Standup Zone Forum
General => Environment => Topic started by: Admin on June 14, 2015, 03:06:38 PM
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The Tesla Powerwall. Very cool. Love the idea of individual energy independence.
https://www.minds.com/blog/view/440915676031356928/tesla-unveils-a-battery-to-power-your-home-completely-off-grid
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXWHqjQNJ5Y
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Mercedes too
http://www.engadget.com/2015/06/09/mercedes-benz-home-battery/
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The wall is cool but the utility and community verion is the big story. Utilities deploying smartgrids with tesla systems will be able to save a huge amount on infrastructure. No need to expand a lot of transmission and distribution--they can buffer demand locally with off-demand charging. Also the unreliable alternative energy generation becomes satisfactorily reliable for a lot more situations. Less necessity for running thermal plants.
As electric cars become more common the cars in garages can also serve as smartgrid components--an electric goldsmith theory.
Of course both the gigafactory, demand for batteries from Teslas, and the new higher efficiency Solar City panels to be manufactured in the old Solandra plant all play nicely together.
Musk thinks big.
Oh, and rthe next gen Mercedes battery will be Tesla gigafactory. This one is Nimh which is a step into the market.
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Musk marketing BS is more like it.
His Power Wall is not designed for home PV use. The Power Wall bus voltage is about 300 VDC while standard PV systems run at 24 or 48 VDC. It requires 3rd party components to make it work either with the grid or with common PV design. And nobody can buy a Power Wall directly - you have to go through Solar City which charges thousands to install it (and guess what, Elon Musk is the chairman of Solar City). After all is said and done, the cost of a Power Wall goes up from Elon Musk's statement of $350/KWH to about $650/KWH.
Right now, today, you can buy Lithium Ion battery storage from other vendors that is solar panel compatible for $450/KWH. So what exactly is Musk going to give us that is not already available, and is cheaper?
I do not believe Musk is serious about power storage otherwise he would have a product (er, proposed product) that is better than what one can buy today. He is drumming up support for his battery factory and trying to keep his investors (i.e., stock holders) from revolting because his car business is not meeting quotas or deadlines.
The drop in oil price is a problem for Tesla, so Musk counters with a grandiose plan for storage batteries and markets it as if he is the first and cheapest. Storage is huge for the future of renewable energy but that problem will be solved within the grid, by either utilities or 3rd party storage providers. Why should every home have its own storage when the grid can do it for them?
EV and PV are totally cool, but I don't trust Elon Musk.
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Of course you can go it on your own, the engineering is trivial. The slick bit is the control and integration software, and making it utility compatible which isnt easy unless you do some clugy isolation relay. Anyone can charge batteries from a pv system and connect a inverter to make ac. But integrated systems that can be bought in increments for about the cost of the components is pretty slick.
There isnt an entrepreneur operating at the big end who anyone is going to "trust". Execution at that level demands a mindset that simply isnt pleasant. But the guy brought spacex to some version of profitability. he's probably the only hope that an american spacecraft will carry people anytime soon, and he's currently resupplyinf the iss with falcon nines..Built tesla from weenie little company to a company buiding the safest car ever tested, with absurd performance, and a nationwide network of high speed superchargers that let you drive them across the country for free. And built the dominant solar power installation company in the us, an shortly probably the biggest manufacturer or high performance solar panels. And the gigafactory. And paypal.
I find it strange that he has so manu detractors. Certainly he's not someone you want to hang out with, but geez.
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Every house and every business needs to be completely independent of the electric wire grid. I look forward to the day when entire communities will be free of electric bills, power outages or blackouts. Soon the practicality of independent power will outweigh the many disadvantages of power plant supply.
If I ever have a new house built, it will be designed to be completely independent of the grid, even if it means making the house a little smaller to accommodate the cost.
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i have a likely failed investment in a zinc-flow battery technology. Load balancing battery technology, combined with solar and other energy alternatives, is the wave (since we surf) of the future. I just don't think the baseline battery technology is there yet. Whoever invents and ends up owning a legitimately significantly superior battery technology, will be the next Bill Gates.
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The grid is a really cheap battery at 14 bucks a month.
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The grid is a really cheap battery at 14 bucks a month.
