Tesla Wins Contract to Help Power the California Grid • Hacker News Board

Re: Tesla Wins Contract to Help Power the California Grid

#141

Post by mirekrusin » Fri, Sep 16, 2016, 1:15 PM UTC

So California gets big rechargeable batteries, interesting.

Does it mean Solar City (pending acquisition by Tesla) will speed up building Gigafactory and that's how Tesla will deliver it?

And does it mean that the market was wrong with recent Solar City stock drop?

I'm assuming this is just a "pilot" and, if executed happily, can keep doubling capacity every x months, driving battery prices down, leveraging it as an further advantage over fossil alternatives.

I'm assuming I'm completely wrong because I don't see any spikes in Solar City stock prices?

ps. Bit off-topic but when opening this article I've decided to disable adblock for bloomberg, just because they made bucklescript :P

Re: Tesla Wins Contract to Help Power the California Grid

#142

Post by wyldfire » Fri, Sep 16, 2016, 1:21 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #118

TeMPOraL wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> And that need standards for things like communication protocols. All that is needed is a way to get the spot price of electricity from the internet, similar to how I can get the current temperature in Anchorage. Devices don't need to talk to the power grid.

Moving electricity is "hard" so effectively there are many marketplaces in which the spot price is different. A natural design that's been considered/proposed is to get that info directly from the power utility itself.

Re: Tesla Wins Contract to Help Power the California Grid

#143

Post by icc97 » Fri, Sep 16, 2016, 1:28 PM UTC

adventured wrote: post #126

oneplane wrote: post #106

I 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?

Famously the US had an extraordinary power grid for many decades. Among the most reliable of any nation. Blackouts used to be very rare in the US, now they're still rare but not nearly so. Since the 1980s there has been a significant under-investment in the grid. Since the 1970s there has been a significant under-investment in production. The outcome to that is what you see now. Good article on the rising blackout ph…

Musk was commenting on this point in his YC interview yesterday. There can be no assumption that technology will always get better. If people aren't focussed on improving it then the current level of the technology will fall.

Re: Tesla Wins Contract to Help Power the California Grid

#144

Post by beachstartup » Fri, Sep 16, 2016, 1:44 PM UTC

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #64

toomuchtodo wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sure peakers are expensive, but they are profitable, otherwise no-one would build and run them. Supply and demand etc. I'm not sure what you mean by Tesla cannibalizing the peakers? Do they already own traditional peaker plants? I agree revenue is revenue, I'm just saying this is perhaps unlikely to provide more revenue from sales outside CA.

> Sure peakers are expensive, but they are profitable, otherwise no-one would build and run them.

i don't know anything about power, but this is faulty business logic. we do plenty of stuff that isn't profitable, but rather is value-add to either win or retain business.

Re: Tesla Wins Contract to Help Power the California Grid

#145

Post by jgalt212 » Fri, Sep 16, 2016, 1:47 PM UTC

More corporate welfare for the Corporate Welfare Queen.

Re: Tesla Wins Contract to Help Power the California Grid

#146

Post by mikeash » Fri, Sep 16, 2016, 1:58 PM UTC

paulyg wrote: post #125

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #56

Earlier 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…

Why are people comparing and debating "batteries vs combustion turbines"? Batteries only store energy and you still need to generate it somewhere. Probably from a CCGT plant. And it's not risk aversion. Its buried subtly in the article but part of SoCal's gas infrastructure is shut down because of the leak. They literally can't provide enough gas to generate enough electricity for peak demand. So they will generate o…

People are comparing them because they serve the same purpose here.

Base and peak loads on the grid can be wildly different. Without storage, if you want to avoid brownouts or blackouts, your generating capacity needs to match the peak load, even though you might only hit peak load a few times per year. The traditional way to handle this is to have power plants that can be spun up rapidly but sit idle 99% of the time. Because they're idle most of the time, the electricity they produce is extremely expensive.

Storage (including batteries, but also many other technologies) can substitute for these plants. You fill the storage when demand is low, then drain it when demand is high. Yes, the energy still needs to be generated somewhere, but you can generate it using existing plants during periods of low demand. If this is cheaper than maintaining peaking plants that mostly sit idle, it's a win.

Re: Tesla Wins Contract to Help Power the California Grid

#147

Post by mikeash » Fri, Sep 16, 2016, 1:59 PM UTC

azernik wrote: post #98

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought about this some more, and I realised, Tesla and other EV manufacturers better be praying that this is not a financially viable replacement for gas turbine peakers in general. Otherwise there will be a big jump in demand for batteries, as power companies will be looking for hundreds of GWh of battery capacity. If they make a yearly profit for the power company that's significant enough to warrant the CAPEX o…

Tesla seems to be making the opposite gamble - that the grid-attached storage market will give the large-battery market economies of scale and help the EV market (and the other way around). They're building a very-large-scale battery factory, and probably cannot utilize it fully just on building their own cars.

Even if massive demand for batteries driven by grid storage makes EVs uneconomical, Tesla is setting themselves up to build and sell the batteries, so they win either way. (Well, aside from their goal of having the entire planet transition to EVs. They win financially.)

Re: Tesla Wins Contract to Help Power the California Grid

#148

Post by mikeash » Fri, Sep 16, 2016, 2:09 PM UTC

forgetsusername wrote: post #127

toomuchtodo wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bookmarked to come back to show my math in the morning. The gist is they can absorb power at a cost that is pretty close to free (when there is excess power flowing through the grid) versus burning a fuel whose price is volatile, a steep declining cost curve for batteries, and aggressive federal government tax incentives.

> aggressive federal government tax incentives. I'm not sure that should be included in the cost analysis, otherwise anything can be subsidized to the point of being "cheaper".

That's entirely fair, but then we should also include the full costs of peak power, including all the externalities due to emissions and such that the utilities don't currently have to pay for.

Re: Tesla Wins Contract to Help Power the California Grid

#149

Post by mikeash » Fri, Sep 16, 2016, 2:11 PM UTC

1024core wrote: post #6

> 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.

A more useful perspective would be how much of the gap between peak generating capacity and peak load it covers. It's not intended to run SoCal for a day. Unfortunately, the "2,500 homes for a full day" statistic is really misleading, since it seems to imply that's what it would actually do.

Re: Tesla Wins Contract to Help Power the California Grid

#150

Post by mikeash » Fri, Sep 16, 2016, 2:18 PM UTC

h4nkoslo wrote: post #22

Musk 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.)

Is this really unusual? I've seen that said before, but I'd expect everyone to take maximum advantage of such things, aside from a very few extremely principled people.