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> Well, that battery might cost more than the entire house. And for what purpose? So I can disconnect from the electric grid for a week, and then reconnect agai

> Well, that battery might cost more than the entire house. And for what purpose? So I can disconnect from the electric grid for a week, and then reconnect again when the battery has run out? Or to power it with expensive solar panels? I can't figure out if he's being willfully obtuse here. It's to allow you to get off the grid entirely. If you generate enough solar to cover 100% of your usage, right now you're still slapped with a grid connection fee. The battery covers you overnight and makes grid connection totally unnecessary. Oh but what about charging your car? Battery swap stations.

geori 12y ago
This also solves the peak load problem, since you can pay for power at night and run off of your giant Tesla battery in the garage during the day.
- aetherson 12y ago
  Let's say that electricity was FREE during the night. What exactly is your electric bill today? $300 per month if you're a big user? If that battery costs $50,000 and reduces your eclectic bill to zero, then it pays for itself in a mere 12 years. In other words: no.
  - Spooky23 12y ago
    It's a similar story to solar panels, except that it might work for a variety of people who live in northern climates or don't have a ton of roof space. It also might be a good candidate for utilities, most of whom buy electricity at market rates, to forward deeply stored energy closer to the delivery point.
  - stardek 12y ago
    From jegutman elsewhere in the thread, batteries cost $12000, so even buying two would cut that to 6 years and I bet the batteries usefulness would last longer than that so it would definitely add value to a home and probably be a reasonable investment.
  - funkyy 12y ago
    Why Battery cost $50K? More like $10K + patent fees at most. You can see how batteries are made on some videos and most expensive part will be technology behind assembly. The high cost of Tesla cars is caused now because it is a new, unique product that needs huge amounts of live cash to fund the development etc. Its like with Apple where their phones could be priced 50% of what it is now, but there is a lot of money spent on marketing, future development and to build up cash reserves in case of market turmoil.
ChuckMcM 12y ago
He actually makes two assumptions both of which hurt his point, the first is that cost of the battery is that of a house (given that an 85kW Tesla costs $90K and you don't need the car with it, we'll guess the battery is less than $90K) so lets call it $75K. And the second is that stabilizing energy costs doesn't change anything else. If your house is nominally electric (using gas for things which gas is really good at, making heat) and your gasoline bill is non-existent because your vehicle is electric. It means you can cost out power with a depreciation/replacement cost model which gives you much better forecasting ability. One of the reasons given for taking 'energy costs' out of the whole inflation/cpi metric was due to its volatility. I tend to agree with his thesis that Apple will not buy Tesla but I don't think he makes a good argument against the battery claim.
- simonebrunozzi 12y ago
  Author here: to run a house for a week, one of Tesla's battery would not be enough; you would need a few. I guess I wasn't much clear on the post.
  - bsder 12y ago
    You don't need to run the house for a week for a battery to be useful. The standard idea for this is for the houseowner to charge the battery during off-peak night hours and deplete it during peak hours thus helping the electric company to decrease the variation between peak and average load. This also has the effect of decreasing the amount of copper in a cable required to connect a house to the grid. If enough people have batteries, it also helps grid reliability. Most grid failures are single point of failure so having a distributed source allows power to keep flowing while repair is being carried out. There are a lot of advantages to having a big battery which could power a household for even a day.
    - dikaiosune 12y ago
      In the short-term, this also allows homeowners to take advantage of variable-rate billing from power companies. Charging a bank of batteries in off-peak would be much cheaper than getting full current during the peak. One problem is that eventually the cost savings is eroded by everyone jumping on the bandwagon to use the off-peak hours, which eventually become more expensive. Also, regarding your point about grid stability, if enough power consumers use these kinds of batteries, some sort of scheduling might be necessary to actually level out the grid's demand across all 24 hours.
loceng 12y ago
Unfortunately I don't think cities will deal with this well if there all of a sudden is a mass migration - they still will likely have costs/debt to pay off and divide that cost among everyone in cities. I'm not sure many cities are planning for this transition.
drawkbox 12y ago
All of those reasons and really, no power outages anymore ever. Unless the grid is down for a long time, days, weeks you could be uninterrupted. In the future it will probably seem ancient to not have this, and laughed at that we had power outages or rolling blackouts. It would probably be great in the developing world and off the grid. It could enable housing to be away from the grid if the solar was good enough or even networks of battery grids and many other uses we cannot imagine yet.