My bill in May was $74 and we have relatively low consumption compared to other houses in the area, but to me it's the principal. I'd gladly pay more to be independent but my income is at the poverty level right now so no major expenses until that changes.
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The major detractor for personal alternative energy up until now has been the systems themselves. Awesome for doodlers, but the genpop looks in "the solar closet" and winces. They want something pretty to hang on the garage wall and they want to flip a switch. They want Steve Jobs solar. That is the beauty here.
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Yes, I get it. Stringing a bunch of lead-acid batteries together is far from sexy and if Elon Musk can do anything, it is put sex appeal into high tech. People I know who have off-grid PV systems do just that - get a bunch of lead-acid batteries which cost less than Lithium Ion (about $300/KWH). Not very hi-tech but definitely works.
The good thing about being grid-attached besides not needing batteries, is that in areas that allow net metering, it encourages people to implement their own alternative energy systems since they can make money selling power to the grid. The problem is with the utility companies - most are unprepared for sporadic, uncontrolled power being added to their grid. This problem goes beyond home power - I live in Klickitat County (the gorge) part of the year and wind power is big here, but much of it is wasted because it is generated at times and seasons when the grid cannot accept any more power. Klickitat PUD is trying to ship it off to California but they won't take it either. The whole thing can be solved with grid storage - it will benefit the homeowner and his roof-top PV system and it will benefit the huge wind farms in eastern Washington, and it will encourage more alternative energy production.
It is a very interesting problem to solve. Klickitat's current thinking is to create a reservoir/dam closed system and pump water up to store energy, and use hydroelectric generation when they need power. I personally think they should consider electrolytic hydrogen production - they can sell the hydrogen to the hydrogen fuel cell cars coming out, or they can burn it (with zero carbon) to produce electric power.
Lots of cool stuff. I believe mass-power storage is going to be a huge industry in the near future.
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There's some excellent lead acid battery tech on the way that could be good for stationary storage. The batteries most early adopter off-grid folks use are not great, require a lot of maintenance. About the only things that recommend them is initial cost and recycling. LA batteries are nearly 100 percent recyclable and in fact 98 percent of battery lead is recycled and over 50 percent of the casing and acid. Pretty amazing. On a side note, those giant tire stacks that were environmental disaster are also no more--80 percent recycled.
Newer tech lead acid include various flooded designs as well as lead carbon, lead antimony, and advanced plate designs. Some of the tech makes the batteries into essentially ultra-capacitors, meaning a lot of the energy is directly stored as plate charge instead of as chemical reactions. Interesting stuff. I suspect a lot of future stationary storage could be LA instead of LiON, but any application with weight issues will be lithium, and with capacity increases to accommodate transport the Li batteries will likely be competitive in cost and much lower maintenance. The failure mode of Lithium batteries is amenable to technical improvement, to the point that they may reach highly extended life--like 30-50 years. There's a lot of extension available just in better charging control and discharge management. A lot of dead hobby LiPoly batteries were simply charged to 100 percent and stored, which drastically reduces life. Charging to 75% and precisely balancing each cell completely eliminates that failure mode. It's just a little bit of electronics.
Besides just mechanical to electrodes by vibration or temperature variation, the cells are also susceptible to coatings on the anode and/or oxidation of the cathode. Managing the charge/discharge rate and the ultimate voltage of the cells reduces these factors substantially. Various chemistries produce improvements as well. The gigafactory batteeries will be Lithium Nickel Cobalt Aluminum Oxide, but the factory is designed to accommodate radical changes in chemistry. There's a lot more improvement to come.
It's pretty remarkable to see the capacity of the first Li gigafactory completely committed before it's completed. The critics claimed the capacity would depress the battery market and result in surpluses, depressing prices and making the gigafactory fail as soon as it started production.
Anyway, interesting times, and nice to see people having some notion of hope for the future and some promise from technology rather than a continually dystopian view.
My PV system in Maui is grid-attached and my average monthly bill is $14 instead of the $1000+ that some of my friends pay. I need to add a few more panels to compensate for the volt, and I'll certainly be getting some kind of zooty battery system to eliminate the irritating power outages we suffer and lengthen my net consumable power time. the net metering agreement with Maui Electric is not as favorable as one might wish. If my neighbors were a bit more forward thinking we'd probably get together and do a street-level system, but it's unlikely with several rental houses on the street.
