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This is a three-pronged stroke of genius: 1) Immediate benefits to just about anyone. If you have your own solar panels, you need this (or something like it).

• watty 11y ago
  I don't see how it's immediately beneficial for just about everyone. I currently have a flat rate for kWh and no solar panel... and moving soon. It's not worth the $. In 6 months I'll be renting for a year, still not beneficial. Perhaps in a couple years I can purchase solar, a battery, and an energy system that can automate some demand shedding but we're talking about 1%ers here. In fact, I'd say it's only immediately beneficial to a minority.
  • nkohari 11y ago
    A better way of looking at it is that it's immediately beneficial to anyone who owns real estate.
    • butwhy 11y ago
      Or anyone who lives on Earth with a vested interest in limiting carbon emissions.
      • Angostura 11y ago
        I think I'd want to see an environment impact assessment of manufacturing the batteries.
        • jarvist 11y ago
          OK; here's a well cited study from 2010 on electric cars: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es903729a http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es903729a "The share of the total environmental impact of E-mobility caused by the battery (measured in Ecoindicator 99 points) is 15%. The impact caused by the extraction of lithium for the components of the Li-ion battery is less than 2.3% (Ecoindicator 99 points). The major contributor to the environmental burden caused by the battery is the supply of copper and aluminum for the production of the anode and the cathode, plus the required cables or the battery management system." The copper and aluminium foils that make up the electrodes of the battery dominate. Both these metals are highly recyclable. Not much Li-ion recycling goes on currently as there's lots of different battery shapes + sizes, and there haven't been the economies of scale. I would imagine that whatever technology Tesla have standardised on, there will be (possibly closed loop) recycling plants.
          • webXL 11y ago
            15% and 2.3% didn't really mean much to me without seeing the total composition (chart on page 3). Turns out operation is dominant source of electric vehicles' environmental impact. I guess the operational impact is primarily from electricity generation, which is always going to be cleaner than refining crude oil unless every power plant switches to coal. Compared to internal combustion engine vehicles, the battery impact is much less than the total improvement in operational impact in all 4 impact assessments. But if the ease of installing these batteries makes home solar panels more attractive, that may offset their impact outside of EV use.
          • Angostura 11y ago
            Thank you for that, much appreciated.
    • deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  • psychometry 11y ago
    As someone who rents an apartment with no garage and has a traditional gas-powered car, I can echo your sentiment and claim that Tesla has had zero impact on my life and that this announcement doesn't change that. I sincerely hope that Tesla's many innovative business efforts improve society in some major way, but right now they're still just a high-end automative company that's exploring the renewable energy space. I'm not trying to discount anything they've done, because it's forward-thinking and technologically impressive, but it's not like Elon Musk has saved the world just yet.
    • agmcleod 11y ago
      Agreed. I'd love to have a living situation where a tesla or electric vehicle was realistic for me. They're just better pieces of engineering. But sadly due to renting an apartment, parking underground, and so forth, it's not a life style I can change to.
      • checker 11y ago
        Not trying to sound snarky, but how does parking underground preclude you from owning an electric vehicle? Is there a physical reason for this? There are apartments that have electric vehicle chargers. You might even be able to convince your complex to install a few as an amenity that will make it more attractive to new tenants.
    • criley2 11y ago
      >" but it's not like Elon Musk has saved the world just yet." "I choose to rent, I choose to have no property rights over the building I live in, I choose to be legally incapable of installing solar panels and batteries on a structure I don't own: Elon Musk has failed me" Come on now. You made your choice to not be a part of the greater community and culture of property owners. These options, they're available to owners, not renters. Did you realize Google Fiber was the same way? As a renter, you have 0 ability to install Google Fiber without your owners permission. (https://support.google.com/fiber/answer/2847916?hl=en https://support.google.com/fiber/answer/2847916?hl=en) This is the same. If you care, you'll petition your landlord to invest in these technologies. Or you'll buy property and change your status to enable yourself materially and legally to be able to do it yourself. But you can't blame Elon because of your choice to make yourself willingly devoid of the legal authority to make these decisions for yourself. Elon can never overcome your landlords property rights. Not now, not in 100 years. That's not his failure, it's your choice in a free society. Next time, rent in a location that has these options already installed, or make it known that these are your priorities. I personally have sat down with my landlord and discussed Fiber and the costs and the benefits, and I'm confident he will make that investment on behalf his property. It's not hard to take the initiative and make a case.
  • je_bailey 11y ago
    You missed an additional subset of users. I live in an old neighborhood that experiences power outages and fluctuations once or twice a year. This is fantastic and something I will be installing as soon as I can. So older neighborhoods, rural areas with inconsistent power supply. All of these potentially benefit from this.
    • sfrigon 11y ago
      Living in a region with cold weather, this is the kind of situation I would like to solve too. The problem is that a generator still has benefits over a battery, it can be refilled (i.e. when you lose electricity for a longer period).
      • ams6110 11y ago
        And is a fraction of the cost, best case, or about the same if you want one capable of powering your entire household load indefinitely. And if you have natural gas service, you don't need to refuel either.
      • gus_massa 11y ago
        I agree, but I guess that the generator have a no zero starting time. (Do you have o turn it on manually?) So the battery keeps the electricity for the meanwhile. Also, the generators are noisier. Perhaps you can turn them off during the night and use only the battery while you are sleeping and the electricity consumption is smaller.
