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Tesla Plans To Disconnect 'Almost All' Superchargers From the Grid In Favor of Solar and Battery Power (electrek.co)
Only half a dozen Supercharger stations or so out of the over 800 stations have solar arrays and batteries, but that may be about to change. Elon Musk said Tesla plans to deploy more battery and solar systems with the upcoming "Version 3" of the Supercharger, adding that "almost all Superchargers will disconnect from the electricity grid." Electrek reports: Previously, Musk said that Tesla's new Powerpack and solar arrays will power some Supercharger stations in sunny regions to go off-grid -- adding that "the grid won't be needed for moderate use Superchargers in non-snowy regions." While it makes sense to add solar arrays and battery packs, it's not clear why there would be a need to completely disconnect from the grid, which is often still useful -- especially if net metering is available. Even in regions where coal dominates electricity generation, electric cars are still more efficient than some of the most efficient gas-powered cars. Therefore, the argument could have ended here, but Musk apparently wants to take Tesla's Supercharger network off-grid as part of the company's mission to accelerate the advent of sustainable energy. Depending on the size and popularity of a Supercharger station, which generally varies from 6 partly used stalls to 20 stalls in almost constant use, Tesla would need some significantly large solar arrays at some stations -- almost football field in size. Unless there are some impressive advancements in efficiency, it's not clear how they would make it happen.
I think this idea would make sense for charging stations on the Interstate highways. Buy lots of cheap land and put in a charging station every so many miles. It makes distance travel easier for the electric car owners and the lack of power lines to the stations is NOT a problem.
A dingo ate my sig...
We're already pretty green here already?
1) low to moderate usage stations are self-surviving, and can pretty much be left to their own devices (outside of having to send out for repairs if someone breaks a charger). They have no persistent cost from a local utility billing. This also gives the local government less leverage over Tesla.
2) This helps reduce the "hur hur electric cars still burn coal/etc by proxy". If they can get most of the Supercharger network off the grid, most electric cars wouldn't be powered by anything other than the sun.
3) They aren't beholden to power grid compatibility. I'm not sure what innovation or tricks you can pull due to this, but not having to be compatible with the existing electrical system means you can directly do whatever you want with AC or DC and maybe save a few thousand on a transformer or other conversion.
>partly
They installed one of those at a supermarket near me about a year ago (big-ish college town in the midwest, fairly close to an interstate exit). Drive by it almost every day and have *literally* never seen a single car using it in all that time.
I'm glad NYC and LA and San Jose are so excited about electric cars, because they're completely delusional if they think they're going to sell in the interior of the country where literally any trip out of town would suddenly require one or more hour-long fuelling stops. Electric or hybrid cars of any kind are a very rare sight here to begin with. Even back when Priuses (Prii? Priii?) were trendy I would go months between seeing one. Still have never seen a Tesla in person.
There are so many, for lack of a better word, "Haters" who think that we can't have nice things and all technology must be destroyed if we are going to save the earth. By disconnecting from the grid Musk wants to make a point: This technology is sustainable. There are no outside inputs that need to go into it to make it work once it's setup. Somebody will say that the batteries or the cells will wear out eventually, but if it lasts for more than 20 years, what are they really going to say then? That's the point he wants to make, that there is hope for the future, we're not all going to die, there is another way to save the world besides deindustrialization and the massive drop in standards of living and population that would have to follow.
Someone in California has forgotten that it can rain in non-snowy regions. It can even be heavily clouded when it doesn't rain.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Don't you people see what happening here?! Elon is going to suck up all the sunlight with his solar panels and we'll have to pay him for electricity to turn on LED light bulbs! With no sunlight, all the plants will die and we'll have to pay him for electricity for our oxygen scrubbers! Someone has to stop this mad man! ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
As in, over time, batteries will become so awesome that we won't need to be connected to the grid anymore. He doesn't say it's happening today.
So while I rejoiced that the Paris accord died as it benefits my country in that we aren't now the pocketbook for what needs to happen; I love that so many governors implied in the least that they would keep with the spirit of it.
I don't fucking care who you are, but that was a win-win solution.
We aren't held to economic amajgeddon, but we will move forward with what we have been doing for the past decade. We are going to pursue better sources of energy. We are going to clean our air up. CO2 is what plants eat... so... you need to put more trees and plants into our good earth. They can save us.