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Have you looked at flywheel storage? That is pretty wild. They pump those things up to 50,000 RPM. Vacuum enclosed, gimbal suspended. Superconducting magnetic bearings in the commercial units. Some guy in Si valley is building a home unit that is the size of a washing machine. It will store 15 KWH for $6k. Has almost unlimited duty cycles and lifetime. Fully charges in 15 minutes. Supposed to be drop-in replacement for LA batteries in PV systems. Pretty impressive technology.
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ya i have heard there will be excellent flywheel and gyro based storage techs.
both are subject to not-insurmountable, but serious, safety issues.
sumpin goes wrong with a heavy flywheel spinning at 50k, and you could see some wild shit happen in your basement!
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Anyway, interesting times, and nice to see people having some notion of hope for the future and some promise from technology rather than a continually dystopian view.
It's heartening to see the alternative energy technology get cost competitive with oil energy prices, that's what will really drive the change. I doubt oil will ever be replaced, but it would be nice to have an affordable option readily available.
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I'm thinking that developing a battery to power a house can be a huge game changer for energy mainly due to the transport of the power. Here in Southern California we are having a lot of controversy with locating solar power farms. The population is near the coast and the sunshine and cheaper land in the desert 100+ miles away. To get the solar generated power from the desert to the population centers they have to construct power lines through parks, private land, farms, and small communities. Would it be possible to charge home batteries at a desert solar farm and transport them to cities by truck or rail? Then, when your home battery drops in power, take it to a exchange facility like you do with your 5 lb BBQ propane tank.
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Yes, but its a much simpler thing to use existing distribution off hours and off demand. It can be micro scheduled if the system is smart enough. In most areas that enables distribution resources to be at least doubled but often much more. ,,
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econ of all this stuff requires that crude trade well back into the 100's.
i suspect the breakdown of opec, which resulted in crude trading to the 50's, was all spin--where the real mission was to cheapen crude, render competing (often more environmentally considerate) technologies diseconomic, and cause them to rust.
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Of course it was. Could anyone doubt that? despite no such analysis in the media I assume that is common knowledge. A way to stop frackimg other than relying on hollywood ditzes.
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I'm thinking that developing a battery to power a house can be a huge game changer for energy mainly due to the transport of the power. Here in Southern California we are having a lot of controversy with locating solar power farms.
The utility companies need to be separated into generating companies and grid companies. A lot of the economic problems arising today (like net metering controversies) are due to who subsidizes what. Everyone who is grid-attached should pay a grid usage charge. But only those who consume power will pay that. In fact that whole thing could be free-marketized - you generate your PV power and sell it when you want, when the price is to your liking. You can battery store it for later selling (or your own use), or just sell it immediately to a grid-attached power broker if you don't want to buy batteries. Presumably the power-broker has batteries and is just a middle man. All of this just requires smart metering, basically could use the Internet to facilitate who is providing, at what rate, and who is consuming and at what rate.
Money is a powerful motivator and if the utilities are forced to allow more competitive use of their grid, a whole lot of opportunities will open up and will foster more creative renewable energy projects.
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Remember enron and the california brownouts? California separated utilities into distribution and generation, the end result was an easy play for creating scarity to drive price up. In that scenario generation utilities have no requirement to serve coonsumers while the distribution utilities do. the regulators instituted price controls but they could be undone by creating emergencies. Presto, emergency. If generators have no economic ince tive to provide power at the lowest cost and no reliability requirement, then two things happen, the system gets less reliable, and less large scale generation gets built. The logical next step is central planning, and we know how well that works. Doesnt mean idisconnecting utility function isnt a good idea, but like every other government regulatory action it has unexpected consequences. The market is going to assert itself anyway. The utilities are constrianed by the economics of plant size whereas smart grids and individual power generation and storage has no such constraint. solar city is on a path to be the largest utility in the us in terms of total generation.
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I recently read an interesting analysis of the cost of oil. Lots of room for fluff in there, but there's a reasonable argument that oil costs the US between 30 and 70 Trillion per year. Our GDP last year was 17 Trillion. It's about 30 trillion if you include all economic costs including environmental damage and 70 Trillion if you include climate change costs.
