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Elon Musk's SolarCity Offering To Build Cities, Businesses Their Own Grids
Lucas123 writes Rooftop solar distributor SolarCity announced a new service where it will build a centrally-controllable power grid for cities, business campuses and even islands. Marketing its GridLogic service by calling attention to the recent uptick in natural disasters and the extended power outages that resulted from them, SolarCity said its "microgrids" are fully independent power infrastructures fed by solar panels with lithium-ion backup batteries (courtesy of Tesla). SolarCity claims its GridLogic program can provide electricity to communities and businesses for less than they pay for utility power and the facilities can still be connected to their area's utility power grid as an added backup.
Seriously, try to find something a little less toxic. You're going to destroy the environment.
If LiOn supplies are already tight how does anyone not account for that when they price out some grand new adaptation? Where are the future batteries, Obama?
Now let's see what you can deliver.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Why not the far simpler and more beneficial Grid tie syncing systems? They work great and will let the power generated spread out to others that dont have the money for a solar installation. It causes the benefits to reach out further.
Eliminate the batteries, system is simpler, and benefits more. It's a win,win,win, anger republicans which is another win.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
That would be, from the gigantic factory he's building along side Panasonic ;)
There is more than just a "green" reason to build local microgrids.
Energy Security and Grid Reliability are two.
The American electrical grid, built decades ago and in need of major upgrades, is acknowledged to be a problem moving forward with renewable energy. Utilities complain that they can't handle the load. As utilities whine about what solar and wind will do to their grids(while simultaneously poopooing renewables and how much power they can generate) SolarCity will build microgrids that will allow localized power generation and distribution, so the tender and fragile utilities-of-old won't have to be bothered by pesky solar derived electricity.
The American megagrids serve a purpose, and they should be upgraded, however we should be simultaneously building infrastructure than is localized and more robust.
Someone should not lost power because a tree fell on a line hundreds of miles away.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
For decades we were told over and over, how the utility power is a "natural monopoly" and how, therefor, it can not be subject to competition...
This nod does not seem like anything more than a fig-leaf. Because, if I my campus or block or town can connect to a utility's grid, it can also connect to another town's grid — or simply that of a different commercial power-generation provider (solar or otherwise).
Either way, the myth of natural monopoly is crumbling.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Why are they using lithium batteries? For solar you want the cheapest long lasting low cost electronics overhead solution per kWh, performance to weight or size is almost irrelevant. Lithium batteries are only the best tech for moderate to expensive portable/mobile tech and not power back up installations.
I think more solar with better tech is the future and worth investing in under many circumstances. But due to no grid tie in and the batteries i can't help but think it smacks of a crappy bundling package like you get from comcast when you just want internet and not the added junk.
Musk is promoting the use of LiOn batteries because the more they make, the cheaper they get (to a point). It's about scaling up the industry as fast and as much as possible.
Flywheel systems make more sense for power grid applications, but only marginally, and only for the specific engineering. In other words, it makes tactical sense, but Musk is in this for the long run, which requires strategic planning. These microgrids provide the quickest way to sell a lot of batteries, far more than he's selling in Tesla cars.
If his production costs come way down, so does the cost of his cars... and microgrids... and so forth. Obviously, there is a point where mass production no longer offers any savings, but we are still a LONG way from there where these battery technologies are concerned.
Oh, those batteries - they'll happen to be in swappable modules that just happen to fit Tesla automobiles. You pay for the infrastructure, Musk magically creates the 1 minute electric car fill-up.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Sub-saharan Africa.
"TAMS shouldn't be destroyed. They should just tag us before releasing us into the wild." -- Maeglin
Kind of like say building disaster proof micro grids that are not under control by government sanctioned utility monopolies? I never understood the whole low IQ concept of "we have to save it for something more important, so we shouldn't use it logic because it might get expensive".
No we should use the shit out of it to drive the price up to the stratosphere so that the market comes up with either a cheaper way to produce it or more effective technology to replace it and meet the demand.
Will you please stop with these mundane, low-hanging fruit goals and try something lofty and ambitious for once? It's always the same-old, same-old, doing-what-everyone-else is doing with you, isn't it?
