Tesla Runs an Entire Island on Solar Power (engadget.com) 191
Jon Fingas, writing for Engadget:Now that Tesla has officially acquired SolarCity, it's not wasting any time showing what the combined entity can do. Tesla has revealed that it's running the island of Ta'u (in American Samoa) on a solar energy microgrid that, at 1.4 megawatts, can cover "nearly 100 percent" of electrical needs. It's not just the 5,328 solar panels that are key -- it's the 60 Tesla Powerpacks that offer 6 megawatt-hours of energy storage. While Ta'u is normally very sunny, the packs can keep it running for three days without sunlight. They don't have to worry about a cloudy day leading to blackouts. The solar switch, which took a year to complete, has both its long-term environmental and immediate practical benefits. Like many remote communities, Ta'u previously had to run on diesel generators. That burns 300 gallons of fuel per day, which is neither eco-friendly nor cheap. Solar eliminates the pollution, of course, but it also saves the cost of having to continuously buy and ship barrels of diesel. And crucially, it provides a more reliable source of electricity.
Solar makes a lot of sense (Score:5, Interesting)
As indicated, shipping fossil fuel has high costs, and operation is noisy. Sunlight works even on cloudy days, and you can run desalination plants using solar, and it withstands weather effects fairly well.
Many islands operate with a hybrid solar and wind system, especially in equatorial regions.
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As a counterpoint, note that where I live we had a pretty solid overcast for five days last week.
That said, yah, solar is a perfectly usable system when you have to ship any other fuel in across the Pacific, and when you don't need power 24/7.
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However, overcast does not mean no power from solar. With the reduce power from the solar panels plus the batteries being fully charged to run for three days you probably have enough power to run six to seven days before the batteries are totally drained
So it is very unlikely that you will have too little sun in a tropical island to keep it running.
E.C.P.
Cost? (Score:2)
Re:Cost? (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't forget the shipping cost of those 300 gallons of diesel per day, the maintenance and parts required for the generators, etc.
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In a very remote (expensive) location.
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This thread started as a sarcastic joke, but let's get some numbers in here.
Tanker capacity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The smallest is 10000 - 25000 DWT (deadweight tonnage), and largest is 549,999 DWT.
How many barrels of oil can a 20,000 DWT tanker carry? https://onlineconversion.vbull... [vbulletin.net]
About 147,980 barrels.
1 barrel = 42 US gallons.
300 gallons a day = 109500 gallons a year = 2607 barrels a year
So, a 20,000 DWT tanker can supply over 56 years worth of fuel to that island.
If those batteries should b
Re:Cost? (Score:5, Informative)
Diesel bug [wikipedia.org] is a thing.
That's actually another reason for regular generator tests in backup facilities:
It frees up storage volume that can be filled with fresher fuel.
Re:Cost? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Cost? (Score:5, Informative)
Keep in mind, also, that you need a harbor that can support a 20,000 DWT tanker.
Re: Cost? (Score:2)
Because diesel is totally shelf-stable and can be used 50 years later, right?
No wait, it goes bad just like any other liquid fuel that sits around for long periods of time.
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https://www.google.com/maps/pl... [google.com]
It's an island near the far tip of the island chain extending north-east from Australia, roughly midway between New Zealand and Hawai'i, about 2000 miles from either, and over 60 miles from the bulk of American Samoa, with no obvious intervening islands aside from it's nearby sister island . Looks to be about as close to living in the middle of the open ocean as you can get, and as such I'm guessing ferries aren't the preferred method of transportation, especially carrying
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I'll see your remote T'au and raise you a Tristan da Cunha.
https://goo.gl/maps/3jXGSyvzqr... [goo.gl]
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Wholesale diesel costs about $1.5/gallon. A day of diesel for the island thus costs ~$450/day, with shipping and storage probably about 20k/year. A set of generators for 1.5MW probably costs about 500k, and the same in maintenance over 10 years especially in a remote area. So you're talking about at the high end (with land, storage, regulatory and fuel cost increases) $1.5M investment once all is said and done.
