Tesla CTO: Batteries and Solar Will Lead to Cheap Electricity Within 10 Years | Hacker News Reader

Tesla CTO: Batteries and Solar Will Lead to Cheap Electricity Within 10 Years

forbes.com

109 pointsprostoalex61 comments

> Straubel ended his talk with a slide that featured a quote from Sheikh Yamani, a former Saudi oil minister: "The stone age came to an end not for lack of stones. And the oil age will come to an end not for lack of oil."

I remember when calling long distance was a big deal. It cost real money, and multiple big companies specialized in it and competed fiercely. Today for Internet connected folks, long distance phone calling is too cheap to meter.

It's not just that the price fell, although it did. It's that better technologies came along--cell phones and Internet--and the remaining cost of long distance just become embedded in them.

It's interesting to think of where energy generation or storage costs might become embedded. Homes? Cars? Appliances?

How much energy storage do you have in your house right now? Looking around right now, I've got 3 laptops, 2 tablets, and a smartphone in view. We're slowly accumulating watt-hours, just as a side effect of buying mobility.

I anxiously await the plucky zoning committee that decides to make it a zoning requirement that all new roofs must be made of solar panels.

If I were mayor, I would require new construction to have 1kw of grid intertied solar per unit.

and then most city will burn down because once a unit is on fire, there is no reliable way (yet!) to have firefighter safely turn panels down to avoid electrocution. especially damaged solar cells that can produce energy while being shorted as contacts melt

distributed solar is nice and dandy but it does have some share of problems to solve before becoming viable.

a solar concentrator in the desert, on the other hand...

A 1kW system is horribly inefficient. That's 4 modules, which even in series is not going to get you to grid voltage so you will have to use costly microinverters. Plus you have all the fixed costs of installation, inspection, switchgear, etc. that has to be amortized over a tiny amount of power. Silly. For most circumstances, 4-5kW is going to be the minimum economical installation. There are many people who know how to evaluate a particular site and customer needs to figure out what is and is not economical and how to accomplish that. The mayor, and you, probably are not among them.

This is why politicians need to stay away and let the market do its job. It's too easy to let ignorance or some temporary set of circumstances lead you to impose costly and harmful regulations with far-reaching effects.

> horribly inefficient

No. And I wasn't making a spec. I'd be optimizing for something else, installed base, know how and a population of contractors kickstarted into action. This was a minimum, not forcing people to ONLY install 1kw.

http://www.wholesalesolar.com/1977311/astronergy/solar-panel...

If we are arguing over buck or boost when it comes to solar penetration we arguing at the wrong abstraction level.

Palo Alto is already trying it

http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2015/04/13/palo-alto-set-...

If you're a house owner in California, what economic motivation is there to not do it?

Falling solar costs. Next year's deal will be even better than this year's deal. And so on.

I'm a home owner in California, and have no south-facing roof, plus a shady lot.

I don't use a ton of electricity so right now if i lease I save like $15 a month.. Not worth being tied into a 20 year lease. If I buy I think my payback is like 8 years which isn't bad just not worth it yet for me.

I'm betting on panel prices will continue to decrease in cost and become more efficient so the cost of buying them is more like 10k and not 25k where it is about now.

In most of Australia, while on new properties you don't have the include solar panels specifically, you do have do meet a particular energy rating. The easy ways of doing this are heaps of insulation, solar panels, and solar hot water. Also, water tanks and water-saving shower heads are mandatory.

It's the same in Germany. Almost every new home has solar panels on the roof. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energieeinsparverordnung

Great points, but about energy storage in the home, mentioning tablets and smartphones, those are insanely negligible. An iPhone has about a 6 watthour battery. A large TV uses about 240 watts, so hooking up your iPhone to just your TV gets you about 90 seconds of power. A typical 1000+ watt coffee maker or microwave or toaster won't even be able to make you coffee or hot water or toast because the iPhone's battery lasts about 20 seconds.

