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Tesla To Construct 'Virtual Solar Power Plant' Using 50,000 Homes (cleantechnica.com)
Long-time Slashdot readers denbesten, haruchai, and Kant all submitted this story. CleanTechnica reports:
Tesla and the government of South Australia have announced a stunning new project that could change how electricity is generated not only in Australia but in every country in the world. They plan to install rooftop solar system on 50,000 homes in the next four years and link them them together with grid storage facilities to create the largest virtual solar power plant in history. And here's the kicker: The rooftop solar systems will be free. The cost of the project will be recouped over time by selling the electricity generated to those who consume it.
"We will use people's homes as a way to generate energy for the South Australian grid, with participating households benefiting with significant savings in their energy bills," says South Australia's premier Jay Weatherill. "More renewable energy means cheaper power for all South Australians..." Price predicts utility bills for participating households will be slashed by 30%.
Electrek reports that the project will result in at least 650 MWh of additional energy storage capacity, and Tesla points out that "At key moments, the virtual power plant could provide as much capacity as a large gas turbine or coal power plant."
"We will use people's homes as a way to generate energy for the South Australian grid, with participating households benefiting with significant savings in their energy bills," says South Australia's premier Jay Weatherill. "More renewable energy means cheaper power for all South Australians..." Price predicts utility bills for participating households will be slashed by 30%.
Electrek reports that the project will result in at least 650 MWh of additional energy storage capacity, and Tesla points out that "At key moments, the virtual power plant could provide as much capacity as a large gas turbine or coal power plant."
They are paying in data collection by Musk. You couldn't pay me to sign up for this.
I suspect it may take longer to recoup the costs, but perhaps not.
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
This is great news for rental tenants and others who can't make the numbers work on a solar system. South Australians can register their interest at http://ourenergyplan.sa.gov.au/virtual-power-plant
we .au techs have informed them that it is in fact a Distributed Power Plant, not a Virtual one (but if they want unlimited virtual power i have these solar panels in minecraft they could use).
PSA + bad jokes expended. My work here is done.
But if Tesla can build the solar panelling for ~.50USD/W, it might be doable in 7.5-15 years (I calculated recoup costs at 30 years as requiring ~0.30c/KWh power pricing to make it back, based off an 8 hour/day generation period. It is possible you could improve the repayment period with a mix of solar and wind, or better battery tech. I was using cheap lead acid batteries at ~2x the generation capacity, with an expected life of 5 years. If LION can actually last 15+ years it could cut off some secondary costs and reduce the time to ROI by a few years.
The real trick of solar and wind tech isn't helping the grind however. It is offering you the opportunity to leave it behind altogether, while still benefitting from the advanced technology it is needed to power.
Musk the serial welfare addict does it again.
Why would I provide my roof (and have holes drilled into it and everything else) so someone else can install solar panels on it and then sell me the electricity that is generated?
Where's the advantage for the homeowner over just telling this lot to go way and continuing to purchase power as today without all of that gear on the roof?
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
Then it will be very convenient when the soylent green equipment arrives for installation. Bam!
go eagles
Solar panels are always connected to the grid. And several other companies have offered to install them for free if the householder pays slightly reduced power costs to the company.
The key point is that only about 1/4 of the cost of buying power is the generation. About half is in transmission and distribution. And the other quarter in admin, solar subsidies etc. So we pay about 21c/kwh, but only get paid about 6c/kwh to give power to the grid.
That means the real benefit is to be able to use the power during the day when it is generated.
The kicker is that soon (5 years?) batteries will be cheap enough for people to go off grid altogether. And then who will pay the 75% of costs that are not related to generation?
(There are some people grandfathered in to receive 40c/kwh. They make a point of using no power during the day!)
in my neck of the woods, but the contracts are just awful. They're structured so that the homeowner takes on all the risk. There's monthly lease payments for the equipment and if the value of the electricity generated doesn't cover the lease you're on the hook to pay the rest. Also if you move you have to buy out the lease or get the new homeowner to buy into it. It's a pretty crap deal all around.
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I'd be cautious about their claims of a 30% savings. I had SolarCity give me a very similar pitch. At the time, electricity prices were USD$0.08/KWh. Their offer was that I would be required to purchase from SolarCity 100% of the electricity my roof generated, at $0.13/KWh, for the life of the system. Pay close attention to what I just said - generated electricity, not consumed electricity. If I only consumed half of the electricity generated by my roof, I would sell the remainder to my local utility at the going rate, which is still $0.08/KWh. In fact, it's been $0.08 +/- $0.01 for the past 15 years. The more the sun shined, the bigger the hole I would have been digging for myself. Fortunately for me, I understand basic math, so I declined their offer. I instead purchased my panels from a local installer, and I'm on track to have my system pay for itself within my original 7 year estimate.
I saw nothing in a quick skim of TFAs that indicated people would be obliged to participate. The economies of scale only kick in if Musk can get a critical mass of participants. Does the 50,000 figure include that qualifier?