Solar currently costs about $1/W. 1.5MW is thus about $1.5M and lasts 20 years with a lot less mai
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Grabbing the back of napkin...
In October, wholesale solar started selling the brand new 14KWH powerwall2 for $5,550. http://www.wholesalesolar.com/... [wholesalesolar.com] $5550/14KWH = $396/KWH
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] The Powerwall has a lifespan of 1000-1500 cycles.
So, assuming 1500, that makes the amortized raw cost of storage = $396/1500 = 26 cents per KWH.
The going rate for uninstalled solar panels is about $2/peak watt. If we figure 80% efficiency, 6 peak equiv hours/day in sunny Samoa, 25 yea
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Um, the PowerWall, like all batteries, is DC. Pretty sure an AC battery is physically impossible. As such, if the PowerWall delivers AC, then it means it has an integrated inverter already. And while I seem to remember them being useful as battery backups on their own (implying charging from AC), it seems extremely unlikely that they would not also have the ability to accept DC power directly, saving the losses of and expense of inverting and immediately rectifying the output from the panels.
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The link I posted says "and comes with an integrated inverter". This is what they call "AC Coupled", rather than "DC Coupled". In other words, this is designed for a system that adds batteries to a grid-based system. AC current is generated either at the panels (via microinverters) or using a string inverter that connects the panels to directly to the grid. The "battery" is an add-on that consists of cells, plus a charger and an inverter. When viewed as a black box, the "battery" is AC.
In traditional
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The going rate for uninstalled solar panels is about $2/peak watt.
Where? When? That's a little bit too much for the hardware. Also, you seem to be counting with all power going through the batteries. That probably unrealistic; a significant portion will be directly consumed.
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I hadn't looked at prices lately. Seems that they are going for about $1/watt now for name brand panels with frames.
Still, as I showed in my arithmetic, the price of the raw panels is only about 10% of the cost. So, even if the cost of panels fell to zero, it wouldn't make a drastic difference in overall system cost. The necessary racks, wiring, concrete footings, labor, and maintenance are the significant factors.
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45 cents is well below what electricity costs on many much larger islands. According to Wikipedia it's about what it costs in Jamaica.
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Li-ion voltage degradation curves generally don't plunge off a cliff, the rate of degradation slows down significantly with time. For a lot of consumer goods this isn't of much use because the voltage drops below the threshold and it becomes usable. But if the Powerwalls have a good voltage conversion then they might be able to get quite a long lifespan out of them.
Still surprised at 10% loss of capacity in 10 years. I'd have thought that they'd have a low DoD and climate control paired with low discharg
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Well, given the solar array is 1.4Mw and the 6M of batteries have "3 days" emergency runtime, their usual daily depth of discharge is likely to be well under 40%.
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You are ignoring the costs of maintaining the diesel generators, storage tanks, piping, etc.
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Did you actually math this out?
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Installation cost? (Score:2)
The summary is I think a bit misleading in saying how expensive the fuel is, while not giving any figures for how much the solar panels plus battery cost... I would love to know how much diesel all of that money could buy...
That said there are a lot of fantastic benefits of being totally independent for energy and not having to rely on fuel shipments and being immune to price fluctuations, so you can't just look at the monetary cost and say it's not worth doing.
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https://www.tesla.com/powerpac... [tesla.com]
It tops if you do certain things but at 2000 KW for 3 hours (should be 6 MW hours of total storage?):
Roughly $2,751,100.
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At $2.50 a gallon (seems to be current US price?), 300 gallons a day costs $750.
Which means that THE BATTERY for that system that runs for 3 days only without solar would cost the equivalent of 10 years of diesel.
