110 AC, manufacturers could perhaps start selling CFLs and LEDs without builtin transformers. Although I'm not what voltage they actually run on internally.
If we accepted 20 amps as the current rating, a 12v ride-on system would offer 100 / 5 * 12 -> 240 watts, which seems low, except that DC, especially if well filtered, stacks in parallel and series much more composably than AC.
The cigarette charger standard plug sucks though, and there's a limited window of opportunity to replace it.
Oh, and to address the comment on wattage, I should have made clear I don't want to eliminate AC sockets where they are needed. I'm just looking at having DC in the wall as a convenience and efficiency thing and a way to reduce the number of power adaptors I need.
I don't see it as a step forward to add an extra port to my cellphone or tablet. Lamps and small kitchen appliances don't even read data.
There's probably no mass-appeal way to satisfy both goals.
There are already DC power standards used for electronics, too. Telecom equipment commonly uses -48 VDC. However, I expect that you will find that the majority of your electricity is used by motors and other appliances that run directly off of 110 VAC.
There, the possibility that a "Tesla" battery could do anything the same or better is not new, redundant and this article is just marketing hype: It's a report of an investor call, for crying out loud, not researched journalism. There is no reason to expect a lithium battery in the home would be cheaper than traditional, established lead-acid batteries.
The advantage of lithium in a car is obvious (weight, if you haven't had your coffee). In the home, weight is not a factor. Lithium would save space, but at the expense of lifetime and cost. Since cost is the only factor holding back installation now, I don't expect many people to pay even more for the privilege of a lithium home battery bank.
BTW, in reference to your expectation, a motors expert I work with says that 50% of all electricity consumed is consumed by motors. The refrigerator's compressor motor is generally the heaviest electricity consumer in the home.
A low cost space saving battery with high energy density would be pretty game changing here.
Is the building strong enough to support the weight? Space also has a cost.
It would also cost more to manufacture, transport and install big and heavy equipment, because it is big and heavy equipment.
"The main problem with gravitational storage is that it is incredibly weak compared to chemical, compressed air, or flywheel techniques (see the post on home energy storage options). For example, to get the amount of energy stored in a single AA battery, we would have to lift 100 kg (220 lb) 10 m (33 ft) to match it. To match the energy contained in a gallon of gasoline, we would have to lift 13 tons of water (3500 gallons) one kilometer high (3,280 feet)."
And from a whole house perspective, I keep hoping for a capacitor (storing charge directly rather than in chemical bonds) which would give me back most of the energy I had stored.
Also, USB outlets still down convert 120V AC. It'd be much better to do it in bulk at once place in the house and let devices use that
That's not entirely clear. Low-voltage DC has higher transmission losses, so converting to USB-level voltage in one central location might do quite a bit worse. Plus, you still need logic at the plug to detect how much power to supply.
The problem with these connectors is that they usually aren't designed for many plug/unplug cycles. The SATA power connector is also nearly unique in being designed for hotplugging by ensuring that the ground pins make contact first and disconnect last.
??
I was under the impression that a capacitor takes twice the amount of energy to charge than what is actually stored within it. i.e. efficiency is a maximum of 50%.
I had an experimental panel in my backyard to provide power to a work shop shed. The shed was there when I purchased the property & house. About 6 months after planting a pole in the ground, behind the shed, but in view to my neighbors garnered a letter from the township where I live that basically said to remove it for being an eye sore.
Has anyone else ran into this problem?
So many people did that this very practice is now banned in the state of California.
I would look into fighting whomever told you to remove the solar panel. I thought solar panels were protected by Federal law? In my town, I couldn't put up a car shade for one day--without risking a ticket. I don't know what country you are in, but in the United States we have way to many laws. "Oh it sounds good, and doesn't effect me; let's enact a law prohibiting it."
Also, there are solar 'panels' in the shape of shingles or roof tiles that blend in much more than the 'traditional' ones.
Would you mind posting a link to the ones that look like shingles?
Talk to any telecoms workers and they will tell you amusing stories about acidents with the DC supply - the Painters shorting out the bussbars whilst decorating an Echange (Central Office) was one I remeber.
