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$3,500. That's crazy good for your average household, on par with natural gas backup generators with half the logistics. I might just be ordering sooner rather

$3,500. That's crazy good for your average household, on par with natural gas backup generators with half the logistics. I might just be ordering sooner rather than later given some of the grid instabilities in my area over the past year, and through the mid-term in preparation for a solar switch here in Chicago. While Elon might not be the best orator, you can easily derive his authenticity and belief in the product by virtue of his delivery. You can't do that with accuracy in the canned and carefully rehearsed.

deleted 11y ago
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- deleted 11y ago
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- vanadium 11y ago
  Playing the margins in my home would probably save $25/mo against a $100/mo charge, I'm spitballing. Our local utility here in Chicago, ComEd, is starting to roll out to the population what flux in energy usage actually means on a granular basis (hourly, daily, monthly, seasonally) while offering incentives to change their consumption patterns.
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    I too have ComED (Schaumburg). From midnight to 5am daily, I can get power for 1 cent/kwh. If I were to shift all of my consumption to that time period, its effectively free.
    - joezydeco 11y ago
      I've been on ComEd RRTP for 6 years now and I've been wanting a nicer way to shift load or arbitrage price drops. The Telsa device, as others have mentioned, seems like a rebranded solar storage device. I suppose the intelligence would be in the inverter/grid cutout mechanism anyway. This system would run my home for about 8 hours in the winter and 4 in the summer before emptying, so I would need a lot more smarts in the box to try and anticipate price spikes without running out.
      - toomuchtodo 11y ago
        > This system would run my home for about 8 hours in the winter and 4 in the summer before emptying, so I would need a lot more smarts in the box to try and anticipate price spikes without running out. Most new grid-tie inverters can be controlled from a computer either over IP or a serial interface; you could fairly trivially control the flow of power by polling your electric provider's website (I scrape the RRTP API for current and future pricing data every 60 seconds) and commanding your inverter based on that.
        joezydeco 11y ago
        I don't have a lot of experience with those inverters. How many cycles do you drop when switching over? My first idea was to create a system that watched the immediate price as well as the day ahead AND the weather forecast to try and predict the best time to stay off the grid, but that's a little too ambitious. My current idea is to grab my 5-minute history over the last year or two and model it against a simple buy-low-sell-high threshold. It should at least tell me how much the system would save each month. (BTW about your earlier post, even if supply is 1c/kWh, there's still the delivery charge and taxes. I think supply needs to drop to something like -3.5c/kWh before the juice is "free". It's happened only once or twice in my history with the system.).
tlb 11y ago
$3500 doesn't include the inverter or transfer switch. Transfer switch is maybe $200, and it's not clear what the inverter might cost. It's a nontrivial part, since it would be responsible for daily cycle estimation and cost optimization. For $3300 you can get a 17 kW generator with inverter and transfer switch [0], which will run for days on a house-sized propane tank. At my house in the woods, we do sometimes get multi-day power outages after storms. Though, to be fair, you need a concrete pad and 30 square feet to install the generator. It doesn't seem like a competitive backup system, but load shifting is still appealing. [0] http://www.costco.com/Honeywell-17-kW-Automatic-Standby-Generator.product.100144364.html http://www.costco.com/Honeywell-17-kW-Automatic-Standby-Gene...
- TaylorAlexander 11y ago
  Some people (like me) are simply unwilling to keep using carbon-based sources of energy. At some point it just feels awful to be contributing to such a terrible problem. I'm counting the days till I can sell my worn out petrol car and get an electric car. If I had a home and dollars, I'd want one of these batteries.
  - SCAQTony 11y ago
    Batteries are not clean; lithium mines are one ugly slight and recycling is difficult: http://whenonearth.net/awe-inspiring-aerial-images-worlds-mega-mines/ http://whenonearth.net/awe-inspiring-aerial-images-worlds-me... In my clueless opinion these batteries should be used strategically in places where solar, wind, and hydro power are unavailable.
    - Zombieball 11y ago
      Yes the real breakthrough tech needed is a new battery! Which hopefully Tesla is on track to develop,because as is, electric cars are just not scalable.
      - TaylorAlexander 11y ago
        People say that, but from what I've heard there is plenty of lithium in the world to increase use 20% every year for 30 years before we need to get more creative in how we mine it. That's a huge total increase and means that electric cars totally are scalable. Do you have information supporting the idea that electric cars aren't scalable? My understanding is that they definitely are scalable.
Yaggo 11y ago
That's crazy cheap. The closest competitor which comes into my mind is probably SMA Sunny Boy Smart inverter with lithium battery, costing more than double while offering only 2 kWh of energy (but includes a solar inverter).
- fredkbloggs 11y ago
  It's not crazy cheap at all. The incumbent technology here is flooded lead-acid, a proven solution used everywhere from telco COs to forklifts to off-grid cabins for over a century. Industrial FLA batteries (the top grade, longest-lasting, etc.) retail for somewhere around $250 per kWh, and typically have warranties ranging from 7 to 10 years. We don't know exactly what the differences are between Tesla's two offerings, but even if we assume that the 10 kWh model is rated for continuous deep cycling for 10 years (their language suggests it may not be), we would still have to justify the $350 per kWh price tag. The other model comes in at $428. So this is somewhere around 50% more costly than existing solutions with a similar expected life span. The limitation of 2 kW continuous power is also a major drawback relative to FLA solutions, which can typically provide at least 200 A (around 10 kW at 48V, much more at the higher voltages the Tesla unit operates at). Since the Li-ion battery is maintenance-free, a better comparison might be AGM or other VRLA technologies, which are slightly more expensive than FLA, but still less expensive than the Tesla units. Since no inverter, grid-tie transfer relay, or charge controllers are included in this unit, those will all be additional costs just as they would with any other batteries. And it appears you will be limited to a few inverters and probably a micro-inverter PV design; this is purely a grid-tie-only design. Existing battery technologies can do all of that, but they also give you much broader flexibility for other applications and system designs. I'm not sure why I would want this. I'd be paying above the odds for some serious design constraints and limitations I wouldn't otherwise have. Tesla seem to be taking a very different approach from their launch of the Roadster, which was a super-premium offering at a super-premium price. This is a modest offering at a premium price in relative terms, but low enough in absolute terms to appeal to people who aren't well-versed in the field. Their success will probably depend on installers deciding it's easier to just take people's money and sell them the Tesla than to educate their customers and give them the best value available. Not a bad gamble, for Tesla.
greedo 11y ago
I don't think most households (in the US at least) could run off a single unit. You would need three units, and they would only give you 1 days capacity, compared to a natural gas generator which could keep running indefinitely. http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=97&t=3 http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=97&t=3

