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I know nothing about the Australian power grid but I do know a fair bit about batteries. The cost of batteries and surrounding hardware here means that on this

I know nothing about the Australian power grid but I do know a fair bit about batteries. The cost of batteries and surrounding hardware here means that on this particular deal Musk is losing money. 100 days isn't a lot of time, and he needs to get about 1% of yearly global li-ion battery production to Australia, build surrounding hardware, AND install it in 3 months. It's definitely doable, and he's not giving out-of-this-world prices, but he is losing money here. It is completely worth it though: a lot of backup battery plants are hilariously overpriced and seeing "oh, this Australian company got 100mWh for $25MM, we paid $100MM for the same" will probably get some people thinking about switching to Tesla. Also worth noting that Tesla's battery costs will drop in the future, so if a utility company asks them in a year from now for the same $250/kWh rates they can probably get them. (Yes, I am 'that battery guy' that makes battery systems and comments on battery stuff a lot here.)

windexh8er 10y ago
Appreciate the insight. For edification who are the other big players Tesla would be ousting here? I'm curious to see if the public play has long term consequences for the competition. The transparency here is great, obviously it forces an interesting conversation for deals that are on the table for others - Musk likely made a bad weekend for some sales oriented folks in that space. And that's great for all of us long term (hopefully).
schiffern 10y ago
>he's not giving out-of-this-world prices, but he is losing money here Note that the quoted price of $250/kWh was given at the pack level (just the Powerpacks).[1] So the total project cost should be expected to exceed $25 million after including shipping, tariffs, site preparation, installation, bidirectional inverters, and interconnection. >build surrounding hardware, AND install it in 3 months The nice thing about the Powerpack is that they need very little surrounding hardware. The units are rated for outdoor installation, and they just forklift into place to a concrete pad. A group of Powerpacks (4-8) shares a common bidi inverter, which is wired to the grid interconnect on site. Done. The obvious thing to do would be to construct a building to house the packs and protect them from the elements, but I'm not sure that makes economic sense. These are exothermic devices when operating, so a big challenge will be cooling and ventilating the building. And if you're making a building just to spend capital and energy to ventilate it, was it really worth it to enclose weatherized equipment? It might make sense in hot climates to put a solar "carport" over the batteries to shade them and reduce cooling load. Tesla has one that's supposed to be cheap to install.[2] I expect the economically "right" answer (open air install, solar canopy, or prefab building) depends on local climate, expected battery duty cycle, and financing. Not to mention factors like your boss saying "100 days or it's free." ;) >he needs to get about 1% of yearly global li-ion battery production to Australia In 2013 Tesla gave global production as 34 GWh of cells.[3] 100 MWh works out to 0.29%, and I don't expect cell production has gone DOWN since 2013. So if you're looking for an order-of-magnitude, 0.1% would be less wrong (in both the multiplicative and the additive sense). The completed Gigafactory is expected to produce 150 GWh/year, so this is only 0.06% of that. Unfortunately I haven't seen reliable numbers about the production volume at present (with about 14% of the planned 13.6 million ft^2 footprint completed, and probably half of that outfitted for production). I naively estimate the Gigafactory is currently producing at about 2% planned final capacity, so 100 MWh represents around 12 days of production. [1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/840096176678420481 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/840096176678420481 [2] http://www.solarcity.com/newsroom/press/solarcity%E2%80%99s-new-zs-beam-solar-carport-system-makes-it-faster-cheaper-easier-and-safer http://www.solarcity.com/newsroom/press/solarcity%E2%80%99s-... [3] https://c1cleantechnicacom-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/files/2014/09/image2.jpg https://c1cleantechnicacom-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/files/201...
- owenversteeg 10y ago
  The source in that image from Tesla are extremely suspicious. A Google search for "IIT Takeshita" gives you only that image. Further research took me to this page. http://www.iit.co.jp/ http://www.iit.co.jp/, where I got the plain text "I'm sorry. It is under construction. Please wait." By the way, your own sources contradict each other - even if you _do_ believe that image from Tesla, the Gigafactory's completed capacity is 35 GWh/yr. This blog post states the same [0]. The segment which is done is cool, but it is surrounded by construction equipment and I doubt it is producing very many cells. Finally, since I doubt you're in the battery industry, there are two very important numbers: production capacity and production. For example, 2014 worldwide production capacity was almost 30 GWh, but worldwide production was only 5.4 GWh [1]. This is due to a lot of factors, but ultimately only a fraction of manufacturing capacity is used at any given time. A lot of graphs that you see on blogs will conflate the two. [0] https://www.tesla.com/blog/battery-cell-production-begins-gigafactory https://www.tesla.com/blog/battery-cell-production-begins-gi... [1] http://evobsession.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/image-23-e1461122689735.jpg http://evobsession.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/image-23-e...
  - schiffern 10y ago
    >The source in that image from Tesla are extremely suspicious. A Google search for "IIT Takeshita" gives you only that image. It's not easy to find, but I did some digging. Looks like an analysis of the global battery industry, with the 2013 version presented at the 2013 Battery Japan conference.[1] From other citations I found[2][3] it's clear the speaker is Hideo Takeshita, who in 2001 was the vice president of IIT (the Institute of Information Technology Ltd.)[4] and in 2014 was the president of a battery market research firm called B3 Corporation.[5] Sure the document isn't freely available online, but given the commercial nature of the content that hardly seems suspicious. >your own sources contradict each other Sorry, I should have been more clear. It gets very confusing since it's a moving target, and you can rarely tell who is using what source (and when that source is from). The original capacity announced in their blog post[6] on 2014-02-26 was 35 GWh/yr at the cell level and 50 GWh/yr at the pack level (importing 15 GWh/yr of cells).[7] That's what you're seeing on the chart. Later at the 2016 shareholder meeting on 2016-05-31, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced that they were going to triple the final production capacity at the Nevada Gigafactory.[8] [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20130207162628/http://www.batteryjapan.jp/en/Home/ https://web.archive.org/web/20130207162628/http://www.batter... [2] http://www.sdle.co.il/AllSites/810/Assets/c%20pillot-avicenne.pdf#42 http://www.sdle.co.il/AllSites/810/Assets/c%20pillot-avicenn... (page 42) [3] http://www.avem.fr/docs/pdf/AvicenneDiapoXining.pdf#21 http://www.avem.fr/docs/pdf/AvicenneDiapoXining.pdf#21 (page 21) [4] http://electronicdesign.com/energy/li-ion-batteries-reach-higher-performance http://electronicdesign.com/energy/li-ion-batteries-reach-hi... [5] http://wardsauto.com/miscellaneous/battery-experts-seek-lower-costs-better-technology http://wardsauto.com/miscellaneous/battery-experts-seek-lowe... [6] https://www.tesla.com/blog/gigafactory5 https://www.tesla.com/blog/gigafactory5 [7] https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_attachments/gigafactory.pdf https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_attachments/g... [8] http://electrek.co/2016/05/31/tesla-triple-battery-output-gigafactory-1-150-gwh-elon-musk/ http://electrek.co/2016/05/31/tesla-triple-battery-output-gi...