      • uberdog 11y ago
        Having lived through Hurricane Sandy in NYC: don't assume you can get gas to fill your generator in a disaster situation. Solar panels paired with a battery aren't dependent on a supply chain (that itself needs energy).
        • sfrigon 11y ago
          Yes, getting energy from a sustainable source of energy is the best way, but assuming you only use it for power outages once or twice a year, I am not sure it is worth the investment. Especially if you expect it to last a day/few days (if you are self sufficient for a few days you'd better do it all year long).
• eli 11y ago
  > power during cheaper off-peak times Pretty sure my rate is the same all the time. I wonder what percentage of electricity customers have variable rate pricing.
  • __xtrimsky 11y ago
    Yea my rate is the same too. I've lived in many places, and only in Canada I had variable rate.
  • lsaferite 11y ago
    I'm just excited about maybe having a relatively cheap way to do whole house backup. Living in Florida we experience many power outages a year.
  • geoffharcourt 11y ago
    NYC has it now, but I think as generation/fuel prices rise (in the long-term) and utilities get slightly more sophisticated, we're going to see more on-demand pricing as utilities seek to apply the same price changes they pay generators for peak-demand supply to consumers. In a situation where many people were doing load shifting, I think this could even benefit those who aren't doing load shifting themselves (by reducing peak demand across the network).
    • danielweber 11y ago
      For each person that load-shifts, it slightly reduces the payoff for the next person to load-shift. In the UK, the peak demand is already in the evening[1], because solar has eaten the cheap lunch during the day (which it was supposed to do, but it means that each additional solar panel is going to have a harder job paying for itself). And the demand difference between low and high is about 30GW to 40GW. [1] http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
      • geoffharcourt 11y ago
        Great point about marginal benefits of load shifting. I do think we're so far from that reduction being significant at this point that it's worth attempting. I believe peak demand in most non-industrial areas is already evening, because residential areas tend to have less efficient energy use than commercial spaces due to density, and everyone is home at the same time, often doing energy intensive tasks such as cooking, using the A/C, opening the fridge. I heard from someone at a power company that advertisements during the Super Bowl are a major issue, because everyone opens their fridge and flushes the toilet at the same time, and power supply has to spike for 3 minutes and then return to normal.
• aquark 11y ago
  re 1: part of the benefit of solar locally is that the rate you get for pushing power back into the grid is way in excess of what you have to pay to pull it out. Whilst storing it for your own use later makes sense in theory, it doesn't work with the current economics
  • justatdotin 11y ago
    lucky you. Here (in one of the sunniest cities of the world) you can only earn parity - if you're lucky. The power company are disallowing new grid-feed connections in some suburbs because their aged infrastructure can't handle too much 'unconventional' input. (!!)
• ams6110 11y ago
  It's a good idea; I would place it more in the "obvious" category than "stroke of genius" but it's clearly got a market. I think that the technology to do (2) at grid scale is far from ready. The grid was built to distribute power from generating stations out to users. It was not designed to have power flowing into it from thousands of dispersed battery packs at the tips of the network (i.e. residential service points). Significant reengineering and investement will be needed to make this really workable.
  • ZoFreX 11y ago
    Your point is valid, but it's still beneficial to the grid even now to have a bunch of batteries on it: you won't get power flowing into the grid from them, but it does mean output power can be varied a lot more with batteries soaking up some of the difference.
• rhino369 11y ago
  1) You don't need this if you have solar. Most states and utilities have pretty favorable subsidies for "selling back" energy to the grid. The utility is credit the feeding back to the grid at 100%. This device will introduce efficiency losses and it is expensive. Unless you have extreme peak v. non-peak fees, I doubt this will save you money. Even at 20 cent difference, 7kW hours is a 1.40 a day. But that assumes that you could use all 7kW hours at peak times (you probably aren't). Also, you'll lose 10% going form AC-DC, you'll lose 8% on the battery, and you lose 10% going from DC-AC. That is about 25% loss. 2) If lots of people get them, the peak v. non-peak difference will collapse.
  • billions 11y ago
    I see this product targeted at current tesla owners. A PowerWall driven supercharger in-house could reduce charge times by 80%. Today's 10 hour charge time is a huge inconvenience compared to a 10 minute gas station run.
    • rhino369 11y ago
      Doesn't Telsa already sell a product like that?
      • parasubvert 11y ago
        The home charger cable is capable of 240V/80A (20 kWh) connections. Superchargers are around 363V/225A (90 kWh) but supposedly capable of 120 kWh. http://www.autoblog.com/2013/02/01/hands-on-with-the-tesla-supercharger-video/ http://www.autoblog.com/2013/02/01/hands-on-with-the-tesla-s... So you're looking at 3 hours at home vs 45 minutes at a supercharger for a full charge. With the 10 kWh wall charger you might be able to cut 45 min off a home charge.
        • create123 11y ago
          Not possible. The specs on their site say 2.0kW continuous and 3.3 peak power per power wall.
• blacksmith_tb 11y ago
  I am not so sure. On paper, I would be an ideal candidate, I have a 4.8kW PV system (20 panels), with an inverter the Tesla could likely use. But in practice I generate enough extra power during the sunny months to have credit for the winters, and that's in Portland OR. $3K for a whole-house UPS seems like a lot, somehow...
  • loudmax 11y ago
    You have credit because you're selling power back to the electric company (PGE?), is that not right? The ideal candidate for one of these systems doesn't have the option of selling power back into the grid, either because their utility company doesn't want to buy electricity from consumers, or because they're off the grid completely.