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
vanadium 11y ago
Playing the margins in my home would probably save $25/mo against a $100/mo charge, I'm spitballing. Our local utility here in Chicago, ComEd, is starting to roll out to the population what flux in energy usage actually means on a granular basis (hourly, daily, monthly, seasonally) while offering incentives to change their consumption patterns.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  I too have ComED (Schaumburg). From midnight to 5am daily, I can get power for 1 cent/kwh. If I were to shift all of my consumption to that time period, its effectively free.
  - joezydeco 11y ago
    I've been on ComEd RRTP for 6 years now and I've been wanting a nicer way to shift load or arbitrage price drops. The Telsa device, as others have mentioned, seems like a rebranded solar storage device. I suppose the intelligence would be in the inverter/grid cutout mechanism anyway. This system would run my home for about 8 hours in the winter and 4 in the summer before emptying, so I would need a lot more smarts in the box to try and anticipate price spikes without running out.
    - toomuchtodo 11y ago
      > This system would run my home for about 8 hours in the winter and 4 in the summer before emptying, so I would need a lot more smarts in the box to try and anticipate price spikes without running out. Most new grid-tie inverters can be controlled from a computer either over IP or a serial interface; you could fairly trivially control the flow of power by polling your electric provider's website (I scrape the RRTP API for current and future pricing data every 60 seconds) and commanding your inverter based on that.
      - joezydeco 11y ago
        I don't have a lot of experience with those inverters. How many cycles do you drop when switching over? My first idea was to create a system that watched the immediate price as well as the day ahead AND the weather forecast to try and predict the best time to stay off the grid, but that's a little too ambitious. My current idea is to grab my 5-minute history over the last year or two and model it against a simple buy-low-sell-high threshold. It should at least tell me how much the system would save each month. (BTW about your earlier post, even if supply is 1c/kWh, there's still the delivery charge and taxes. I think supply needs to drop to something like -3.5c/kWh before the juice is "free". It's happened only once or twice in my history with the system.).

