Why Morgan Stanley Is Betting That Tesla Will Kill Your Power Company 502
Jason Koebler (3528235) writes One major investment giant has now released three separate reports arguing that Tesla Motors is going to help kill power companies off altogether. Earlier this year, Morgan Stanley stirred up controversy when it released a report that suggested that the increasing viability of consumer solar, paired with better battery technology—that allows people to generate, and store, their own electricity—could send the decades-old utility industry into a death spiral. Then, the firm released another one. Now, it's tripling down on the idea with yet another report that spells out how Tesla and home solar will "disrupt" utilities.
Good, I say (Score:0, Insightful)
Anything that reduces the average home owner's reliance on the grid is good in my book...especially as the infrastructure is so dated and fragile.
Re:This explains why republicans push coal (Score:0, Insightful)
Troll, perhaps.
But just sit back and watch every Republican scream and throw fits and equate solar energy with communisim/islam/$conservative_groupthink_villan_of_the_week
You'll never lose if you always bet on the R's acting like cartoonish villains.
Macroeconomic investment theses are always wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Wouldn't electric cars have the opposite effect? (Score:2, Insightful)
The energy needed to power vehicles used to come from oil-derivatives (gasoline, diesel fuel). In a way, each car was its own little power plant.
With more and more cars becoming electric — for better or worse — the need for somebody to turn fuel into electricity will increase. That somebody can only be a power company, really... Solar panels remain joke — you need too many of them [howstuffworks.com] and making them is rather harmful to Earth [ehow.com]. And disposing is a problem too [theguardian.com].
So, even if they lose some business to the consumers' ability to generate some share of their own electricity, they'll gain from our increasing total demand for electricity.
Re:This explains why republicans push coal (Score:0, Insightful)
It's easy to sit back and watch things that happen entirely in your imagination.
Half of Americans rent (Score:5, Insightful)
Half of Americans rent. People who rent can't do anything to their property. Apartment buildings are stuck with whatever they were built with 40 or 50 or more years ago. They're built using the cheapest technology available at construction time and they're never upgraded. When they get old enough they become the bad part of town or in some cases the outright ghetto until they collapse or are torn down. Some people rent houses, but there is no way your landlord going to put solar panels and a charging system in your rental unit, at least not this decade and not bloody likely the next.
When I read here on Slashdot about intelligent devices in homes, or this thing people have called garages, or home chargers for vehicles, or fiber to the home, it kind of makes me laugh because these aren't most people. These are the things that less than half of Americans even have a chance of using.
People who rent aren't necessarily poor. Many renters in New York City, Boston, and San Francisco would be informally considered rich in most of the United States.
The electric company will continue to serve at least 50% of Americans indefinitely.
Re:Good, I say (Score:4, Insightful)
Anything that reduces the average home owner's reliance on the grid is good in my book...especially as the infrastructure is so dated and fragile.
Dated and fragile? Where on earth do you get that impression?
The technology of power transmission hasn't fundamentally changed in 100 years. Yea, there is some OLD equipment out there, but it is not like running electricity though wires somehow wears them out, so why would you replace it if it's still working just fine? The same for transformers, if they have enough capacity and are not leaking or arcing over someplace, why replace it? It's not like there is anything better, more reliable or more efficient out there.
The power grid is only fragile at times because we do not keep enough excess capacity in the system for efficiency reasons. But even then, Major blackouts are extremely RARE events and usually are caused by multiple faults and human error. The grid is actually a very tough system, designed to keep operating in the face of lots of unforeseen faults and failures. It routinely takes lighting strikes, component failures, human error and sabotage attempts in stride while it delivers huge amounts of power to almost every location you will find yourself.
What has changed in power distribution of late is the control systems and the efficiency of the power plants, but you are talking about the "grid" which implies the distribution system. Most of these control systems are for efficiency, monitoring and metering and don't really matter to the operation of the actual distribution system, which in most cases would be just fine without the control system watching.
So let me get this straight.... (Score:5, Insightful)
A company making an electric car, which has the potential to roughly double residential electrical demand, is going to put the utilities out of business? Using two of the biggest vaporware technologies around -- practical residential solar and really good batteries? The only thing they left out is nuclear fusion.
Re:Wouldn't electric cars have the opposite effect (Score:5, Insightful)
Solar panels are no joke. They're already out-competing all other forms of electricity on price [thinkprogress.org] in some places in the USA.
