7 ms·

Your Home Doesn't Matter for Tesla's Dream of a Battery-Powered Planet

34 points by europa 11y ago

ghshephard 11y ago
First, this is the opening price. The economics are going to get better from here, and the early adopters always pay a bit more for the privilege of experiencing the technology - and someone has to be first to get the ball rolling. Next - If I have a $500K+ house (modest, by Northern California standards), and for $10K I could get this sleek, hi technology, 10 year warranty battery that lets me more efficiently leverage my solar panels, plus potentially giving me some insurance against a grid outage? Hell, I'm first in line. Now, does the Tesla Battery make sense, for 100% of the US Population, today? Of course not - but I don't think anyone has suggested that. But this is where we start, and we improve from here.
- dragontamer 11y ago
  Except decentralized power are an expensive luxury product. If you build a 1GW pumped hydro plant with 10-hours of storage (10GW-hr plants cost roughly $3 Billion), then everyone benefits, including those in poverty who are unable to buy batteries for themselves. Net-Metering from those who can afford rooftop panels can then store the energy centrally, and then offset the costs for the non-solar users in the rest of the neighborhood.
  - crdoconnor 11y ago
    This assumes that the utilities aren't price gouging their customers. Which is true in some countries.
  - ghshephard 11y ago
    Just a pedantic note - I don't think you would price Hydro Plants power stores based on GW-Hr capacity (that's just the size of the lakes/water reservoirs, which might store petawatt-hours of capacity depending on the geography), but on the rate/number of pumps, right?
    - dragontamer 11y ago
      Yes, due to Pumped Hydro's benefits... the major cost is the size of the generators. A single 100MW turbine can store weeks-and-weeks of power if drawing from any small lake. But for it to be useful to a lot of people, you probably need to build a gigawatt scale turbine. With that said, the Bath County generator is the largest in the world, and is close to 30 GW-hr of capacity (3GW of power. Yes, it can empty the lake in 10 hours, and refill it in another 10 hours)
      - ghshephard 11y ago
        I just lost 45 minutes reading about the Bath County generator - that has 50% more generation than Hoover Dam. Amazing. In terms of Storage Capacity of a Dam, I checked: http://www.nps.gov/lake/learn/nature/storage-capacity-of-lake-mead.htm http://www.nps.gov/lake/learn/nature/storage-capacity-of-lak... The water available for power generation starts at 1050 feet, and goes to 1221.4 The Capacity goes from 11,474,857 acre feet to 31,141,756 acre feet. So Hoover Dam has an operational storage of 19,666,899 foot acres The Turbines have a capacity of 2,080 MW. From: http://www.usbr.gov/lc/region/pao/brochures/faq.html#capc http://www.usbr.gov/lc/region/pao/brochures/faq.html#capc we discover What is the maximum capacity of these works? About 118,000 cubic feet per second: 32,000 cubic feet per second for power generation and 86,000 cubic feet per second of valve discharge. One cubic foot per second of water equals nearly 7 gallons passing a given point in one second. So, dividing 19666899 foot acres / 118000 cubic feet/second = 6,408,487,134,720 gallons / 882,701.2987 gallons/second = 7,260,085.76644 seconds = 2,016.69049 hours (only 12 weeks) So, the operational storage capacity of Hoover dam is 2 GW * 2000 Hours = 4 Terawatt Hours. I realize these are entirely different projects, but it's interesting to get a gut sense of how incredibly large the Bath County generators are - not only do they generate power going down - they can also pump that water up. Incredible - wonder of the world.
Aqueous 11y ago
"So defection from the electrical grid will remain well out of reach for most Americans, and even those who manage the feat will waste a lot of capacity thanks to solar panels and batteries that are rarely used to their full potential." Once again a news outlet (deliberately) fails to see the long-term strategy for the sake of a click-baity nay-saying headline. Just like the Tesla vehicle itself, which is still outside the reach of 99% of Americans, the point is to aim for the luxury market first and through scale and process optimization gradually lower the price so that it is within the reach of most Americans. The luxury market is why Tesla is now able to develop a mass market vehicle, why solar panels are reaching an inflection point where in many parts of the world it will no longer make financial sense not to have them, and why home batteries will eventually be in the reach of everybody.
- fredkbloggs 11y ago