That's why the whole Tesla car battery and home battery is interesting, because the latest Teslas have about 80000 watt hour batteries, or the equivalent of having 13 thousand iPhone batteries in your garage, and the powerwall batteries they sell each have the capacity of about 1500 iPhones. If everyone had such an electric car and battery pack, intermittent sustainable energy would make a lot more sense, but phones and tablets aren't going to play any role in energy storage. Laptops with 100 wh+ batteries could play a tiny tiny role, but that market is all going fanless on ever more powerful and efficient mobile chips, so I don't see that happening either.

Utility grade solar already has a less then 8 year payback. For profit companies are setting up money making solar plants in the SW right now. Solar here. I applaud the Saudis for shutting off fracking in US. It was kinda like a fever that cleared the system of pathogens.

You are wrong on the Saudis: lowering the price of oil had the main effect of making most energy alternatives less interesting in the near future, effectively buying them some extra time.

It also had the effect of making fracking too expensive, but I bet they didn't care much about it.

> lowering the price of oil had the main effect of making most energy alternatives less interesting in the near future

Only for vehicles; oil is not fungible between utility and transportation energy needs. Solar and wind compete against coal and natural gas (I concede natural gas prices are a function of US fracking, but natgas pricing has always been highly variable in the US).

Saudi Arabia hasn't shut off fracking in the US in any respect.

As of July 3rd, US crude oil production was 9.6 million barrels per day. The highest in at least 32 years. This is one year after the price of oil began to plunge. Since December / January, when oil particularly got cheaper, US crude production has expanded another 5%.

In fact, the Saudis have accomplished the effect of forcing US companies to innovate and make fracking even cheaper. What people seem to fail to understand about fracking, is that it's a shift in technology, not a temporary blip. It will continue to get cheaper and more efficient, and it will spread globally, leading to a wave of oil for decades. Just wait until you see what US frackers can do in Mexico with a liberalized oil market there.

As an example of technology making fracking cheaper, meet re-fracking:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-06/refracking...

What is the rate of exploration and drilling? Surely that has slowed. Also, what about natural gas?

The US was able to ramp up the shale / fracking oil boom and nearly double production in just seven years. It's a key that can be turned at any time if oil goes above a certain level. Exploration isn't an issue, they know where the oil is, and can tap into it at any time. Take for example the Spraberry/Wolfcamp field in Texas, it's almost entirely untouched, and is one of the world's largest oil fields.

Natural gas has a massive, perpetual domestic demand basis. That isn't going to change unless the price of natural gas goes up three or four fold from here. Coal plants are being shuttered, coal has gone from ~45% to ~30% of US energy production in a decade, while natural gas has become the #1 energy supplier in the US.

The US has essentially infinite natural gas, as far as consumption in the next hundred years is concerned. It's a non-issue in any direction.

Counting new rigs/new investment is much better metric, and rig counts have responded to pricing pressure by stopping drilling. Counting current crude is just measuring what happened before the Saudis dropped the prices.

Most fracking companies are pretty bloated right now and they have plenty of things they can do to improve returns w/o new tech. But lower gas prices means higher risk - thus less investment.

It's not a better metric. The only metric that matters, is output. The US is producing one million more barrels per day than a year ago. The only thing the reduction in rigs will cause, is slowing down growth.

The Saudis weren't the primary cause of the price drop anyway. The US dollar going on its greatest run in decades is what broke the price of oil. The strong dollar also caused the low price of oil in the late 1990s. The US dollar is the only thing that coincides with the drop in the price of oil. Global oil production had been in significant over-production for years prior to the price falling.

New sites have high upfront capital costs, so even if they are losing money on each barrel they are losing less money than if they just stopped. Therefore no, output isn't the only thing that matters.

Then why are all the analysts fixated on supply-demand mechanics? Do you have further readings about the correlation between USD and the price of crude? I'm very interested.

Drilling a well takes a long time, and it typically is not worth stopping part way. So it takes a long time for output to respond to price signals.

Most of the increased capacity is due to wells that were started before the prices dropped. You'll see the output dropping once those wells start tapering off, and no new ones are coming online to keep up the supply.

Those operations are running heavily on borrowed money. They're currently trying to make their loan payments by increasing production, which drives the oil prices down still further.

The smaller operators are.