Sure, there's a lot of losses, shipping, conversion, other equipment on the diesel side, but there's also a lot of solar etc. required on the Tesla side that's unaccounted for above. And it would take 10 years to break even just on the battery storage alone, let alone the solar + battery.
Sure, it'
Re:Installation cost? (Score:4, Insightful)
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At $2.50 a gallon (seems to be current US price?), 300 gallons a day costs $750.
If you're buying it at a pump in the US, sure. If you have to load it onto a plane and send it to the easternmost volcanic island in the Samoa chain, it's going to be a touch more expensive. In Hawaii, for example, (which contains major air and sea infrastructure), diesel is over $4 per gallon. American Samoa is about 2600 miles from Hawaii, or 1800 miles from New Zealand. A chartered flight to the airport on this island from the capital of American Samoa is about $4,400 (obviously, not including the co
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with a maximum cargo capacity of around 8,000 lbs, or about 4200 gallons of diesel, or enough for 2 weeks of power generation.
Actually, diesel weighs about 7.1 lbs/gallon so you can only carry ~1100 gallons.
Re:Installation cost? (Score:5, Insightful)
Diesel cost in Samoa as of last July (quick Google check) was $2.06 to $2.28 per liter. That's between $7.80 and $8.63 per gallon. Call it $8.00. 300 gallons per day, 365 days per year, gives an annual cost of roughly $876,000. A $2.75 million battery cost would be paid for in saved fuel costs in a little over 3 years.
Still have to figure in the solar panel costs. It's a 1.4 MW microgrid. Current Google response on solar panel costs is $3.57 per watt. There's federal compensation for solar installations (~30%), but I have no idea whether they'd be able to get any funding/credit for that, given that it's not a home installation. So going with the $3.57 value, 1.4 million watts would cost $4,998,000.
Total cost is thus $7.75 million. Figure maintenance costs balance out with the diesel setup (less to break, more expensive per break), so no real effect there.
Total buyback cost in terms of diesel fuel would thus be slightly under 9 years, not counting inflation or continued increases in fuel prices. Allowing for cost fluctuations, you could then say that the entire solar grid plus batteries should for itself within 10 years, which is a pretty decent rate. As long as the replacement time is significantly above that, it's a good deal.
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Solar panels can be had for closer to 50 cents per watt these days. The cost you found is average installed cost on a house roof. The cost should be substantially less for a grid scale installation.
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Another approach to costing this system out, since sadly the article itself gives no numbers, is to consider the retail cost of the electricity. A handy comparison is Hawaii - another island location that, until recently anyway, generated almost all of its electricity from diesel shipped fro
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The Radio NZ article says the cost of the project was US$ 8 million.
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Well, there's a reason they're doing this kind of trial/test run on this island. Of course it won't immediately be at maximum efficiency, but that's why things like this are done. To learn how to do it better in the future.
Give Tesla a few years of practice at these sorts of deployments, allow for greater economies of scale, and the costs will go down dramatically.
What you're saying is essentially akin to claiming passenger air traffic is impossible, based upon the results at kitty hawk.
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Other dimensions than today's price:
- Inflation: What will Diesel cost in 10 years?
- Politics: Will there be a consistent political climate to allow diesel to arrive from somewhere?
- Availability: We could run out of oil one day. Reliable energy seems smart.
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And it would take 10 years to break even just on the battery storage alone, let alone the solar + battery.
So years 11+ are free? Where do I buy one?
Sure, it's not linked to oil prices, but it's still only just verging on "viable" assuming nothing ever goes wrong. Same as every "green" project I've ever done the numbers for.
Trajectory is just as important as position. Solar/Battery are getting cheaper every year. So if it's barely viable now it would follow that it will be absolutely viable soon, and really really viable later on? And we shouldn't bother because why exactly?
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So years 11+ are free? Where do I buy one?
Call Solar City, tell them I sent you, we both get a free month and I get $100
Re: Installation cost? (Score:2)
These metals still are much more abundant than fossile fuels.