  I love how the echo chamber keeps talking about the Powerwall as if it were the first battery system ever made. You can buy batteries for your home, today, at a retail price half that of the Powerwall. With equal or greater energy storage, power output, and lifetime. There's no need to wait for Li-ion to become "within reach". It's a needlessly expensive technology and product attempting to displace cheaper, more capable solutions that have been available for years. Their marketing sure is clever, though; they're already the only battery system that 98% of Americans have ever heard of! This is going to be a fascinating B-school case study in a year or two. It's one thing for Apple to convince people to pay a huge premium for its design, another entirely to convince people to pay twice as much for a noninteractive energy-storage device that sits in a basement or closet. I'm in awe. Luxury product indeed.
  - Aqueous 11y ago
    Sure - and plenty of MP3 players existed before the iPod, some of which, on paper, were better than the iPod (longer battery life, bigger capacity, more formats, better platform compatibility). But it took somebody who cared about user experience and design to make it a popular consumer product.
jakozaur 11y ago
The article omit use as alternative to UPS + diesel engine. In that use case it is competitive. Moreover, any modern invention could be dismissed as toy/limited use for rich. E.g. Computers, mobile phones, cars... Next generation should be even more competitive.
- dragontamer 11y ago
  Why can't gas generators become more competitive? Flywheel Disel Engines for example will automatically turn on when the power goes out... using a Flywheel to regulate the power the moment energy goes out... while simultaneously being the automatic-startup mechanism for the generator. It's not like a flywheel + generator is very expensive. There's still a lot of innovation possible in the generator space.
  - sageabilly 11y ago
    Gas goes bad after sitting for a long period, meaning that there's regular maintenance involved with any gas generator- and it's messy maintenance at that. Plus gas generators are only good as long as you have gas to power them, and if you've had three feet of snow it's impossible to nip down to the gas station for a refill, not to mention that at that point you're relying on the gas station receiving a regular shipment of gas, something that again might be affected by whatever made the power go out in the first place. Additionally, they're loud and smelly- if you've ever been in a neighborhood after a hurricane when everyone's running their generator it's obnoxious as all hell. Natural gas generators could be a good option, but only in areas that have natural gas lines already which rules out a lot of rural areas where generators are probably going to be more important anyway.
- hoopism 11y ago
  Problem with Net Metering (at least for the people I know int he northeast who have solar) is that when the lights go out they are in the same boat as everyone else... where I live we have had multiple week+ outages. They, like everyone else, have to have a generator to keep things going (despite solar up on the roof). A battery would replace the generator and UPS in that case. Of course, the week+ outage is usually due to ungodly amounts of snow... sooooo solar may not be your friend then...
crdoconnor 11y ago
>For the average U.S. home to rely solely on solar panels and Tesla's new batteries, the complete system would cost roughly $98,000, according to analysis by Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Even that glum assessment assumes a house in a sunny region such as Southern California. 927 kwh / month off grid solar system : http://www.wholesalesolar.com/solarpowersystems/large-home-7-off-grid-solar-power-system.html http://www.wholesalesolar.com/solarpowersystems/large-home-7... Cost : $20,172 Two of Elon's batteries: $7k Total cost = $27,172 How the hell did they get $98k? I think they intentionally tried to make that number look ridiculous. I wonder if this is more of ALEC's anti-solar bullshit.
- alexggordon 11y ago
  Not sure if you factored this in but don't forget about the federal renewable energy credit[0]. For the solar panels alone, it's a $6051.6 credit. [0] http://energy.gov/savings/residential-renewable-energy-tax-credit http://energy.gov/savings/residential-renewable-energy-tax-c...
- vonmoltke 11y ago
  Look at the link you posted. The recommended battery pack for that system is 62kWh (1284Ah * 48VDC). That is the equivalent of 6 10kWh Powerwall batteries. Furthermore, the 10kWh Powerwall is not for solar or other daily applications; it's for backup.[1] A PV system needs to use the 7kWh batteries, thus requiring 9 for this system. That is $27,000 in batteries. Now, on to the panels. The sizing of the system you posted indicates it assumes 5 Sun hours per day. Most of the US gets less than that; from the map on the site it looks like 4.3 is a good average for the US. Next, as the site clearly says when you run their off-grid calculator, you need to discount the Sun hours if you plan on using the system in the winter; they recommend knocking 1.5 off your yearly average. That drops most of the US to 2.8. That means the median house would need twice the number of solar panels in that set to cover all times of year. Combined with the actual cost of Powerwall batteries, we are at $67,344. If you want to use the Pacific Northwest as your baseline (which someone opposed to solar would try to do) you approach the $98,000 for an off-grid system. [1] http://www.teslamotors.com/powerwall http://www.teslamotors.com/powerwall
