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.
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.
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.