3 ms·

I think this is because Tesla/SolarCity/SpaceX has this philosophy of versatility of components. They want to have one and only one energy storage technology an

by sonium 10y ago

I think this is because Tesla/SolarCity/SpaceX has this philosophy of versatility of components. They want to have one and only one energy storage technology and produce it at scale. This also one reason for the Tesla/SolarCity merger: you can use the same building block and scale it up. SpaceX is doing the same: use one rocket motor on booster and upper stage, and mass produce it. In contrast Ariane uses three different motors on one rocket.

michaelbuckbee 10y ago
This is one of those really important business decisions that feels almost trivial but with profound positive results. It immediately reminded me of Southwest Air and how they credit some of their early success to _only_ flying 737s. Letting them standardize their maintenance and getting very good at keeping that one model of airplane flying.
- giarc 10y ago
  This is currently happening with Canadian airline WestJet. For many years they only flew a single aircraft which made maintenance much easier (staff trained on a single aircraft, parts are easier to keep in stock). They since purchased a few larger aircraft to fly to London and Dublin and have been plagued with maintenance issues. Passengers are getting stuck in London while WestJet scrambles to fly in a mechanic and parts to fix the planes.
- jdietrich 10y ago
  The computer industry is perhaps the most extreme example of this. From a dizzying array of different systems in the infancy of computing, the overwhelming majority of the market has consolidated to two instruction set architectures and a handful of operating systems. Magic things happen when your economies of scale are big enough.
antisthenes 10y ago
While your argument makes sense for Tesla/SolarCity specific case, there's no reason that the same efficiencies of scale could not be applied to flywheels overall for energy storage. The additional benefits of batteries over flywheels however is that utility-scale energy storage can be achieved with a wide range of battery quality. What I mean by that is that say, for example, a batch of batteries doesn't pass QC to make it into the Tesla cars by virtue of having only 85% of their desired capacity. They can still be used in energy storage facilities. Same goes for used battery packs from Teslas that have degraded to 70-80% of their original capacity over the years. I surmise it's quite more efficient to use these packs for grid storage than to recycle them right away. Space is probably not a huge constraint for them, so it's not a big deal to use packs that operate in the lower capacity ranges. Think of it as a big energy storage cloud like Backblaze's storage pods. They mix and match consumer grade hardware, but because of scale and redundancy, they can get away with it and still provide reliable storage. Same goes for energy. I'm not quite sure what the scales are for flywheel manufacturers compared to Tesla's gigafactory, but they're probably at least an order of magnitude smaller, plus flywheels generally can't be used as the main source of power in cars or portable electronics, while Li Ion cells can.
- leephillips 10y ago
  This is exactly the approach planned by BMW: to use batteries that are no longer in good enough shape for cars in a home storage system: http://fortune.com/2016/06/22/bmw-energy-storage/ http://fortune.com/2016/06/22/bmw-energy-storage/

by sonium 10y ago

michaelbuckbee 10y ago

This is one of those really important business decisions that feels almost trivial but with profound positive results. It immediately reminded me of Southwest Air and how they credit some of their early success to _only_ flying 737s. Letting them standardize their maintenance and getting very good at keeping that one model of airplane flying.

giarc 10y ago
This is currently happening with Canadian airline WestJet. For many years they only flew a single aircraft which made maintenance much easier (staff trained on a single aircraft, parts are easier to keep in stock). They since purchased a few larger aircraft to fly to London and Dublin and have been plagued with maintenance issues. Passengers are getting stuck in London while WestJet scrambles to fly in a mechanic and parts to fix the planes.
jdietrich 10y ago
The computer industry is perhaps the most extreme example of this. From a dizzying array of different systems in the infancy of computing, the overwhelming majority of the market has consolidated to two instruction set architectures and a handful of operating systems. Magic things happen when your economies of scale are big enough.

antisthenes 10y ago

While your argument makes sense for Tesla/SolarCity specific case, there's no reason that the same efficiencies of scale could not be applied to flywheels overall for energy storage. The additional benefits of batteries over flywheels however is that utility-scale energy storage can be achieved with a wide range of battery quality. What I mean by that is that say, for example, a batch of batteries doesn't pass QC to make it into the Tesla cars by virtue of having only 85% of their desired capacity. They can still be used in energy storage facilities. Same goes for used battery packs from Teslas that have degraded to 70-80% of their original capacity over the years. I surmise it's quite more efficient to use these packs for grid storage than to recycle them right away. Space is probably not a huge constraint for them, so it's not a big deal to use packs that operate in the lower capacity ranges. Think of it as a big energy storage cloud like Backblaze's storage pods. They mix and match consumer grade hardware, but because of scale and redundancy, they can get away with it and still provide reliable storage. Same goes for energy. I'm not quite sure what the scales are for flywheel manufacturers compared to Tesla's gigafactory, but they're probably at least an order of magnitude smaller, plus flywheels generally can't be used as the main source of power in cars or portable electronics, while Li Ion cells can.

leephillips 10y ago
This is exactly the approach planned by BMW: to use batteries that are no longer in good enough shape for cars in a home storage system: http://fortune.com/2016/06/22/bmw-energy-storage/ http://fortune.com/2016/06/22/bmw-energy-storage/