Tesla Will Install More Energy Storage With SolarCity In 2016 Than The US Installed In 2015 (electrek.co) 149
An anonymous reader writes: Tesla is scheduled to install more energy storage capacity in 2016 with SolarCity alone than all of the US installed in 2015. It was revealed in a recent filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that Tesla foresees an almost 10x increase in sales to SolarCity for behind the meter storage. [From the SEC filing: "We recognized approximately $4.9 million in revenue from SolarCity during fiscal year 2015 for sales of energy storage governed by this master supply agreement, and anticipate recognizing approximately $44.0 million in such revenues during fiscal year 2016."] This revenue projection means Tesla expects to install approximately 116 MWh of behind the meter storage. The U.S. for example installed about 76 MWh of behind the meter storage. SolarCity and Tesla Energy doubled their battery installation volume last year. What's particularly noteworthy is that the 116 MWh expectation does not include SolarCity's biggest project -- Kauai Island's coming 52 MWh system. Hawaii is aiming for 100% renewable energy by 2045 and has contracted with SolarCity to balance the two 12MW Solar Power plants with the Kauai Island Utility Cooperative (KIUC). By 2020, there will be 70 GWh of Tesla battery storage on the road, and Straubel expects there to be 10 GWh of controllable load in those cars.
Confusing (Score:1, Troll)
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yeah, confusing (Score:4, Insightful)
The point is that so little has been done at large scale with batteries/storage to date that Tesla's efforts are a big leap for the cost and installed base of battery storage, and now feasibly making off-the-grid / backup / peak shaving / frequency regulation / demand response a real possibility to experiment with at scale.
Re:yeah, confusing (Score:5, Informative)
Battery storage is a waste of time, generates massive pollution, and will need replacing every 10 years. It is far better to feed the grid during peak times, and pump water to use hydro generation later in the day. We've know this for over a century!
This is all about PR for Telsa to sell batteries; batteries with obsolescence built in.
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This is all about PR for Telsa to sell batteries; batteries with obsolescence built in.
tl;dr Tesla is Apple for cars, but with more public money.
The US was once about separation of Church and State, but then Churches were renamed to Corporations.
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Battery storage is a waste of time, generates massive pollution, and will need replacing every 10 years.
Utter nonsense.
First, it depends on the type of battery. Utility scale you use sodium sulphur, residential scale you use lithium. Both are highly recyclable and will last for more than 10 years. In the case of lithium, most batteries will already have been recycled from cars anyway, so are on at least their second stint.
Panasonic and Tesla are building the world's largest battery factory, with an output in excess of the current world output. They rightly expect that many of those batteries will be installed
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First, it depends on the type of battery. Utility scale you use sodium sulphur, residential scale you use lithium. Both are highly recyclable and will last for more than 10 years. In the case of lithium, most batteries will already have been recycled from cars anyway, so are on at least their second stint.
Is that true (the italicized portion)? I had not heard of that before.
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Some of the current ones are recycled, but most are new. I was talking about the medium to long term plan for them. Tesla packs are good for 900,000 miles, and even then they retain 80% capacity, so it makes sense to reclaim them from scrapped cars.
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Battery storage is a waste of time, generates massive pollution, and will need replacing every 10 years. It is far better to feed the grid during peak times, and pump water to use hydro generation later in the day. We've know this for over a century!
This is all about PR for Telsa to sell batteries; batteries with obsolescence built in.
My home regularly loses power, especially during ice storms that take out power lines. I'm looking to install solar with several days of battery storage to mitigate that recurring problem. Don't mistake your preference for universal truth. It's a common mistake, and one reason people feel comfortable demonizing others.
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The people one block over got really mad when I told them I was going to flood their block so I could use it as a pumped storage reservoir.
I agree that your "solution" makes some sense, but you have to have a lot of geography and water available at your disposal. With 6 ft of head and 20 liters/sec you need about .83 acre-feet to get 10 kwh of power. That's not exactly residential scale.
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My typo, I mean 6M of water.
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Pump storage works great as long as you have a mountain, a lake, and all the permits are in place. There are maybe a dozen places in the US where pump storage is viable. Batteries will be needed for EVs and the batteries in the EVs will massive controllable storage facility. When the batteries are no longer suitable for EVs, they can be re-purposed for grid storage for a few more years, and finally they can be recycled.