tlb 11y ago

$3500 doesn't include the inverter or transfer switch. Transfer switch is maybe $200, and it's not clear what the inverter might cost. It's a nontrivial part, since it would be responsible for daily cycle estimation and cost optimization. For $3300 you can get a 17 kW generator with inverter and transfer switch [0], which will run for days on a house-sized propane tank. At my house in the woods, we do sometimes get multi-day power outages after storms. Though, to be fair, you need a concrete pad and 30 square feet to install the generator. It doesn't seem like a competitive backup system, but load shifting is still appealing. [0] http://www.costco.com/Honeywell-17-kW-Automatic-Standby-Generator.product.100144364.html http://www.costco.com/Honeywell-17-kW-Automatic-Standby-Gene...

TaylorAlexander 11y ago
Some people (like me) are simply unwilling to keep using carbon-based sources of energy. At some point it just feels awful to be contributing to such a terrible problem. I'm counting the days till I can sell my worn out petrol car and get an electric car. If I had a home and dollars, I'd want one of these batteries.
- SCAQTony 11y ago
  Batteries are not clean; lithium mines are one ugly slight and recycling is difficult: http://whenonearth.net/awe-inspiring-aerial-images-worlds-mega-mines/ http://whenonearth.net/awe-inspiring-aerial-images-worlds-me... In my clueless opinion these batteries should be used strategically in places where solar, wind, and hydro power are unavailable.
  - Zombieball 11y ago
    Yes the real breakthrough tech needed is a new battery! Which hopefully Tesla is on track to develop,because as is, electric cars are just not scalable.
    - TaylorAlexander 11y ago
      People say that, but from what I've heard there is plenty of lithium in the world to increase use 20% every year for 30 years before we need to get more creative in how we mine it. That's a huge total increase and means that electric cars totally are scalable. Do you have information supporting the idea that electric cars aren't scalable? My understanding is that they definitely are scalable.

Yaggo 11y ago

That's crazy cheap. The closest competitor which comes into my mind is probably SMA Sunny Boy Smart inverter with lithium battery, costing more than double while offering only 2 kWh of energy (but includes a solar inverter).

fredkbloggs 11y ago
It's not crazy cheap at all. The incumbent technology here is flooded lead-acid, a proven solution used everywhere from telco COs to forklifts to off-grid cabins for over a century. Industrial FLA batteries (the top grade, longest-lasting, etc.) retail for somewhere around $250 per kWh, and typically have warranties ranging from 7 to 10 years. We don't know exactly what the differences are between Tesla's two offerings, but even if we assume that the 10 kWh model is rated for continuous deep cycling for 10 years (their language suggests it may not be), we would still have to justify the $350 per kWh price tag. The other model comes in at $428. So this is somewhere around 50% more costly than existing solutions with a similar expected life span. The limitation of 2 kW continuous power is also a major drawback relative to FLA solutions, which can typically provide at least 200 A (around 10 kW at 48V, much more at the higher voltages the Tesla unit operates at). Since the Li-ion battery is maintenance-free, a better comparison might be AGM or other VRLA technologies, which are slightly more expensive than FLA, but still less expensive than the Tesla units. Since no inverter, grid-tie transfer relay, or charge controllers are included in this unit, those will all be additional costs just as they would with any other batteries. And it appears you will be limited to a few inverters and probably a micro-inverter PV design; this is purely a grid-tie-only design. Existing battery technologies can do all of that, but they also give you much broader flexibility for other applications and system designs. I'm not sure why I would want this. I'd be paying above the odds for some serious design constraints and limitations I wouldn't otherwise have. Tesla seem to be taking a very different approach from their launch of the Roadster, which was a super-premium offering at a super-premium price. This is a modest offering at a premium price in relative terms, but low enough in absolute terms to appeal to people who aren't well-versed in the field. Their success will probably depend on installers deciding it's easier to just take people's money and sell them the Tesla than to educate their customers and give them the best value available. Not a bad gamble, for Tesla.

greedo 11y ago

I don't think most households (in the US at least) could run off a single unit. You would need three units, and they would only give you 1 days capacity, compared to a natural gas generator which could keep running indefinitely. http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=97&t=3 http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=97&t=3