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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

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.

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