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Tesla Will Install More Energy Storage With SolarCity In 2016 Than The US Installed In 2015 (electrek.co)
An anonymous reader writes: Tesla is scheduled to install more energy storage capacity in 2016 with SolarCity alone than all of the US installed in 2015. It was revealed in a recent filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that Tesla foresees an almost 10x increase in sales to SolarCity for behind the meter storage. [From the SEC filing: "We recognized approximately $4.9 million in revenue from SolarCity during fiscal year 2015 for sales of energy storage governed by this master supply agreement, and anticipate recognizing approximately $44.0 million in such revenues during fiscal year 2016."] This revenue projection means Tesla expects to install approximately 116 MWh of behind the meter storage. The U.S. for example installed about 76 MWh of behind the meter storage. SolarCity and Tesla Energy doubled their battery installation volume last year. What's particularly noteworthy is that the 116 MWh expectation does not include SolarCity's biggest project -- Kauai Island's coming 52 MWh system. Hawaii is aiming for 100% renewable energy by 2045 and has contracted with SolarCity to balance the two 12MW Solar Power plants with the Kauai Island Utility Cooperative (KIUC). By 2020, there will be 70 GWh of Tesla battery storage on the road, and Straubel expects there to be 10 GWh of controllable load in those cars.
The point is that so little has been done at large scale with batteries/storage to date that Tesla's efforts are a big leap for the cost and installed base of battery storage, and now feasibly making off-the-grid / backup / peak shaving / frequency regulation / demand response a real possibility to experiment with at scale.
Too bad in order to go 100% renewable and be able to iron out daily and seasonal input fluctuation, we need an estimated 0.2-1 MWh capacity per person. What Tesla is planning to do this year covers maybe ONE MILLIONTH of what USA would need. Does that sound like a solid plan?
Last year, Tesla had a press release stating PowerPacks would be ~$250/kWh but the recently released pricing on their site shows a cost of $470/kWh even if you purchase FIFTY-FOUR PowerPacks for a total of 5,4 MWh of energy storage.
And the inverters aren't cheap either.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
In a bunch of socialist states collecting rain water is illegal.
We had that topic a few days before: AFAIK only in the USA there are "states" where collecting rain water is illegal.
for those who are using free sun will not be paying their fair share of taxes.
They pay taxes on the installation, VAT etc. and pay workers who pay taxes. And they have money left over that they spent somehow and pay taxes again, VAT etc.
Your concerns are overrated.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Everybody who is focusing on off-grid uses, and residential energy prices, is missing the point. The better market for battery energy storage, right now, is businesses on-grid, who pay for peak electrical usage at absurdly high rates.
http://pipedot.org/story/2016-01-18/high-electrical-fees-lead-school-districts-to-install-batteries
With the peak billing, the cost per kilowatt at peak can actually be over $40... Batteries can easily be more expensive. And since it's not a daily charge/drain cycle, they can last MUCH longer than simple residential off-grid use.
A 1 MWh battery however costs around 1 million dollars, and not 10000. Whole two orders of magnitude more than the figure you claimed
Please link to an analysis that shows a 1 MWh battery per household would be needed in any kind of rational power system. This is a full months worth of electricity for an (extremely wasteful) American household, and almost 3 months of electricity for a more efficient OECD economy.
This is a preposterous made-up "requirement".
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Are you intentionally comparing apples to oranges, or was it a typo? You say you can get 10 KWh of storage or about 2500 kWh of petrol for around $1200. Are you including the cost of storing the petrol? Are you including the cost, and loss of energy, when converting the petrol to electricity? The cost of obtaining, extraction, shipping and refining petroleum is already in the price and taxes (for the most part not including the military cost to keep the oil flowing).
I'm not arguing with you that the energy density of petrol is very high, and other forms of storage are often not as efficient. Are you also considering the highly inefficient nature of creating petroleum in the first place? It took hundreds of millions of years for the petroleum to form. You're taking advantage, and rightfully so, of a very long and inefficient process that produced a very dense energy storage product.
We can manufacture batteries for storage from raw materials relatively efficiently. We cannot manufacture petroleum efficiently from raw materials and there is a limited supply available to us. We can manufacture alcohol, methane and plant based oils as energy storage from raw materials (with the help of plants, yeast and bacteria and animal waste). These are not as energy dense as petroleum, but they cost much less to manufacture than petroleum.
I'm not a petroleum engineer, but I'm familiar with the industry and I can find no process known for manufacturing petroleum products from raw materials. You can find processes for converting one form of fossil fuel from another (ie petrol from coal) or for extracting petroleum from tar sands. None of these processes actually create petroleum from raw materials.
We will run out. As petroleum becomes more scarce, the costs will increase. You can lead humanity into the future, or you can cling to the past. Investing in renewable energy and robust electrical storage infrastructure is not opposition to using petroleum, but it does lessen dependence on one source for power. This would make a future more resilient to wild swings in oil prices and shortages of oil. It is especially important to a place like Hawaii, as so much of their energy is imported, and yet they have abundant sun and wind.