geori 12y ago

This also solves the peak load problem, since you can pay for power at night and run off of your giant Tesla battery in the garage during the day.

aetherson 12y ago
Let's say that electricity was FREE during the night. What exactly is your electric bill today? $300 per month if you're a big user? If that battery costs $50,000 and reduces your eclectic bill to zero, then it pays for itself in a mere 12 years. In other words: no.
- Spooky23 12y ago
  It's a similar story to solar panels, except that it might work for a variety of people who live in northern climates or don't have a ton of roof space. It also might be a good candidate for utilities, most of whom buy electricity at market rates, to forward deeply stored energy closer to the delivery point.
- stardek 12y ago
  From jegutman elsewhere in the thread, batteries cost $12000, so even buying two would cut that to 6 years and I bet the batteries usefulness would last longer than that so it would definitely add value to a home and probably be a reasonable investment.
- funkyy 12y ago
  Why Battery cost $50K? More like $10K + patent fees at most. You can see how batteries are made on some videos and most expensive part will be technology behind assembly. The high cost of Tesla cars is caused now because it is a new, unique product that needs huge amounts of live cash to fund the development etc. Its like with Apple where their phones could be priced 50% of what it is now, but there is a lot of money spent on marketing, future development and to build up cash reserves in case of market turmoil.

ChuckMcM 12y ago

He actually makes two assumptions both of which hurt his point, the first is that cost of the battery is that of a house (given that an 85kW Tesla costs $90K and you don't need the car with it, we'll guess the battery is less than $90K) so lets call it $75K. And the second is that stabilizing energy costs doesn't change anything else. If your house is nominally electric (using gas for things which gas is really good at, making heat) and your gasoline bill is non-existent because your vehicle is electric. It means you can cost out power with a depreciation/replacement cost model which gives you much better forecasting ability. One of the reasons given for taking 'energy costs' out of the whole inflation/cpi metric was due to its volatility. I tend to agree with his thesis that Apple will not buy Tesla but I don't think he makes a good argument against the battery claim.

simonebrunozzi 12y ago
Author here: to run a house for a week, one of Tesla's battery would not be enough; you would need a few. I guess I wasn't much clear on the post.
- bsder 12y ago
  You don't need to run the house for a week for a battery to be useful. The standard idea for this is for the houseowner to charge the battery during off-peak night hours and deplete it during peak hours thus helping the electric company to decrease the variation between peak and average load. This also has the effect of decreasing the amount of copper in a cable required to connect a house to the grid. If enough people have batteries, it also helps grid reliability. Most grid failures are single point of failure so having a distributed source allows power to keep flowing while repair is being carried out. There are a lot of advantages to having a big battery which could power a household for even a day.
  - dikaiosune 12y ago
    In the short-term, this also allows homeowners to take advantage of variable-rate billing from power companies. Charging a bank of batteries in off-peak would be much cheaper than getting full current during the peak. One problem is that eventually the cost savings is eroded by everyone jumping on the bandwagon to use the off-peak hours, which eventually become more expensive. Also, regarding your point about grid stability, if enough power consumers use these kinds of batteries, some sort of scheduling might be necessary to actually level out the grid's demand across all 24 hours.

loceng 12y ago

Unfortunately I don't think cities will deal with this well if there all of a sudden is a mass migration - they still will likely have costs/debt to pay off and divide that cost among everyone in cities. I'm not sure many cities are planning for this transition.

drawkbox 12y ago

All of those reasons and really, no power outages anymore ever. Unless the grid is down for a long time, days, weeks you could be uninterrupted. In the future it will probably seem ancient to not have this, and laughed at that we had power outages or rolling blackouts. It would probably be great in the developing world and off the grid. It could enable housing to be away from the grid if the solar was good enough or even networks of battery grids and many other uses we cannot imagine yet.