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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.
Cue Slashdotters claiming it is either impossible or a really bad thing in 3..2..1..
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
This is one step closer to getting houses off the grid. And it's a pretty big step at that.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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.
When everybody charges at night and uses it during the day, the less used period will shift and so the rates.
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.
I wonder if they'll last any better as a fixed battery vs a car mounted battery, I think the car mounted ones loose 20-30% of their capacity after 10 years. For example I've heard that a lead acid battery that will typically only last 5 years in a car will last 20 years in a backup battery bank for a home/business. If the pack only lasts 10 years then I highly doubt this will be economical ($108 a month? that's more than my entire electric bill) except in very specialized applications. If it lasts 20 or 30 years ($54-$36 a month) then we're starting to get into the realms of sanity especially in areas with high peak usage costs.
All hail Cylon Musk!
The only thing I see happening is the utility company maybe adding charges if usage drops below a certain point - Like in Texas a few years ago..
Utilities have their own monopolies and hooks into the legislatures and they are going to protect their revenues.
I think the idea sound but it might be too expensive and not cost effective. Let's say that saves $50 a month in electricity bill (that is very optimistic). $13K / $50 = 260 months = 21 years. Let's say tax payers chips in to offset 50% of the cost. It is still 10 years to break even, not to mention installation cost and the battery may not last 10 years. If it is priced at $2K, that is a different story.
Electricity is cheap at night because usage rates are low. But if everyone is charging up their houses every night it won't be cheap for long.
Also, if the energy source is still the grid, doesn't this seem like a poor solution since it will decrease efficiency (due to loss associated with the storage medium)? If charging occurs via solar or some other local renewable than great. But if this is just a way to essentially game existing power providers it seems like a step in the wrong direction.
making absurd claims to people that believe absurd claims.
Bruce Jenner is more famous for cutting his dick off than for being the Wheaties man. I wouldn't mind sitting in traffc on I-95 for 2 hours trying to get into the stadium to watch the Marlins lose another game, but the radio keeps blasting reminders to me that Bruce Jenner is dickless. Believe me, this is not the kind of thing people want to think about. It's not my place to judge Bruce, but if this guy shows up in a dress on my Wheaties box at breakfast, I'm going to blow my brains out.
Subsidy just changes who pays, the total cost of the battery is still the same.
And your calculation of $13k/$50 is incorrect. Go to a bank and tell them you want to borrow $13K for 21 years at 0% interest and see what they tell you.
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.
Golf Cart Batteries cost about $125/ea for 1.25KWh, so 10kwh with a nice enclosure for $2k or so, life of 3-5 years. Note 3 years is the typical life of a golf cart battery and those are stored in unheated spaces that get down to 0 in the winter and up to 125 (unvented building) in the summer--exactly the worst way to treat a battery, so with proper control it is likely they will last a few years longer.
If you instead of Golf Cart Batteries buy the extended live storage batteries those push the price up to 3-4k with an enclosure life of 6-10 years.
High Density Batteries don't really make sense price wise for a non-mobile installation where weight and size don't matter so much.
I cannot see a $13k battery of 10KWh being that useful. The only serious issue with the standard lead acid battery is the leakage and venting but that appears to be fairly well controlled when using a smart charger.
I don't see the appeal here. $13000 for a 10KW-hr battery pack seems very expensive when you can get the same storage with conventional sealed AGM batteries for 1/3 the cost.
Electricity rates are going up, making peak usage twice as expensive as off peak usage. I think that a lot of businesses could benefit from something like this if they could finance the upfront costs of batteries+ installation. While my understanding of our electrical systems is limited, it seems like batteries should have been part of our grid for exactly these reasons as well as emergencies etc. - it just seems like we have something that is always on, always outputting based on demand projections, so how do we make it smarter?
I take it back, perhaps there is a conspiracy.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
the economics don't add up. Others on this thread have already done the math for us. If you're off the grid or have a remote cabin somewhere this could be a great idea, combined with solar panels. But for the typical on the grid residential customer it just doesn't add up.