Solar most definitely is a Good Thing (TM) but forcing it onto peoples' roofs? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think any government owns a homeowner's roof yet.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
We've got multiple Solar Companies that install a Grid-Tie System on your roof the provides your electricity during the day. You have to pay for it but the rate is less then the Electric Company charges and any extra goes to reduce what you pay.
Energies seems to be right.
ARTED
BoNeRs!
I thought originally the household would get first dibs on the solar power and the leftovers go to the grid....but it's all to the grid and subsidy to the household. This is so it's easier to get the power to where it needs to be without loss over long distances. Why use houses? Why not highrise buildings? There is alot of gap for abuse on Tesla's part "a tree in the way causing lack of sunlight, we are fining u daily till it's taken down.." or worse "this small building will block the houses solar panels so we are rejecting this at town planning levels.
without government subsidies. It's sad to see so many people suck from the government.
They claim 250 MW of generation capacity. So, how much will this cost? I don't mean how much for the home owner but for Tesla or whomever is funding this. I ask because while solar power is nice this cost can, and really must, be compared to other options.
I did a little looking about the internet and I find that General Electric will sell a 50 MWt/15 MWe nuclear reactor to the US government for use in their navy submarines. By just about any definition of "small modular reactor" this qualifies. This reactor cost the US government about $100 million. To get the same 250 MW of electrical capacity as the Tesla "virtual power plant" it'd take 17 of these nuclear reactors, so about $1.7 billion. These reactors are fueled once and will run for 30 to 35 years. If we assume that these Tesla solar panels also last 30 to 35 years then this should be a pretty easy comparison.
There's one big difference though between the nuclear reactor and the solar panels, they provide power at night.
What about the safety of these reactors? Well, you have something like 150 sailors practically sleeping on top of each reactor and no one has been hurt yet. I think that's pretty safe. But what about the nuclear waste? Do not these solar panels also have waste? Waste is inherent to everything we do. If we are going to make a fair comparison between solar and nuclear then we need to discuss how this solar waste is dealt with. As it is now we basically just dump nuclear waste in a deep hole. That's a perfectly viable option for nuclear waste. There's lots of places to dump the waste in a hole.
A better solution for the nuclear waste would be to recycle the waste into new fuel and such. As it is there is waste inherent to everything, and that includes recycling the nuclear waste, but we can turn a ton of nuclear waste into a few pounds. We know how to do this economically. Can we recycle solar panels? I assume so, but nobody knows how to do this yet at a price that makes any sense.
Reliance on solar power means a reliance on batteries and/or dispatchable power like natural gas. Nuclear power is dispatchable too. The thing is that the cost of a nuclear power plant has no real fuel costs, it's just capital and labor. The more energy nuclear produces the cheaper the energy gets, so while a nuclear power plant can be dispatched no one would want to unless they had to. Solar is similar in this, no one wants to dump the power unless they have to. To address this means storing the energy, but nuclear power has storage built in and it's called "fuel". The less energy taken out of the core the longer it lasts, so if you don't need the energy then just save it for later and delay the decommissioning of the reactor.
At some point Australia will figure out that they can't rely on solar because the storage requirements will become unmanageable quickly. Then they will have to move to nuclear. The sooner they deploy nuclear the smaller their solar panel waste problem will be in the future.
Meanwhile, people who paid the $1,000 to pre-order a solar roof from Tesla 9 months ago are being told it will be another 5 to 8 months.
the government. Here he picks up billions in land use and access rights that he is probably already scheming to leverage into localized spying on his victims and suborning for alternate purposes, while effectively locking others out. Good deal for him, maybe not so good for others.
It's all very nice. But will the power grid support that infrastructure?
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Beautiful. Large enough area for partly cloudy day.
I'd love to get my 50 home neighborhood setup like this. Providing a little redundancy is a good thing. Would love to have a 200ft tower for wind generation and line-of-sight internet antenna to be shared by the community too.
My roof is east/west facing, so solar panels are at the wrong angles for the best results. And we have those huge trees which shade the entire roof which might be a problem too. But these are personal problems.
In Europe we've been able to contract our roofs to PV companies for years. They take any profit, the homeowner gets free electricity. With the drop in feed in tariff rates new installations are dead in the UK now but it's still viable elsewhere. The schemes are so old they predate affordable domestic storage systems or grid storage but Tesla aren't really doing anything new.
I did a little looking about the internet and I find that General Electric will sell a 50 MWt/15 MWe nuclear reactor to the US government for use in their navy submarines. By just about any definition of "small modular reactor" this qualifies. This reactor cost the US government about $100 million. To get the same 250 MW of electrical capacity as the Tesla "virtual power plant" it'd take 17 of these nuclear reactors, so about $1.7 billion. These reactors are fueled once and will run for 30 to 35 years. If we assume that these Tesla solar panels also last 30 to 35 years then this should be a pretty easy comparison.
You'd have to include the cost of the 10 or 15 people* who run and constantly monitor each of those naval reactors 24/7/365.25 in your estimates. Qualified nuclear techs don't come cheap.
*A guesstimate on my part but I can't imagine less than 4 or 5 people per shift to run them.