scott_s 11y ago
Something this article doesn't address is the potential impact batteries everywhere could have. This quote in particular tells me the author, and the speaker, don't see it this way: “The battery-in-every-home idea—not only do I think it doesn’t make economic sense, I don’t think it’s necessary,” said Brian Warshay, an analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance. “Having a centralized grid is incredibly useful and incredibly efficient.” The difficulty with our current power infrastructure is that there is no buffering at the consumption side. Because there is no buffering at the consumption side, the overall grid must be able to handle peak demand. That is, we must over-provision. With batteries everywhere, this isn't necessarily the case. In theory, we could all have generators, but we don't because they're noisy, smelly, and a maintenance hassle. But sticking a giant battery on the wall? I can see everyone having one, and big institutions having large arrays of them. I think that has the potential to fundamentally change our power grid.
- dragontamer 11y ago
  Erm... or centralized storage mechanisms could be built. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Sta... Do you have any idea how many Li-Ion batteries would be needed to match the 30 GIGAWATT-hours of storage potential in the Bath County pumped storage plant? The problem is that California didn't build enough of these 20 years ago. California has a couple of pumped-storage plants coming in... and as soon as they're built then net-metering will be even better for consumers. In general, centralized storage at the utility-level will benefit from scale. Redox batteries will probably be cheaper and more efficient than Li-Ion batteries that Tesla is putting out. And Pumped-Hydro is already much much cheaper, and has existed since the 60s.
  - ceejayoz 11y ago
    Centralized storage doesn't offer some of the benefits in-home batteries do, though, like the ability to store up power from home solar, or the ability to keep your furnace running in a power outage.
    - 11y ago
Spooky23 11y ago
Typical NYC based media people not getting it. There are many many people who spend money right now on generators as emergency power sources. My parents are a great example of a perfect use case for this product. They live in the country, and have 5-6 significant power outages a year, usually in winter. They need a way to automatically deliver power to critical house systems: furnace, well pump, fridge, freezer. Right now they use a large portable generator, but that requires maintenance and a manual engagement. You also cannot leave it unattended for long periods of time. That basically ties them to their house in the winter months, making vacations difficult. Lots of other markets for this type of thing too. If you have a horse or hobby farm, one of these things keeps the heat on in the barn when the power goes out.
- dba7dba 11y ago
  That is a great use of Tesla Powerwall that I didn't think of. Looks like most people are thinking Powerwall would be useful only in Sun drenched ares/season. But from your case, Powerwall would be very useful everywhere even in areas without much sun.
bsbechtel 11y ago
I seem to remember a lot of very similar articles arguing the economics of the iPhone didn't make any sense when it first arrived as well. Not trying to say the result here will be the same, just running hard numbers doesn't always tell the whole story.
gwbas1c 11y ago
Net metering doesn't make sense. About half of the cost of residential electricity goes to running the grid. That being said, electric companies aren't stupid. If / when solar power and batteries become ridiculously cheap, they will just switch over to solar and batteries. Residential off-the-grid solar power will make sense in two markets: - Highly rural areas where it's very expensive to maintain power lines. - "Be prepared" cultures like Utah where people take pride in preparing themselves for Armageddon.
- hliyan 11y ago
  Don't forget line losses [1,2] -- closer the point of generation and the point of consumption, the lesser they are. [1] http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/1.2-Trillion-Metric-Tons-of-CO2-in-Line-Losses http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/1.2-Trillion-Met... [2] http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.ELC.LOSS.ZS http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.ELC.LOSS.ZS
Htsthbjig 11y ago