Part of the problem is the off peak rates that are part of the equation. The power companies are already pushing back on the amount they are willing to pay solar customers for excess power that is sold back to them from solar customers. A lot of people that bought panels were counting on those rebates and now their payback period is going to be much longer. Same thing will happen to off peak rates if this battery idea takes off.
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? You're stuck with old technology that you can't trade in or sell easily. This is the exact question I asked Solar City when I was considering solar panels for my house. They told me you can't trade up to the newer panels. You have to pay off the first panels and then lease or buy the new ones. Their payoff calculation for the panels is based on two things that Solar City cannot control - the amount that the utility company will pay you for excess power and the amount of money that utility rates will rise in the future. No thanks.
It's kind of like buying a new computer or TV. You know that next years model will be better and cheaper. Except that instead of a $1000 computer you are taking about $20,000 solar panels. Or $6,500 batteries.
The coal industry supports THOUSANDS of American jobs. What do you hippy moron leftists propose to do about all the families your precious "solar" panels will put out of work? Oh that's right, you'll just pass some big-goverment high-tax shit and the swirl down the toilet of American society continues.
The batteries are three-feet high by 2.5-feet wide
First 2D batteries ever! Advances in energy storage at a spooky distance made possible thanks to recently published ER = EPR discovery. Is Elon Musk really Ironman?
Donate free food here
So, for $13,000 up front, I can save at most about $80/month, maybe less, depending on the particular battery technology and how deeply the batteries can be safely discharged. (Yes, I used actual numbers.) It's a first step, but assuming that the capacity is 10KWh as mentioned in earlier articles, it's not really any cheaper than existing solutions. Now maybe Tesla will ramp up capacity and make them more available, or maybe it will actually be higher capacity, or maybe the price will come down substantially as volume increases. Because at 1/2 the $/KWh it would start to be really interesting, but right now, it's kind of marginal--at least for me at ~$0.15/KWh peak; obviously, in a state, CA for instance, where peak power prices are higher, the economics are better.
Offer a package with solar panels so we can get off the grid with no maintenance that a typical solar+wind offgrid setup requires.
Most people can barely change the batteries in their TV remote, they cant handle the work involved in taking care of an offgrid power system. Been there done that.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Few people have the space for so many panels to run their house on them — even if the problem of storing it were solved. From MIT:
And 48kWh, which is cited above as "about average", means, no home-servers running 24x7 (about 200Watts*24h=4.8kWh — or 10% more than the estimate — per server), no super-duper Christmas lights, and other limitations...
No, electricity companies are better positioned to produce electricity. And, truth be told, they should be using these wonder-batteries to store electricity during the night so they wouldn't have to charge more during the day. If only we had them properly competing with each other...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Usually mining and extraction are the greatest energy and pollution generating periods of a device's life. Not greater than the entire lifecycle of use and disposal, unless the product is used less than 10 years. if its used less than 5 the impacts of mining can be even greater than the product 's use. Don't crash and total your Tesla or Prius. http://science.howstuffworks.c...
What's interesting with this home-battery is that this its use may not achieve any real energy savings, like a hybrid motor (which contributes captured friction) or like solar. Or maybe there is some lost energy in off peak hours and it contributes to efficiency, but that will be lost if the use of the product scales and every house has one. But the point is that the rare earth batteries must be mined in China, meaning a portion of the energy is being diverted to coal burned in China.
Gently reply
Based on my average monthly usage and cost per KwH, $13,000 would cover all of my electricity needs for just shy of nine years. If they subsidize half of it, it's just under four and a half years. My home is 100% electric, older neighborhood means no gas lines were run here. We're also just talking about the battery. Not the solar system that would need to be installed to complement it. But then, I don't live out on the West Coast where electricity prices are ludicrous. ( My current locked in price for the next three years is 9 cents / KwH in case you're curious )
I'm poised to install a $4K backup generator in the next few months. I don't live in a region where I can force my neighbors to pay for my tech goodies, and the $9K difference doesn't get paid for on any kind of time horizon that outpaces even a basic interest rate.
The generator also has a near-infinite runtime, in the case of a bad storm. However, it needs more maintenance, so if there were price-parity I might opt for the battery.