Pioneer, Apache, EOG, Continental, Concho, etc - along with a few majors that are involved - will withstand the oil decline. More specifically, they'll gobble up the smaller debt-ridden players as they collapse, accumulating vast resources for pennies on the dollar.

If someone like EOG tips over, a major like Exxon will scoop them up in the same way. Exxon would love to continue boosting its domestic holdings (after making a few big bakken acquisitions previously). Exxon for example has managed to drop its bakken production costs by 25% in less than five years.

Indeed, this process will lower the cost level US oil can be produced at even further. When the debt heavy players collapse, their existing property and assets will be liquidated for cheap, bringing down the cost for the acquirer - they won't have to pay a premium for the assets. Debt makes the net operational costs higher; if you wipe it out in bankruptcies, the total industry production costs will fall proportionally.

Simultaneously, the producers are getting a lot more production per rig. In the bakken, the average new well production has increased from 200 barrels per day to 600, in five years.

I'm not entirely sure about that being the Saudi's move. I suspect they cut a deal with the US to destabilize the Russian economy (remember that at the time when a lot of the big changes were being implemented by Saudi Arabia, Russia was using oil money to fund some aggressive moves in the ex-Soviet bloc). Fracking cutbacks in the US may have been one of the things the US traded for that.

I have a startup in solar software, and the big thing that I don't think people here realize is that 64% of the installed cost of solar in the U.S. is soft costs (i.e. not hardware)[1]. The industry is incredibly inefficient when it comes to customer acquisition, marketing, distribution, project development, permitting, monitoring, analytics. etc. There's a huge effort by the DOE[2] and the industry itself[3] to attack soft costs with software and process improvements. The vast majority of innovation in solar over the next decade will be in software.

However, strangely, much of the startup community remains uninvolved. Why? The solar industry is expected to grow by 100-200x over the next 30-40 years[4], even when it's already a $14 billion dollar industry[5]. And yet, this week in SF, there's a huge solar conference[6], and I personally know most of the software companies there (there's only a few dozen of us). Why isn't more of the startup community coming in an "disrupting" solar software along side us? We just got $100k in free money from the DOE. We closed a seed round in less than 6 weeks. Pretty much every solar software company we know (including us) is hiring. Yet when I go to normal bay area startup events, no one there has any any clue that solar is taking off like a rocket ship and their biggest pain points right now are completely solvable with software.

Come join us. In the last few years, the solar industry reached "grid parity", which means that the unsubsidized installed cost is now cheaper than buying power from the grid. That's why this industry is the fastest growing industry in the country. This isn't some subsidy-dependent industry anymore. We work hard and we make real money (while conveniently also saving the planet).

[1]: http://energy.gov/eere/sunshot/reducing-non-hardware-costs

[2]: http://energy.gov/eere/sunshot/soft-costs

[3]: http://www.solarindustrymag.com/e107_plugins/content/content...

[4]: http://www.pvsolarreport.com/the-next-internet/

[5]: http://www.seia.org/research-resources/solar-industry-data

[6]: https://www.intersolar.us/en/home.html

>their biggest pain points right now are completely solvable with software.

What pain points are those?

"customer acquisition, marketing, distribution, project development, permitting, monitoring, analytics. etc."

(I'm not vouching for this, I have no personal experience.)

Yep, you'd be amazed at how much solar work is still done in Excel and on pen and paper.

I imagine most contractors for all forms of construction are still working on paper or in spreadsheets. What makes solar so different that some organizational software will slash consumer prices? I guess from a sales, customer acquisition, permitting point of view at least.

I guess if we are talking advanced mathematics to pick out optimal installation patterns and angles (for fixed position panels), maybe this is where the software would be useful.

Cool, I have a friend working here http://www.3megawatt.com in Munich. I had few discussions with him about their analytics solution and the solar industry in this regard - very interesting stuff. It looks like a lot of value for the solar industry would be just in copying existing solutions in other sectors into this one. I mean, analytics and finance (accruals) is a (partially) solved problem in many industries, but not in solar. They were now talking to rebuild their software infrastructure in Django, maybe I should join them.

You should definitely consider joining them! We aren't going to find enough talent from within the existing energy industry, so we'd love to have people come in from outside.