Re:Until we learn how to use less ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Who said anything a out roof tops? I just price solar for my roof, here in Oregon. 10,000 BEFORE tax breaks and incentives, BTW.
Anyway, we can build solar thermal farms and hook them into the existing grid.
The US has vast open mostly sunny areas. We can build several solar farms 25 miles to a side.
Nothing about that is hard from an engineering perspective.
Roof top would be bonus. But if you want to talk about panels then:
Mandate new houses have to have them.
Cover parking lots and put panels there.
Put panels along the side of the freeways. These panel would probably get less efficiency do to the cover getting dirty, but that is over come with just the shear volume you could do.
This is a doable solution.
.
Re:Until we learn how to use less ... (Score:5, Insightful)
FYI, transmission losses over 4000 miles is 7%.
100% solar panels? we could trivially wipe out a day time use.
We can use gravity systems for storage.
Fuck, if this was 1930, we would be doing it all ready. Now everyone is a whiny ass afraid of big projects.
The bests roads, best education system, best space agency, tallest buildings, longest bridges all see to be in the US, but apparently everyone has given up and have no problems watching out civilization built into straw start to blow away. At least billionaires get to keep more billions and suck money out of the system; which is what kills the middle class..
A massive solar project would pretty much put everyone to work, increase the tax base.
Re:Wouldn't electric cars have the opposite effect (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe — with government subsidies, tax-credits, and cheap solar panels made in China...
"In some places" you hardly need a car too...
Re:A Republican clearing up your misconceptions. (Score:4, Insightful)
A good example of Poe's law.
Re:Until we learn how to use less ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Or about 14% of the cost of the Iraq War.
Re:Good (Score:4, Insightful)
only recently went "Power positive" (where over their useful life a cell can generate more power than it took to make it in the first place. ... and I'm approaching my first half century. ...
Solar panels are 'power positive' longer than I'm old
They still cost more per kilowatt hour than buying power from the power company Depends on how your grid/infrastructure/marketing works. Right now on europeans energy spot market during peak time solar power sells for a premium. Even without subsidies you have a payback period of your installation on roughly ten years. With an expected lifetime of 30 years and more you are are certainly in the plus side, but that is Europe
You insensitive clod! (Score:5, Insightful)
My roof is the floor of the people upstairs. I can't install solar!
This is increasingly the situation many people find themselves in, having bought into the urban, high density, live close to everything and take your bicycle to work lifestyle. We will forever be the slaves of the big power utility.
Where's that hipster urban planner with the pony-tail that sold me this line of crap? I want to strangle him.
Re:This explains why republicans push coal (Score:2, Insightful)
Fortunately, it works well on a local scale.
Re:Small-scale, real-time. (Score:5, Insightful)
Similar here in Western Europe. Wind is very reliable, as we get wind almost every day. But we're too far north to make solar energy an interesting option. Solar should be built in more southern countries such as Spain or southern Italy.
If anything, all this sustainable energy will demand a stronger, and more integrated grid, which will mean more (not less) business for the grid company. If that all means some old coal power plants go out of business, then so be it. I am sure that the solar/wind industry will compensate the loss of jobs.
Re:This explains why republicans push coal (Score:2, Insightful)
So, they are not planning to run any industry at night? Or during the monsoon season?
Re:Small-scale, real-time. (Score:5, Insightful)
Um, yeah, I don't believe you for even a quarter second.
1. Nobody who runs a wind farm would refer to wind turbines as "windmills". Seriously, that's like a third-grade level mistake. This is a windmill. This is a wind turbine [geometrx.com]. Nobody in the industry would ever call a wind turbine a windmill, they'd get laughed at.
2. The typical bat in the US weighs about 10 grams. Even if we assume that the "trucks" are only pickup trucks that can haul 2 tonnes and your use of the plural only means two - about the lowest possible way we could interpret your "truckloads every year" comment - that would be 400 thousand bats per year. Your mere 700 commercial-scale wind turbines (less than 2% of the US total) would have long ago driven to local extinction any bats in your area.
The reality, of course, is that estimates for all bat deaths from wind turbines in the US combined range from about 30k per year to 800k per year. All combined.
3. Your "destroys the health of operators and technicians" line puts you solidly in autism-vaccine cookoo land [discovermagazine.com].
Just ignoring your grossly inaccurate description [oz-energy-analysis.org] of wind power availability, or the concept that a wind farm operator is going to hire someone who despises wind power with a red-hot passion to run their facility.