Tesla Wins Contract to Help Power the California Grid

I think its important to note, for those who complain Tesla can't compete against pumped storage or other utility scale storage methods, that Tesla is able to have this deployed in 3 months (this is partly because Tesla can just drop racks of batteries on site and be up and running, and partly because of the regulatory environment after the Aliso Canyon natural gas storage complex leak fiasco).

Edit: This will replace the need for peaker plants first (generators of last resort, very expensive, only run a handful of hours a year), and as the cost drops, will slowly push out base load coal and natural gas (by increasing the capacity factor of solar and wind). "Batteries are the new peaker plants", as it were. [1] [2] [3]

This is what it looks like when batteries are used to offset fossil fuel generators (instead of curtailing excess wind and solar, it'll be soaked up by utility batteries such as these). Frequently, depending on renewables output, the spot of price of power can go negative. This means someone gets paid to use that power. This is where utility scale battery storage shines, as its happy to gobble up that power, being paid to do so, and can later be paid to release that power when demand is high.

Edit 2: If Tesla can book this revenue in Q3, combined with their vehicle sales push, they're going to be GAAP profitable for the quarter, which will allow them to close the Solar City acquisition. Well played.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaking_power_plant

[2] http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/dueling-charts-o...

[3] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-22/batteries-...

I find it weird how technological process sometimes plays out. We have been complaining for decades about how green energy is unreliable and that we need innovative storage solutions. And now batteries somehow seem to be good enough and we are like: "Hey, why don't we put a bunch of batteries in a container?" Proving ones again that economy trumps technology.

The next really big thing after green energy will be recycling. Not that it matters to our generation.

> Tesla's contribution is enough to power about 2,500 homes for a full day

This is < 0.1% of the total number of homes in SoCal, just to put it in perspective.

Why doesn't Panasonic just cut out the middleman here? Are they afraid of making their own deals in america?

The biggest need for storage is to offset the intermittency of solar and wind, and to help shift peak solar generation (typically 12-2pm) to match peak demand (typically 4-8pm). Reliable and affordable storage is a prerequisite to wide scale solar and wind generation.

http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/californias-duck...