Even at 30 trillion the cost of alternate energy generation and smartgrids starts to look very reasonable.
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ah but PB, but try explaining "indirect costs" like enviro damage etc to hard-driving business folk, like our esteemed chamber of commerce, or most republicans, frankly. until those costs actually cost someone or cost a business entity, they aint part of the equation..i believe they should be but the US is apparently not ready.
this said spot crude trades mid-low 40's--i am scaling in distant contracts
dont tell my daughters--they'd disown me for seeking to profit on crude prices
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I think oil will stay at 40 until the last fracking company dies. Even just the direct costs of 10 Trillion seem like they should be enough of an impetus.
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like i say distant contracts--theyve crushed carry so it's not too pricey to go way out the calendar--but you may be right that the tide has finally turned for crude, but ive made money buying down here before, so i will try again
another hypocrisy--progdem trades crude oil!
i can con myself into thinking i am doing good by contributing to higher prices and encouraging alternatives
yes, i am laughing too.
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You can lease a Nissan Leaf now for around the monthly cost of my current gas charges per month at $3/gal. That price is the lowest I've seen in years here but even at that the EV looks good for cost to own. A $30/month card here on Maui allows you to fast charge your vehicle at 9 stations on the island. Slap some racks on that baby....
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That little Volt is a great car. When the engine falls out of my Nissan (probably right on the ground in front of Larry) I'm gonna get one. the chances of Diane letting me put racks on that one will only improve if she hands it down to me and gets a new one. Fat chance. She keeps cars forever. I'd probably buy a stripped version of the Volt and have the roof sprayed with bedliner. That or do some massive cathodic protection system that will stop a pacemaker on anyone who touches the car.
Nice thing with the Volt is I don't have to worry about charging it. Usually the charge from sitting in the garage is enough for a full day of travel. If it's not the gas motor kicks in and you can't tell the difference. Six months on the island with daily travel from the boonies and Diane used eight gallons of gas. And most of that because we needed to run out the old stuff before we stored it for the summer.
Nice thing with the Leaf is that people have already done the work for it to serve as a personal smartgrid. DC feed to a wall mounted inverter to run the house. The Leaf software already does off-hours scheduled charging--most modern EVs do. Maui doesn't charge a peak usage time rate yet, but they should. Run your house off the car during peaks when you aren't using it and charge when it's cheap. Or connect to PV and go off grid whenever a car is in the garage.
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Of course you can go it on your own, the engineering is trivial. The slick bit is the control and integration software, and making it utility compatible which isnt easy unless you do some clugy isolation relay. Anyone can charge batteries from a pv system and connect a inverter to make ac. But integrated systems that can be bought in increments for about the cost of the components is pretty slick.
There isnt an entrepreneur operating at the big end who anyone is going to "trust". Execution at that level demands a mindset that simply isnt pleasant. But the guy brought spacex to some version of profitability. he's probably the only hope that an american spacecraft will carry people anytime soon, and he's currently resupplyinf the iss with falcon nines..Built tesla from weenie little company to a company buiding the safest car ever tested, with absurd performance, and a nationwide network of high speed superchargers that let you drive them across the country for free. And built the dominant solar power installation company in the us, an shortly probably the biggest manufacturer or high performance solar panels. And the gigafactory. And paypal.
I find it strange that he has so manu detractors. Certainly he's not someone you want to hang out with, but geez.
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The guy can build surfboards too....... ;D
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The detractors are super noise. I suspect funny business with the short sellers. The model for a large company in the age of Amazon is very different than most people are used to. If I were running Tesla I'd do everything I could to take it private, or at least gain control of a majority of the stock so the hedge fund guys wouldn't have me by the dick.
