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Why doesn't Panasonic just cut out the middleman here? Are they afraid of making their own deals in america?
They've also done some larger grid storage projects in other countries, and with partners other than Tesla.
Why do you all rely on oil? Just use batteries... \s I think it's important to note that they are not "replacing fossil-fuel electricity generation with lithium-ion batteries". They are putting fossil-fuel supplied electricity into batteries to use at a later date.
> 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?
I guess it's maybe rational in a self-interested way--no longer do we live in a world of many competing tribes advancing ourselves for our own survival among competition for scarce resources. We live in an increasingly globalized world with a class structure and an overabundance of resources. Or, in other words, "the scarcity problem," as Keynes put it, has pretty much already been solved--at least in terms of survival we have enough resources to feed, cloth, provide shelter and basic healthcare to every person on the planet, but we don't. The answers to that are some of the same reasons.
> 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.
Batteries aren't great for large amounts of power for long periods of time (yet). What they are good at is smoothing out the supply curve from potentially intermittent suppliers like solar and wind, and that is one of the things that causes price spikes.
The nice thing about the Bloom fuel cells is very efficient conversion of natural gas to electricity, the weakness is that it's response time is long (an hour or more to change its output by 50%). The nice thing about LiOn battery packs like the ones in Tesla cars are that they respond instantly to various power demands, can deliver massive amounts of power in a short period of time, and recharge again and again.
This combination would let me supply all of my house power under all circumstances using nothing but natural gas. That would take my house completely off the grid infrastructure for PG&E (although I would still be a gas customer).
C'mon Elon, make it possible! :-)
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 recyc…
Why doesn't Panasonic just cut out the middleman here? Are they afraid of making their own deals in america?
'Bout 50% of the human race is middlemen, and they don't take kindly to being eliminated.
OP seems confused, claims these battery packs will 'replace fossil fuels'. Under some misconception that the batteries get charged for free or something.