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Hydroelectric dams make great batteries on the grid for balancing out demand for energy generated in big power stations. But this is for an entirely different purpose. This is for balancing domestic and commercial micro-generation with solar panels and wind turbines. Except in very exceptional circumstances, you can't use hydro for that.
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It is far better to feed the grid during peak times, and pump water to use hydro generation later in the day.
People are pissed about Net metering laws, [wikipedia.org] even though the money could be used to build hydro storage. They would rather build their own energy storage than trust the power company to do it for them.
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Yeah ok, I'll just build a massive water tower in my back yard with a huge noisy pump to fill with water, and run a big noisy turbine at night off that water. I'm sure that the county and local zoning authorities will have no problems with this, and neither will any of my neighbors.
Or I could put a fucking battery on the wall in the garage and call it a day.
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yeap (Score:1)
We get it (Score:1)
Tesla is great and facts are irrelevant. Elon Musk will solve all environmental problems with its arrogance-to-electricity technology.
Now we can state (Score:2)
The future looks so bright, you have to wear shades! Expensive shades.
Tesla's PowerPacks 2x as expensive as promised (Score:5, Insightful)
Last year, Tesla had a press release stating PowerPacks would be ~$250/kWh but the recently released pricing on their site shows a cost of $470/kWh even if you purchase FIFTY-FOUR PowerPacks for a total of 5,4 MWh of energy storage.
And the inverters aren't cheap either.
Re:Tesla's PowerPacks 2x as expensive as promised (Score:4, Informative)
Welcome to Tesla Maths. They include the savings on your energy bill, any available subsidies and other random things they could think of.
It's like when Musk said you could own a Model S for $350/month. What he meant was, $350 if you put down a massive deposit, include all the fuel savings, include billing for the time to saved not pumping gasoline, took advantage of all tax breaks, free parking for EVs etc.
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Demand outstripping supply presumably.
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Let's hope so; if it's because they were unable to control costs and could be off that much in just one year, that doesn't bode well for the Model 3 price 2 years from now.
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Are they still using slave labor panels? (Score:1)
I was all set to be stoked about Solar City until I found out they were buying panels from someone who uses slave labor to manufacture them [dailycaller.com] (Suniva [reuters.com]) ... more like conniva. Is that better or worse than buying them from China? Still can't decide.
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FTA:" Suniva Inc, a Georgia-based solar cell and panel maker that is backed by Goldman Sachs Group Inc, farms out a small portion of its manufacturing to federal inmates as part of a longstanding government program intended to prepare them for life after prison."
No. It is a longstanding program intended to use them as slaves while depriving Americans of jobs. Nobody is going to hire ex-cons to assemble solar panels, and we're continuing to incarcerate people for victimless and nonviolent crimes so that the supply of slave labor won't dry up.
"Overrated", the refuge of the shill mod (Score:1)
How much do you get paid to downmod anything critical of his Muskiness?
Drop in the ocean (Score:2)
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There is absolutely no reason to consider the battery requirements for running the entire country, and it's kind of asinine to just average it out like you did.
Solar can handle a significant portion of the peak loads, since the peak loads coincides strongly with time of day. Wind, hydro and whatever other whatever region-appropriate renewable can fill in for most of the night/off peak loads. You'd only need storage to cover the edge cases, and not all of that storage would need to be chemical battery (see:
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SCTY articles (Score:1)
Why do these anonymous pro Solar City articles appear after SCTY stock declines? I didn't think Slashdot had been infected by the stock pumpers but now I'm not so sure.
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I love how you say that, and SCTY is up at least $2 today. And, was up yesterday. In fact, they're trading at their highest price of 2016.
What was your point again?
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Perhaps it has something to do that with every centimeter the sea rises, the hawaii landmass shrinks? And who is the major land owner in Hawaii? Yes, the taxpayer [sfgate.com]! Means that raising sea levels destroy state owned real estate in the hundreds of millions. And land in Hawaii is not cheap you know.
Yes, of course its symbolic, but they want to not look like hyppocrites when they demand other states to adopt greener technologies.
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Interesting that suddenly a lot of anonymous, caustic comments turn up every time there is an article about renewable energy or cheap energy storage. If you didn't know better, you would almost think that there is an astroturf campaign going on...
