Your living room Tesla

[Admin]

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

[juandoe]

Mercedes too
http://www.engadget.com/2015/06/09/mercedes-benz-home-battery/

[PonoBill]

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.

[SuppaTime]

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.

[PonoBill]

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.

[Badger]

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.

[eastbound]

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.

[PonoBill]

The grid is a really cheap battery at 14 bucks a month.

[Badger]

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.

[Admin]

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. 

[SuppaTime]

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.

[PonoBill]

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.

[SuppaTime]

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.

[eastbound]

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!

[johnysmoke]

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.