Long time ago I visited the home of a young entrepreneur that had spent all his money installing optical fiber all around his home. I remember what I thought: How stupid someone could be. It does not make financial sense at all when it was so expensive. Turn out I was the stupid one. This man created a company doing exactly what he had done in his house but for others and made a ton of money. In some way he paid a cost for living in the future, and he understood the practical shortcomings and advantages of the new technology much better than anyone else, which made him succeed when others failed.
higherpurpose 11y ago
The article is much more negative than it should be. There is some truth in there, but the rest of it seems short-sighted. It's like saying "why in the world would anyone buy a $5,000 4k TV with an OLED screen?" Yet people buy them and that's how the technology becomes cheaper. It's a little different with batteries because they don't improve at the same rate tech products do, but they still improve and I think once Tesla gets a couple of those Gigafactories going the batteries will become more appealing to a wider range of customers. It's also the same with electric cars - 95% of the people still don't want one, even if they had the money for it, because they don't want the range anxiety. Also aren't solar panels still more expensive than buying coal-produced electricity? Or it least it was in the past few years, yet people still installed solar panels. The bottom line is Tesla only needs some "early adopter" customers to hold it over until the product is cheap/good enough for the mainstream market. And by the looks of it, whether it's in electric cars, solar panels or batteries, that seems to have worked pretty well.
- dragontamer 11y ago
  I don't understand why people feel the need to be an "early adopter" of something like this. How many people out there want to be an early adopter of a Lennox Air Conditioning unit? Or of a New, more efficient furnace? Or more efficient windows? The fact remains: the Tesla Powerwall is a "home appliance". The process for buying a new home appliance is the same as any other. You run the calculations, you determine if the appliance saves you money in the long term, and if it does... you go for it.
breischl 11y ago
This is the second article I've seen from Bloomberg that ignores two-thirds of what Tesla actually said and thus massively misses the point. I'm starting to think it's intentional. No kidding this isn't (currently) attractive for North American homes. If I recall correctly, they basically said that in the press conference, though I can't find the link now. They were expecting it to be more useful in places with lots of solar and dodgy electric grids, such as Australia. Bloomberg also goes on and on about utility scale storage. They apparently didn't read the press kit, where Tesla talked about how they're doing just that. Press Kit - http://www.teslamotors.com/presskit http://www.teslamotors.com/presskit
- dba7dba 11y ago
  I'm starting to think it's intentional. It IS intentional. Pretty much everything said (and NOT said) on MSM is intentional.
gnoway 11y ago
I'm confused about why 'net metering exists' is a good argument against these batteries. As I understand it this is a mandated buy of excess home-generated solar at retail prices - is this correct? If so, does everyone really think this is sustainable if rooftop solar really takes off? Even if it technically is I expect to see widespread lobbying to end it (like in Hawaii) and expect most of the lobbying to succeed. I don't think the Tesla batteries are a good way to lower your home energy costs, but I don't think I would factor in net metering as a reason why, at least not looking 5-10 years out.
andrewtbham 11y ago
> No matter how cheap prices get, batteries won't be the easiest or the cheapest way to take advantage of solar power. that seems like it can't possibly be true.
- bryanlarsen 11y ago
  That statement is true as long as net metering is in effect. Net metering means you sell back to the grid for the same price as you buy from the grid. So you can treat the grid as a giant, perfectly efficient battery. Put $X of electricity in during the day and pull out $X at night. With a battery, you'd only be pulling out ~0.9X due to efficiency losses, not to mention the cost of the battery itself.
sunstone 11y ago
If I recall correctly about 80% of Tesla's battery pre-orders by dollar value were in the commercial and utility categories rather than residential. This article makes a big point that in the residential/solar panel market the battery is marginal at the moment in most of the US where grid electricity is cheap. Ok, but so what?
dba7dba 11y ago
Imagine the world where only acts that make financial sense are done. 1. No kids would be born. They do not make financial sense at all. 2. We all would be living in some nasty environment. Caring for the environment doesn't make much sense for companies. 3. Caring weak, vulnerable people doesn't make any financial sense at all.