Give it another five years and that just might be feasible - good for Musk for getting this ball rolling, and kudos to the early adopters who take it in the pocket to promote the technology.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
So Edison finally won the War of Currents and got Tesla to start using DC.
"need to be installed at least a foot and a half off the ground"
For what purpose? That old wives' tale of putting a battery on the ground causing it to discharge or drain is absolute bullshit.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Is anyone else getting tired of these "news" articles stating that there will be some news to announce in the future?
Bruce Jenner is more famous for cutting his dick off than for being the Wheaties man.
Like I told me wife, if you are going to be transgender, shouldn't you at least look like this (Janet Mock):
http://www.thewrap.com/trans-a...
and not this?:
http://www.businessinsider.com...
The late great Benny Hill said it best in regards to Bruce:
"Everyone has the right to be ugly, but s/he abuses the privilege."
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
how long until we have a 3 ft vibrator to run off of the 3ft battery.
For the next 10 years. If the funds are invested at a reasonable rate could easily be 20-30 years.
What's the lifespan of this thing ?
1. Why the fuck do you care?
2. Sexual reassignment surgery is not "cutting your dick off".
3. She has not even had the surgery.
4. Why the fuck do you care?
I'm sure your wife appreciated your insane presumption of entitlement to tell people how they should look.
I have been thinking for awhile about building a house out in the country and not bothering to have it connected to the grid. My first thought was to go with a whole lot of solar panels and a couple giant propane tanks with a gas generator. Still, that is a lacking setup, but these batteries just might make the difference. I would probably buy more than one of whatever the top of the line battery would be. Of course, I have already checked the availability of water in the areas I have been considering.
Throw in a couple substantially less hydrogen fuels cells to take over in the event I loose power and I might seriously go through with it.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Tesla seems to be adopting the "Wendy's strategy". Wendy's apparently sells excess hamburger as chili, thus somewhat compensating for daily swings in hamburger sales. Similarly Tesla is probably anticipating that their Gigafactory will also have unexpected swings in demand depending on vehicle sales and existing contracts with other battery suppliers.
By selling the excess Gigafactory battery production as battery based storage for homes, Tesla ensures two things: 1 - a better ramp up in Gigafactory utilization during the early years, and 2 - protection from unexpected swings in vehicle sales.
The coal industry supports THOUSANDS of American jobs. What do you hippy moron leftists propose to do about all the families your precious "solar" panels will put out of work? Oh that's right, you'll just pass some big-goverment high-tax shit and the swirl down the toilet of American society continues.
You got it soldier! Back in the days of the agrarian society, everyone worked! And we worked hard!
Progress sucks. Now we have to figure out what to do with our time when we the hippies win we are getting our energy from free sunlight.
Revolution is the opium of the intellectuals.
Since I use on average 12kWh per day over the course of a year I would only save about $1 a day even if I transferred all of my electricity use from peak use to off peak use. Of course my peak use is only about a quarter of my actual use (40% of my cost) so my savings would be much less. That's using the 8 cent difference between peak and off peak that's coming into effect in Ontario in May.
Think I'll look into a ground source heat pump. It'll cost a lot more (especially to drill the holes since I'm in a suburb) but I'll get rid of the expense of my A/C and my natural gas heating and hot water tank. The efficiency of the new furnace should cover the pump.
the electric companies don't charge this way in your country? Is the battery suitable for long time storage like say from solar or wind?
Continually innovating for rich people is exactly what the world needs! How on earth did rich people manage before you came along?
http://hardware.slashdot.org/s...
The company says it has proved the feasibility of building a 100MW reactor measuring only 7 feet by 10 feet.
Is there something about energy tech that makes people afraid to mention a third dimension (other than time, of course)?
Sealed Lead Acid Batteries (SLA) for home use go for about $250/kw. The current Tesla/SolarCity Pilot batteries go for about $1300/kwh; which means even with the 50% PG&E rebate it is still more expensive then SLA.
Unfortunately lithium-ion does not have many advantages over SLA for home use because, unlike a car, weight does not matter.
