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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.
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.
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.
Let's be optimistic, and assume the battery lasts 10 years - 3000 cycles from full-empty.
This is perhaps optimistic.
I am using the numbers for my electricity costs.
These are $.28 or so.
If it's 10kWh, and lasts 3000 cycles, that's 30000kWh.
Or close on $10K worth of electricity stored.
Even with free electricity - it will never break even against grid cost.
Actually having to buy solar panels makes the numbers much worse.
Is it great for off-grid - perhaps. It's a _lot_ more expensive than even spendy lead-acid batteries.
What did you assume for the battery trade in value when it's worn out ?
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
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.'"
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.
I do understand the solar industry, that's why I fliped two big middle fingers to them and bought and imported all china solar panels and installed a 5Kwh setup for drastically cheaper than any of the overpriced US crap.
Spent 1/2 the price got the same panels all monocrystalline and of very good quality build. It's been in operation for 3 years now with no problems. I use grid intertie and drive the meter backwards. No local storage.
Electrical bill is $14.95 a month because you have to pay the "fees" and the scumbag leaders in my states government passed a law that allows the power company to not pay for any surplus I generate above my own use.
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.
That's how Musk makes his money. By selling over priced panels supported by dodgy break even calculations. Buying your own panels is the way to go. I know people that have done it and it's not that difficult.
So Edison finally won the War of Currents and got Tesla to start using DC.
I assume this is to prevent a leaking main from electrocuting everyone in the area, and/or to prevent gasses building up underneath and/or to have better airflow around the battery to keep the temperature from going up in hotspots.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
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.
They make deep cycle lead acid batteries for (mostly) boats. Typically they last 5-6 years in a marine application and you can drain them to about 10% without problems. Newer controllers are good in that regard. I'm using six deep cycle batteries pulled from various boats as my backup system. They should last for at least another 5 years since they are now warm and dry and not vibrating all of the time. They are also fully recyclable.
Not sure why you'd want to go to a lithium based technology in a stationary application.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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?
Regarding efficiency there is not much to expect from new solar panels anymore.
The only thing you can do is combine several technologies, to gather light in several wave lengths.
A typical mono crystalline PV cell might improve by 1% ... perhaps ... however the future gains will likely be in cheaper production, not in efficiency gains.
Other gains are paint based solar cells, that can be painted on houses. So far they have low efficiencies, around 1% to 5% ... but they don't look like PC modules and can be painted everywhere.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.