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Tesla To Announce Battery-Based Energy Storage For Homes
Okian Warrior writes: Billionaire Elon Musk will announce next week that Tesla will begin offering battery-based energy storage for residential and commercial customers. The batteries power up overnight when energy companies typically charge less for electricity, then are used during the day to power a home. In a pilot project, Tesla has already begun offering home batteries to SolarCity (SCTY) customers, a solar power company for which Musk serves as chairman. Currently 330 U.S. households are running on Tesla's batteries in California. The batteries start at about $13,000, though California's Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (PCG) offers customers a 50% rebate. The batteries are three-feet high by 2.5-feet wide, and need to be installed at least a foot and a half off the ground. They can be controlled with a Web app and a smartphone app.
Would make sense to have pv panels charge them up during the day and release energy at night.
The batteries are three-feet high by 2.5-feet wide
They can be controlled with a Web app and a smartphone app.
Gee, that sounds like a great idea. I wonder what could possibly go wrong.
Cue Slashdotters claiming it is either impossible or a really bad thing in 3..2..1..
Impossible? No. Economical? I don't see how, if it were why isn't the power company doing this centrally? Then they could average it out across everyone on the grid, instead of just you as the problem is usually production not transmission capacity. I guess it might make sense if you're producing your own power with solar panels and don't have to transfer power into the grid when it's sunny and out of the grid when it's dark, but the price seems steep for what you're getting. I mean this tech already exists but only for solar powered cabins off the grid, it's really expensive per kWh and usually just to power light bulbs and such.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Distributed storage capacity has the potential to even out the prices over the day and match consumption and production. It also solves a major issue with most renewables. It would be even more interesting if people were allowed to store cheap electricity and sell it back during expensive hours for profit.
Are you really this stupid?
This isn't stupidity, exactly, it's obstinacy. And actually, it's cognitive dissonance. Typically, when you see someone passionately arguing against their own best interests, that is what at fault. In this case, one of the people ranting against solar and storage is arguing that if this were a good idea, it would have been done already, because they want to believe that they are more intelligent than Elon Musk, every PG&E employee, and the majority of slashdotters who have woken up and recognized that batteries have gotten immensely better within our lifetimes — and will likely improve just as much in the next thirty or forty years.
People want to believe that they are smart and moral, and therefore they justify their poor decisions and the FUD they've spread by continuing to attack ideas long after they have been proven viable.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Would prefer a flywheel over a battery for home storage, longer life, more reliable, non hazardous materials, smaller carbon footprint, faster to charge, can accurately monitor/diagose, can bury them underground.
13 grand will also buy you lots of electricity. Assuming a 7 year lifespan, you are spending 1.85K per year just on the batteries. My electric bill don't even add up to 1.85K per year.
Bullshit. Not all ideas are viable. Where's our flying cars? Where's our nuclear powered airplanes? How about gas turbine powered cars? We've built all of these, but it turns out the technology is just too expensive and of limited benefit to be viable to be used en masse. Deny it all you want, but Lithium ion based batteries are reaching the limits of their energy density. There are not any breakthroughs on the horizon that are going to make lithium ion batteries cost 1/10th their current cost per watt hour of capacity.
You are also projecting. Perhaps its YOUR cognitive dissonance that is preventing you from recognizing that the technology is not viable. People like you are quick to turn to conspiracy theories and pop psychology as to why alternative energy is not mainstream when it is simple economics.
What happens if you buy this battery and a year or two down the road someone comes out with a battery that is twice as efficient as the one you have?
Then the whole world changes, whole corporations go out of business overnight while others swell, and there is widespread financial chaos.
This is the exact question I asked Solar City when I was considering solar panels for my house.
That's because you don't understand the solar industry even a little bit. When new, more efficient panels come out, not only is their price per watt higher but the price per watt on the old panels comes down. The primary benefit is not reduction of cost, at least not at first, but in reduction of panel area needed. That reduces the size of an installation which can reduce its cost — but in the case of a residential solar system, that is rarely the case. Since they're usually fixed and roof-mounted, the amount of materials used to mount them is fairly small and there are no property cost considerations whatsoever. The homeowner doesn't care if they have three or six panels on their roof, because they're on their roof and they're not taking up any space they were using before.
The truth is that improvements in batteries and solar panels do not come in 100% increments. They come in small increments delivered over long periods of time, just like the savings on energy costs delivered by a solar installation. Not installing solar now because you're worried that solar is going to get better is just depriving yourself of the benefits that you enjoy by doing it sooner. Meanwhile, your system can be upgraded piecemeal, so you can replace your batteries in 15 years and your panels in 30, maybe add some more batteries then. You can mix and match different kinds of panels to a certain extent; sure, you need different charge controllers for old and new style panels, but you can have both kinds of charge controllers right next to one another, connected to the same battery bank. So really, there is no basis whatsoever for your concern that a 100% efficiency improvement will come along tomorrow and eliminate the value of your investment. And frankly, if such a leap in efficiency were realized in a commercial product, then some government would probably buy up 100% of it and you wouldn't be able to get any anyway. Kind of like what happened with nanosolar, which was then driven out of existence by the chinese dumping panels on our market so none of us got to buy any of it. That stuff had the potential to be disruptive, but now we have to wait for someone to conceive of the idea again with some new and even cheaper technology because we're okay with goods produced with slave labor so long as it doesn't happen within our borders.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Since Pacific Gas and Electric is actually subsidizing the batteries in the pilot program, which is for solar users, it would seem to demonstrate that the power companies aren't lying when they say grid feed-in is a problem.