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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."
But all I see putting the Utilities business model in jeopardy is inept management and political pandering. Rooftop solar and battery storage cannot even begin to compete with efficient central generation and distribution. Utilities however have no incentive to run an efficient organization. For decades that have been drunk on the power of captive rate-payers, with no competitive pressure to be efficient. Rooftop solar and batteries threaten to bring that competition to the game. Modern utilities are so bloated and inefficient that the rooftop solar and battery combination is a threat despite being much less efficient. So yeah, utilities are scared, but not for the reasons, or in the manner the Solar proponents claim, but scared they will have to grow up, and abandon the monopoly model and actually run an efficient business. Competition always frightens the monopolist.
the local power company, SRP, is attempting to get permission to charge an insane amount of money for a solar home to be connected to the grid. They're trying to scare-off home solar by making it as expensive or more expensive than being grid-connected. In the middle of the desert.
If nighttime storage issues get resolved, many homes won't need to be on the grid here, as our peak power use is also the time of year with the longest daylight hours and the highest demand is in the mid-afternoon when it's hottest and the HVAC units are running. If they get solar and battery tech going well enough that we can generate all the power we need at-peak and still have enough for nighttime use, then customers won't need the power company anymore.
I am strongly considering this. I have a room that is climate-controlled but not part of the house that could be a battery and inverter room, and I've got enough land that I could install a demand-load generator if my demand or nighttime use peaks above production or storage capability. The only significant downside is that I have no natural gas service, so I would have to have fuel delivered for the generator.
If I had natural gas service I wouldn't think twice about going solar for electricity and getting off-grid for electricity service.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Do they really? The fossil fuel industry throws money around like it's confetti to undermine alternatives, but the electric companies? Do they really do any more than the usual profit-enhancing lobbying done by every government-sanctioned monopoly in the country?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Well, I'd go with something like Florida, where they're mandating a hookup to electric and water for everybody. Even if the individual has spent the resources to have it provided through alternative means.
In Arizona, the woman even had water, though the level of solar provided might not be enough, given that she was getting some electricity from the neighbors.
The officials decided it was better for her to be homeless than to live in a house without air conditioning or heating. Well, they denied knowing that she'd end up sleeping in her car when they kicked her out. Probably ended up costing the state more money in shelters and what not.
So while Florida might be like the rules for waterless urinals - plumbing code still says you have to run water there, but all you need is a valve and a capped pipe in the wall - so if you ever decide to get rid of the waterless urinal and get a water using one(or put toilets in or something), it's easy. That's a static cost.
Or if you have to have a meter and pay a monthly connection charge, even if you consume 0 kwh. Like Arizona.
I don't read AC A human right
This will revolutionize the grid. I was reading that lithium ion batteries are around $500/kWh right now wholesale (and I've seen some you can buy from China that make me believe that's roughly true). Then there's a projected cost as low as $180/kWh in about 5 years after Tesla's factory ramps up (and no doubt others start to come online).
Right now (in Ontario) I can buy peak electricity at about 13 cents per kWh and maybe 7 or 8 cents per kWh at night. Imagine a system of batteries where I buy power at night, store it, and then use that during the day. I worked the rough numbers and at today's battery prices I'd be hard pressed to get a return on my investment in 20 years, and that's only considering battery cost. However, if you use $180/kWh, suddenly you might see the payback period on a system like that drop below 10 years, and if I can do it at that price, what can a utility do with its economy of scale?
The addition of economical grid-level storage will radically change the way the utilities run their business. You won't need so much idle generating capacity such as natural gas or coal sitting around to service peak loads because you can charge up your battery banks at night using nuclear and during the day with solar and consume them during the peak periods.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Better battery technology would be an incredible benefit for some utilities. They could store some of their excess generation output at non-peak times and sell that electricity later on at times of peak demand.
Absolutely!
But... So could we. Currently, solar has become cheap enough that you can see an ROI on a grid-tie system in well under a decade (under five years if you can do most of the work yourself and just get a sign-off on final inspection from a licensed electrician). Key phrase there, however, "grid-tie" - Meaning you don't need to care whether or not your installation actually meets your home's total demand, nor do you need to care about aligning your home's production and demand curves.
In order to make going totally off-grid viable, you need the ability to cheaply and safely store somewhere in the ballpark of 100KWH (three to four days for a typical US household). Currently, that costs a small fortune in batteries, not to mention the space they take up, the weight, the outgassing, the useful lifetime, etc. If Elon turns all those problems into one pallet-sized box that sits outside your house and has one wire in from your array, and one wire out to your breaker box, all for a few grand - Suddenly a hundred million Americans have no use for the local electric company.
Germany is cloudier than Seattle and yet they're the global leader in solar power. Go figure.
Have you looked at the price of Solar these days? In bulk it's down to less than $2/watt and that includes the inverter. You can install 800w of capacity for $1200 these days (plus batteries) so you're looking at $3000-4000 for 1KW professionally installed with lead acid battery backup. I pay about $1500-1800 a year for electricity in Texas and that would cover about 70% of my peak usage and would pay for itself after the third year. Solar is good for about 18-20 years and drops below 80% of it's nameplate rating after about 25 years. After year 5 you can just take your savings and roll it in to buying additional capacity/maintenance.
moox. for a new generation.
won't need to be on the grid here
Don't worry, they'll almost certainly add being connected to the grid to be a mandatory part of the housing code or something.