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Gosh, I wonder if there are any externalities associated with your choices? Because the way you write it, it sounds like the only factor to consider is cost. That might be just a teensy bit shortsighted.
Question for you... (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you intentionally comparing apples to oranges, or was it a typo? You say you can get 10 KWh of storage or about 2500 kWh of petrol for around $1200. Are you including the cost of storing the petrol? Are you including the cost, and loss of energy, when converting the petrol to electricity? The cost of obtaining, extraction, shipping and refining petroleum is already in the price and taxes (for the most part not including the military cost to keep the oil flowing).
I'm not arguing with you that the energy density of petrol is very high, and other forms of storage are often not as efficient. Are you also considering the highly inefficient nature of creating petroleum in the first place? It took hundreds of millions of years for the petroleum to form. You're taking advantage, and rightfully so, of a very long and inefficient process that produced a very dense energy storage product.
We can manufacture batteries for storage from raw materials relatively efficiently. We cannot manufacture petroleum efficiently from raw materials and there is a limited supply available to us. We can manufacture alcohol, methane and plant based oils as energy storage from raw materials (with the help of plants, yeast and bacteria and animal waste). These are not as energy dense as petroleum, but they cost much less to manufacture than petroleum.
I'm not a petroleum engineer, but I'm familiar with the industry and I can find no process known for manufacturing petroleum products from raw materials. You can find processes for converting one form of fossil fuel from another (ie petrol from coal) or for extracting petroleum from tar sands. None of these processes actually create petroleum from raw materials.
We will run out. As petroleum becomes more scarce, the costs will increase. You can lead humanity into the future, or you can cling to the past. Investing in renewable energy and robust electrical storage infrastructure is not opposition to using petroleum, but it does lessen dependence on one source for power. This would make a future more resilient to wild swings in oil prices and shortages of oil. It is especially important to a place like Hawaii, as so much of their energy is imported, and yet they have abundant sun and wind.
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I guess it depends on how you define "raw materials" but my understanding is that the old Fischer Tropsch process can produce petroleum products fr
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Thanks,
I'll look into it. It seems like it would take a lot of energy input to do that, which is kind of my point. As long as petroleum is plentiful we will continue to use it. We have already reached the point where we are turning to more and more expensive extraction techniques. The big benefit to petroleum is that the process of storing the energy in petroleum didn't cost us much as it took place naturally over many aeons. We get to release that energy.
If the choice is between manufacturing petroleum
Re:I hope taxpayers aren't on the hook for this (Score:4, Informative)
...The problem with coal is not the strip mining, but what happens thereafter.....
As if those were separate, unrelated things. It is precisely the mess left over that is the problem with "strip mining" (now typically "mountain top removal" which also completely buries watersheds). Mining operations are typically conducted by specially formed companies owned by shell companies that are the real mining operator. When the project is done, the company declares bankrupcy, disappears, and leaves an awful mess behind with no one to hold accountable or pay the bills for remediation.
We are all hammers, everything is a nail (Score:4, Funny)
It's a useless project. Can anyone explain any way this would be worthwhile? ..
Yeah, didn't think you could!
PHASE I
1. Install electric utility meter on house [done]
2. Install solar panels on house [done]
3. Install battery storage in house [done]
PHASE II
4. Extend axles through basement windows
5. Mount monster truck tires
6. Hook washing machine and dryer to drive shaft
7. Mount steering wheel on front porch
8. Install La-Z-Boy recliner seat
PHASE III
9. Fire it up!
10. Pull out and head down the highway, dragging the entire North American energy grid infrastructure behind it.
Project REDNECK SOLAR HYBRID HOUSE complete.
Easy to explain, it's a rational plan (Score:5, Informative)
Sure. It's obvious to most people but it might as well be explained in case some folks haven't thought about it.
There you go, it's pretty simple and very sensible. It's also a good idea to add the following prediction to the above as well, as it's really a foregone conclusion and hence very safe to forecast:
Adding item (4) means that everyone will want the energy storage of (3) for recharging their cars when they get home. Paying the grid for that power when the sun can provide it for free during the day would be poor domestic economics. This pushes towards needing even more battery capacity.