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PB---the short sellers are the only regulators who can keep our markets honest!! our regulators are generally installed and paid for by those they shd be regulating--what has always been a swamp is now a complete sewer
and there's a totally compelling case to short a co that's never shown a profit, has benefitted heavily from subsidy largesse (but rails against the solyndra's of the world, despite that tesla got an interest free 500mm govt money in the very same obama funding program that solyndra partook of)), that cant go on forever, with a ceo i find disingenuous
the cost of shorting is totally putative--the cost of borrowing stock renders a short posish much like owning high-delta fast-decaying options--youd better be right and quickly! and ceo's, who get paid based on stock option strikes, hate shorts for obvious reasons and engage massive PR and even private investigations of short sellers---and then we get to hear how short-sellers are not patriotic! that is often a big flag for accounting fraud ...
some think the outsized cost of shorting is unfair, if one thinks market prices shd represent equilibrium price--of course politicians oft end up aligned with ceo's--funny is the indignance of ceo's, poltiicians publicists, when companies are being shorted--all of whom crawl back in their holes when accounting fraud or some such hits the news!
re the tesla shorts, the only thing sleazy going on is that Musk has a religious following, and tweets whatever he feels like in frequent attempts to shake out the shorts, and he knows well that, in addition to their vulnerability to neg carry, his tweeting (possibly illegal--no board clearance etc), wild-assed statements about tesla can move the stock in ways that seriously pressure shorts.
i short lots of securities, and find tesla compelling as a short, but i can't go against musk and his irrational following and tendency to tweet/manipulate prices
musk? i dont like him--from what i know of him as a person, but also as a ceo---but he's done an amazing job using our system to build excellent cars and sell them to drivers---and the tesla machine is so big, whatever happens, it will be around--oh and musk has enriched himself too---so what he has done from nothing (prepaypal) is impressive---but that's a totally different issue than whether the stock price is valid or not--and this is the age of amazon, where some of the best-performing stox go for years without showing profit--but im old fashioned and think the chicken will come home to roost eventually--if revenues dont exceed expenses, with some degree of consistency, stock price gets hurt--i keep it simple that way
ive missed out on stox like amazon and tesla, but ive continually made a solid living, and consider it good trading discipline to avoid stox that cant show a profit, no matter how big the company or how well-received the product is
now long crude is neg carry--which means that if you buy futures, as i described on this thread in 2015, the longer you hold them, or the more distant-dated the contract you buy, the cheaper the price---when i bot the spot contract in the high 30's back then (as described here, real time), and sold it in the low 60's, it was a nice trade, but forward contract rolls, which imply cost of carry (storage, insurance, etc) reduced my profit by appx 50%--whatever, i was happy to take the money.
owning commodities is neg carry--shorting stox is extreme neg carry---timing critical
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Hey Eastbound, your spellchecker is broken
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actually, in american english, it's "spell checker"--but thx for the tip!
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/spellchecker?s=t
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In a new or substantially changed industry if revenues exceed expenses the company will probably get eaten by its competitors--not growing fast enough. Traditional investors are comfortable with GMC's model but they use their profit to buy back stock. In the face of the likely changes in the auto/truck industry, that seems a lot more wasteful and pointless than building a couple of gigafactories. Change happens dramatically fast these days. The GE model is toast. How did that happen? Wire/fiber-based telephone companies? WTF are they worth? The big ones can pivot and buy innovation but the smaller ones seem like their customers are dying every day--from old age. I'm looking at the behemoth that is Facebook and wondering how long it has to run. If a geezer like me is bored with it, where is growth going to come from? Probably mostly from buying the new, new--as long as no one gives a shit about antitrust anymore.
I agree about the swamp--it's just about as bad as it can get without stormtroopers and shooting dissidents. And I understand the value of short sellers to a vibrant market, but you're wise to stay away from Tesla. I think Elon gets to win this one. His arguments for why he tweeted are rational, even if it's on the fringe. I feel kind of prescient for seeing this coming, though there were plenty of flags.
From a technical standpoint it's hard to criticize Musk. The battery for the Model Three looks like it came from outer space. The tech is years ahead. The only surprise is no supercapacitors to store braking-generated electricity. Nice to have a place to stick that stuff without worrying about maximum charge rates.
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hear you re growth before profits with new companies and industries---you are quite right about that---but amazon and others have taken that story to limits never previously imaginable, yet those who bought in have done very well, way better than i have---so my old fashioned view is admittedly somewhat obsolete, and not sure i can still learn new tricks at my fair age--so i am kind of stuck with what i know and what works for me--and new shit might threaten capital, which at our fair ages matters a bit too--but that's another arguable: some might say, since there's almost zero chance ill die broke, why not take some shots for my heirs?? in which case they'll might get little, or lots.............
prolly ill just remain here in jurassic park, just another pea-brained old dinosaur, going after the easier safer prey