Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tesla Energy

teslamotors.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 590 posts

Re: Tesla Energy

#281

Post by butwhy »

nkohari wrote: post #279
watty wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how it's immediately beneficial for just about everyone. I currently have a flat rate for kWh and no solar panel... and moving soon. It's not worth the $. In 6 months I'll be renting for a year, still not beneficial. Perhaps in a couple years I can purchase solar, a battery, and an energy system that can automate some demand shedding but we're talking about 1%ers here. In fact, I'd say it's only immediate…

A better way of looking at it is that it's immediately beneficial to anyone who owns real estate.

Or anyone who lives on Earth with a vested interest in limiting carbon emissions.

Re: Tesla Energy

#282

Post by spacefight »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #161
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People say that, but from what I've heard there is plenty of lithium in the world to increase use 20% every year for 30 years before we need to get more creative in how we mine it. That's a huge total increase and means that electric cars totally are scalable. Do you have information supporting the idea that electric cars aren't scalable? My understanding is that they definitely are scalable.

Charging is where the scaling problems come in. If everybody in your neighborhood plugs in their Tesla at their home at night and/or at their office during the day, it will likely cause brownouts and blackouts in areas with grid service that's already marginal for current demand. Hence Musks's interest in load-shifting technology.

Solar power, local wind turbines, , etc. We need to get off the grid and start working on isolated energy systems.

Re: Tesla Energy

#283

Post by kragen »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #149
milesf wrote: post #33

Today is a big deal. Open sourcing the patents to build fully solar-powered electrical grids around the will be a paradigm shift in the power structures of the world. I expect from today onward there will be a full-scale attack from those who stand to lose because of the reduced dependency on oil. First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.

Most of the power in the US comes from coal. Solar is 0.4%: http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=427&t=3 What do you do with the batteries and the toxic materials inside when you're done with them (and how long do they last)? What do you do with all the toxic materials produced during mining, refining, and production of batteries and materials? How do you deal with these same issues as they affect solar panels, w…

Are you satirizing some hypothetical ignorant anti-solar activism movement I've never heard of?

Re: Tesla Energy

#284

Post by eli »

ZoFreX wrote: post #261

This is a three-pronged stroke of genius: 1) Immediate benefits to just about anyone. If you have your own solar panels, you need this (or something like it). Even if you don't, you can benefit by drawing more power during cheaper off-peak times. 2) If lots of people get in on this, we'll have the storage capacity we need on the grid to be more dependent on renewable energy. Lack of storage capacity is one of the big…

> power during cheaper off-peak times

Pretty sure my rate is the same all the time. I wonder what percentage of electricity customers have variable rate pricing.

Re: Tesla Energy

#285

Post by roel_v »

TheLoneWolfling wrote: post #263
roel_v wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LED's are available in various color temperatures, including 2700K (commonly referred to as 'warm white' which is basically the temperature of incandescent). It's true that the dollar-bin Chinese LED's have all sorts of bad characteristics that used to be associated with all things LED - pale color, bad spread, bad (or no) dimming capabilities, etc. It's 2015 though - take a 20$ Philips Master LED for example (I deci…

Color temperature is nowhere near everything. Or rather, it would be, were LEDs actually anywhere near a blackbody in terms of radiation output over the visible spectrum. But they aren't. Nowhere near.

There is no every-day use case where the difference in light perception from an incandescent bulb is different, or even distinguishable without measurement, from an LED bulb. Feel free to try it yourself in a light studio, or otherwise, please cite any studies with modern lamps that conclude that the 'light quality' (by whatever metric) of an incandescent bulb is higher (that is, 'higher' as in 'makes a material difference for normal use cases', not 'in the lab using our spectrometer we measured a difference').

As always, there are people (analogous to 'vinyl produce a richer sound' idiots) who have 'opinions' on light quality, but well, we all know what they say about 'opinions'. In 2015, it's plain nonsense to take 'light quality' as a reason not to use LED light for domestic purposes, full stop.

Re: Tesla Energy

#286

Post by willholloway »

Animats wrote: post #195

The wall mount surprised me, but 10KWh at the same density as the Model S battery should be only 155lb. That's not too bad, although you need a solid connection to the building structure. Having it above floor level is a good thing, since it won't be shorted out by minor flooding. If you get a new solar installation, installing one of these seems an obvious win. The solar installation already includes the inverters a…

As I've learned more about heat pumps I've been wondering why we all use air-source cooling for central A/C. We are cooling our condensers with hot summer time air when the temperature is much lower just four feet under the yard.