"TAMS shouldn't be destroyed. They should just tag us before releasing us into the wild." -- Maeglin
They're going to be constantly replacing LiOn packs on any appreciable sized system. Why not go with a NiFe battery system that will last for fifty years? The price won't be much different, especially over the life of the system, or is the system life that short? Its not like you need to keep weight and size down in a building. Also who wants the fire risk that LiOn's pose in their business or home?
I expect the mainline utilities will fight this tooth and nail. The idea of people choosing their electrical provider or offsetting their usage seems to terrify them. Distributed generation/storage, even if it is as simple as a little 1kw wind turbine or a dozen or so solar panels is definitely going to be a significant part of our future energy generation but the only thing most of them seem to be interested in is building natural gas plants and ignoring the propensity of fossil fuel prices to fluctuate (we're currently in the low point of natural gas prices).
And why would they be doing that?
Let's say it all together now: "Li-ion != Cell phone batteries". Li-ion is a whole broad range of chemistries that follow a basic mechanism of action involving the intercalation of lithium ions on either side of a membrane. There are an incredibly wide range of anodes, cathodes, electrolytes, and membranes, and these offer widely varying performance in terms of power density, energy density, cost, cycle life, and shelf life. Cell phone and laptop batteries are li-ion batteries specifically engineered with design life deemphasized in favor of high energy density in order to keep their products small and light. They're not climate controlled and they're generally run at high depths of discharge. This is not what you do with all li-ion battery types. Where longevity is of concern, you more carefully control temperature, control charging more carefully, you have many cells in parallel that can allow for individual cell failures, you use a lower DoD, and you use a chemistry that sacrifices some energy density for greatly improved cycle life.
The exact same rules apply to NiMh. You can get NiMH with high energy density by sacrificing cycle life. A typical NiMh hybrid battery pack only achieves its lifespan by running at a tiny 20-40% DoD range.
"TAMS shouldn't be destroyed. They should just tag us before releasing us into the wild." -- Maeglin
Simple, Reuse. Its part of his business model for Tesla EVs. They intend to take old Tesla EV batteries and use them in grid storage of various types (car quick charge stations, general electrical, solar, etc). If they get major demand for these kinds of services I imagine they'll fall back to another battery technology but assuming EV's take off like some hope they will there will be A LOT of old EV battery packs that won't have the proper performance for road use but will still have years of possible service life in fixed applications.
Your cell phone is running on them. The batteries of today are the future batteries of half a decade ago, and have capabilities that would have seemed very impressive by the standards of the time.
So it will be with the batteries of tomorrow.
NiFe batteries have great longevity, but very poor performance compared to Li-ion. Lithium Ion batteries can store ten times as many watt hours per kilogram, and twenty times as many watt hours per litre. NiFe is also not any cheaper than lithium ion, and when you consider that Tesla is going to be producing a large number of "worn out" battery packs that are still perfectly usable for grid applications, NiFe will end up a bunch more expensive too.
Also, weight and size definitely do matter. Shipping stuff around isn't free, buildings have load limits, and real estate isn't cheap.
If LiOn supplies are already tight
Lithium supplies are very price elastic. When prices are low, it comes from salt deposits in Bolivia, and Chile. When the prices go up, we can extract it from brine wells. If the prices go up even more, it becomes cost effective to extract it from sea water as a byproduct of desalinating water. The oceans contain 230 billion tonnes of lithium. Extraction costs will go down as technology improves. The world is not running out of lithium.
And why would they be doing that?
Let's say it all together now: "Li-ion != Cell phone batteries". Li-ion is a whole broad range of chemistries that follow a basic mechanism of action involving the intercalation of lithium ions on either side of a membrane. There are an incredibly wide range of anodes, cathodes, electrolytes, and membranes, and these offer widely varying performance in terms of power density, energy density, cost, cycle life, and shelf life. Cell phone and laptop batteries are li-ion batteries specifically engineered with design life deemphasized in favor of high energy density in order to keep their products small and light. They're not climate controlled and they're generally run at high depths of discharge. This is not what you do with all li-ion battery types. Where longevity is of concern, you more carefully control temperature, control charging more carefully, you have many cells in parallel that can allow for individual cell failures, you use a lower DoD, and you use a chemistry that sacrifices some energy density for greatly improved cycle life.