Elon Musk is quite a visionary, but he's also a clever cookie when it comes to business. He knows where all this is going and is sewing up the future in EVs, mobile power storage, recharging stations, solar panels, and fixed power storage. He's got it all covered.
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Re:Easy to explain, it's a rational plan (Score:4, Interesting)
The summary claims they are doubling what they did last year. If they keep investing in the infrastructure to keep scaling up each year, being at one millionth right now is only 20 years away from your estimate of what the US would need.
Of course in practice the trick is to stop scaling up when there won't be people who want it or you business goes bust instead of being highly profitable at the end, but yes, this sort of infrastructure overhaul in 20 years is not only a rational timeline but pretty agressive in historical terms.
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There is plenty of lithium on this planet. But that isn't the problem. As we have both said, the problem is the economics. The assumption in my comment, highlighted by the second half, is that since they are doing this as a business, they will stop scaling when they no longer see profit to be made by doing so. As long as there is profit in doing so, the total potential market size is a POSTIVE for the business case, not a negative.
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Do you realize that the cost would be then in the range of 100 trillion?
Lesee... 100 million households at a cost of $10-30K per household.. total cost $1-3 trillion i.e. a whole two orders of magnitude less than the figure you claimed.
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And of course scale effects and learning curves will drive the costs down much further.
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A 1 MWh battery however costs around 1 million dollars, and not 10000. Whole two orders of magnitude more than the figure you claimed
Please link to an analysis that shows a 1 MWh battery per household would be needed in any kind of rational power system. This is a full months worth of electricity for an (extremely wasteful) American household, and almost 3 months of electricity for a more efficient OECD economy.
This is a preposterous made-up "requirement".
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And a 1GWh costs 1 billion dollars which is another whole two orders of magnitude. So?
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What Tesla is planning to do this year covers maybe ONE MILLIONTH of what USA would need. Does that sound like a solid plan?
Umm, yeah. It does sound like a solid plan. What on earth makes you think we need to or even could replace all fossil fuel generation in one year by one company with a nascent technology? It's going to take a while. That doesn't make it a bad idea or make it impossible. I can't be bothered to verify your generating capacity claims but quite frankly we should have as much battery backed solar and wind power as our technology feasibly will permit.
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When Ford started churning out the Model T, the factory coul
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Too bad in order to go 100% renewable and be able to iron out daily and seasonal input fluctuation, we need an estimated 0.2-1 MWh capacity per person. What Tesla is planning to do this year covers maybe ONE MILLIONTH of what USA would need. Does that sound like a solid plan?
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't SolarCity's main objective to provide the new Tesla Gigafactory with 100% renewable energy?
Average W/person (Score:1)
I think your are off by a big factor. A usual home (4 persons) needs an average electrical power of 400W (Europe) to 1000W (US). Add full electrical AC/heating by heat pumps, the power may double or triple. So even assuming for each person average total power 1000W = 1kW yields at most a daily storage capacity of maximum
24kWh = 0.024MWh.
If one includes for each person the industry, transport and government energy expenses, 4 times the previous value is still below your lower value. Obviously not all
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Damn. I guess we'd better do nothing until someone comes up with a solution that addresses THE WHOLE WORLD AT ONCE.
Clearly you can't start somewhere, and grow from there. That would never work!
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Napoleon: I want trees planted along the sides of the roads so my soldiers can march in the shade.
Minister: But sir, the trees will take years to grow?
Napoleon: Yes, so start immediately.
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Actually it is not worthwhile.
It is likely more an experiment.
As long as you don't produce the day consumption and (at least a part of) the night consumption during daytime, it makes no sense to store anything.
Unlike wind, solar power is 100% predictable, so you can schedule your fossile power plants long enough ahead of time to react to all fluctuations.
NO STORAGE
You have overproduction during daytime, you power down gas/oil/coal plants. So you safe fuel at daytime.
At night you power them as usually. What
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Burning fossil fuels may even become illegal, if not because of global warming and pollution then because it's far more valuable to use hydrocarbons as a raw material for industry. Burning money is silly.
If it's actually more valuable, you don't need to worry about people 'burning money'. The literal example is actually quite apropos: nobody heats their homes with $100 bills.
