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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.
I don't think "toxic" is the word you are looking for. Maybe you are thinking of lead-acid batteries?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Unobtainium?
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
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.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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.
Why are they using lithium batteries?
Because EVs use them, but when the EVs are done with the packs, the packs are still good for something.
The plan for Leaf packs was to use them for this purpose from day one. Why not Tesla? Hell, they might be able to get their hands on the Leaf packs cheap.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
Yeah this guy is always promising us the moon. How the hell is he gonna get there? With his own personal rocket factory?! Why doesn't he start with something more down to earth...like a car or something. If his companies can somehow gain a lot of experience with these solar panels and batteries he plans to use then maybe we don't need to brush off this natural innovation as complete hype. Then maybe, just maybe I can stop typing exclusively in sarcasm. Only time will tell.
Distribution is generally a monopoly, generation is not.
And "less than they pay for utility power" is a very, very high bar. Installation of a parallel grid, storage, and solar collection? Ignoring the grid, most solar companies I work with will contract to use your rooftop and install a solar system to tie into your grid-based power. You agree to pay $0.30(!) per kWh for all the generated power, they maintain the system. The cost of energy is fixed for the life of the contract (usu 20-30 years), and that's how the financing of the project is secured.
It's all find and dandy, but to break even you have to assume a large annual increase in local electricity cost (>10% inflation every year iirc). That's a pretty big bet to make, and one that relatively few companies are taking for cost reasons.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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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Sub-saharan Africa.
"TAMS shouldn't be destroyed. They should just tag us before releasing us into the wild." -- Maeglin
I was getting worried (my sarcasm detector has been offline since 1987). I thought there for a minute you might be the one of 9 people in the US that has managed to miss every single article about Tesla/SpaceX and did not know who Musk was.
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
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).
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?
1973 called, they want their solar power cost benefit analysis back.
Obviously there are still situations where solar is not ideal but there is a reason its one of the fastest growing energy sources. Things everyone should know:
-Solar panels collect back the power used to manufacture them in 1-4 years.
-Their useful lifespan is over 30 (approaching 50).
-If your roof gets sun more than half the days of the year, a solar array will pay itself back in under 15 years WITHOUT SUBSIDIES (I'm looking at about 12 for my array not including subsidies).
-Storage is indeed an issue, but that is the very issue that this plan is addressing!
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
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.
The power day starts ramping up at about 5am. Your batteries will need to cover from about 5pm though 8am with little help, which means you will need a power capacity that approaches the peek demand and a storage capacity that covers at least half your daily consumption. This battery capacity will require that you double your collection capacity plus about 40% more to cover for conversion loss and battery losses.
Are we still talking about households, or about three-shift factories? Households do not have the same power consumption at night. Granted, if you live in an ancient structure with lousy thermal management and you're compensating for it with a AC without heat storage, then yeah, perhaps, but there's no reason in principle why you should be forced to be able to replicate your daylight power use with batteries at night.
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
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.
The main reason that distribution became a monopoly was due to the over crowding of spaces with dozens of companies running their lines - take a look at the following link for an example:
http://io9.com/photos-from-the...
To stop the over crowding, power companies were forced to merge and de-clutter the streets.
That is even better, as Mars has two moons!
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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.
In the US, all places that sell car batteries actually give money for the old dead batteries. It is called the "core charge" and is because there is serious money in recycling the lead acid car batteries to be used on the next generation of batteries.
http://shop.advanceautoparts.c...
Apparently, according to this site, it is mandated by state, but I would expect it to occur in most states as there is good money in the recycling.
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.
* not sure how X-Rays convert lithium to tritium...
And this is why you're a know-nothing AC on Slashdot and not a nuclear scientist!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Companies like Exxon and Chevron spend billions drilling the ground to find oil. They then build collection systems on numerous wells, tanks to hold the oil and shipping facilities to load the oil into tankers. Then the transport oil around the world (with the immense logistics that requires), unload the oil into more tanks, process the oil through a distillation process to separate the different hydrocarbons (and keep in mind how hard it is to distill something that has more energy than thousands of tons of dynamite). They then collect and distribute those refined hydrocarbons into separate tanks, pump from the storage tanks to tanker trucks, distribute the tanker trucks to your local gas station which is probably also owned by them and includes additional tanks and pumping infrastructure.
I want the world to move away from Carbon as well but don't discount the challenge of doing what the oil companies do in finding, extracting, refining and transporting it to your local gas station. It is an immense job to do that they accomplish and they do it pretty much continuously to keep that spigot flowing.
I'm not sure why you're assuming that a competing utility has to have separate lines. Here in New Zealand the power companies are not allowed to own lines - those are a highly regulated monopoly (The national grid is owned by the government, local grids by local lines companies.) Generating companies sell power wholesale via a trading system, Retailing companies buy the wholesale power (priced at grid-exit points) and deal with the consumer and local lines company. You can be a Generator and a Retailer, but not own transmission as well.
Interestingly the same model is being taken with the national fibre rollout - the fibre owning company will wholesale services to various ISPs and comms providers but will not be allowed to be an ISP itself. This avoids some of the effects you see where several providers build out fibre in the most populous areas, but you end up with monopolies covering less-dense areas and no-one covers the rural areas.