If we were able to create individual or community power grids; imagine how much infrastructure could just be removed. Maintained by the individuals owning it, instead of these stupid power companies and the way they work now.
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Tesla Motors Announces a New Home Battery
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Re: Tesla Motors Announces a New Home Battery
#12In addition to doing things like storing any excess solar power you might have, it could also be used to charge up at night on off-peak rates ("Economy 7" in the UK) and release during the day to reduce your peak rate electricity consumption - whether it would be financially worthwhile to do so would depend on a number of factors.
Re: Tesla Motors Announces a New Home Battery
#13Can someone explain to me why being able to build off the electrical grid is worth all this effort since you're still going to need running water, sewage, bins collecting, broadband and a number of other things?
I get water from my well, have a septic tank in my backyard and use a 3G connection (there is no landline connection available where I chose to live). Getting off the electric grid would be nice, not to mention it would be cheaper too!
Re: Tesla Motors Announces a New Home Battery
#14Can someone explain to me why being able to build off the electrical grid is worth all this effort since you're still going to need running water, sewage, bins collecting, broadband and a number of other things?
Water and sewage -- Most people in rural america and even in semi-suburban america already use their own wells and septic systems for water and sewage. Likewise with trash, many people drop their trash off at the dump/recycling center themselves.
Broadband, yep, no DIY solution there but various forms of wireless internet are available that make it quite feasible to have a completely unwired home if not disconnected.
Re: Tesla Motors Announces a New Home Battery
#15I've always been wondering why there have never been affordable local power storage solutions on the market. I'd love to have a battery like this to store excess power from solar panels. Returning power to the grid is a waste in both efficiency and money (you just make the power company richer). Unless you live in Germany (where there are laws forcing power companies to buy excess energy back against peak price), a b…
> Unless you live in Germany
Not anymore. The price you get from your power company has been consistently lowered over the last years, now you only get about half of what you pay the power company for the electricity you use.
Re: Tesla Motors Announces a New Home Battery
#16I've always been wondering why there have never been affordable local power storage solutions on the market. I'd love to have a battery like this to store excess power from solar panels. Returning power to the grid is a waste in both efficiency and money (you just make the power company richer). Unless you live in Germany (where there are laws forcing power companies to buy excess energy back against peak price), a b…
I guess the big questions are,
- How do battery charge/store/discharge efficiencies compare to transmission losses?
- How do capital investments to support returning power to the grid compare to the cost of batteries?
One thing I'm fairly confident of is that just having batteries (without solar panels) to do peak-flattening temporal "arbitrage" can't make economic sense. If it did, power companies would do it themselves and keep the profit.
Re: Tesla Motors Announces a New Home Battery
#17Can someone explain to me why being able to build off the electrical grid is worth all this effort since you're still going to need running water, sewage, bins collecting, broadband and a number of other things?
Water and sewage -- Most people in rural america and even in semi-suburban america already use their own wells and septic systems for water and sewage. Likewise with trash, many people drop their trash off at the dump/recycling center themselves. Broadband, yep, no DIY solution there but various forms of wireless internet are available that make it quite feasible to have a completely unwired home if not disconnected.
But still the question is, why would I want that? I'm all for distributed power generation, but it can still be optimized better when it's connected to a grid.
Re: Tesla Motors Announces a New Home Battery
#18Sure, Musk makes it sound sexy, but do we really need to use Lithium in a stationary application? I'd probably be happier with a battery that weighs twice as much but costs half as much. Those might not be the exact tradeoffs, but that's the general idea.
However, I don't know much about the details of battery technology, so I could be completely wrong. If traditional technologies such as lead-acid were up to the task, then someone would have already made a big business out of using them. Does that make sense?
Re: Tesla Motors Announces a New Home Battery
#19I've always been wondering why there have never been affordable local power storage solutions on the market. I'd love to have a battery like this to store excess power from solar panels. Returning power to the grid is a waste in both efficiency and money (you just make the power company richer). Unless you live in Germany (where there are laws forcing power companies to buy excess energy back against peak price), a b…
affordable
Because so far batteries have been improving in cost/Ah only very gradually? And generated grid power from fossil fuels has been historically cheap?
Re: Tesla Motors Announces a New Home Battery
#20It looks like Elon wants to ramp up production in the new Gigafactory right away, and create home batteries from the excess capacity. A Gigafactory running at full capacity should bring the cost of lithium ion batteries way down. Electric cars haven't hit the mainstream yet, so he has to do something with the excess capacity, and this looks pretty straightforward. So even if he sells these batteries at the break even…
If I recall correctly, battery production is currently a bottleneck for Tesla production and one of the major reasons why there is a waiting period of a few months after ordering. So I'm not sure to what extent he depends on home batteries to find a use for excess capacity, even if Model 3 isn't available yet.