48 V might be posble but that means 2 Diferent sets of wireing.
Watts = Volts * Amps
Power lost in transmission is current through the wire times the voltage drop across the wire. The voltage drop is easy to figure out with Ohms law:
Volts = Amps * Ohms
Rewriting these with V = voltage, I = current in amps, R = resistance in ohms and P = power in Watts and simplifying one gets:
P = V * I
P = (I * R) * I
P = I**2 * R
My house has 20 Amp circuits at 120 Volts. The same power transmitted at 5 volts needs 24 times the current (i.e. 480 Amps) and 24^2 times the copper in the transmission wire to have the same power losses. So I would basically need a wire with 576 times as much copper to have the same power loss in that one low voltage circuit.
This is why it isn't practical to run the whole house on low voltage. High efficiency transformers can step up or down a voltage while losing only a few percent of the power. When their output voltage is 10 times higher their output current will be 10 times smaller and can be transmitted over the same wire with only 1 percent of the original voltage's transmission power loss.
This is the reason that power transmission lines run at 120,000 volts--a million times lower transmission line losses. (It actually is a bit more complicated due to the alternating current interactions, but it's the basic idea.) Power transformers can be 99% efficient. I have no idea of the power losses that would occur between DC current from solar panels to 120 VAC and then back to 5 VDC for USB, but you definitely don't want to transmit 5VDC over long distances.
Given a do-over on infrastructure, with today's equipment costs, it would save up front capital and power to use a small inverter at the batteries and run those items off of AC using smaller copper lines for the long run. Keep in mind that you still need DC-DC converters at the loads, since nothing is going to want to run off of your varying DC socket voltage.
(Batteries closer to the cabin is not a win, the solar panels are off that direction and those lines need to be kept short too. I do have a large inverter in the battery shed and send 120v to the cabin for big loads, but its idle current is too high to keep up for the base loads. The most expensive part of this spring's wind turbine installation (and heaviest) is the copper wire. Low voltage DC is not an answer.)
I'm still amazed that they can get 100W out of those tiny USB wires...
With how much USB cables get beat up, staying on the lower end of voltage is probably a good idea. I've definitely seen some old ones that ended up with wires exposed. But 20V is definitely more capable than the old 5V. You'd need a lot of copper to run 100W at 5V.
More info: http://www.usb.org/developers/powerdelivery/PD_1.0_Introduct...
It's not too far-fetched to imagine a rebate program on home battery systems if the utility got the same remote control power to disconnect homes from the grid when needed, or even have their batteries dump power back onto it at those times. Essentially, individual homes become part of "smart grid" management systems.
Germany along with a few other EU countries are currently high on renewable energy. As far as I know the most profitable way to utilize electric solar panels is to sell excessive energy back to the grid, not store it in batteries.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity
... but not when it's ice.
EDIT: Why the downvotes? This is a real issue... The current model of 'buy solar panels and pay for them by selling power back to the grid' will not scale forever...
Granted, I think we're a very long way away from that, but I don't see anything wrong with the funding mechanism.
You are buying when everyone is buying and you are selling when everyone is selling.
That isn't even considering reliability. With wildly variable production, we will have to pay out of the ass for peaker plants to pick up the slack.
This assumes that all homes are using the same technology to generate power, but after the landrush to solar, rates (which are time variant) would incentivize new entrants to the "sell-to-the-grid" market to choose technologies which might be less average output per unit cost than solar, but which have different timing characteristics.
Though maybe a new type of renewable power that is easily distributed will pop up.
I think the solar rush is mostly because of the subsidies. I think I'd rather fund commercial scale solar.
The early adopters for this, at least in residences, will be people living off-grid, focused on self-sufficiency, and who are willing to take a financial hit to achieve that goal.
What really gets interesting are the times (especially during early summer mornings) where there's too much supply on the grid and the price drops into negative territory (i.e. they'll pay you to shed load off the network). That's when you need the storage system charging up as fast as it can. I've been working on a personal system that watches the price and other factors (weather forecasts, family schedule) and cycles the A/C as deep as possible during those times.
What might really suck though is if everyone has one of these in their homes, then the price advantage will go away. Not a bad problem to have, but it means we'll have to shift our supply to other places like personal solar panels (hmm, does Musk sell those?)
The negative price situation only happens maybe 0.5% of the year. Your expensive equipment will sit idle the rest of the time.
I am wondering where you are that the electrical power allows you to have real time pricing. I think in California some of the utilities have already banned people from using battery packs to help smooth out the grid while gaining money from it.
https://rrtp.comed.com/live-prices/
(For reference, the local fixed price default option is around 7.5c/kWh)
Granted, our latitude and climate doesn't offer the best location for solar generation so other things that hang off the grid aren't a huge problem for us at the moment.