windexh8er 10y ago

Appreciate the insight. For edification who are the other big players Tesla would be ousting here? I'm curious to see if the public play has long term consequences for the competition. The transparency here is great, obviously it forces an interesting conversation for deals that are on the table for others - Musk likely made a bad weekend for some sales oriented folks in that space. And that's great for all of us long term (hopefully).

schiffern 10y ago

>he's not giving out-of-this-world prices, but he is losing money here Note that the quoted price of $250/kWh was given at the pack level (just the Powerpacks).[1] So the total project cost should be expected to exceed $25 million after including shipping, tariffs, site preparation, installation, bidirectional inverters, and interconnection. >build surrounding hardware, AND install it in 3 months The nice thing about the Powerpack is that they need very little surrounding hardware. The units are rated for outdoor installation, and they just forklift into place to a concrete pad. A group of Powerpacks (4-8) shares a common bidi inverter, which is wired to the grid interconnect on site. Done. The obvious thing to do would be to construct a building to house the packs and protect them from the elements, but I'm not sure that makes economic sense. These are exothermic devices when operating, so a big challenge will be cooling and ventilating the building. And if you're making a building just to spend capital and energy to ventilate it, was it really worth it to enclose weatherized equipment? It might make sense in hot climates to put a solar "carport" over the batteries to shade them and reduce cooling load. Tesla has one that's supposed to be cheap to install.[2] I expect the economically "right" answer (open air install, solar canopy, or prefab building) depends on local climate, expected battery duty cycle, and financing. Not to mention factors like your boss saying "100 days or it's free." ;) >he needs to get about 1% of yearly global li-ion battery production to Australia In 2013 Tesla gave global production as 34 GWh of cells.[3] 100 MWh works out to 0.29%, and I don't expect cell production has gone DOWN since 2013. So if you're looking for an order-of-magnitude, 0.1% would be less wrong (in both the multiplicative and the additive sense). The completed Gigafactory is expected to produce 150 GWh/year, so this is only 0.06% of that. Unfortunately I haven't seen reliable numbers about the production volume at present (with about 14% of the planned 13.6 million ft^2 footprint completed, and probably half of that outfitted for production). I naively estimate the Gigafactory is currently producing at about 2% planned final capacity, so 100 MWh represents around 12 days of production. [1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/840096176678420481 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/840096176678420481 [2] http://www.solarcity.com/newsroom/press/solarcity%E2%80%99s-new-zs-beam-solar-carport-system-makes-it-faster-cheaper-easier-and-safer http://www.solarcity.com/newsroom/press/solarcity%E2%80%99s-... [3] https://c1cleantechnicacom-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/files/2014/09/image2.jpg https://c1cleantechnicacom-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/files/201...

