Tesla battery storage will accelerate exit of coal generators

I find it fascinating, that, by 2017, there will be areas in Hawaii and Australia, in which you can make an argument that Solar Power is now less expensive that grid power.

What these authors seem to fail to recognize (or highlight) in their criticism - is that these lines are being crossed 10-15 years ahead of time. Nobody expected parity on these edge cases until at least 2025-2030, and we're going to see it in 2016.

And, what they also seem to fail to recognize, is that the curves for solar are going down. This is just the start.

But the economies break down slightly if you are not paying 10c/kWh for electricity. In Australia we pay more than double that, even taking currency exchange into account.

Also, we have to pay a 70-80c AUD "connection charge" for the privilege of paying them for electricity.

Basically, while prices are falling slightly, they won't forever.

I agree that letting others take the risk early on, and hopefully push the storage price down, is a good move though.

No doubt battery technology is important for the management of the power grid of the future, but at this time the average homeowner should let the big power generation utilities take the risks and bear the costs of perfecting the technology."

cough .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003 .. cough

If you run the numbers, the battery slightly decreases the payback time for that system to ~7 years vs 7.5 with the panels alone. However, once its paid off, it could save almost $1000 a year if you live in somewhere like Sydney. This does make the big assumption that you store the electricity and use it optimally, but it's not unreasonable.

I would argue that in this case, it's definitely worth buying.

http://www.eevblog.com/2015/03/16/eevblog-724-home-solar-pow...

To add more to the energy debate, I haven't seen too many people talk about replacing ships fuel, since that accounts for ~20% of our CO2 pollution, from sources I read a few years back.

Maybe replacing our grid and all grids is a feasible goal which is why companies are tackling it now?

Trucks, ships, and rockets consume a lot of fuel and are horrible polluters. When we can replace perishables fuels with renewables we will finally see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Although the author has 'corrected' his numbers, he has not modified his conclusions. Someone who does that is not worth paying attention to.

I would like to read a sober and accurate accurate article on Tesla's powerwall, this one is not.

While change is happening and change in inevitable I think you're greatly overestimating the rate of the change and badly misunderstanding the quality.

The majority of energy usage is in commercial processes - factories and commercial buildings.

Think about an airline. To make money it has to fly when it's customers want to take a flight - not when the spot price of jet fuel is advantageous. An airline which flew when the price of flying was cheap would attract a niche market of price sensitive travellers. Everyone else wants the flight at a set time.

The same goes for industrial production. If you spend money building a large commercial business which has specific energy needs, you want that asset producing a return as close as possible to 24x7x365. There are very few types of industry that lend themselves to batch production (which implies spending capital to create overcapacity to absorb spikes).

The need for baseload generation is not going anywhere. The more advanced and productive the society, the higher the need for baseload power.

Tesla cars are warrantied the same way. He over promises now to get traction, then uses the profit at volume to cover any gaps in initial deployments. It's a pretty solid plan, but you have to deliver or you lose your reputation. Musk knows he can do it.

Musk's batteries are the entire definition of a disruptive product. They're certainly not better than most energy solutions, but it'll be cheap and useful for a non-trivial sector of the market.

We haven't even begun to see the real advances in economies of scale for batteries, let alone the technologies that have been in development in the last decade.

Look at this chart for a coal company[1]. It's already been almost dead and a major chunk of the coal GHG emissions are already cut way back (albeit at the expense of natural gas emissions).

http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=ACI+Interactive#{"range":...

It is only expensive in places where the government has decided to force it out of business via taxes and regulations. That's not true for most of the world, and the future of coal production is certainly up.

What? Your ordinary starting battery for a medium-sized car has 65 Ah @ 12 V. That is 780 wH. They cost here < 60 € or about 65 $.

So they are significantly less than $100/kWh, and the technology has been around for more than a hundred years.

(These are starting batteries, not entirely suitable for storing e.g. solar which are currently a bit more expensive, but not nearly twice as expensive, and the difference in price comes just from manufacturing and sales volume).

Considering there's 3 year old Teslas that are still running with 80%+ capacity, I'd say that yes, they can manage to last more than two years.

The definition is the relevant one for the context. The definition of affordable here is relative to the people who may buy it. If it is affordable for >50% of new homebuilders in US, Europe, Japan, etc, and for the minority middle classes in middle income countries (china, Brazil..) then it is "affordable" in the context that we are talking about.