And, sometimes, it isn't crazy cheap (especially when there's a cold snap in the south and everyone turns on their heat pumps)
The whole reason of this negative pricing is that today, the grid can't store energy. When the tech becomes available, I don't see why the grid wouldn't use it.
I like that because we could really use some more resiliency in our infrastructures. A legacy of the 20th-century love affair with centralization is that it involves mass-creating single points of failure. Having large-scale, distributed, significantly-sized, low-maintenance energy stores is good for all sorts of corner-case scenarios.
The price advantage may go away. But you would still benefit from it by overall more consistent/lower prices because inflexible (baseline) demand wouldn't drive up prices as much. And there are indirect benefits too. Baseline is mostly supplied by coal and nuclear. Needing less of those has health and environmental benefits which, when translated into $$$ are also non-negligible even if they're not really priced into the system.
Indeed not a bad problem to have.
In NZ one of the major electricity generating companies pays some major industrial customers for the ability to cut them off, enabling them to reallocate the power almost as if it were additional generation.
Aluminium smelters are good too, but you can't cut them off without warning, because it will break the arc-furnaces when the aluminium solidifies around the carbon electrodes.
My favorite quote is probably:
> To put this into perspective, who would have believed 10 years ago that traditional wire line telephone customers could economically “cut the cord?”
[0] Disruptive Challenges: Financial Implications and Strategic Responses to a Changing Retail Electric Business (http://www.eei.org/ourissues/finance/Documents/disruptivecha...)
[1] Solar panels could destroy U.S. utilities, according to U.S. utilities (http://grist.org/article/solar-panels-could-destroy-u-s-util...)
[2] HN Discussion 261 points, 670 days ago, 139 comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5543603)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decoupling_%28utility_regulati...
The situation is set to continue for at least a year while the new coal power plant "Medupi" is being constructed - its more than 4 years behind schedule.
A battery that could be charged and then used to power your home during loadshedding could be a breakthrough solution as the costs for generators and solar are quite expensive. That being said not sure how much the Telsa "Home Battery" would be.
Any event, if its feasible it could really be a good solution. Im sure in the long run countries experiencing similar a situation could use this.
Size and weight are much less of a concern for fixed installation grid storage, of course.
Source? I always assumed the the main reason why modern cellphones' battery life is a lot worse than a few years ago was because of power-hungry processors and screens.
In addition I would really like to have the phone component moved to watches (with at least 3 days battery) and leave all the rest for a pocketable computer to handle.
The Mate 2 feels small enough that doubling the thickness would still result in an acceptable phone.
1) use the latest most efficient panel technology - let's say the latest Super AMOLED from Samsung
2) Use a very lower resolution such as 480x320 (also the initial resolution of the iPhone, which many thought looked "great" a few years ago)
3) Put a screen that's as small as possible on it - let's say 3.5" (you now...the "ideal" size that the iPhone used to have?)
4) Put the lowest power chip you can find in it (even if that means lowest performance - although a single-core 1 Ghz Cortex A7 should do the trick).
5) Put a relatively powerful (enough to handle that resolution easily), but very efficient GPU in it
6) Use other components that are also cutting edge in terms of power efficiency.
7) Put a 3,000-3,500mAh battery in it, even if it makes the phone 10-12mm thick (so like the Nokia Lumia 900 that many liked at the time for its "design", despite its thickness).
I would be surprised if all of this didn't lead to a week of battery life for the phone. The "problem" is this phone will be quite expensive unlocked (probably close to $300) due to its cutting edge/more efficient components, yet at the same time it will look like a $100 cheap phone in terms of "specs".
So where I'm going with this is that the market doesn't want such a phone even if it has a "1 week battery life". The market wants "PC-like performance", 2k resolutions and 5.5" screens more than they want "1 week battery life". And the other problem is that they want those specs to keep going up, and as long as those go up, battery life can't go up much either.
They optimize for performance and high specs rather than battery life. So if an OEM can choose between a 1080p panel with 30 percent less power consumption and a 2k panel with the same power consumption, they go for the 2k. And that's how our phones get stuck forever in the ~1 day battery life.
Increased uncertainty and risk will not be welcomed by investors, who will seek a higher return on investment and force defensive-minded investors to reduce exposure to the sector. These competitive and financial risks would likely erode credit quality. The decline in credit quality will lead to a higher cost of capital, putting further pressure on customer rates. Ultimately, capital availability will be reduced, and this will affect future investment plans. The cycle of decline has been previously witnessed in technology-disrupted sectors (such as telecommunications) and other deregulated industries (airlines).
http://grist.org/climate-energy/solar-panels-could-destroy-u...
http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21587782-europes-elec...