I really hope that when Musk does the actual product announcement that the packs are either much more powerful or much cheaper. Otherwise this really doesn't change anything. . .
Modern li-ion batteries are over 90%
Last time I checked, lithium-ion batteries lost a substantial chunk of their capacity after a few years. Does the 10 percent loss figure that you stated include the cost of manufacturing a replacement battery?
Actually this is part of what makes Wendy's burgers great. They estimate burger needs as customers come in the door, and start to cook them before they are ordered. That way, when you order a burger you quickly get one that truly has just been cooked. The "excess", then, are the burgers they start to cook that go unsold -- they store the cooked meat for next day's chili. When there is a good stream of customers this works really well.
Ironic that burning a more environmentally sound fuel (electricity) gets you roundly criticized by others for using too much electricity.
Perhaps they're assuming that transmission losses in the electric grid will more than offset the theoretical gains of using electric heat over natural gas heat.
Reminds me of the post on The Verge the other day about $45K 3.3KW solar charging stations that San Francisco bought with taxpayer money. Man, I'm glad I'm not a CA taxpayer, because I'd be pissed. Let's very optimistically assume 365 days sunny days a year and 10 hours of sunlight. That's 12775 KWh of energy, which at $0.15/KWh works out to $1916 per year. That's 23 years before those chargers pay for themselves, and that does not include repairs and maintenance (such as, you know, washing those panels once a year, and replacing broken stuff), AND the assumption is that the batteries generate their peak output through the entire day. So realistically, 50-60 years before you have any chance of breaking even.
This is basically the same thing. It makes no economic sense for 99.9% of its potential users, even those who already have solar.
F@H is incredibly inefficient.
> batteries ... can be controlled with a Web app and a smartphone app
Hackers imitating the success of Stuxnet will turn those Li-Poly batteries into native american comms devices (hint: emit smoke signals they will)
I'm sure your wife appreciated your insane presumption of entitlement to tell people how they should look.
I suppose you apologized to yours for a total lack of a sense of humor?
My Asperger's friend says that the stick up yer backside has to hurt after a while.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
If only families could feed their kids with smug superiority of statists and big goverment liberals.
I'm not going to bother defending my sense of humor, because that never works out for anyone. But I didn't even realize it was intended as such. All I saw was ignorance demanding insane barbie standards of people with male anatomies.
You're right, we should humiliate "ugly" people being themselves. It's "funny".
Turning fuel into electricity at large scale is 40% efficient.
Thank you for clarifying that the big loss in electric heating is generation, not transmission. But I think batteries like this are intended to work with power sources other than "fuel", such as wind turbines and PV. These are not only unaffected by the Carnot limit but also intermittent enough to need energy storage between generation and use.
I'm not going to bother defending my sense of humor, because that never works out for anyone. But I didn't even realize it was intended as such.
No, I suppose you didn't realize it. Have fun with your outrage.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
LOL you think me getting bored while day drinking on a Saturday and shaming shame-mongers on a dumb website is outrage?
Shrug. More bored now. My poor liver.
LOL you think me getting bored while day drinking on a Saturday and shaming shame-mongers on a dumb website is outrage?
Shrug. More bored now. My poor liver.
Oh hell, I was supposed to be shamed? My wife will tell you, I ain't got no shame. A beer does sound good however. Cheers!
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Tell your wife the guy you argued with on the internet thinks she looks great, regardless of what you think.
Without the 50% discount, and without a captive market of millionaires, how is this a viable solution?
a hybrid motor (which contributes captured friction)
No. Energy lost to friction is lost as heat. You can only capture it if you use a stirling engine - but the additional energy used in carrying the stirling engine is not worth what you get back.
Hybrid motor captures kinetic energy (energy of motion). While it is true that energy is lost as friction heat in brakes if you don't have a regenerative engine, once it has gone down the friction route, it is not recoverable.
Centralized power storage is appropriate for some scenarios, DEcentralized storage for another.