So cool idea but the real question is how do they plan to finance it? Putting solar on that many homes will be a huge up front capital expenditure (with some ongoing maintenance costs too) and that money has to come from somewhere. Furthermore the payback on a system like this isn't going to be in a year or two. It's going to take a decade plus or minus a few years to break even under even the most optimistic of assumptions. So Tesla will have to raise a large amount of capital today for a speculative payback 10 years from now. Tesla doesn't have that kind of cash just laying around so they are going to have to either sell more stock or borrow it to raise the funds unless a government somehow finances it.
Why would I provide my roof (and have holes drilled into it and everything else) so someone else can install solar panels on it and then sell me the electricity that is generated?
Is this a serious question? The answer to why is easy. They give you a deal that benefits you. Why is not complicated. Now the devil is in the details of course but it's not hard to answer why you might do this. Seriously, you cannot figure this out?
Where's the advantage for the homeowner over just telling this lot to go way and continuing to purchase power as today without all of that gear on the roof?
Because it costs you more to keep buying power the way you do today. Aside from a few eco-fanatics, almost nobody is going to install solar panels unless there is a financial payback that makes sense for them. If someone wants to come to me and offer me a deal to install solar panels that costs me less on my electric bill, doesn't hurt the value of my home, doesn't tie me up in a restrictive contract, and costs me nothing up front or to maintain, then that is a deal I'll listen to and so would you.
Mother of god, you really are letting a foreigner buy your government, not just your infrastructure.
You'd have to include the cost of the 10 or 15 people* who run and constantly monitor each of those naval reactors 24/7/365.25 in your estimates. Qualified nuclear techs don't come cheap.
*A guesstimate on my part but I can't imagine less than 4 or 5 people per shift to run them.
Those solar panels will need a full time crew to maintain too. They plan to put solar panels on 50,000 rooftops, that's a lot of buildings to keep an eye on. I didn't see how much area this might be but we have to be somewhere in the range of many square kilometers of rooftops here. Maybe all the people watching these panels don't need to be rocket surgeons but they'd have to be well paid to climb up on rooftops in all kinds of weather for repairs.
Assuming your estimate of crew needed to watch those submarine reactors is correct that does not mean they'd need the same crew if on land and if there were perhaps four of these reactors on one site. Not all of these people would need to be rocket surgeons either. The US Navy will turn a high school graduate into an enlisted nuclear power technician in less than a year. The officers that watch over them are going to be college graduates, likely in an engineering discipline, and given less than a year of training on top of that. I don't know what a nuclear engineer gets paid in the private sector but I can imagine it's not that far from a solar power engineer.
In short, I'm not seeing a big difference on labor costs. There's just too many variables to make any solid claims that the nuclear labor costs would be substantially higher.
This is done in Quebec since ages... private power centrals re-inject electricity back to the gris and get credited. This is mainly possible with an "Asynchronous' electrical grid system. The same reason Quebec was not affected by the 2003 major black out. The grid can load balance a lot more easily.
100% savings? Generate excess power and sell it to offset the financial cost of the solar installation. There is no reason why a home can't be a net energy producer.
I bought ultimate after a few installs with VM the key no longer worked. I hate win 10 and bought a Mac.
I love my Pro 5,1 all your linux command you feel right at home in a Mac.
guess that means oklahoma is out. (for some reason, having surplus power here just means the power company gets it and doesn't pay you... because, republicans? i guess.)
The participants' houses won't completely belong to them anymore, just to cut 30% of electricity cost? Now that's a deal. :D
My white wire to the heat rails was hooked back up. unhooked I am just as warm in NC and my bill is 59.00.
I can only guess what the future cost og grid will be.
I will buy 22 320 watt from craigslist for 2200 when my credit card is paid off next time.
Anyone who can and does not have solare is a fool.
Ultimately, the fossil fuel (including nuclear, just really OLD fossils) industry can afford the troll line, for there are always true believers in global warming as a solution to overcrowding
So it was the non convict settlers that massacred the Aborigines then? Mmm, nice. The smugness can be felt from here.
Slashdot's nuke fetishists don't seem to understand the titanic military vulnerability every single terrestrial fission facility represents. Which is weird, since so many of them are hawks... y'know, folks, if you want to send your armies all over the world, having giant centralized power production plants is pretty obviously a bad idea.
You know, those solar "leases" where you put the panels on your house and they sell you the power at a "discount"?
How long does a tree take to grow? Not everyone is chasing tulips like you.
How long does it take to bring a new drug to market?
How long does it take to cure cancer? Put a man on Mars? Build a transcontinental railway?
If you can't do it tomorrow, why bother right.
And when the wind doesn't blow hard enough - well, you get brown-outs and black-outs, until you can turn on all those natural gas peaker stations
Or the battery could just kick in within milliseconds...
Do you have any idea what you're talking about?
The lynwood idiot stuck his foot straight into his mouth again. The whole point of this is the ability to smooth out the power to keep the grid stable from all the wind and solar. Do you not understand anything about this?
If you don't even understand the summary, thats probably a clue you should keep your mouth shut...