owenversteeg 10y ago
The source in that image from Tesla are extremely suspicious. A Google search for "IIT Takeshita" gives you only that image. Further research took me to this page. http://www.iit.co.jp/ http://www.iit.co.jp/, where I got the plain text "I'm sorry. It is under construction. Please wait." By the way, your own sources contradict each other - even if you _do_ believe that image from Tesla, the Gigafactory's completed capacity is 35 GWh/yr. This blog post states the same [0]. The segment which is done is cool, but it is surrounded by construction equipment and I doubt it is producing very many cells. Finally, since I doubt you're in the battery industry, there are two very important numbers: production capacity and production. For example, 2014 worldwide production capacity was almost 30 GWh, but worldwide production was only 5.4 GWh [1]. This is due to a lot of factors, but ultimately only a fraction of manufacturing capacity is used at any given time. A lot of graphs that you see on blogs will conflate the two. [0] https://www.tesla.com/blog/battery-cell-production-begins-gigafactory https://www.tesla.com/blog/battery-cell-production-begins-gi... [1] http://evobsession.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/image-23-e1461122689735.jpg http://evobsession.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/image-23-e...
- schiffern 10y ago
  >The source in that image from Tesla are extremely suspicious. A Google search for "IIT Takeshita" gives you only that image. It's not easy to find, but I did some digging. Looks like an analysis of the global battery industry, with the 2013 version presented at the 2013 Battery Japan conference.[1] From other citations I found[2][3] it's clear the speaker is Hideo Takeshita, who in 2001 was the vice president of IIT (the Institute of Information Technology Ltd.)[4] and in 2014 was the president of a battery market research firm called B3 Corporation.[5] Sure the document isn't freely available online, but given the commercial nature of the content that hardly seems suspicious. >your own sources contradict each other Sorry, I should have been more clear. It gets very confusing since it's a moving target, and you can rarely tell who is using what source (and when that source is from). The original capacity announced in their blog post[6] on 2014-02-26 was 35 GWh/yr at the cell level and 50 GWh/yr at the pack level (importing 15 GWh/yr of cells).[7] That's what you're seeing on the chart. Later at the 2016 shareholder meeting on 2016-05-31, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced that they were going to triple the final production capacity at the Nevada Gigafactory.[8] [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20130207162628/http://www.batteryjapan.jp/en/Home/ https://web.archive.org/web/20130207162628/http://www.batter... [2] http://www.sdle.co.il/AllSites/810/Assets/c%20pillot-avicenne.pdf#42 http://www.sdle.co.il/AllSites/810/Assets/c%20pillot-avicenn... (page 42) [3] http://www.avem.fr/docs/pdf/AvicenneDiapoXining.pdf#21 http://www.avem.fr/docs/pdf/AvicenneDiapoXining.pdf#21 (page 21) [4] http://electronicdesign.com/energy/li-ion-batteries-reach-higher-performance http://electronicdesign.com/energy/li-ion-batteries-reach-hi... [5] http://wardsauto.com/miscellaneous/battery-experts-seek-lower-costs-better-technology http://wardsauto.com/miscellaneous/battery-experts-seek-lowe... [6] https://www.tesla.com/blog/gigafactory5 https://www.tesla.com/blog/gigafactory5 [7] https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_attachments/gigafactory.pdf https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_attachments/g... [8] http://electrek.co/2016/05/31/tesla-triple-battery-output-gigafactory-1-150-gwh-elon-musk/ http://electrek.co/2016/05/31/tesla-triple-battery-output-gi...