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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.
Eliminate the batteries, system is simpler, and benefits more.
Are you sure? A bank of batteries may very well be simpler than upgrading the entire grid to handle distributed generation.
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Partly because a solar-powered city is gauranteed to still need power at night, and local storage eliminates loss inherent to transmission and distribution. But mainly because trying to tie into the grid means the big investor-owned utilities will screw you.
Lithium is actually about the least toxic battery technology, compared to older tech like lead acid, nimh and nicad it's practically green. True it causes pollution to produce but after that disposal is much less of a concern.
Has he ever given any reason to doubt him?
Says he can build an electric car, ends up producing the safest, best engineered, and fantastic car ever made, for under $100k. And now they're working on making it drive itself.
Says he can build rockets for a fraction of the cost everyone else is charging. Ends up producing the most successful and economical lift vehicles in existence. Also working on a way for it to land itself on a platform in the ocean.
I'd say he has a history of under-promising and over-delivering.
And no-one should be disposing of them anyway, they can be recycled. In fact, nothing should be going into landfill these days.
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Well, lithium-6 deuteride tends to make much boom in thermonuclear weapons. So that is a concern.
Gosh darn it, you're right! I'm afraid, uncertain, and doubtful about lithium and its uses now. Maybe we should ban that "hydrogen" stuff they use in the bombs too?
</sarcasm>
I really can't believe I'm having to deal with comments like these on Slashdot, AC or otherwise. Just because something can be used in bombs does not mean that it is of any particular concern (did you know that they use steel too?!). But if you really feel like wasting your life by worrying about lithium, then maybe you should do everything in your power to prop up the lithium battery industry (e.g. buy more batteries), since you can think of each of those batteries as a little, tiny sequestration of lithium that won't make it back into bomb production as long as it's in your possession.
Do your part for the anti-nuke effort: buy more lithium (batteries).
In reality, that also helps. He cannot promise a battery with infinite capacity. Cars running on gas need refueling too and sometimes, when I'm running low, I wouldn't mind knowing where the closest gas station is. Not saying Tesla and Elon Musk will solve the world's problems, but they are trying to solve one or two while still making some profit. What do companies Exxonmobil or Chevron do for us? Really? Endless wars for oil, oil spills and other environmental impacts, price fluctuations and possibly many other negative factors.
which didn't do a thing about range or the anxiety drivers feel about how limited their Tesla's range is
The anxiety is not about the range, but about running out of charge with no idea where the next charge point is.
You know the rough range and you know how long your journey is. There's no reason before you leave you should feel anxiety because you know you need to recharge en-route.
Knowing the remaining range isn't enough when you have no idea where the next charge point is, unlike petrol vehicles you can't just pull into any petrol station - you need to pull into one that's got a charging point added. It's about anxiety due to the non-mature nature of the technology meaning the infrastructure isn't fully rolled out yet.
Knowing where the nearest charge point is should remove that anxiety because you can plan it into your route. And if it's a super charger then you can plan to have your lunch at the same time and it'll be fully charged when you get back to the car. So not really different from stopping to refuel at a motorway services on a long journey.