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[gettingbeached.com]
OIA expects direct cost savings in avoided diesel fuel is about $238,000 per year and the project began last year.
But, TFA says the batteries are 6MWh not 600KWh, which does not match a 10KWh x 60 figure. This must be the 100KWh powerwall... so have to go find the price for that. Though, at a remote location it will be higher installed, and best to find the total project cost from govt docs.
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Mold (Score:5, Interesting)
While the idea of a sunny Pacific island may seem like an easy and ideal place for solar power, this may not be the case.
When I worked for NOAA, I heard wild stories about how the molds in Samoa would destroy our scientific instruments. They would even eat glass... This should prove an interesting and challenging situation.
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Fungus regularly eats camera lens glass. It sounds like exotic tropical island stuff, but it happens in closets all over the world, where grandpa's camera is rotting away.
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You haven't been to Samoa. Heat, humidity, molds, time -- a very effective destroyer of hardware (even glass). See the AC's link for something similar...
Re:Mold (Score:4, Interesting)
It doesn't "eat" it. The fungus grows between lens elements. It seems to like the glue. Lost a nice Nikkor 200mm lens that way. It's fixable, but not economic to do so.
The PV frames would (unless pre-emptively treated) corrode in the salty, damp air, but as they sit in harsh sunlight for extended periods, I think fungus would be somewhat down on the list of problems. Salty air can kill domestic computers inside 1 year, so junction boxes, blocking diodes, micro-inverters, etc would all have to be treated with sealant before installation. Same with all the controller circuitry, chargers, inverters, etc.
Today's price of diesel in Brisbane - AUD$1.13/litre
300 litres/day x 365 days = AUD$123,735.00 per annum
Transport and maintenance of fuel and gensets = ?
The payback period needs to be shorter than the Panel/battery system's expected lifespan, but as someone else has pointed out, there are benefits other than economic.
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This is how I wish we'd fix out broken economy (Score:2)
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Trump said he would oppose the merger of AT&T and Warner Bros which sounds like he isn't exactly going to be conducive to a while bunch of anti-competitive mergers...
and you beleive what he said (Score:2)
He has already backed off prosecuting Hillary, how many more statements will he back off of?
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He's even waffling [theguardian.com] on the Paris deal, so it's quite possible that many of the people that supported him may find he's not as keen to fulfill all his campaign promises as they hoped.
Re:and you beleive what he said (Score:4, Funny)
He has altered the deal. Pray he does not alter it further.
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My kingdom for some mod points!
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I think we all know there is little to no likelihood of Clinton being investigated, much as there isn't going to be a wall or a Muslim registry.
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I think that if there is one thing everyone should have learned from the 2016 election, it's that the words that are heard coming out of Trump's mouth on any given day N are no indication of what his words or behavior will be on day N+1 or later.
You might as well listen to a white noise stream; there's an equal amount of useful information present, and it's a lot more soothing.
Supervillain's lair? (Score:2)
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http://www.theverge.com/2015/1... [theverge.com]
For a while after that, he changed his twitter picture to that of him holding a long-haired white cat, so at least he has a sense of humor about it... well, that or he really is one:
"Do you expect me to talk, Elon?"
"No, Mister Bond, I expect you to buy my electric car."
Perfect Proof of Concept (Score:5, Interesting)
This is the perfect proof of concept that Musk is aligning all the pieces needed for Mars Base 1.
SolarCity for the energy collection
Tesla for the storage and local transportation
SpaceX for the "long haul" to/from Mars, as an umbrella for the expedition and for the environmental pieces (habitat design, space suits).
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Context (Score:2)
"The land area of Tau Island is 44.31 square kilometers (17.11 sq mi) and it had a population of 873 persons as of the 2000 census.
Why not wind? (Score:3)
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It's the crazy gusts you get with cyclones that are the problem, but you're right about wind power generally in those 'trade winds' locations.