Science has a process. Something we lost in the campaign to save our planet. We can't really prove that "climate change" is something we can control. If someone tells you different they obviously have no concept of science. You see, we lack a control group. It really is that simple. I can't tell you that I know how this is going to end because it would be simple conjecture on my best day.
Still, whenever you see that electric solutions rise in technology, even if you loathe liberals, it is a win for humanity. This is what we are waiting to see happen. Some day we will figure out how to wield technology in such a way that it will make financial sense to move from energy sources that hurt our environment to something that is truly a symbiotic relationship with our world.
This gentleman is working to that end before its time.
Liberals might think that this is the answer, but some of us are skeptic, and will continue to work towards the day that we can actually provide the beautiful reality of Star Trek where all peoples work to better everything that exists.
and that is going away. My utility no longer does net metering. They pay me about 10c/kwh generated and in summer I pay them about 15c/kwh for every kwh I consume. Yeah, you guessed it, I pay a nickel per kwh my panels produce and I consume. Winter I am in a lower price tier so my consumption price drops to about 10c/kwh so it is basically net metering. But they keep dropping the price they pay me per kwh and raising the price I pay them.
As it is, tesla/solar city continues to push all to stay connected to the grid. Now, he wants to separate? Big mistake.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Pretty simple. Animal-powered electrical generators. He might even have some type of "Wheel of Pain" for those people who want to buy a Tesla but just can't afford one with money.
Depending on the size and popularity of a Supercharger station, which generally varies from 6 partly used stalls to 20 stalls in almost constant use, Tesla would need some significantly large solar arrays at some stations -- almost football field in size. Unless there are some impressive advancements in efficiency, it's not clear how they would make it happen.
Simple, change the business so the 20 stall location isn't so busy. You can close the stalls, or you can charge a surge price based on demand for stalls.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
These battery packs could also be used for load balancing the grid.
It's about MONEY.
Keep in mind Europe had times when electricity prices were negative. If Musk can take that electricity and store it for when it's needed, he can reduce his electricity bill.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-europe-power-prices-idUSBREA080S120140109
As long as renewables carry a subsidy, then negative prices can occur. The subsidy is there to encourage the investment in the infrastructure needed. Storage is part of that needed infrastructure. So this is an inevitable outcome, and necessary.
"hur hur electric cars still burn coal/etc by proxy"... if we didn't hammer that point home, then why would there be a subsidy to fix it? It's a truth that needs to be addressed.
IMHO the biggest threat in the US to renewables is the fossil companies. See "Florida Amendment 1", tried to define solar users as stealing from poor people (by not buying enough electricity to cover the utlities fixed costs, thus fixed costs on others, for others, swap "poor" and pretend its rich stealing from poor. 50k to buy a Hannity slot to get the message out.)
Those companies haven't gone away, The "Trump" brand name can be freely "licensed", and he can obstruct the renewable subsidies.
Again, that's about MONEY. Ultimately the subsidy will transfer profits from fossil fuel utlities to Renewables + Storage companies, i.e. they will lose market share, and they don't like it.
Diesel generator should do it.
He is going to be making semi-trucks so why not make some that haul one hugely big battery and haul energy from the sunny south to the cloudy north?
He could make some semi-trucks which are one big hydrogen tank and he could make hydrogen in the sunny southland and truck it up to power his fuel cells at the charging stations in the cloudy north. This way he would get a foothold in the hydrogen market as well in that he could add hydrogen refueling to his services. This would be a nice hedge on the uncertainty of whether eventually electrons or protons will prevail in our energy future.
As this announcement confirms. Marketing hype to the contrary.
The guy gets things done, smart money wouldn't bet against him achieving these goals.
Assume on average a 85 kWh battery pack getting a 50% supercharge. 85 kWh * 0.5 = 42.5 kWh. Real-world charging efficiency is about 80%, so 53.125 kWh is needed to put 42.5 kWh into the car's battery.
Assume 160 W/m^2 commercial panels. PV solar capacity factor in the desert Southwest is about 0.185. That is, over a year, a 100 Watt panel will produce the equivalent of a constant 18.5 Watts. So the 160 W/m^2 panels will produce 160 Watts * 0.185 = 29.6 Watts average over 24 hours, or 0.7104 kWh / m^2 in 24 hours.