34 points by europa 11y ago

First, this is the opening price. The economics are going to get better from here, and the early adopters always pay a bit more for the privilege of experiencing the technology - and someone has to be first to get the ball rolling. Next - If I have a $500K+ house (modest, by Northern California standards), and for $10K I could get this sleek, hi technology, 10 year warranty battery that lets me more efficiently leverage my solar panels, plus potentially giving me some insurance against a grid outage? Hell, I'm first in line. Now, does the Tesla Battery make sense, for 100% of the US Population, today? Of course not - but I don't think anyone has suggested that. But this is where we start, and we improve from here.

dragontamer 11y ago
Except decentralized power are an expensive luxury product. If you build a 1GW pumped hydro plant with 10-hours of storage (10GW-hr plants cost roughly $3 Billion), then everyone benefits, including those in poverty who are unable to buy batteries for themselves. Net-Metering from those who can afford rooftop panels can then store the energy centrally, and then offset the costs for the non-solar users in the rest of the neighborhood.
- crdoconnor 11y ago
  This assumes that the utilities aren't price gouging their customers. Which is true in some countries.
- ghshephard 11y ago
  Just a pedantic note - I don't think you would price Hydro Plants power stores based on GW-Hr capacity (that's just the size of the lakes/water reservoirs, which might store petawatt-hours of capacity depending on the geography), but on the rate/number of pumps, right?
  - dragontamer 11y ago
    Yes, due to Pumped Hydro's benefits... the major cost is the size of the generators. A single 100MW turbine can store weeks-and-weeks of power if drawing from any small lake. But for it to be useful to a lot of people, you probably need to build a gigawatt scale turbine. With that said, the Bath County generator is the largest in the world, and is close to 30 GW-hr of capacity (3GW of power. Yes, it can empty the lake in 10 hours, and refill it in another 10 hours)
    - ghshephard 11y ago
      I just lost 45 minutes reading about the Bath County generator - that has 50% more generation than Hoover Dam. Amazing. In terms of Storage Capacity of a Dam, I checked: http://www.nps.gov/lake/learn/nature/storage-capacity-of-lake-mead.htm http://www.nps.gov/lake/learn/nature/storage-capacity-of-lak... The water available for power generation starts at 1050 feet, and goes to 1221.4 The Capacity goes from 11,474,857 acre feet to 31,141,756 acre feet. So Hoover Dam has an operational storage of 19,666,899 foot acres The Turbines have a capacity of 2,080 MW. From: http://www.usbr.gov/lc/region/pao/brochures/faq.html#capc http://www.usbr.gov/lc/region/pao/brochures/faq.html#capc we discover What is the maximum capacity of these works? About 118,000 cubic feet per second: 32,000 cubic feet per second for power generation and 86,000 cubic feet per second of valve discharge. One cubic foot per second of water equals nearly 7 gallons passing a given point in one second. So, dividing 19666899 foot acres / 118000 cubic feet/second = 6,408,487,134,720 gallons / 882,701.2987 gallons/second = 7,260,085.76644 seconds = 2,016.69049 hours (only 12 weeks) So, the operational storage capacity of Hoover dam is 2 GW * 2000 Hours = 4 Terawatt Hours. I realize these are entirely different projects, but it's interesting to get a gut sense of how incredibly large the Bath County generators are - not only do they generate power going down - they can also pump that water up. Incredible - wonder of the world.

Aqueous 11y ago

"So defection from the electrical grid will remain well out of reach for most Americans, and even those who manage the feat will waste a lot of capacity thanks to solar panels and batteries that are rarely used to their full potential." Once again a news outlet (deliberately) fails to see the long-term strategy for the sake of a click-baity nay-saying headline. Just like the Tesla vehicle itself, which is still outside the reach of 99% of Americans, the point is to aim for the luxury market first and through scale and process optimization gradually lower the price so that it is within the reach of most Americans. The luxury market is why Tesla is now able to develop a mass market vehicle, why solar panels are reaching an inflection point where in many parts of the world it will no longer make financial sense not to have them, and why home batteries will eventually be in the reach of everybody.