Now, we might need better tech and financial instruments to address the capital costs, but if the value is there and such instrument
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Re: I hope taxpayers aren't on the hook for this (Score:1)
Solar flux in the tropics is rather steady over the course of a year.
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Re:Murika (Score:4, Interesting)
If the free market wanted your alternative energy storing methods, it would have already happened.
What I read in articles like this is that the "free market" already wants it, and now it becomes more affordable and mainstream, it actually happens. Those batteries are very probable not mainstream enough, but what you see is a market growing. It is happening now.
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What I read in articles like this is that the "free market" already wants it, and now it becomes more affordable and mainstream, it actually happens.
You are right, now. The only reason that alternative energy prices are so high is that they are still paying off the capital investment, however as more and more competition comes on line that is going to be forced down. The price of oil has probably permanently gone below the cost of exploration and alternative energy will replace all fossil fuels except gas surprisingly soon. However remember that it would never have got to this stage via the free market. The reason that China is overtaking the US in
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You're free market screed is misplaced. There was and is a lot of opposition by market forces towards renewables, particularly from the fossil fuel industry. Renewables do not have the same political clout that the fossil fuel industry has, nor do they enjoy special treatment that the fossil fuel industry receives from government.
If this were truly a free market, renewables would be offered the same opportunities as fossil fuels and would see a
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Given that it's unlikely that solar panels can be legally made in the US or western Europe
Except for the billion dollar solar panel manufacturing plant [twcnews.com] being built by SolarCity in Buffalo, NY right now? Due to start production this year, and ramp to capacity some time in 2017.
Yeah, try to Google for 5 seconds before asserting something completely false.
Re:Murika (Score:5, Informative)
> Really? Because what I read is $44M in a multi trillion dollar energy industry suggests that behind the meter storage is a niche market at best, and a small one.
Yes and no. In the lower 48, it's largely confined to a small number of people living beyond the reach of the power grid, a few eccentrics, and victims of poorly thought out "green" policies. Hawaii, however is a special case being 4000km from any source of hydrocarbon fuels. Residential electricity rates on Oahu are over 25 cents per kw/hr and on the outlying islands are pushing 40 cents. https://www.hawaiianelectric.c... [hawaiianelectric.com]
Seems to me like a great testbed for rooftop solar with on-site storage and similar renewable based technologies.
Then there's California which seems to be determined to test renewables on a large scale. Nice of them to do so assuming that the rest of us are capable of learning from their experience -- good or bad. They may be able to make it work as they have a favorable situation for grid scale solar as well as hydro and a significant percentage (about 25%) of the world's actual up an running grid-scale geothermal generation.
Personally, I think Hawaii might do OK eventually although probably not 100% renewable. There's some stuff -- aircraft, emergency vehicles, etc that probably work best with liquid fuels.
California? Iffy, I think. But I don't live there. And they aren't all gonna die if their experiment founders.
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Or it's an emerging market that has absolutely no market penetration whatsoever at this time.
Everything starts somewhere.
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I live in the center of Texas... and the town that I live in is getting a sizable chunk of its power from a solar array. It already has been asserted that solar is cheaper than coal, especially with the fact that upkeep costs are relatively low compared to other methods of energy generation.
Even though we see a lot of battery improvement announcements, most of them likely flashes in the pan at best, there is a cumulative effect. A battery that holds 1/10 as much energy per volume as gasoline would revolut
Re: Sums up USA (Score:2, Informative)
The gigafactory is in Nevada not Japan, the Solar cells are from New York not China, Musk is a US citizen....who has a Hebrew first name but isn't even a little Jewish.
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The solar cells aren't from New York, yet. The SolarCity / Silevo factory doesn't come on line until at least June of this year, and won't reach full capacity until some time in 2017.
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With whining racist AC complaining about the wrong facts on Slashdot but too cowardly to speak clearly and so resorting to hints ("moneychanger"). Poor ickle racist AC. I bet you pine for the days when men were men, women knew their place, and you could carry out a lynching without anyone complaining.
Energy storage is expensive (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry, I don't have time this morning to glean exact numbers. But there is a misconception that energy storage is free. I just went through these calculations for my off-grid dream home. (My cabin has been off-grid for 20+ years, so I am intimately familiar with wind+solar+storage.)