This means to supercharge a single Telsa S requires 53.125 kWh / 0.7104 kWh/m^2 = 74.78 m^2 of solar panels.
Oh wait, you're gonna store that solar energy in a battery first? That's going to introduce more charging and discharge losses. If you figure 90% for both, that's 74.78 m^2 / (0.9*0.9) = 92.32 m^2 of solar panels needed for every car you want to supercharge that day.
How busy is a Supercharger station? Summary says 6-20 stalls per station, so say 13 average. Figure they're half occupied during day hours, empty at night. At 30 minutes to charge, that's 2 per hour per bay, or (6.5 bays occupied)*(2 vehicles per bay per hour)*(12 hours) = 156 vehicles charged per day.
So to generate enough electricity to supercharge those 156 vehicles requires (156 vehicles)*(92.32 m^2/vehicle) = 14,401 m^2 of solar panels per Supercharger station. Or approx 120m x 120m of solar panels. Or put another way, the average home solar installation is about 30 m^2. So each Supercharger station would need as many panels as 480 homes.
A couple of things:
Perhaps you missed the 'Tesla Solar Tiles', the tiles that replace conventional roof tiles to generate electricity. Musk has a project working on that too.
https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/28/these-are-teslas-stunning-new-solar-roof-tiles-for-homes/
At peak mid day those tiles can get hit with 1kw/m2 there's a suprising amount of energy from the sun... but the energy isn't useful mid day. You can sell it back to the grid in most countries, which could then be sold on to Musk superchargers as renewable electricity used to charge his storage.
Which leads me to the second point: It doesn't need to be a dedicated wind or solar farm, it could just be the tiles on a housing estate that sells the surplus energy back to the grid which sell it to his superchargers.
It's not like he needs to build a big solar farm next to each supercharger as long as there's a market in electricity from renewables, the same wires can ship it from suppliers to buyers.
It was the fact that the large coal and nuke stations took 5 hours to respond.
Would it not make more sense to sell the surplus back to the grid
With high daytime usage and more or less constant streams of vehicles, it can actually be cost effective.
Photovoltaics is nowadays one the cheapest source of electricity. Especially if you have no net metering, like most of the world:
Just realized, that the whole supercharger station could actually go DC.
The solar panels, the supercharger and the PowerPack work all with around 600V DC. DC-DC converters are cheap and efficient, especially if the voltage difference is small.
Every AC-DC/DC-AC inverter has an intermediate direct current link. You can more or less just rip out all of the AC stuff and wire all intermediate direct current links together.
You can still install a AC/DC inverter to connect the 600V DC supercharger to the grid.
But what about when the Sun goes down???? What then, eh?
(senile cackle)
Even the ones in Montreal? a meter of snow on the panel will be really efficient in winter.
Most humans live in warm climates. Canada as a whole has millions less citizens than California. Which, by the way, is where virtually all the Teslas are. Also, starting a comment in the subject is a dick move.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If you had a valid argument, you'd use it. I demonstrate how it is done just above. Try it, if you dare.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The problems with solar in cold snowy climates is very real. Insulting those that bring it up, and dismissing the facts doesn't change anything.
The problems with solar in cold snowy climates is very real. Insulting those that bring it up, and dismissing the facts doesn't change anything.
The fact is that Musk said "almost" all of the superchargers will be converted. The facts are not on your side.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If the Sun goes down than the Moon goes up, right? I got a good foolish idea: to install Lunar panels.
For the cars. it's better optimized if they drop the 4th wheel from the vehicle (for lesser weight) because 3-wheels vehicle is enough for everyones.
The great sir Musk has a technical problem in his project: how to obtain massive energy for the cars of their customers? And how to charge them without waiting > tens of minutes?.
What does it happen if the electrical vehicle is heavy with 3 or more passengers and 1 driver? The autonomy of the vehicle will be affected enormously and will be shorter because the original autonomy was assumed 1 driver without passengers.
To imagine that a collapse of some kind can not be solved soon, and the market will fail: it will make unsuccessful.
Hybrid vehicles (fuel+electric) are the competitive alternatives when the traffic is collapsed!
I can afford the karma, can you afford the mod points?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Notice that every single Musk enterprise is completely dependent on billions of dollars of federal subsidies. You suckers.