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.

Comments

Nice idea but

[burtosis]

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.