In reality, batteries don't last forever. The best of the best Rolls/Surette sealed lead acid batteries are good for 3,300 discharges to 50%. So, when you calculate the cost of those batteries against their total number of KWH that they will EVER store, it works out to approximately 10 cents per KWH. I've looked at every option available, and there are no other options close to flood lead acid storage amortized price.
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] the Tesla powerwall has/had projected cycle life of 1000–1500 cycles. On a cost per KWH of new battery, they are about 3x the cost of flooded lead acid. So, for 3x the price, you get about half the energy storage over their lifespan. Again, apologies for not presenting the arithmetic. But the stored energy will cost somewhere between 30-50 cents per KWH. So, it is already not competitive with on-demand generation - even if the cost of generation is zero.
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Everybody who is focusing on off-grid uses, and residential energy prices, is missing the point. The better market for battery energy storage, right now, is businesses on-grid, who pay for peak electrical usage at absurdly high rates.
http://pipedot.org/story/2016-01-18/high-electrical-fees-lead-school-districts-to-install-batteries
With the peak billing, the cost per kilowatt at peak can actually be over $40... Batteries can easily be more expensive. And since it's not a daily charge/drain cycle, they can
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can actually be over $40
Are you sure? This seems high by a factor of about 100.
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Your cells are the cheaper ones. Rolls specs say 3300 cycles for Series-5000 cells.
"5000 series is no-compromise solution for extended use. Dual container construction, 10 year limited warranty. Rated for 5000 cycles at 20% depth of discharge. 3300 cycles at 50%. Capacities are listed at 100 Hr. rate." http://www.cosolar.com/catalog... [cosolar.com]
They are designed for a 15 year lifespan. Mine are still nearly good as new after 10 years.
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10 cents per KWH
I think you mean 10 cents per WH, not kwh. That's the number that I used for my off grid house.
Just out of curiosity, how much battery storage do you have? I have 4kwh, but limit myself to ~20% dod and haven't found that I need more.
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No, 10 cents per *amortized* KWH is correct.
My system has 4 Surrette 6CS-25PS. About 28-30 KWH total storage, stored at 24v.
Those batteries cost about $1100 each, depending where you buy them. 6v, 1158 AH (20 hour rate)
So, without splitting hairs on load rates and voltage, $1100/(6x1.156) = $159/KWH
But when amortized against the rated 3300 cycles to 50%: $159 / 3300 / .5 = $0.096 per KWH to store your energy. Again, I've done a lot of research, and that's the best I could come up with.
Amortized cos
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Tesla powerwall has/had projected cycle life of 1000–1500 cycles.
you aren't wrong but a recent advancement could change that number by orders of magnitude. [popsci.com]
Re:They did it for rain water.They will do it for (Score:4, Insightful)
In a bunch of socialist states collecting rain water is illegal.
We had that topic a few days before: AFAIK only in the USA there are "states" where collecting rain water is illegal.
for those who are using free sun will not be paying their fair share of taxes.
They pay taxes on the installation, VAT etc. and pay workers who pay taxes. And they have money left over that they spent somehow and pay taxes again, VAT etc.
Your concerns are overrated.
Fringe sites (Score:3)
The most famous fringe site is Washington Post. Here is the link: https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
Those who do not see the results, are too sensitive to scroll down the results page in google query. Nobody reads page #2 of google results anyway.
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Why on earth would you cite water laws as being something instituted by "a bunch of socialist states"?? As the article you yourself linked to demonstrates, these laws are actually an embodiment of crazy ideologies about individual ownership -- the principle being that the owner of the rainwater is not the person on whose head it falls, but the person whose great-grandpappy laid claim to a river into which the raindrops might conceivably wend their way in due course. Extremes of individual property ownership
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Clearly you suck at Google then. Colorado has laws about rooftop runoff and rain barrels, prohibiting them. [denverpost.com]
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Whatever your anonymous trash talk might be Your doubt and hate fuels the very fire of people of Musk's ilk. They love to prove you wrong. So thank you for degrading yourselves for the public good.
See? We're helping already! We're the reverse-psychology cheerleaders of the clean-energy market! ;^)
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You do know that it's possible to recycle batteries from cars into batteries for homes, right?
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Sounds like the perfect place to start installing behind-the-meter battery storage.