fredkbloggs 11y ago
I love how the echo chamber keeps talking about the Powerwall as if it were the first battery system ever made. You can buy batteries for your home, today, at a retail price half that of the Powerwall. With equal or greater energy storage, power output, and lifetime. There's no need to wait for Li-ion to become "within reach". It's a needlessly expensive technology and product attempting to displace cheaper, more capable solutions that have been available for years. Their marketing sure is clever, though; they're already the only battery system that 98% of Americans have ever heard of! This is going to be a fascinating B-school case study in a year or two. It's one thing for Apple to convince people to pay a huge premium for its design, another entirely to convince people to pay twice as much for a noninteractive energy-storage device that sits in a basement or closet. I'm in awe. Luxury product indeed.
- Aqueous 11y ago
  Sure - and plenty of MP3 players existed before the iPod, some of which, on paper, were better than the iPod (longer battery life, bigger capacity, more formats, better platform compatibility). But it took somebody who cared about user experience and design to make it a popular consumer product.

jakozaur 11y ago

The article omit use as alternative to UPS + diesel engine. In that use case it is competitive. Moreover, any modern invention could be dismissed as toy/limited use for rich. E.g. Computers, mobile phones, cars... Next generation should be even more competitive.

dragontamer 11y ago
Why can't gas generators become more competitive? Flywheel Disel Engines for example will automatically turn on when the power goes out... using a Flywheel to regulate the power the moment energy goes out... while simultaneously being the automatic-startup mechanism for the generator. It's not like a flywheel + generator is very expensive. There's still a lot of innovation possible in the generator space.
- sageabilly 11y ago
  Gas goes bad after sitting for a long period, meaning that there's regular maintenance involved with any gas generator- and it's messy maintenance at that. Plus gas generators are only good as long as you have gas to power them, and if you've had three feet of snow it's impossible to nip down to the gas station for a refill, not to mention that at that point you're relying on the gas station receiving a regular shipment of gas, something that again might be affected by whatever made the power go out in the first place. Additionally, they're loud and smelly- if you've ever been in a neighborhood after a hurricane when everyone's running their generator it's obnoxious as all hell. Natural gas generators could be a good option, but only in areas that have natural gas lines already which rules out a lot of rural areas where generators are probably going to be more important anyway.
hoopism 11y ago
Problem with Net Metering (at least for the people I know int he northeast who have solar) is that when the lights go out they are in the same boat as everyone else... where I live we have had multiple week+ outages. They, like everyone else, have to have a generator to keep things going (despite solar up on the roof). A battery would replace the generator and UPS in that case. Of course, the week+ outage is usually due to ungodly amounts of snow... sooooo solar may not be your friend then...

crdoconnor 11y ago

>For the average U.S. home to rely solely on solar panels and Tesla's new batteries, the complete system would cost roughly $98,000, according to analysis by Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Even that glum assessment assumes a house in a sunny region such as Southern California. 927 kwh / month off grid solar system : http://www.wholesalesolar.com/solarpowersystems/large-home-7-off-grid-solar-power-system.html http://www.wholesalesolar.com/solarpowersystems/large-home-7... Cost : $20,172 Two of Elon's batteries: $7k Total cost = $27,172 How the hell did they get $98k? I think they intentionally tried to make that number look ridiculous. I wonder if this is more of ALEC's anti-solar bullshit.

alexggordon 11y ago
Not sure if you factored this in but don't forget about the federal renewable energy credit[0]. For the solar panels alone, it's a $6051.6 credit. [0] http://energy.gov/savings/residential-renewable-energy-tax-credit http://energy.gov/savings/residential-renewable-energy-tax-c...
vonmoltke 11y ago
Look at the link you posted. The recommended battery pack for that system is 62kWh (1284Ah * 48VDC). That is the equivalent of 6 10kWh Powerwall batteries. Furthermore, the 10kWh Powerwall is not for solar or other daily applications; it's for backup.[1] A PV system needs to use the 7kWh batteries, thus requiring 9 for this system. That is $27,000 in batteries. Now, on to the panels. The sizing of the system you posted indicates it assumes 5 Sun hours per day. Most of the US gets less than that; from the map on the site it looks like 4.3 is a good average for the US. Next, as the site clearly says when you run their off-grid calculator, you need to discount the Sun hours if you plan on using the system in the winter; they recommend knocking 1.5 off your yearly average. That drops most of the US to 2.8. That means the median house would need twice the number of solar panels in that set to cover all times of year. Combined with the actual cost of Powerwall batteries, we are at $67,344. If you want to use the Pacific Northwest as your baseline (which someone opposed to solar would try to do) you approach the $98,000 for an off-grid system. [1] http://www.teslamotors.com/powerwall http://www.teslamotors.com/powerwall

