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.

Comments

yeah, confusing

[supernova87a]

Agreed, very confusing headline. Maybe a simplified way to explain it would be to say:

• "This year, Tesla will singlehandedly double the amount of battery storage installed in the United States."

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.

Re:yeah, confusing

[Anonymous Coward]

Battery storage is a waste of time, generates massive pollution, and will need replacing every 10 years. It is far better to feed the grid during peak times, and pump water to use hydro generation later in the day. We've know this for over a century!

This is all about PR for Telsa to sell batteries; batteries with obsolescence built in.

Re:yeah, confusing

[AmiMoJo]

Battery storage is a waste of time, generates massive pollution, and will need replacing every 10 years.

Utter nonsense.

First, it depends on the type of battery. Utility scale you use sodium sulphur, residential scale you use lithium. Both are highly recyclable and will last for more than 10 years. In the case of lithium, most batteries will already have been recycled from cars anyway, so are on at least their second stint.

Panasonic and Tesla are building the world's largest battery factory, with an output in excess of the current world output. They rightly expect that many of those batteries will be installed in cars that are scrapped long before the battery is dead, so plan to simply remove it and install it in homes with some extra control electronics. Beyond that, recycling lithium cells is going to be big business. You would be crazy to throw away cells that can be refreshed with fairly minimal effort.

So given that the batteries will be used for cars anyway, it makes sense to reduce the cost of the vehicle by planning to extract maximum value from the cells in it.

Re:yeah, confusing

[cnaumann]

Pump storage works great as long as you have a mountain, a lake, and all the permits are in place. There are maybe a dozen places in the US where pump storage is viable. Batteries will be needed for EVs and the batteries in the EVs will massive controllable storage facility. When the batteries are no longer suitable for EVs, they can be re-purposed for grid storage for a few more years, and finally they can be recycled.

We are all hammers, everything is a nail

[TheRealHocusLocus]

It's a useless project. Can anyone explain any way this would be worthwhile? ..
Yeah, didn't think you could!

PHASE I

1. Install electric utility meter on house [done]
2. Install solar panels on house [done]
3. Install battery storage in house [done]

PHASE II

4. Extend axles through basement windows
5. Mount monster truck tires
6. Hook washing machine and dryer to drive shaft
7. Mount steering wheel on front porch
8. Install La-Z-Boy recliner seat

PHASE III

9. Fire it up!
10. Pull out and head down the highway, dragging the entire North American energy grid infrastructure behind it.

Project REDNECK SOLAR HYBRID HOUSE complete.

Re:Murika

[Errol backfiring]

If the free market wanted your alternative energy storing methods, it would have already happened.

What I read in articles like this is that the "free market" already wants it, and now it becomes more affordable and mainstream, it actually happens. Those batteries are very probable not mainstream enough, but what you see is a market growing. It is happening now.

Easy to explain, it's a rational plan

[Morgaine]

Can anyone explain any way this would be worthwhile?

Sure. It's obvious to most people but it might as well be explained in case some folks haven't thought about it.

• 1) Energy will be cheap during the day because the sun is overhead and that power source is effectively free and limitless.
• 2) The sun isn't available at night, but solar power could be captured during the day and used at night, if storage were available.
• 3) The battery storage of the article provides that storage.

There you go, it's pretty simple and very sensible. It's also a good idea to add the following prediction to the above as well, as it's really a foregone conclusion and hence very safe to forecast:

• 4) All normal land vehicles will be electric in just a few decades. Burning fossil fuels may even become illegal, if not because of global warming and pollution then because it's far more valuable to use hydrocarbons as a raw material for industry. Burning money is silly.

Adding item (4) means that everyone will want the energy storage of (3) for recharging their cars when they get home. Paying the grid for that power when the sun can provide it for free during the day would be poor domestic economics. This pushes towards needing even more battery capacity.

Elon Musk is quite a visionary, but he's also a clever cookie when it comes to business. He knows where all this is going and is sewing up the future in EVs, mobile power storage, recharging stations, solar panels, and fixed power storage. He's got it all covered.

Re:Easy to explain, it's a rational plan

[DemoLiter3]

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?

Re:Easy to explain, it's a rational plan

[Diss Champ]

The summary claims they are doubling what they did last year. If they keep investing in the infrastructure to keep scaling up each year, being at one millionth right now is only 20 years away from your estimate of what the US would need.
Of course in practice the trick is to stop scaling up when there won't be people who want it or you business goes bust instead of being highly profitable at the end, but yes, this sort of infrastructure overhaul in 20 years is not only a rational timeline but pretty agressive in historical terms.

Re:Easy to explain, it's a rational plan

[DemoLiter3]

Do you realize that the cost would be then in the range of 100 trillion? And that's just for USA. Doubling shit every year isn't something that comes for free? Is there even that much lithium on this planet?

Re:Easy to explain, it's a rational plan

[sjbe]

What Tesla is planning to do this year covers maybe ONE MILLIONTH of what USA would need. Does that sound like a solid plan?