Who's building the "I have a 10kW load, I'm in zip code XXXXX, when is the cheapest/best time to turn this on" API?
(Maybe I'm wrong about the number of cycles?)
On the other hand, some batteries on the market show substantial capacity loss after just 300 cycles [3].
Needless to say, the product that lasts 50 times longer costs quite a bit more - and they're bigger and heavier to boot. For stationary power storage, you don't care if they're big and heavy, but for transport applications you do.
[1] https://www.toshiba.com/tic/datafiles/Battery_Energy_Storage... [2] http://www.altairnano.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/60Ah-Da... [3] http://industrial.panasonic.com/www-data/pdf2/ACA4000/ACA400...
The replacement cost of a Tesla S battery is $30,000.
Why? The constraints (in terms of size, cooling, wiring, weight, temperature changes, …) are completely different. A stationary battery is a separate product, competing in a completely different class and with very different constraints.
Stationary power storage applications can use larger batteries with worse power density, if they offer a longer life per $.
Having batteries as energy cache spread out around the network is a great idea and will offset the need to build out more power lines.
http://reneweconomy.com.au/2014/citigroup-solar-battery-stor...
http://reneweconomy.com.au/2014/ubs-time-to-join-the-solar-e...
It all really comes down to battery cost. If Tesla's gigafactory does what it says it will do, in seriously reducing cost per kwh, then a huge home storage market will open up naturally.
The projections do seem a bit heroic, though. People seem to have been predicting cost reductions in batteries for the last 15 years, but they don't seem to have come to fruition.
While Musk's plans aren't the same as Tesla's, the idea that an important part of the new structure of the modern electric grid bears his name is great.
The refrigerator bit is a bit harder...
I'd imagine a lot of houses would pay $1500 for a battery to operate their whole house during an outage.
Another product I'd like to see is a plug in battery to operate the sump pump for a few hours during an outage? Apparently a UPS can't handle the high load, and the battery backup ones you make require an expensive plumbing visit to install the special DC powered pump.
(for homes with nat gas it's a no brainer)
$1500 would give you 4.25KWh. The average home averages 1KW, so you'll have 4.25 hours.
Obviously you could get more efficiency with a stationary battery.
Even cutting to 80%, you get an extra hour. 50%, and you've got 4. I am having a hard time finding refrigerator specifics, but around 1000KWh annually seems to be on the high side. This gives you 1.5 days on the 4.25KWh battery.
I'm sure they'll build it some day, but call me when you can buy it.
http://media.chevrolet.com/media/us/en/chevrolet/news.detail...
However, it is true than in Latin American Spanish we do not perceive the difference between V and B. I guess the Aztecs and Incas did not have that in their own languages.
In Spain they do.
And in portuguese (the most similar language to Spanish) the difference is important as well.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/how-te...
The new thing here appears to be a new model and impending larger scale production.
I will be curious as to regulations for ventilation, wiring, and similar, are.
But maybe with enough insulation you could put it anywhere?
I suspect it will be a while longer before battery technology is as useful above the 49th parallel.
...which is not such a bad idea (e.g. power outages), until you realise that you might need that power for driving too.
If you bought one of these and enough solar panels you could go completely off-grid. Which the power companies desperately don't want. It's to the point where they're charging people for being hooked up at all, lest everyone think about putting in solar and only buying power when the sun isn't shining.
The utilities would be happy about this if they controlled it, but they won't because the capital expense would be way too high. They'll only be happy about it if they somehow are the only ones who have control and get to use it for free. Somehow I doubt that'll happen.
http://www.takepart.com/article/2013/07/19/solar-energy-ariz...
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-solar-boom-so-su...
The problem is obvious, of course. At some point the only people left paying any kind of substantial monthly fees are those who can't afford solar, and those are likely the poorest. And then what happens is that there's a regressive tax. I get that you can't have that kind of bad outcome.
But at the same time, grid maintenance is fairly cheap and peak power generation is very expensive, which is why utilities will pay people to be able to turn off their A/C at peak times. This is quite literally where solar shines: the more A/C load there is the more likely you're getting good power out of solar.