The exact same rules apply to NiMh. You can get NiMH with high energy density by sacrificing cycle life. A typical NiMh hybrid battery pack only achieves its lifespan by running at a tiny 20-40% DoD range.
Yes but there is a reason few if any large power backups use lithium technologies of any type. Typically it is lead acids. Using a radically different lithium battery from the tesla wont reduce the cost of tesla packs much and further consumers wont like paying more money up front for less reliable and more expensive solutions just to improve Musks bottom line. Pretty much all lithium batteries are a pain in the ass to work with their main selling point is the power and energy density, both of which are useless for backup.
Go to the solar city website... I'll wait.
Ok now that you are back you probably know how solarcity works right? No? Weird because you'd think it is pretty simple.
Here is how it works, once you TALK TO THEM ON THE PHONE they will send you "do not disclose" paperwork that amounts to: You pay to install solar cells on your roof, then you pay to keep them clear of tree branches etc, then you buy electricity from the solar cells at slightly higher than municipal power rates, then you buy the rest of your power from the municipality or other provider at the normal price. Then they uninstall them 20 years later for free.
100% of tax credits go to Solar City.
I really don't understand why you would do this over green mountain or some other "renewable at a slightly higher price to make you feel better" kind of place. SolarCity is a complete rip, offering all of the disadvantages of a grid-tied solar install, with none of the advantages. For my particular area, the more power their solar cells would generate, the higher my electric bill would be.
I wonder if major innovators are safe from the inevitable enemies they will make due to change. Tesla is probably seen as the great Satan by the auto industry and now we can add in the oil and gas industries and power industries, big coal and natural gas to people who are not exactly in love with Mr. Musk. This man deserves to be protected by the secret service as he is a national treasure and in my opinion he is at risk. There are many billions of dollars involved and we have to many people devoid of conscience in our society.
They will constantly be replaceing because of the number of packs in a large system and the fact the packs are on the downside of their cycle life, and thus why they were removed from cars. NiFe doesn't really have a cycle life like LiOn does. These will be cycling daily for night discharge; this will be an issue. Why not install a low maintenance system to start with rather than be replacing battery packs constantly, or at least several times, throughout the 30 year( 10,000cycle) life of the system?
I think you just explained why lithium batteries aren't very good for backup, doubly so nearly dead ev packs. The metric to minimize is cost per kWh/year. Including maintaining them. So swapping out failing ev batteries every 1-3 years gets expensive fast compared to a bullet proof long term low maintenance battery. There is a reason so few backup power systems use lithium.
That's not true. PbA is used in the small scale but there is no standard for the large scale. Among the largest battery backups out there today are the NiCd battery backup for Fairbanks, Duke Energy's lead-acid Notrees battery, and AES's li-ion Laurel Mountain battery. Vanadium-redox is fairly common. Sodium-sulfur has some use too. There is no single standard.
And it's simply not true that "power is useless for backup". Quite to the contrary, high power output battery backups are incredibly valuable for peaking. This is especially important with renewables like solar and wind whose output can change rapidly.
"TAMS shouldn't be destroyed. They should just tag us before releasing us into the wild." -- Maeglin
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I tried to get a quote on a solar system from SolarCity for our home. They were rude, pushy, and kept insisting that I "think of SolarCity as a utility company, not an installer."
I contacted them because of Musk's association with the company. I have since decided to go DIY, and now I don't really see why "solar companies" are even necessary. Any electrician worth his salt should be able to wire and setup a solar system. The panel, inverter, and battery manufacturers are what matter.
Cost is one reason, although NiFe is already more expensive than Li-Ion, and rapidly becoming more and more so. Particularly when EV batteries are available so cheap. They also ought to last more than a year or three. NiFe's cost also needs to take into account the fact that they require a massive increase in infrastructure compared to lithium ion. What you can do with a single building worth of lithium ion batteries would require twenty buildings of NiFe batteries. That's not an insubstantial difference!
It's also worth noting that nobody uses NiFe batteries for backups either: they use lead acid. That's not a coincidence. Lead acid is still at the point where the lower costs negate the lower efficiency, although that may eventually change.
Because Elon Musk owns Tesla - and a giga factory designed to turn out LiOn batteries like Carter's churns out little pills.