How does it differ from other countries? I've heard Germany's installation costs per watt are about 60% of the US rate, even though they access mostly the same market to procure panels, and that their customer aquisition, marketing costs etc are much lower. I guess some of it has to do with a national feed in tariff that generates a ton of easy inbound leads, but I'd love to hear the subtleties. (what is your startup btw)

Great question. I'm not sure. Most of the research I've seen on this subject compares the U.S. and Germany.

http://emp.lbl.gov/sites/all/files/german-us-pv-price-ppt.pd...

My startup is UtilityAPI.com.

Thanks for the links, I was thinking about getting into Solar Energy Industry for a while now.

Sent an email to your startup's info address.

Are you open to remote workers?

Its an interesting proposition, although I'm not sure that you can really make that leap with just solar, wind, and batteries. There is a lot of base load to make up for.

I could see however individual houses become independent of the grid. And that will have tremendous benefits when things like storms hit, no longer knocking out power to residents, simply factories and office buildings and street lights. Presumably with a more simplified infrastructure that could be protected and repaired more easily.

[side note the unexpurgated page had 150+ tracking tools attempt to load according to ghostery! That is a record for me so far.]

It's just about do-able, people have done studies on total de-carbonisation that would involve shifting all cars to electric or bio-based fuels for example, not just the electricity generation side of things. The big hold up is finding political will to stop subsidizing fossil fuels and let the new tech compete on a free market basis (not the free- but lets pretend externalities don't exist market), but the ball has started rolling now so things should be interesting over the next decade as public opinion and lobbyist dollars find themselves shifting more to one side.

We are in desperate, desperate need of more decentralization in our core infrastructures, to the point that this libertarian could see his way clear to agreeing not to grouse about subsidies for technology that's already cost-effective if it will accomplish more decentralization. As nifty as the "big solar plants" are in some ways, installing 10,000 acres of solar in the middle of the desert isn't really "decentralization".

(I was much grumpier about subsidizing things that couldn't stand on their own economically as there's a lot more economic waste and false investments that occur, but if solar can already stand on its own two feet and the we collectively tip some money into the kitty to get it out there faster the waste is far less, and the societal benefit far greater.)

Almost none of the solar installations today can run with the grid down. Almost all are grid-tie because it is thousands of dollars cheaper.

Hmm, while your statement is technically correct it is also ignoring all of the hype around Tesla's "whole house battery" technology which is, as part of its positioning in the market, turning grid tied installations into more stand alone installations. And yes, it is "thousands of dollars" cheaper to do a grid tie system, and yet the regulatory changes are making it harder on home solar systems to recover costs (mostly because it shifts peak load costs toward the utility and away from the individual rate payer, the utilities are trying to avoid that).

And the article is discussing a "future" world where almost all individual houses are not grid tied, rather they are perhaps grid backed up, in the event that there isn't enough solar or wind to keep their house batteries up.

So in that world, where folks are converting their "old" grid tied system to the "new" grid independent systems, it is going to change other parts of the community that break when external events disrupt the grid. That will mean that communities will be less impacted by the "grid" getting knocked off line by a hurricane because their normal mode will be to not be on that grid. And that has some positive implications for community planners.

I think it is time for JB to take over as CEO so that Elon can spend more time at SpaceX (and still be chairman of Tesla).

I don't think that's going to happen until the Model 3 is launched.

Elon was asked about a replacement CEO in late 2014, he stated that there currently was no one in mind, and that the plan was to stay on as CEO till volume production of Model 3 and the Gigafactory, and then evaluate [1]. Of course, he may not have been at liberty to say the person in mind.

[1] https://youtu.be/FE4iFYqi4QU?t=7m25s

Electricity will become cheaper thanks to renewable energies (Solar, Wind...) and energy storage improvements (Batteries). But, I think we should point out that those energies represent large investments at first. For instance, building solar electricity plants is very expensive, the same way as Wind power. Germany is a good example: they stopped nuclear plants to increase their renewable energy production but costs of electricity increased a lot there. I'd say electricity costs will go up first (because of high investments) and then will decrease.

The cost of solar production is highly dependent on geography, and in some places, like California, Nevada or Arizona deserts cheap land and good weather allows for massive economies of scale https://gigaom.com/2015/01/20/a-special-report-the-rise-of-a...