If the utilities need to prevent a regressive tax situation then they need to change incentives to be more transparent rather than just flailing about. If peak power is expensive, make it easier for people to put solar up and get paid for it. If nighttime power is cheap, make it cheaper on the bill.
Power companies are basically complaining that arbitrage is hard. They're the ones who are in charge of their own business models, though, not me. So if they fail to adapt to the world as it stands, you'll forgive me for not feeling sympathy.
You didn't mention issues of connecting to the local grid. There may be issues adding solar to your house, relative to the transformer and neighborhood substation. That $100 may be what it cost them to adapt. Likely its a tiny fraction of the cost of dealing with customers with unusual requirements.
Almost assuredly no. There are laws in place and inspections which get done that prohibit anyone's inverters from being on when the power is off, this is to protect workers from getting shocked when a line SHOULD be down, but isn't. The inspection is simple and it's been done for many years for people who choose to install backup generators. Obviously those don't feed power back, but that leads into my next point.
If they can run 100 or 200 amp service to my house, surely they can afford a few dozen amps of power in the other direction. 100 amps * 220V = 22kW Many houses are wired for 200 amps so that's 44kW of power. Who is putting in 20kW to 40kW solar plants on their roof? A normal panel is between 200 and 400 watts. Which houses have 100 solar panels on them?
Further $100/mo times forever isn't reasonable if they only have a fixed capital cost to adapt. Again, they almost certainly don't unless everyone in the neighborhood is developing truly commercial amounts of solar and wind power. And if someone is breaking that threshold, fine I have no problems with them having to jump through hoops. They can afford it.
> For the most part, 'they' is 'us'.
It GREATLY depends on where you live. In rural areas it's a power co-op or whatever and I'm inclined to agree with just about everything you've said. But there are a lot of places where it's not a co-op and it's about someone turning a profit; for shareholders and everything.
That's a completely reasonable thing to do... You're saying you would expect them to be ready to provide electrical service at a moment's notice, 24/7, but you should only pay for the actual power you use, but not for the standby capacity?
I'd also be happy to sign a contract whereby I'm only allowed X watts of draw and no more than Y watts of feed-in such that they don't need to have much standby capacity for me. But if I do that I want to get real-time pricing on power so that when it gets cheap or negative that I can charge batteries or make ice or whatever.
To me it kind-of feels like the utilities are pushing for a heads-they-win-tails-we-lose kind of situation where you get paid "base load" wholesale for your solar even if it's at peak times, but then have to pay retail for everything.
I know a guy who used to run a power company here in Houston (we've got a utility owned grid with many retailers making use of the "last mile" to sell power) and he said that $50/MWh ($0.05/kWh) was the normal rate but on very hot days it might go as high as $1500/MWh ($1.50/kWh) as everyone scrambles to buy enough wholesale power to meet the demand of their customers.
I'm not necessarily saying that I should get the $1.50/kWh that the utility is paying the marginal producer. But it doesn't feel exactly fair that someone who is peak-shaving their load and saving the utility company from buying power at $1.50/kWh and selling it at $0.08/kWh should also have to pay a connection fee for even having solar at all.
This could really help wind and solar if these battery packs are cheap and utilities allow them to help regulate the power grid.
[0]: http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2013/08...
http://insideenergy.org/2014/08/20/the-solar-challenge-part-...
http://www.midwestenergynews.com/2014/09/02/survey-finds-cus...
But they are unlikely to prevent it. It just means their existing monopolies won't be as profitable in the future.
The SAE J1772-2009 connector specification has been added to the international IEC 62196-2 standard (1)
The SAE J1772-2009 was adopted by the car manufacturers of post-2000 electric vehicles like the third generation of the Chevrolet Volt and Nissan Leaf as the early models. The connector became standard equipment on the US-market due to the availability of charging stations with that plug type in the nation's electric vehicle network (with the help of funding such as ChargePoint America program drawing grants from provisions of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act).(1)
The Tesla charger is actually better tech:
https://transportevolved.com/2014/06/16/nissan-bmw-look-adop...
I suspect the standard will go no where as Tesla also owns more charging stations than anyone else and is expanding them constantly:
The non-standard is the Level 4 direct DC charging, which has multiple competing standards. Tesla developed their own because there wasn't a standard when they launched Model S, and they wanted a system that allowed for free DC charging for their cars.
Tesla > Cars & Oil/Gas, SpaceX Rockets > Aerospace, SpaceX Satellites > Telecom, Solar City & Tesla > Utilities
Where is the Musk for Finance and Health Care?