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Yeah, you'll always need them for backup, e.g. when a cyclone destroys some of your solar/battery infrastructure. Trouble is, diesel gensets become less reliable (i.e. need more maintenance) the less they are used. You have to run them at high/max load for a while every week to keep them in shape. Ditto with the fuel. You can't just leave it there unused and expect it to work. Petrol and diesel go "off" after a few months - so you're going to have to rotate stock, so to speak - which means continuing to shi
Solar makes sense in remote areas (Score:2)
In remote areas where there is no existing grid infrastructure Solar is already cost competitive. Many parts of India which are off the grid are running on a mix of Solar and Biogas plants(basically farm waste and cow shit in a sealed tank with a pipe to draw out the methane). An Island where fuel needs to be shipped in is ideal for Solar and wind as it gets rid of the uncertainty of the fuel ship being delayed by a storm. However the locals need to be trained to fix the solar panels and batteries themselv
Elsewhere (Score:3)
Orkney, a group of islands of the north coast of the UK is apparently now self sufficient in electricity from wind turbines. Yes we still have a diesel fired power station in case of problems and an undersea link to the UK national grid.
This is the future - solar, wind, whatever, not filthy fossil power pushed by some bad tempered businessman with dodgy hair.
T'au use solar FOR THE GREATER GOOD! (Score:2)
Meh. (Score:2)
Another evil genius builds a secret lair on an island under a volcano.
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"We don't know who struck first, but we know it was us that scorched the skies..."
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I don't know that diesel engines are getting more efficient. If they are, they're coming to the end of their efficiency curve while solar and batteries are just getting started.
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That's better than a diesel engine at 45%. And the fuel costs you nothing.
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Also, you want a solar panel that's 138% efficient?
When you find any energy source that's 138% efficient, you'll be the wealthiest person in the world. Also, you'll have disproven physics.
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Betting on the price of replacement batteries going down is probably as safe or a safer bet than betting on the price of fossil fuel to remain stable over an entire decade.
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Longer than the barrels of diesel fuel anyways.
Re:Sure (Score:5, Insightful)
All of which, added up, is no more than a small fraction of the environmental cost of pumping, transporting, refining, flying in and then burning all that diesel.
If there is an award for the comment that best embodies the slack-jawed, drooling idiocy of the neo-conservative right, surely it should be won by the one above.
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> Solar eliminates the pollution, of course
Except for the pollution from mining the rare earth metals, and the whole solar manufacturing process.
What "rare earth" metals would that be? Solar cells are silicon
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Cadmium, Indium, Tellurium
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We're practically out of silicon. It's even more scarce than oxygen!
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Good news is they're found together; just have to go through the trouble of separating them from all that sand
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You should be thanking Panasonic as Tesla are just their salesmen, even their GigaFactory is paid for with Panasonic cash.
basically SolarCity make stickers and have a bunch of contractors to fit them on the roof, maybe the contractors should just skip the "innovative" middle men and buy them direct, you know, cut out the inefficiencies and all that..
I guess you've been buying your cars from Magna Steyr or Karmann Mobil?
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Islands are ideal places to test small energy sources, because islands as large as Hawai'i are 'off the grid' and are often run entirely on diesel.
A geothermal plant is on my itinerary in Iceland.
Re:Tesla Runs an Entire Island (Score:5, Insightful)
It'd be a real shame if Ta'u can't keep up the payments to Solar City and their power controllers all stopped working at the same time.
As opposed to the regular diesel shipments, which would definitely continue to arrive whether any payments were made or not?
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Well, you know, cargo cult. Show up at the dock and ships are almost guaranteed to come.
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So the back up for solar is properly managed sewerage, as in a methane farm and you store that methane, compressed (using solar power), to power gas turbine generators when needed and produce hot water, for direct local use (care needs to be taken where the plant is to be located).
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That's the option I'm going with, financing them rather than leasing them.