Countries with sunny deserts do get an economic edge on this one though compared to overcast, densely populated countries http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-15/acwa-power...

But there's no turning back - once the newcomer into space gets a massive economic advantage by having access to cheap energy, they attract industries that are relying on cheap energy, and soon those market participants overrun their competitors whose cost structure includes higher energy costs.

Solar plants are completely unnecessary as solar panels can be distributed to wherever the power is needed. The grid will be obsolete before long.

> But, I think we should point out that those energies represent large investments at first.

I think that's part of what Musk is saying will no longer be true in the near future.

Electricity already is very cheap. But I'm happy to know that it will be even cheaper, and cleaner.

Does anyone know what's the latest news about long-distance superconducting cables?

Still no, still working on it. Progress is being made but I'd still characterize it as "don't hold your breath, but we'll probably get it someday".

Its waiting on room temp superconductors I believe. Otherwise you have to cool a 1000km of cable and of course the material needs to be reasonable ductable. And dont hold your breath on room temperature superconductors, it may not even be possible...

Anyone done a DIY solar installation recently? any links/pointers? What's the cheapest way to put this together? Are microinverters worth it? I am thinking of starting with a few 250w panels on my outhouse

No particular tips on how to do it; but at least make sure you don't put too many in serial if you're at all concerned about fire safety.

My father was once involved in a big lawsuit over fires caused by faulty junction boxes and he swore he'd never let the total wattage exceed say 500, max 800, or so watts for panels installed on a house.

After all; it only takes a single slightly faulty contact and you essentially have an improvised arc welder on the top of your roof.

More generally, you need to be aware of the ratings and proper installation methods for the equipment and materials you are using. Nearly all PV modules today are rated for a 600V system voltage, as are most combiner boxes and common wire types. Not all breakers are, though! Higher voltage requires higher-rated and sometimes more expensive equipment as well as more careful work, but it allows longer wire runs with less copper which saves money, and it may enable you to use more efficient equipment as well. All depends on what you're trying to accomplish. If you aren't comfortable doing a 600V (or 300V, or 150V) wiring job, you need to weigh the disadvantages of lower system voltages (less flexible, more costly to wire, limited options for batteries and other equipment) against the cost of hiring someone qualified to do the work.

I don't subscribe to the idea that a rooftop system should be limited to 800W. An 800W system is not viable for grid-tied use (with modern modules you're looking at 3 modules in series which will not even give you 120V much less the required 340 or 480 to do proper grid-tied installation), and will not be cost-effective for an off-grid application unless you have a very small house, minimal power needs, and have a sunny climate year-round.

Know your needs. Know your abilities. Know your equipment. Safety first should not be in conflict with building a cost-effective system that meets your needs; if you can't figure out how to do so properly, hire someone who knows!

I'm not that up to date on the whole solar thing but I guess he then probably recommended not exceeding 600V (not W) for private uses.

The lawsuits were over high end equipment with higher ratings (I'm guessing voltage-wise) that had a small possible weakness which, when combined with installation which was too rough, ended up causing fires in hay-barns all over France.

You need to start by understanding your needs. What are you going to use the power for? Is this a year-round or seasonal application? What is your climate like? Are your rooftops structurally suitable and do they face the equator? If not, what land is available, what direction does it face, and is it shade-free? Do you also have other sources of electricity; if so, what are they? Do you plan to keep/expand/get rid of them? Will your PV installation be tied into a larger electrical system (and/or the grid) or provide standalone power for specific loads? How much power will you need, and how will your usage be distributed throughout the day/year? Are permits and/or inspections required where you live? If so, which parts will you DIY vs. hire out, and what research, supplies, tools, and materials will be required to do the work in a way that will pass inspection?

Once you have some answers there, you can start figuring out what kind of equipment could meet your needs and pricing it out. "I want solar!" is not a constructive way to look at anything; it's a great way to waste a bunch of money on something that will end up not giving you what you want/need. Asking here is not the way to get this done; realistically you have at least several dozen hours of research ahead of you, much more if you are off-grid or really want to do every piece of the work yourself.

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