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Tesla CTO: Batteries and Solar Will Lead to Cheap Electricity Within 10 Years

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Re: Tesla CTO: Batteries and Solar Will Lead to Cheap Electricity Within 10 Years

#31

Post by ju-st »

NeutronBoy wrote: post #16
Consultant32452 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I anxiously await the plucky zoning committee that decides to make it a zoning requirement that all new roofs must be made of solar panels.

In most of Australia, while on new properties you don't have the include solar panels specifically, you do have do meet a particular energy rating. The easy ways of doing this are heaps of insulation, solar panels, and solar hot water. Also, water tanks and water-saving shower heads are mandatory.

It's the same in Germany. Almost every new home has solar panels on the roof. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energieeinsparverordnung

Re: Tesla CTO: Batteries and Solar Will Lead to Cheap Electricity Within 10 Years

#32

Post by LoSboccacc »

sitkack wrote: post #5
Consultant32452 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I anxiously await the plucky zoning committee that decides to make it a zoning requirement that all new roofs must be made of solar panels.

If I were mayor, I would require new construction to have 1kw of grid intertied solar per unit.

and then most city will burn down because once a unit is on fire, there is no reliable way (yet!) to have firefighter safely turn panels down to avoid electrocution. especially damaged solar cells that can produce energy while being shorted as contacts melt

distributed solar is nice and dandy but it does have some share of problems to solve before becoming viable.

a solar concentrator in the desert, on the other hand...

Re: Tesla CTO: Batteries and Solar Will Lead to Cheap Electricity Within 10 Years

#33

Post by ZeroGravitas »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #11

Its an interesting proposition, although I'm not sure that you can really make that leap with just solar, wind, and batteries. There is a lot of base load to make up for. I could see however individual houses become independent of the grid. And that will have tremendous benefits when things like storms hit, no longer knocking out power to residents, simply factories and office buildings and street lights. Presumably…

It's just about do-able, people have done studies on total de-carbonisation that would involve shifting all cars to electric or bio-based fuels for example, not just the electricity generation side of things. The big hold up is finding political will to stop subsidizing fossil fuels and let the new tech compete on a free market basis (not the free- but lets pretend externalities don't exist market), but the ball has started rolling now so things should be interesting over the next decade as public opinion and lobbyist dollars find themselves shifting more to one side.

Re: Tesla CTO: Batteries and Solar Will Lead to Cheap Electricity Within 10 Years

#34

Post by hduwhbs »

adventured wrote: post #19
ohsnap wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counting new rigs/new investment is much better metric, and rig counts have responded to pricing pressure by stopping drilling. Counting current crude is just measuring what happened before the Saudis dropped the prices. Most fracking companies are pretty bloated right now and they have plenty of things they can do to improve returns w/o new tech. But lower gas prices means higher risk - thus less investment.

It's not a better metric. The only metric that matters, is output. The US is producing one million more barrels per day than a year ago. The only thing the reduction in rigs will cause, is slowing down growth. The Saudis weren't the primary cause of the price drop anyway. The US dollar going on its greatest run in decades is what broke the price of oil. The strong dollar also caused the low price of oil in the late 1…

New sites have high upfront capital costs, so even if they are losing money on each barrel they are losing less money than if they just stopped. Therefore no, output isn't the only thing that matters.

Re: Tesla CTO: Batteries and Solar Will Lead to Cheap Electricity Within 10 Years

#35

Post by aidenn0 »

prostoalex wrote: post #15
Consultant32452 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I anxiously await the plucky zoning committee that decides to make it a zoning requirement that all new roofs must be made of solar panels.

If you're a house owner in California, what economic motivation is there to not do it?

I'm a home owner in California, and have no south-facing roof, plus a shady lot.