Umm, yeah. It does sound like a solid plan. What on earth makes you think we need to or even could replace all fossil fuel generation in one year by one company with a nascent technology? It's going to take a while. That doesn't make it a bad idea or make it impossible. I can't be bothered to verify your generating capacity claims but quite frankly we should have as much battery backed solar and wind power as our technology feasibly will permit.

Re:Easy to explain, it's a rational plan

[Diss Champ]

There is plenty of lithium on this planet. But that isn't the problem. As we have both said, the problem is the economics. The assumption in my comment, highlighted by the second half, is that since they are doing this as a business, they will stop scaling when they no longer see profit to be made by doing so. As long as there is profit in doing so, the total potential market size is a POSTIVE for the business case, not a negative.

Re:Easy to explain, it's a rational plan

[ricky-road-flats]

Yes, it does. He doesn't have to satisfy the ENTIRE potential market in the first year, or the second, or the tenth. But there's not much doubt it will be a market that will not be outgrown by supply for a good long while, and that makes it profitable. It also is a key part, as others have said of Musk's over all strategy to make electric cars much more feasible for many more people - more profit for him again. All power to him, no pun intended.

When Ford started churning out the Model T, the factory could only make 11 per month. Eleven. That then grew thanks to demand to 12,000 produced over 15 months, and that paid for the new plant which churned out 15 million over the following years. There are now over 250 million cars on the road just in the USA, and Ford is a MUCH bigger company than it was in 1908.

Did Henry Ford think like you? No. Will Elon Musk? Never.

Re:Easy to explain, it's a rational plan

[Agripa]

Napoleon: I want trees planted along the sides of the roads so my soldiers can march in the shade.
Minister: But sir, the trees will take years to grow?
Napoleon: Yes, so start immediately.

Tesla's PowerPacks 2x as expensive as promised

[haruchai]

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.

Re:Tesla's PowerPacks 2x as expensive as promised

[AmiMoJo]

Welcome to Tesla Maths. They include the savings on your energy bill, any available subsidies and other random things they could think of.

It's like when Musk said you could own a Model S for $350/month. What he meant was, $350 if you put down a massive deposit, include all the fuel savings, include billing for the time to saved not pumping gasoline, took advantage of all tax breaks, free parking for EVs etc.

Re:I hope taxpayers aren't on the hook for this

[Gr8Apes]

$3500*365*15=$19M, plus plant costs. Doesn't seem so crazy all of a sudden.

Re: Sums up USA

[Anonymous Coward]

The gigafactory is in Nevada not Japan, the Solar cells are from New York not China, Musk is a US citizen....who has a Hebrew first name but isn't even a little Jewish.

Energy storage is expensive

[bigwheel]

Sorry, I don't have time this morning to glean exact numbers. But there is a misconception that energy storage is free. I just went through these calculations for my off-grid dream home. (My cabin has been off-grid for 20+ years, so I am intimately familiar with wind+solar+storage.)

In reality, batteries don't last forever. The best of the best Rolls/Surette sealed lead acid batteries are good for 3,300 discharges to 50%. So, when you calculate the cost of those batteries against their total number of KWH that they will EVER store, it works out to approximately 10 cents per KWH. I've looked at every option available, and there are no other options close to flood lead acid storage amortized price.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... the Tesla powerwall has/had projected cycle life of 1000–1500 cycles. On a cost per KWH of new battery, they are about 3x the cost of flooded lead acid. So, for 3x the price, you get about half the energy storage over their lifespan. Again, apologies for not presenting the arithmetic. But the stored energy will cost somewhere between 30-50 cents per KWH. So, it is already not competitive with on-demand generation - even if the cost of generation is zero.

Drop in the ocean

[mr.gson]

116 MWh of battery capacity is still a drop in the ocean compared to the total electricity use. In the 2016, the US consumed 4,686,400,000 MWh of electricity. If we could run the entire country on those 116 MWh of batteries, they would run out in 0.78 seconds.

Re:Drop in the ocean

[Maxwell]

How many seconds would it take before people figure out this is actually going to happen? Would 5s be the tipping point? 1 minute? An hour?

Re:Drop in the ocean

[Smidge204]

There is absolutely no reason to consider the battery requirements for running the entire country, and it's kind of asinine to just average it out like you did.

Solar can handle a significant portion of the peak loads, since the peak loads coincides strongly with time of day. Wind, hydro and whatever other whatever region-appropriate renewable can fill in for most of the night/off peak loads. You'd only need storage to cover the edge cases, and not all of that storage would need to be chemical battery (see: pumped hydro, compress gas, hydrogen, thermal, etc)

Chemical battery has the advantage of being easily deployable in small amounts, perfect for private homes and small businesses.
=Smidge=

Re:They did it for rain water.They will do it for

[angel'o'sphere]

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.