I didn't mean to imply nife batteries are the answer. Merely that burnt out lithium packs pose many problems and even if initially cheap are unlikely to be cost effective in the long run. And yes those packs were only intended to run 8 years it's not just that they likely have sub 70% initial capacity - they are far more likely to fail internally and have much higher internal resistance. Lithium packs not only go bad with age but discharge cycles - they will be cycled once a day in this case making things worse. In fact lithium batteries aren't likely the best solution in general.
It isn't like it is exactly uncommon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Chile, Atacama Desert..
Whoosh, I ducked and your joke missed.
Currently a LiON system is about 3x the price of a Lead Acid installation. Granted, the LiON has a smaller physical footprint and power spec due to efficiencies in LiON tech. But 3x the cost is 3x the cost. Maybe Tesla can bring that cost down some. Otherwise doing an solar install in locations other than sunny places like Nevada/Arizona don't make economic sense.
There's also the issue of thermal runaway.
Granted, current lead-acid batteries have a thermal runaway problem, but LiON is more prone to it due to the higher energy densities involved.
Lead Acid doesn't normally light up when the casing is breached.
Look up Lithium Ion fire or cell phone battery fire online and watch videos of LiON batteries burning VERY vigorously.
What happens if a home user's $45,000 worth of LiON goes Kurgan and decides it'd rather burn out than fade away?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
It most certainly is true power per weight and volume is nearly useless for backup. The only major first order factor is cost per kWh per year. Glad to hear you say that not only are lithium batteries not really used a lot at any scale but they type used in teslas are not used at all. Thanks for agreeing.
Germany, a cloud-ridden small country which extends from 47 degrees
*northwards*, already produces tens of gigawatts of solar power.
How many of the US population live north of 47 N?
It's amazing how far behind the US is. But this is going to
change very rapidly now. Just look at the vast areas of available
land combined with sunshine hours. Texas, Arizona, New Mexico,
and I hear there's even a 'sunshine state'. We're looking at
growth rates > 50%/year over decades.
--Gerhard Wesp
Who do you work for, buddy? Just feels like you're trying to take the LiOn's share of the profits..
70% of generated power in homes goes on either heating or cooling spaces/water.
Why do we even need to convert heating? And cooling?
Why not use the sun to heat a reservoir of water and use that instead? why not do the same with cooling? keep a frozen "lake" of dunno, alcohol for example and distribute cooling to the entire community with insulated pipes.
Isn't there a more efficient way than having each home has its own heating/cooling systems and just deliver the end product to our homes? each conversion is costing us efficiency, the biggest question is - are insulated pipes efficiency losses are greater than conversion efficiencies.....
I can't be the first one who thinks about it, otherwise we're all doomed! ;-)
False. Cost per kWh can be everything or it can be utterly irrelevant, depending on the needs of the backup system. The facts that matter are the particular mix of cost per kWh AND cost per kW needed by the system. Many if not most li-ion batteries have a higher ratio of W to Wh than PbA. Hence saying that "li-ion batteries are expensive" and using a price per Wh as the basis is erroneous.
Furthermore, costs for large backups are not as simple as multiplying the cost of building things out of X number of small cells. Economies of scale come into play, shipping and housing issues come into play, heating and efficiency come more into play, environmental permitting factors come more into play, hazards come more into play, and all sorts of other factors. Many people worry about fire risks from li-ion, for example (although that's not the case with all li-ion types). But in large quantities, PbA batteries become an explosion hazard, as in some circumstances they can outgas hydrogen. Large PbA battery backups have ended in explosion before.
"TAMS shouldn't be destroyed. They should just tag us before releasing us into the wild." -- Maeglin
Tesla packs highly resistant to "failing internally". Each brick is made of dozens of cells wired in parallel. It's irrelevant if a handful of cells totally die.
The li-ion charge retention curve is usually an exponential decay. The lower the capacity of the cell gets, the slower further degradation goes. Now, in many electronic devices, it doesn't seem this way because the device is designed for a particular operational voltage range, and when the pack gets below that voltage it's totally useless. But a large-scale system engineered to use old packs and thus designed for greater voltage flexibility is not bound by this constraint.
"TAMS shouldn't be destroyed. They should just tag us before releasing us into the wild." -- Maeglin
Tesla packs highly resistant to "failing internally". Each brick is made of dozens of cells wired in parallel. It's irrelevant if a handful of cells totally die.
