I wonder what happened to Bloom Energy. Wasn't their technology suited for this kind of use?
Tesla Wins Contract to Help Power the California Grid
21–30 of 218 posts
Re: Tesla Wins Contract to Help Power the California Grid
#22Musk really does seem to be following his pattern of maximally engaging government contracts and subsidies.
(That's not necessarily a criticism, just an observation, and one others have made before.)
Re: Tesla Wins Contract to Help Power the California Grid
#23Musk really does seem to be following his pattern of maximally engaging government contracts and subsidies. (That's not necessarily a criticism, just an observation, and one others have made before.)
Suspect there aren't all that many non-government contracts of that size
Re: Tesla Wins Contract to Help Power the California Grid
#24One of the things I wish I could buy would be a Bloom Energy 2kW natural gas fuel cell and a 50kWh LiON battery pack with whole house inverter. 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 th…
50kwh seems high for your needs. Wouldn't five or ten be enough if you're constantly replenishing from the fuel cell?
Re: Tesla Wins Contract to Help Power the California Grid
#25One of the things I wish I could buy would be a Bloom Energy 2kW natural gas fuel cell and a 50kWh LiON battery pack with whole house inverter. 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 th…
50kwh seems high for your needs. Wouldn't five or ten be enough if you're constantly replenishing from the fuel cell?
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Re: Tesla Wins Contract to Help Power the California Grid
#26> 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.
Or 60,000 for 1 hr. Or 120,000 homes for half an hour.
Which goes a long way to cover wind / solar intermittency
Re: Tesla Wins Contract to Help Power the California Grid
#27OP seems confused, claims these battery packs will 'replace fossil fuels'. Under some misconception that the batteries get charged for free or something.
They do displace fossil fuel generation to some degree, since utilities use natural gas turbines to respond to rapid load shifts. If all these batteries do is buffer short-term demand spikes, then base load can be supported by e.g. nuclear power, which is very slow to spin up or down.
Re: Tesla Wins Contract to Help Power the California Grid
#28> 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.
Most load is predictable; only a little bit is spiky. You don't really need to power 2,500 homes for a full day; you need to power five or ten huge factories at temporary overcapacity for a few minutes at a time, as reserve plants spin up/down.
Consider EC2: you have reserved instances, and then you have autoscaling. If you know the total amount of work is going to predictably rise, you just buy more reserved instances (i.e. build more real power plants.) The non-reserved "elastic" VMs (like the batteries) are just to soak up your highly unpredictable excess load.
Or, think less of a power plant, and more of a capacitor: if a capacitor is way more than is strictly needed to soak up any possible load spike in a system, then we'd say that the system is overengineered, even if a later version of the same system might have enough load to blow that same capacitor. It's "massive" in terms of the predicted load spikes it's facing, not massive in terms of the long-term consumption trend of the system.
Re: Tesla Wins Contract to Help Power the California Grid
#29Musk really does seem to be following his pattern of maximally engaging government contracts and subsidies. (That's not necessarily a criticism, just an observation, and one others have made before.)
I heard Richard Branson's business projects described the same way. (One link: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/10/truth-...)
Re: Tesla Wins Contract to Help Power the California Grid
#30One of the things I wish I could buy would be a Bloom Energy 2kW natural gas fuel cell and a 50kWh LiON battery pack with whole house inverter. 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 th…
If you can get the Bloom fuel cell, you could already do this with several PowerWalls ganged together and the proper inverter. Why the fuel cell though instead of solar? Trying to sidestep the monthly electric utility charge? If so, I'd still go solar, and rely on a natural gas generator as your supply of last resort.