5 ms·

The article, of course, is guilty of exactly what it accuses its opponents of -- truthiness. They say that this is affordable, and then don't even say how much

The article, of course, is guilty of exactly what it accuses its opponents of -- truthiness. They say that this is affordable, and then don't even say how much it costs! He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense [1] [1] http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/ http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/

nl 9y ago
This is true, but I'd note this quite from the article: Nyhan showed a clear tendency for people with high numeracy skills to misread graphs about gun control or climate change, even when they’d just correctly read the same graph about soap. To address you specific point though - the price is less than A$150M/$US115M[1]. By comparison, the SA government is also building a new 250MW gas fired power station which costs A$360M[2]. It's difficult to compare the two because they are such different things of course. But I'd note that at periods of high wind generation the power price in SA does drop to zero, but the peak price is very high. It seems likely the price of energy from the wind farm plus battery will be extremely competitive with gas, and the investment price seems roughly proportional for the amount of energy made available. [1] http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/south-australian-government-refuses-to-say-how-much-worlds-biggest-lithium-ion-battery-will-cost/news-story/ http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/south-aus... [2] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-13/sa-gas-fire-power-station-gains-international-interest/8442578 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-13/sa-gas-fire-power-stat...
- sitkack 9y ago
  One with a big enough sink could get paid to take power off the grid. I repeat, you could make money charging your batteries.
  - nl 9y ago
    Yes. For residential installations they banned the 'charge during cheaper power, discharge into the grid during high power' thing for subsidised solar. But for this it's the whole idea.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
    I don't think it would work like that because there would be a rapidly decreasing amount of cheap power to take as more storage came online.
- petra 9y ago
  How much is the price for kwh stored/dispatched , over the long term ? that's the missing data here. And btw: i don't know the economics of this project, but in general, if this was cost effective, Musk would have tons of customers(including power companies), to supply power during peak hours and save them a lot of money.
  - cinquemb 9y ago
    >Musk would have tons of customers(including power companies), to supply power during peak hours and save them a lot of money. Assuming such customers don't already have existing contractual obligations with existing providers nor assets whose valuation depends on no significant changes to current operations.
    - petra 9y ago
      It isn't the case. There are many businesses(both utilities and others) who could use a peak shaving solution, especially one as scaleable as batteries. EDIT: what's unique about the australian installation(in 100 days), is that it is politically driven, or risk management driven(to reduce the risk of outages). see[2]. And so, using a healthy dose of skepticism, All i'm saying: If there's a real economical solution for the big problem of energy storage, real deployments are the test, not politically/risk driven deployments, or psychological/marketing[1] driven deployments(like we see with the power wall). And this is a repeating pattern with musk(a marketing genius, definetly, and very smart overall), succeeding quite well on the higher end of the market, but when it comes to the more commodity end, his companies are less stellar: see First Solar, or the fact the Renault-Nissan sells more electric cars than Tesla. [1]https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/how-to-sell-energy-storage-when-the-economics-dont-work https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/how-to-sell-ene... [2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14715679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14715679
      - cinquemb 9y ago
        How do you know? Do you have access to the contracts that, for example, a large provider like PG & E signs with it's partners for their current "peak shaving solution"? Do you have detailed access to their balance sheets and appraiser information? From their latest 10k[0], Gas related equipment represents 26% of the value of their assets. They would, have to write some non trivial amount off because they would no longer have any use of it by switching to use batteries like these. What would their majority shareholders think in response to that? What if they are also invested in the supply chain of such? I assume those would be non-zero losses. [0] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/75488/000100498017000012/form10q.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/75488/00010049801700... Edit: If you are implying that economics of a thing can be decoupled from politics, then I think that is a faulty belief. You won't get "real deployments" unless current providers are out competed on whatever front (economics/politics) or routed around and made obsolete in some fashion, because they stand to lose economically based on their current investment. Whether you agree with how Elon (or others) is going about it, is irrelevant in so much as you aren't in direct opposition or exposed to the risk of such changes. I'm not long TSLA nor have no future plans to be so.
calafrax 9y ago
The problems with this article are legion but what I want to know is what the real contract terms were? I know Musk promised the 100-days or free thing, which makes a nice headline, but I really doubt that is what the actual contract says. I may be wrong but would be very interested to know.