The li-ion charge retention curve is usually an exponential decay. The lower the capacity of the cell gets, the slower further degradation goes. Now, in many electronic devices, it doesn't seem this way because the device is designed for a particular operational voltage range, and when the pack gets below that voltage it's totally useless. But a large-scale system engineered to use old packs and thus designed for greater voltage flexibility is not bound by this constraint.
From page 46 of this report Discussions egarding smart grid applications include using automotive battery packs connected to the grid for temporary energy storage, and as emergency power supplies when power is unavailable. There is also considerable discussion in the industry regarding repurposing used or refurbished automotive battery packs for stationary applications such as home level power storage once the packs are no longer suitable for use in vehicles.70 It remains to be seen whether refurbishment of packs will be practical or economical,71 as cells must generally be well matched to provide good performance in battery packs, and aged cells are particularly difficult to match effectively. In addition, for refurbished pack safety, the issue of determining when a cell should be retired will need to be resolved. tl;dr leading industry experts have the exact same concerns i do. You are just not well informed. I'm open to any sources you may be aware of because the facts are buried under political bs.
you obviously never have worked with lithium batteries, doubly so packs of 7000 individual cells. Here is a good example of why using these defunct packs is bull.
From page 46 of this report Discussions egarding smart grid applications include using automotive battery packs connected to the grid for temporary energy storage, and as emergency power supplies when power is unavailable. There is also considerable discussion in the industry regarding repurposing used or refurbished automotive battery packs for stationary applications such as home level power storage once the packs are no longer suitable for use in vehicles.70 It remains to be seen whether refurbishment of packs will be practical or economical,71 as cells must generally be well matched to provide good performance in battery packs, and aged cells are particularly difficult to match effectively. In addition, for refurbished pack safety, the issue of determining when a cell should be retired will need to be resolved.
tl;dr leading industry experts say the same thing I'm saying. Feel free to cite some actual facts here, say from well cited industry leading experts. Because using burnt out lithium batteries to power your grid is more of a pr stunt than actual economics.
Again, it's simply not. You keep acting like cost per kW is irrelevant. This is absolutely not the case. You're the one trying to hand wave away the power input and output demands of stabilizing a renewables grid. According to your logic, people would never use li-ion for grid storage. Except that they actually do. In new projects it's more common than PbA for the large (greater-than-datacenter) scale (PbA still dominates at the datacenter scale, and probably will for some time to come)
I would say that you have obviously never worked with lithium batteries. Tesla does not use large format cells. It uses 18650-format cells. One never messes with individual cells, the bricks are designed to allow multiple concurrent failures without significant degradation in performance. And saying that something is "yet to be seen" does in no way shape or form mean "using defunct packs is bull", and it's beyond me how you could read that into that statement. Furthermore, it's also funny how you read that section but entirely missed the lines before it:
Gee, I thought nobody would want to use li-ion for grid backup? ;)
"TAMS shouldn't be destroyed. They should just tag us before releasing us into the wild." -- Maeglin
Your complete neglect of cost is rather funny. It's still cost per kWh/year obviously you need a battery that will meet your actual capacity vs discharge rate. That is a given - what isn't isnt is paying more money for a more compact and light weight solution.
if you actually read the article they explain how though there is interest, refurbishing packs is not viable. Use of nearly dead packs makes no financial sense in the general case. You will be replacing them all the time, from months to at best a year or two or you need ridiculously oversized batteries to make up for the fact you are losing capacity and discharge rate alarmingly fast. Further you fail to understand as cells to bad it gets exponentially worse as the remaining cells take up the same load, worsening an already bad situation. The only way it's even feasible to use them is if you own both the auto company and the solar company and eat the cost difference between a viable and cost effective economic solution. Sure you can make a great electric car for 100k but he's losing money on them - probably the reason no one else decided on that business plan.
show me where these large scale systems use the same cells and chemistry as tesla packs. Can't? Because saying lithium is like saying computer or car. A MacBook isn't the same as arduino. The lithium batteries you use for ev are no where near the kind you would use in a grid backup. You can't even read the cited source i posted or provide your own so why should I take your point of view as having any credibility?