Consider this: You have a 50MW power plant with 30MW avg demand and 45MW peak demand but the growth is where your grid isn't up to demand. Depending on how much backhaul is involved, it could be cheaper to put several MWhr of batteries out in the grid. Charge them when demand is low and feed the local sub-grids during peak hours.
Alternately, you could have a 50MW power plant with 30MW avg demand but 55MW peak demand on a grid that can handle it. You can either add more generation or centralized batteries.
In both cases, it's a cost effectiveness decision.
Having said that, $13k for 10kWhr is pretty pricy. If you're willing to go with AGM batteries, you can get 10kWhr kit for $7k (google "full house backup battery"). This is only price effective if they're actually providing ~17KW batteries so you only discharge them 60% to give them several decades of total life.
I've been on slashdot so long I'm starting to get out of touch with the cool stuff if it ain't on slashdot.
The US is Crony Capitalist.full of people Rent Seeking for personal profit.
It's for the children, after all.
the machines had found all the energy they would ever need.
Oh, wait, wrong kind of battery, never mind!
http://www.isentropic.co.uk/
Large scale storage using temperature differentials.
this is retarded. Once enough people start taking advantage of it all that will happen is power companies will raise the price of electricity in the night hours.
I hope these monsters are UL-listed and won't jack up my homeowner's insurance because they're a fire risk.
At 10 kW * hr, I wonder what size inverter they supply? My house has a 20 kW generator and that will run everything, including the 2 AC units (mostly startup current). If their inverter is the same size, that battery will last _maybe_ 3-4 hours in the summertime.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
This is a horribly inflated piece of marketing. A lot of urban households in India have power inverters in their homes to be used during the all too common rolling blackouts/load shedding, and draw power from grid when there is electricity. These are locally assembled devices made from two or more commercial truck batteries. The whole assembly is highly serviceable and customizable according to the budget. These are fairly inexpensive and have low cost of maintenance, and much smaller than 3ft*2.5ft*2.5ft.
It isn't that hard to make one yourself, just google for the schematics.
I don't know why Mr Musk is getting into the battery peddling business when even a village in India/China can get you a similar product (may be less efficient and not really great to look at). I guess people pay money to have a "Tesla" or "Apple" brand on their hardware, be it batteries or cars or music players or phones. He might need the money to funnel into battery research, that seems to be the centerpiece of a lot of his undertakings.
"The batteries power up overnight when energy companies typically charge less for electricity"
??? Since when is electricity for homes charged based on night vs. day?? My electricity bill is (and has been for almost 40 years) based solely on the amount of electricity used. There is no 'time-of-day' factor anywhere in my meter or in my bill.
So are you willing to pay for all electric utility companies to replace meters that read out in kWh with meters that read out in joules, at the same time for all customers in order to satisfy franchise regulations that require a city-wide (or larger) uniform rate?
Who pays for the transition to "the internationally standardized units"? Meters would need to be replaced with pedantically SI-compliant meters. And besides, power in practice is correlated with daylight and climate conditions, which recur on cycles closer to 86,400 seconds and 31,556,952 seconds respectively. These numbers are far from powers of two and thus don't quite fit into the decimal SI. Who pays to teach people to multiply and divide by 86,400 and and 31,556,952 in their heads to estimate energy from power or vice versa over the course of a day or year?
But how would that fix the units in customers' heads? "If I turn on ten 100 watt appliances, I'm using a kilowatt. Easy so far. And if I leave them on for an hour, I'm billed for one kilowatt hour." Until you get customers to think about their energy use using kiloseconds instead of hours and megaseconds instead of weeks, you're not going to be able to avoid anthropic units entirely.
The last time fully decimal time was imposed by law, the people rejected it. It was imposed in France on 22 September 1794 after the French Revolution and revoked 7 April 1795 when France adopted what is now SI. Swatch tried again privately in 1998, dividing the day into a thousand 86.4 s millidays called ".beats", and it didn't catch on either. This is why the hour, day, and year still "are accepted for use with SI" (source). Thus, the kilowatt hour isn't an SI unit proper, but it's still "accepted for use with SI" with the value 3.6 MJ, much as the kilocalorie of food energy is 4184 J.