No doubt that Tesla is a great company although it face many serious problems right now.
Tesla represents tomorrow and future.
Tesla Wins Contract to Help Power the California Grid
101–110 of 218 posts
Re: Tesla Wins Contract to Help Power the California Grid
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, I disagree. A/C is very power hungry, and can be adjusted to cool the house lower than normal during cheap power times and let it go a bit higher during expensive power times. It can also "pre-cool" when power is cheaper. The same goes for an electric water heater. The charger for your Tesla can also adjust when it charges based on power prices. The dishwasher/washer/dryer can be set to come on at night when the…
A/C can also freeze water to shift the load very cheaply.
That's a fine idea. I didn't think of that. But I'm sure there's a LOT of low hanging fruit like this that would greatly mitigate the need for the power companies to store power.
Re: Tesla Wins Contract to Help Power the California Grid
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the future is predictable to you, use that ability to make trillions of dollars and then use the resulting power to impact the future. Whining about it on the internet just makes you seem dismissive.
I predict that solar will be used in the future. How do I make trillions with that wisdom? You can only make money with predictions you are right on but others are not. > Whining about it on the internet just makes you seem dismissive. That was not my intention at all. It was more the child in me that wanted to see flying cars and jetpacks instead of massive adoption of stuff, which has been here for 150 years. I sti…
You're working on flying cars and jetpacks? That's awesome, yo!
Re: Tesla Wins Contract to Help Power the California Grid
#104Why 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.
Chicken meet Egg, we have to do both things does it matter in what order it is done. Oil can be stored in a tank, renewables really are playing catch up in terms of storage. This is a great step forward for getting off oil.
Exactly.
Thermal power stations (oil, coal, gas, nuclear) cannot start up or shutdown quickly so they have to run enough to meet peak demand 24/7. Lots of energy is wasted in the small hours.
Re: Tesla Wins Contract to Help Power the California Grid
#105One 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…
Why do you want to get off the electrical grid?
Re: Tesla Wins Contract to Help Power the California Grid
#106I don't understand why there are so many power grid issues in the USA. It's not that hard to generate power and make it go from A to B, yet for some reason (political? commercial? geological?) there seem to be decades of general issues in generating enough to meet demand. Does someone know what the actual issue is?
Re: Tesla Wins Contract to Help Power the California Grid
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
So this is only financially viable because of Californian risk aversion after last years gas leak. If you have a reliable natural gas distribution network, like the rest of the world, batteries don't make any financial sense versus gas power plants. I mean, this entire plant can supply 20 MW and will cost somewhere around $20 million. For that price you can buy two General Electric LM2500 gas turbine generators that…
I'd encourage you to spend 15 minutes researching what the costs are of running a peaker plant. There's a reason they're the most expensive generation method per MWh (peakers run for under 100 hours per year). Revenue is revenue. If Tesla is able to cannibalize the peakers to contribute towards its enormous capital expenditures, and continue to reduce costs with the Gigafactory, it only makes utility battery storage…
>There is no scenario where the cost curve per kWh of battery storage goes up.
Lithium shortage.
Re: Tesla Wins Contract to Help Power the California Grid
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Batteries are now cheaper than peakers everywhere, not just CA. That's what I'm saying. Tesla's PowerPack installs (battery storage receives federal incentives, nat gas does not) will replace peakers, leaving them as stranded assets (the cannibalization I refer to). Edit: unepipe: Tesla packs perform the exact same role as a peaker plant: energy on demand. They are distributed, dispatchable loads and generators, avai…
As you can see in the graphs I linked in upstream comment, in the UK alone, CCGT power plants have a capacity of 20 GW. That's 1000x this battery plant; meaning a $20 billion capital investment. And I don't see any way that Tesla (or anyone else) has the manufacturing capability to deliver that. Remember this is just for the UK, so for the US and Europe in total you're talking at least 10 000 plants like this.
Not all gas generators are peaker plants. Gas is displacing coal for what is often termed "baseload" (though I don't like the framing implied by the term).
The batteries will nibble away at the most expensive peaks first, the plants that run for only very short periods per year.
Meanwhile solar and wind will roll out to displace fossil fuel usage as well. Ideally they'll meet in the middle at some point, but it appears financially viable for this process to start now, and await further drops in pricing to expand later.
Re: Tesla Wins Contract to Help Power the California Grid
#109What a bullshit. I'd call this Russian way of doing business, where you benefit from unhealthy connections with state. 2500 houses? Go find out how many houses are there in California.
Re: Tesla Wins Contract to Help Power the California Grid
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, I disagree. A/C is very power hungry, and can be adjusted to cool the house lower than normal during cheap power times and let it go a bit higher during expensive power times. It can also "pre-cool" when power is cheaper. The same goes for an electric water heater. The charger for your Tesla can also adjust when it charges based on power prices. The dishwasher/washer/dryer can be set to come on at night when the…
This has been the promise of "smart-grid" attached devices; the implementation hasn't caught up with the dream yet, but in theory, yeah, there are a lot of very elastic loads that can be used to smooth out the demand curve, or to match a jittery supply curve.
It ain't gonna work if you need people watching the electricity prices and deciding what to do. It need to be devices talking directly to the power grid. And that need standards for things like communication protocols. Does anyone here know how are those coming along?