scott_s 11y ago

Something this article doesn't address is the potential impact batteries everywhere could have. This quote in particular tells me the author, and the speaker, don't see it this way: “The battery-in-every-home idea—not only do I think it doesn’t make economic sense, I don’t think it’s necessary,” said Brian Warshay, an analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance. “Having a centralized grid is incredibly useful and incredibly efficient.” The difficulty with our current power infrastructure is that there is no buffering at the consumption side. Because there is no buffering at the consumption side, the overall grid must be able to handle peak demand. That is, we must over-provision. With batteries everywhere, this isn't necessarily the case. In theory, we could all have generators, but we don't because they're noisy, smelly, and a maintenance hassle. But sticking a giant battery on the wall? I can see everyone having one, and big institutions having large arrays of them. I think that has the potential to fundamentally change our power grid.

dragontamer 11y ago
Erm... or centralized storage mechanisms could be built. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Sta... Do you have any idea how many Li-Ion batteries would be needed to match the 30 GIGAWATT-hours of storage potential in the Bath County pumped storage plant? The problem is that California didn't build enough of these 20 years ago. California has a couple of pumped-storage plants coming in... and as soon as they're built then net-metering will be even better for consumers. In general, centralized storage at the utility-level will benefit from scale. Redox batteries will probably be cheaper and more efficient than Li-Ion batteries that Tesla is putting out. And Pumped-Hydro is already much much cheaper, and has existed since the 60s.
- ceejayoz 11y ago
  Centralized storage doesn't offer some of the benefits in-home batteries do, though, like the ability to store up power from home solar, or the ability to keep your furnace running in a power outage.
  - 11y ago

Spooky23 11y ago

Typical NYC based media people not getting it. There are many many people who spend money right now on generators as emergency power sources. My parents are a great example of a perfect use case for this product. They live in the country, and have 5-6 significant power outages a year, usually in winter. They need a way to automatically deliver power to critical house systems: furnace, well pump, fridge, freezer. Right now they use a large portable generator, but that requires maintenance and a manual engagement. You also cannot leave it unattended for long periods of time. That basically ties them to their house in the winter months, making vacations difficult. Lots of other markets for this type of thing too. If you have a horse or hobby farm, one of these things keeps the heat on in the barn when the power goes out.

dba7dba 11y ago
That is a great use of Tesla Powerwall that I didn't think of. Looks like most people are thinking Powerwall would be useful only in Sun drenched ares/season. But from your case, Powerwall would be very useful everywhere even in areas without much sun.

bsbechtel 11y ago

I seem to remember a lot of very similar articles arguing the economics of the iPhone didn't make any sense when it first arrived as well. Not trying to say the result here will be the same, just running hard numbers doesn't always tell the whole story.

gwbas1c 11y ago

Net metering doesn't make sense. About half of the cost of residential electricity goes to running the grid. That being said, electric companies aren't stupid. If / when solar power and batteries become ridiculously cheap, they will just switch over to solar and batteries. Residential off-the-grid solar power will make sense in two markets: - Highly rural areas where it's very expensive to maintain power lines. - "Be prepared" cultures like Utah where people take pride in preparing themselves for Armageddon.

hliyan 11y ago
Don't forget line losses [1,2] -- closer the point of generation and the point of consumption, the lesser they are. [1] http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/1.2-Trillion-Metric-Tons-of-CO2-in-Line-Losses http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/1.2-Trillion-Met... [2] http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.ELC.LOSS.ZS http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.ELC.LOSS.ZS