Fringe sites

[Trachman]

The most famous fringe site is Washington Post. Here is the link: https://www.washingtonpost.com...

Those who do not see the results, are too sensitive to scroll down the results page in google query. Nobody reads page #2 of google results anyway.

Re:Fringe sites

[110010001000]

Those are very very old laws that aren't enforced. It has nothing to do with "socialism".

Re:Fringe sites

[shilly]

Why on earth would you cite water laws as being something instituted by "a bunch of socialist states"?? As the article you yourself linked to demonstrates, these laws are actually an embodiment of crazy ideologies about individual ownership -- the principle being that the owner of the rainwater is not the person on whose head it falls, but the person whose great-grandpappy laid claim to a river into which the raindrops might conceivably wend their way in due course. Extremes of individual property ownership, in other words, not state appropriation.

You really have to live in the most bizarre headspace to conceive of the wild frickin' West of the 19th Century, the era in which these laws typically originated, as an era of socialism.

Re:Murika

[oh_my_080980980]

You mean government investing in infrastructure. Wow.

You're free market screed is misplaced. There was and is a lot of opposition by market forces towards renewables, particularly from the fossil fuel industry. Renewables do not have the same political clout that the fossil fuel industry has, nor do they enjoy special treatment that the fossil fuel industry receives from government.

If this were truly a free market, renewables would be offered the same opportunities as fossil fuels and would see a much greater growth.

Re:I hope taxpayers aren't on the hook for this

[crunchygranola]

...The problem with coal is not the strip mining, but what happens thereafter.....

As if those were separate, unrelated things. It is precisely the mess left over that is the problem with "strip mining" (now typically "mountain top removal" which also completely buries watersheds). Mining operations are typically conducted by specially formed companies owned by shell companies that are the real mining operator. When the project is done, the company declares bankrupcy, disappears, and leaves an awful mess behind with no one to hold accountable or pay the bills for remediation.

Re:Murika

[Anonymous Coward]

I live in the center of Texas... and the town that I live in is getting a sizable chunk of its power from a solar array. It already has been asserted that solar is cheaper than coal, especially with the fact that upkeep costs are relatively low compared to other methods of energy generation.

Even though we see a lot of battery improvement announcements, most of them likely flashes in the pan at best, there is a cumulative effect. A battery that holds 1/10 as much energy per volume as gasoline would revolutionize transportation in fundamental ways.

The free market does want alternative energy storage methods. People and companies are sick and tired of being beholden to a very fickle market when it comes to oil and energy, and don't want to see their entire business trashed if another Enron comes to power and is able to cause prices to skyrocket with regards to fuel and grid prices. Of course, few businesses can completely power themselves with their on-site solar arrays, but the cumulative effect does a lot to mitigate what speculators can do.

As for the battery part, it has to meet a lot of criteria. Not just energy dense, but usable in a wide variety of temperatures, idiot resistant, able to be packaged and used in high vibration environments (automotive), and fairly environmentally friendly to produce and use. However, advances are being made on all these fronts because the benefits to this are substational.

Re:To all you doubters and haters

[Jeremi]

Whatever your anonymous trash talk might be Your doubt and hate fuels the very fire of people of Musk's ilk. They love to prove you wrong. So thank you for degrading yourselves for the public good.

See? We're helping already! We're the reverse-psychology cheerleaders of the clean-energy market! ;^)

Question for you...

[number6x]

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.

Re:Murika

[vtcodger]

> Really? Because what I read is $44M in a multi trillion dollar energy industry suggests that behind the meter storage is a niche market at best, and a small one.

Yes and no. In the lower 48, it's largely confined to a small number of people living beyond the reach of the power grid, a few eccentrics, and victims of poorly thought out "green" policies. Hawaii, however is a special case being 4000km from any source of hydrocarbon fuels. Residential electricity rates on Oahu are over 25 cents per kw/hr and on the outlying islands are pushing 40 cents. https://www.hawaiianelectric.c...

Seems to me like a great testbed for rooftop solar with on-site storage and similar renewable based technologies.

Then there's California which seems to be determined to test renewables on a large scale. Nice of them to do so assuming that the rest of us are capable of learning from their experience -- good or bad. They may be able to make it work as they have a favorable situation for grid scale solar as well as hydro and a significant percentage (about 25%) of the world's actual up an running grid-scale geothermal generation.

Personally, I think Hawaii might do OK eventually although probably not 100% renewable. There's some stuff -- aircraft, emergency vehicles, etc that probably work best with liquid fuels.

California? Iffy, I think. But I don't live there. And they aren't all gonna die if their experiment founders.

Re:Murika

[MachineShedFred]

Given that it's unlikely that solar panels can be legally made in the US or western Europe

Except for the billion dollar solar panel manufacturing plant being built by SolarCity in Buffalo, NY right now? Due to start production this year, and ramp to capacity some time in 2017.

Yeah, try to Google for 5 seconds before asserting something completely false.