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Why Elon Musk's Batteries Frighten Electric Companies
JoeyRox writes: The publicized goal of Tesla's "gigafactory" is to make electric cars more affordable. However, that benefit may soon be eclipsed by the gigafactory's impact on roof-top solar power storage costs, putting the business model of utilities in peril. "The mortal threat that ever cheaper on-site renewables pose" comes from systems that include storage, said physicist Amory Lovins. "That is an unregulated product you can buy at Home Depot that leaves the old business model with no place to hide."
Still, the Edison Electric Institute, a trade group representing America’s investor-owned utilities, recently announced that its members will help to encourage electric vehicle use by spending $50 million annually to buy plug-in service trucks and invest in car-charging technology. “Advancing plug-in electric vehicles and technologies is an industry priority,” said EEI President Thomas Kuhn.
Uh, "advancing as a priority" is actually the opposite of fear.
Southern California Edison is planning to spend about $9.2 billion through 2017 to allow the two-way flow of electricity on its system, said Edison International CEO Ted Craver. “We are certainly big supporters of electric transportation,” Craver said. He added: “That electric car isn’t just going to stay at home. It’s going to go other places. It’s going to need to get charged in other places. And I think our ability to provide that glue for all those things that are going to plug into that network is really how we see our core business.”
Again, sounds positive. Actually the only negative thing in the article is that electric cars might cause a load our infrastructure isn't ready for -- to the contrary a solar charging station in the home would mitigate this. Is the new journalism format to title your articles with a thesis directly contrary to all the actual evidence you're about to present?
My work here is dung.
A solar array and grid tie inverter are expensive enough at the moment that a good portion of the developed world only has enough sunlight to get a ROI in 7-10yrs. That's a lot of electric bills to pay up front. Even with a dramatically reduced rate on batteries it will still at another good chunk to the investment and you need to upgrade to a more expensive inverter or as TFS suggests (by referencing an unregulated product) you could go without connecting to the grid, in which case you only get a return on the electricity you use. The rest of the potential energy production is wasted.
The economics make going fully solar a reasonable sacrifice for those who want to lower their environmental impact but it's not going to attract anyone who isn't willing to put their money where their mouth is. I hope that changes, and cheaper batteries will help, but I think we're several years out before solar is a good investment and several years past that before it's an investment most will be willing to afford.
When the economics of solar do swing that direction, the smart utility companies will be the first to jump on board and their advantage of scale will still give them an advantage. They are not shaking in their boots.
it costs them? You have ZERO clue how electricity works or solar grid syncing systems work?
I pay 100% of the equipment costs, I pay 100% of the installation costs, I pay 100% of the inspections and certifications. they pay NOTHING. Then they get to resell my power to my neighbors. Their meter does not run backwards to give me any credits. They do nothing at all.
I strongly suggest that you learn about what you are spouting off about before you open your mouth and sound like a complete and utter fool to the rest of us that actually have solar installations.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The Edison Electric institute is a trade group for electric utilities. They published this report in January of 2013.
http://www.eei.org/ourissues/f...
That report changed the attitudes of a huge number of electric utility executives. Before this report, I would describe most electric utility executives as indifferent to solar PV. They viewed it as a marginal technology and that it would probably always be a bit-player. After that report, pretty much none of them feel this way. Many executives at electric utilities are terrified of solar and are spending significant amounts of money lobbying against it.
If that's really all true and you're not exaggerating or bending anything, that's flat out mega-corruption - how do you UNcondemn a house, if no changes whatsoever were made to the structure?
Have you considered getting a lawyer, or at least giving this story to a newspaper? I know it was only "$800", but if they get away with that today, then tomorrow, who knows.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
No they dont. They do not install a special substation to handle my solar power, in fact they do nothing at all.
Connections to a solar home and a non solar home are 100% identical. In fact my connection is well over 25 years old and my solar install is less than 5. They changed nothing at all. when I installed the system they did not even turn off the power. just the main house breaker for 5 minutes by the electrician when he tied everything together.
Whoever is telling you they have to install "special" equipment on the power grid to support solar home installations is making things up.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
One of the things that has been driving battery development is size and weight. Basically the higher the power density the cooler the iPhone. But with a house you don't really care if the battery is the size of a deep freeze as long as it does its job. This is not entirely true in that shipping and installation are a bit of a concern but once there most people won't care.
;thus house batteries not only benefit from the car battery research but can use low power density discoveries that cars might not readily use.
What an ideal house battery will have is long term durability (20+ years), very low maintenance, and very low cost per Kwh.
These are close to what researchers are looking for with car batteries
But where this all gets interesting is that the economics look very bad for the power companies if only a few percent of customers are able to abandon the grid. Typically those who can abandon the grid will be private homes owned by slightly wealthier people. These are easy and typically profitable customers to service so losing many of them will see profits vanish while not seeing infrastructure costs drop significantly (you still have to run power past their houses).
But the power companies are facing all kinds of much more subtle problems. For instance people generally hate the power company, thus they will typically enjoy screwing them over if the costs are roughly equal. Also people like going green which means that they are willing to endure minor hardships to go off grid (appeals to boomers). Lastly as boomers are heading into retirement one of the most important things is to nail down a budget. Energy costs can be unpredictable and so installing a fully off grid system could result in a near perfect guaranteed energy cost.
Going forward people are also going to have more and more electric cars. A full solar system with large batteries will potentially mean little or no energy costs when running a car. This again will appeal to people on a fixed budget as they can then watch gas prices go up and down and simply not care.
But the economics are very interesting. If the power company loses 5% of their customers that will almost translate to a 5% drop in revenue with only a tiny drop in costs. This could then start a vicious cycle where they try to make up for it with higher rates which drives away customers and so on. This could spiral until the only people still on the grid are those who can't go solar because of too high a demand for too little surface area (tall buildings) or simply don't have the capital wealth to finance the upgrade (poor people).
Some people have commented that some factories can't go off grid but this is a fallacy in that other than the heaviest of heavy industry most factories could easily meet their energy needs with a solar system combined with some local generation. The key to the local generation making sense is if the above vicious circle were to drive up electrical prices local generation would make sense for a growing number of situations.
There is a great historical precedent for this. Horses in large cities. Basically if in 1880 you drove your buggy into any large city you weren't alone and there were plenty of services available. But once the car began to take over and the richer made the switch it not only ate into the customer base a bit but it caused many horse service companies to no longer be able to justify the lower profit use of such prime downtown real-estate. So as more and more horse servicing companies closed it became more difficult to have a horse in a big city. Then the city officials realized that horses sort of sucked (cleaning horse poop and dead horses from the streets isn't cheap) so they began to push them out. Horses continued in the countryside for decades longer but in the cities the horses were mostly gone very very quickly. So one cannot simply compare the costs of a horse to a car and make a prediction. It becomes the whole situation from psychology to short ter