nl 9y ago

This is true, but I'd note this quite from the article: Nyhan showed a clear tendency for people with high numeracy skills to misread graphs about gun control or climate change, even when they’d just correctly read the same graph about soap. To address you specific point though - the price is less than A$150M/$US115M[1]. By comparison, the SA government is also building a new 250MW gas fired power station which costs A$360M[2]. It's difficult to compare the two because they are such different things of course. But I'd note that at periods of high wind generation the power price in SA does drop to zero, but the peak price is very high. It seems likely the price of energy from the wind farm plus battery will be extremely competitive with gas, and the investment price seems roughly proportional for the amount of energy made available. [1] http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/south-australian-government-refuses-to-say-how-much-worlds-biggest-lithium-ion-battery-will-cost/news-story/ http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/south-aus... [2] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-13/sa-gas-fire-power-station-gains-international-interest/8442578 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-13/sa-gas-fire-power-stat...

sitkack 9y ago
One with a big enough sink could get paid to take power off the grid. I repeat, you could make money charging your batteries.
- nl 9y ago
  Yes. For residential installations they banned the 'charge during cheaper power, discharge into the grid during high power' thing for subsidised solar. But for this it's the whole idea.
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
  I don't think it would work like that because there would be a rapidly decreasing amount of cheap power to take as more storage came online.
petra 9y ago
How much is the price for kwh stored/dispatched , over the long term ? that's the missing data here. And btw: i don't know the economics of this project, but in general, if this was cost effective, Musk would have tons of customers(including power companies), to supply power during peak hours and save them a lot of money.
- cinquemb 9y ago
  >Musk would have tons of customers(including power companies), to supply power during peak hours and save them a lot of money. Assuming such customers don't already have existing contractual obligations with existing providers nor assets whose valuation depends on no significant changes to current operations.
  - petra 9y ago
    It isn't the case. There are many businesses(both utilities and others) who could use a peak shaving solution, especially one as scaleable as batteries. EDIT: what's unique about the australian installation(in 100 days), is that it is politically driven, or risk management driven(to reduce the risk of outages). see[2]. And so, using a healthy dose of skepticism, All i'm saying: If there's a real economical solution for the big problem of energy storage, real deployments are the test, not politically/risk driven deployments, or psychological/marketing[1] driven deployments(like we see with the power wall). And this is a repeating pattern with musk(a marketing genius, definetly, and very smart overall), succeeding quite well on the higher end of the market, but when it comes to the more commodity end, his companies are less stellar: see First Solar, or the fact the Renault-Nissan sells more electric cars than Tesla. [1]https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/how-to-sell-energy-storage-when-the-economics-dont-work https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/how-to-sell-ene... [2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14715679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14715679
    - cinquemb 9y ago
      How do you know? Do you have access to the contracts that, for example, a large provider like PG & E signs with it's partners for their current "peak shaving solution"? Do you have detailed access to their balance sheets and appraiser information? From their latest 10k[0], Gas related equipment represents 26% of the value of their assets. They would, have to write some non trivial amount off because they would no longer have any use of it by switching to use batteries like these. What would their majority shareholders think in response to that? What if they are also invested in the supply chain of such? I assume those would be non-zero losses. [0] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/75488/000100498017000012/form10q.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/75488/00010049801700... Edit: If you are implying that economics of a thing can be decoupled from politics, then I think that is a faulty belief. You won't get "real deployments" unless current providers are out competed on whatever front (economics/politics) or routed around and made obsolete in some fashion, because they stand to lose economically based on their current investment. Whether you agree with how Elon (or others) is going about it, is irrelevant in so much as you aren't in direct opposition or exposed to the risk of such changes. I'm not long TSLA nor have no future plans to be so.

calafrax 9y ago

The problems with this article are legion but what I want to know is what the real contract terms were? I know Musk promised the 100-days or free thing, which makes a nice headline, but I really doubt that is what the actual contract says. I may be wrong but would be very interested to know.