The energy requirements would drop way down by cooling the condenser with a water ground loop.

Ground loops are seen as expensive for installation, but I don't understand why. It's just plastic tubing buried in the yard. I've been wondering if a hole digging robot could lower the price. The carbon and money savings would be huge if we could bring down the cost of ground loop installation.

Re: Tesla Energy

#287

Post by msandford »

roel_v wrote: post #200
kondro wrote: post #32

Doesn't include inverter or installer markup and can only provide 2kW output. It will get expensive by the time you actually have all the bits you need inside your house. How is this better than deep-cycle batteries (with 20+ year lives) again? Why does it need to be slimline?

"and can only provide 2kW output." only 2kW? 2kW is enough to power any residential, single-family house for 95-98% of the time; you only need (a little bit) more than that at very short (few minutes) peak intervals - when heating up an oven, or some cycles of doing laundry. A second unit would provide that headroom, and otherwise (when the extra $5k for a second unit is prohibitive) you could still draw from the gri…

> only 2kW? 2kW is enough to power any residential, single-family house for 95-98% of the time

You obviously don't live where it's hot. I live in Houston, TX and while I rarely run the A/C right now, in another month it's going to run on average 15 minutes per hour, every hour, for 3-4 months straight. Highs in the low 90s to high 100s and lows in the 80s (F).

I have 2.5 tons of A/C which is pretty moderate. The condenser draws something like 3kW with an 8kW surge and the furnace fan is another 500 watts. I live in a fairly modest house compared to a lot of people, I'm sure there are places that 5 tons is more common.

In California where humidity isn't really a problem and it tends to cool off more at night and there's nearly always great solar, this seems like a great solution. But don't forget that not everywhere in the world is the target market. There are some places that are very different in terms of electrical consumption.

Re: Tesla Energy

#288

Post by __xtrimsky »

eli wrote: post #284
ZoFreX wrote: post #261

This is a three-pronged stroke of genius: 1) Immediate benefits to just about anyone. If you have your own solar panels, you need this (or something like it). Even if you don't, you can benefit by drawing more power during cheaper off-peak times. 2) If lots of people get in on this, we'll have the storage capacity we need on the grid to be more dependent on renewable energy. Lack of storage capacity is one of the big…

> power during cheaper off-peak times Pretty sure my rate is the same all the time. I wonder what percentage of electricity customers have variable rate pricing.

Yea my rate is the same too. I've lived in many places, and only in Canada I had variable rate.

Re: Tesla Energy

#289

Post by SmellyGeekBoy »

jacobolus wrote: post #211
roel_v wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"and can only provide 2kW output." only 2kW? 2kW is enough to power any residential, single-family house for 95-98% of the time; you only need (a little bit) more than that at very short (few minutes) peak intervals - when heating up an oven, or some cycles of doing laundry. A second unit would provide that headroom, and otherwise (when the extra $5k for a second unit is prohibitive) you could still draw from the gri…

I use incandescent lights. They produce a much more pleasant spectrum than “white” CFLs or LEDs.

I thought so too until I discovered the Philips Corepro bulbs. I replaced every single bulb in my house with them last year. They're a massive improvement on the CFLs we had before. The only thing that took some getting used to was the lack of light shining upwards - ie illuminating the ceilings.

(I know this reads like a sales pitch but I am genuinely just a fan)

Re: Tesla Energy

#290

Post by joezydeco »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #88
vanadium wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Playing the margins in my home would probably save $25/mo against a $100/mo charge, I'm spitballing. Our local utility here in Chicago, ComEd, is starting to roll out to the population what flux in energy usage actually means on a granular basis (hourly, daily, monthly, seasonally) while offering incentives to change their consumption patterns.

I too have ComED (Schaumburg). From midnight to 5am daily, I can get power for 1 cent/kwh. If I were to shift all of my consumption to that time period, its effectively free.

I've been on ComEd RRTP for 6 years now and I've been wanting a nicer way to shift load or arbitrage price drops.

The Telsa device, as others have mentioned, seems like a rebranded solar storage device. I suppose the intelligence would be in the inverter/grid cutout mechanism anyway.

This system would run my home for about 8 hours in the winter and 4 in the summer before emptying, so I would need a lot more smarts in the box to try and anticipate price spikes without running out.

Post reply on HN