Htsthbjig 11y ago

Long time ago I visited the home of a young entrepreneur that had spent all his money installing optical fiber all around his home. I remember what I thought: How stupid someone could be. It does not make financial sense at all when it was so expensive. Turn out I was the stupid one. This man created a company doing exactly what he had done in his house but for others and made a ton of money. In some way he paid a cost for living in the future, and he understood the practical shortcomings and advantages of the new technology much better than anyone else, which made him succeed when others failed.

higherpurpose 11y ago

The article is much more negative than it should be. There is some truth in there, but the rest of it seems short-sighted. It's like saying "why in the world would anyone buy a $5,000 4k TV with an OLED screen?" Yet people buy them and that's how the technology becomes cheaper. It's a little different with batteries because they don't improve at the same rate tech products do, but they still improve and I think once Tesla gets a couple of those Gigafactories going the batteries will become more appealing to a wider range of customers. It's also the same with electric cars - 95% of the people still don't want one, even if they had the money for it, because they don't want the range anxiety. Also aren't solar panels still more expensive than buying coal-produced electricity? Or it least it was in the past few years, yet people still installed solar panels. The bottom line is Tesla only needs some "early adopter" customers to hold it over until the product is cheap/good enough for the mainstream market. And by the looks of it, whether it's in electric cars, solar panels or batteries, that seems to have worked pretty well.

dragontamer 11y ago
I don't understand why people feel the need to be an "early adopter" of something like this. How many people out there want to be an early adopter of a Lennox Air Conditioning unit? Or of a New, more efficient furnace? Or more efficient windows? The fact remains: the Tesla Powerwall is a "home appliance". The process for buying a new home appliance is the same as any other. You run the calculations, you determine if the appliance saves you money in the long term, and if it does... you go for it.

breischl 11y ago

This is the second article I've seen from Bloomberg that ignores two-thirds of what Tesla actually said and thus massively misses the point. I'm starting to think it's intentional. No kidding this isn't (currently) attractive for North American homes. If I recall correctly, they basically said that in the press conference, though I can't find the link now. They were expecting it to be more useful in places with lots of solar and dodgy electric grids, such as Australia. Bloomberg also goes on and on about utility scale storage. They apparently didn't read the press kit, where Tesla talked about how they're doing just that. Press Kit - http://www.teslamotors.com/presskit http://www.teslamotors.com/presskit

dba7dba 11y ago
I'm starting to think it's intentional. It IS intentional. Pretty much everything said (and NOT said) on MSM is intentional.

gnoway 11y ago

I'm confused about why 'net metering exists' is a good argument against these batteries. As I understand it this is a mandated buy of excess home-generated solar at retail prices - is this correct? If so, does everyone really think this is sustainable if rooftop solar really takes off? Even if it technically is I expect to see widespread lobbying to end it (like in Hawaii) and expect most of the lobbying to succeed. I don't think the Tesla batteries are a good way to lower your home energy costs, but I don't think I would factor in net metering as a reason why, at least not looking 5-10 years out.

andrewtbham 11y ago

> No matter how cheap prices get, batteries won't be the easiest or the cheapest way to take advantage of solar power. that seems like it can't possibly be true.

bryanlarsen 11y ago
That statement is true as long as net metering is in effect. Net metering means you sell back to the grid for the same price as you buy from the grid. So you can treat the grid as a giant, perfectly efficient battery. Put $X of electricity in during the day and pull out $X at night. With a battery, you'd only be pulling out ~0.9X due to efficiency losses, not to mention the cost of the battery itself.

sunstone 11y ago

If I recall correctly about 80% of Tesla's battery pre-orders by dollar value were in the commercial and utility categories rather than residential. This article makes a big point that in the residential/solar panel market the battery is marginal at the moment in most of the US where grid electricity is cheap. Ok, but so what?

dba7dba 11y ago

Imagine the world where only acts that make financial sense are done. 1. No kids would be born. They do not make financial sense at all. 2. We all would be living in some nasty environment. Caring for the environment doesn't make much sense for companies. 3. Caring weak, vulnerable people doesn't make any financial sense at all.