Re: Tesla CTO: Batteries and Solar Will Lead to Cheap Electricity Within 10 Years

#36

Post by IkmoIkmo »

snowwrestler wrote: post #2

> Straubel ended his talk with a slide that featured a quote from Sheikh Yamani, a former Saudi oil minister: "The stone age came to an end not for lack of stones. And the oil age will come to an end not for lack of oil." I remember when calling long distance was a big deal. It cost real money, and multiple big companies specialized in it and competed fiercely. Today for Internet connected folks, long distance phone…

Great points, but about energy storage in the home, mentioning tablets and smartphones, those are insanely negligible. An iPhone has about a 6 watthour battery. A large TV uses about 240 watts, so hooking up your iPhone to just your TV gets you about 90 seconds of power. A typical 1000+ watt coffee maker or microwave or toaster won't even be able to make you coffee or hot water or toast because the iPhone's battery lasts about 20 seconds.

That's why the whole Tesla car battery and home battery is interesting, because the latest Teslas have about 80000 watt hour batteries, or the equivalent of having 13 thousand iPhone batteries in your garage, and the powerwall batteries they sell each have the capacity of about 1500 iPhones. If everyone had such an electric car and battery pack, intermittent sustainable energy would make a lot more sense, but phones and tablets aren't going to play any role in energy storage. Laptops with 100 wh+ batteries could play a tiny tiny role, but that market is all going fanless on ever more powerful and efficient mobile chips, so I don't see that happening either.

Re: Tesla CTO: Batteries and Solar Will Lead to Cheap Electricity Within 10 Years

#37

Post by jerf »

crdoconnor wrote: post #21
diafygi wrote: post #17

I have a startup in solar software, and the big thing that I don't think people here realize is that 64% of the installed cost of solar in the U.S. is soft costs (i.e. not hardware)[1]. The industry is incredibly inefficient when it comes to customer acquisition, marketing, distribution, project development, permitting, monitoring, analytics. etc. There's a huge effort by the DOE[2] and the industry itself[3] to atta…

>their biggest pain points right now are completely solvable with software. What pain points are those?

"customer acquisition, marketing, distribution, project development, permitting, monitoring, analytics. etc."

(I'm not vouching for this, I have no personal experience.)

Re: Tesla CTO: Batteries and Solar Will Lead to Cheap Electricity Within 10 Years

#38

Post by jerf »

dlitz wrote: post #24

Does anyone know what's the latest news about long-distance superconducting cables?

Still no, still working on it. Progress is being made but I'd still characterize it as "don't hold your breath, but we'll probably get it someday".

Re: Tesla CTO: Batteries and Solar Will Lead to Cheap Electricity Within 10 Years

#39

Post by IkmoIkmo »

diafygi wrote: post #17

I have a startup in solar software, and the big thing that I don't think people here realize is that 64% of the installed cost of solar in the U.S. is soft costs (i.e. not hardware)[1]. The industry is incredibly inefficient when it comes to customer acquisition, marketing, distribution, project development, permitting, monitoring, analytics. etc. There's a huge effort by the DOE[2] and the industry itself[3] to atta…

How does it differ from other countries? I've heard Germany's installation costs per watt are about 60% of the US rate, even though they access mostly the same market to procure panels, and that their customer aquisition, marketing costs etc are much lower. I guess some of it has to do with a national feed in tariff that generates a ton of easy inbound leads, but I'd love to hear the subtleties. (what is your startup btw)

Re: Tesla CTO: Batteries and Solar Will Lead to Cheap Electricity Within 10 Years

#40

Post by jerf »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #11

Its an interesting proposition, although I'm not sure that you can really make that leap with just solar, wind, and batteries. There is a lot of base load to make up for. I could see however individual houses become independent of the grid. And that will have tremendous benefits when things like storms hit, no longer knocking out power to residents, simply factories and office buildings and street lights. Presumably…

We are in desperate, desperate need of more decentralization in our core infrastructures, to the point that this libertarian could see his way clear to agreeing not to grouse about subsidies for technology that's already cost-effective if it will accomplish more decentralization. As nifty as the "big solar plants" are in some ways, installing 10,000 acres of solar in the middle of the desert isn't really "decentralization".

(I was much grumpier about subsidizing things that couldn't stand on their own economically as there's a lot more economic waste and false investments that occur, but if solar can already stand on its own two feet and the we collectively tip some money into the kitty to get it out there faster the waste is far less, and the societal benefit far greater.)

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