The local trash monopoly did something similar. Trash service is about $60 a month, but you can take your trash to the landfill for $15 per ton. Some people were opting to take their trash to the landfill. So the trash company, which works under city contract, got the city to condemn houses which were using the competitive service. This happened to one of my rent houses. I had to pay $800 in back trash payments to get the house uncondemned and the tenants had to pay stiff fines and could have gone to jail for "creating unsanitary conditions". ie, for disposing of their trash through a competing trash service.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
yes they do. Around here you can not legally live in your home if you do not have electrical service at your home. it specifically says, electrical utility with an active account.
Also they fight like hell to make it illegal for solar installations to have grid interties.
They dont want you to be off grid, as you dont make them money.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Want to get that law changed really quickly? Find yourself a prosecutor who grew up poor. Get that person to press charges against the power company for cutting off people's power when they fail to pay their bills, because doing so forces people to choose between committing a crime and leaving the area, which potentially constitutes election tampering. :-)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
That seems very pessimistic. Laws requiring electricity are typically to force a minimum standard of living
Then a home solar installation should satisfy that standard, no?
Not to mention, some people consider not having electricity as a higher quality of life. Should we force the Amish to stay up late watching TV just because most Americans feel horrified that someone, somewhere might not know the latest news about the Kardashians?
pushing power to the grid is a matter of complexity and annoyance rather than greed.
Complexity? Fire up a generator at home. Use a double-male plug to connect it to an outlet. Congrats, you've just backfed power to the grid. In fact, it counts as so easy, doing what I just described actually breaks the law and makes you liable if a lineman gets injured or killed because of you (thus all grid-tie inverters either have anti-islanding protection, or a hard physical cutover).
The complexity comes entirely from billing. Suddenly, your net power usage for the month no longer accurately describes your real use of the grid. Since your local electric company doesn't care where you get your power (you pay them for transmission, the actual cost of the electric supply gets billed through them but they don't keep it), this reduces to a simple matter of greed - They have no motivation to fix their own shortcomings because they won't make any more than they would by simply blocking end-user generation.
I suppose you could fairly call that "annoyance", but y'know what? I really don't care in the least about whether the likes of PG&E or CalEd find my choices convenient. Though a utility, they still count as a for-profit company - They can either provide what the customers want, or the customers will find alternatives.
Just randomly connecting to the grid and backfeeding power causes real problems (i.e. your generator electronics get fried, you can electrocute the guy trying to fix a power outage, etc.). You need special equipment to make sure there are no phase mismatches, it needs to detach itself from the grid if the grid-side drops in a power outage, and you need a new meter.
Then a home solar installation should satisfy that standard, no?
The issue isn't individuals, but the broader society. If we allow only those who can afford electricity or solar to have it, the poorer segments are deprived and that ends up hurting everybody.
Basic services are provided to just about everyone. Electric companies are regulated and have been quasi-monopolies because having 15 separate power grids running around town is wasteful. By allowing a single company to server a broader area they can amortize the costs of the more expense areas against the lower cost areas and give everyone access to the basic services. It's the franchise model that works well at getting widespread deployment but once that's done becomes a hindrance to innovation (i.e. cable companies).
The problem is that if the rich areas start being able to mostly go off grid, the franchise provider is now screwed having to provide to the high cost areas while still also serving the low cost areas, but receiving much smaller revenue due to the roof top solar/batteries cutting usage of the grid.
It's a macro-economics and social situation we're going to see more of as disruptive technologies challenge the entrenched franchises. Killing the franchises outright is bad, but not innovating and moving forward is bad too.
How to move forward right now is the question.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Yes, and? The Electric companies have no love of coal or anything else. They'll make power however it's cheapest to make it, limited in their ability to switch to new powerplants by the NIMBY problem, and limited in their ability to improve existing plants by the crazy perverse incentives in the environmental regs in most places. Natural gas is incredibly cheap right now, and generating would switch to it completely if it were practical.
(I had college roommate who was an environmental engineer who worked for a while in this area. It drove him out of the field - you can't improve anything, even simple cheap ways to dramatically reduce smokestack pollution, without losing the "grandfathering" and having to pay more than the plant is worth to completely modernize every single component. And what's worse, the requirements for new plants weren't "get emissions below X" , they were often "you must use this exact emission control device, coincidentally manufactured primarily by someone close to the lawmaker at the time the law was made".)
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
"Right now, most people could honestly see a lot more savings/return on investment by reducing their power consumption before even thinking about any of this stuff."
As a homeowner with a PV installation that provides 2/3 of my power usage, that's exactly what I did first before my solar installation. My power usage is HALF of what it was 7 years ago. Without going all-out on efficiency I would have had to spend double on my PV system. I have high efficiency AC units, lots of insulation, Energy Star appliances and lots of LED and CFL bulbs. I will eventually reach 100% solar generation though efficiency gains. I just replaced my 10 year old plasma with a modern LED backlit LCD. Of the approximate 4,000 KWH deficit I run annually, the TV upgrade alone will eliminate 2000 KWH of usage.
After that, when my 2nd water heater dies (I have 2: one is solar, the other electric resistive) I will replace it with something more efficient; either a second solar unit, an instant-on unit or a heat pump unit. I also still have about 40 light fixtures in the house that are not yet LEDs. Finally whenever my dryer bites the dust, which will likely be years from now, I will buy a heat-pump style dryer (which will be available in the US starting in 2015) which uses 1/2 the energy of a conventional dryer by recycling waste heat.
My net electric bill for 2014 will be less than $500--down from $3200. I expect it to be less than $250 in 2015, near to zero by 2016 and a surplus not to long after that.