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Tesla Motors Announces a New Home Battery

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Re: Tesla Motors Announces a New Home Battery

#141

Post by Shivetya »

lsaferite wrote: post #63
jacquesm wrote: post #59

It's very hard to beat lead-acid on: - $/Wh - number of cycles - ability to be recycled at eol - loss of capacity over the lifetime of the battery (or beyond!) - safety It is easy to beat on - power density - weight - maintenance - mechanical stability (especially for fluid based cells) - installation cost (lead/acid requires a sealed enclosure venting to the outside to get rid of free oxygen and hydrogen) The same b…

I'd imagine in this case they are looking at the economy of scale they'll be able to gain when producing these out of the gigafactory. I'd be interested to see the $/Wh cost difference once it comes fully online.

perhaps this is where batteries that miss the tolerances for car usage will end up, like how chip manufacturers handle it

Re: Tesla Motors Announces a New Home Battery

#142

Post by CodeCube »

freehunter wrote: post #138
lsaferite wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hahaha. I love how you end this with another one I had to look up.

Every time I see SMH (shaking my head) or MFW/MRW (my face/reaction when) or a handful of others, it makes me feel really old. If people didn't say it during a Quake match, it's not in my vocabulary. Darn kids these days.

qq

:P

Re: Tesla Motors Announces a New Home Battery

#143

Post by Shivetya »

I disagree that the long term storage stationary storage is extraordinary, at least from the individual home standpoint, it does have great utility application (for windfarms/hydro/etc) and likely would help some businesses offset day time surcharges by charging storage at night.

Still for home use, I would prefer a large lithium pack to be outside my home.

Re: Tesla Motors Announces a New Home Battery

#144

Post by balabaster »

davegardner wrote: post #99
headShrinker wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also many municipalities don't allow battery 'grid-tie' with the option of 'off the grid' living. For example, Connecticut has laws which don't allow houses to have batteries that would allow a house to be self sustaining and have a connection to the grid. This is because if you have batteries which cause a back flow during a power outage to the power station, an electrical worker could get shocked down the road. The…

The same issue exists with grid connected solar panels. My solar panels are designed to stop working whenever there is a power outage. This is a legally mandated requirement here and is very annoying when it happens on a beautiful sunny day. A solar panel installer told me that if I add a battery backup to my installation, then at least it'll still charge the batteries during a power outage.

This is the dumbest mandate I have ever heard of. Part of the installation of such power systems should have a mandate that in order for an off-grid power system to be connected to your box, your breaker to the grid must be off before you can enable your off-grid system. Why isn't there a mandate for this?

It seems like the mandate was written entirely to protect the power company's profits hiding behind a thin veil of trying to protect their technicians.

If the electrical utilities cared at all about the customer they'd mandate something that allows customers to do what they want, safely.

What good is charging batteries during the power outage when you can't use them during a power outage? You can't have power connected during the power outage for fear of "electrocuting the technicians" - so what's the point in spending all this money on solar panels if the only time you can use them is while the grid is up... and you have cheap (comparatively) grid fed electricity? What's the purpose in having batteries if not to use them when the grid is down?

Re: Tesla Motors Announces a New Home Battery

#145

Post by bengali3 »

ThomPete wrote: post #82
slfnflctd wrote: post #77

Yawn. I've been following this concept, and a wide array of very talented scientists working on it, for years now. Any of the below projects, should they ever see the light of day (you'd think out of this many, at least one will make it eventually), stands a good chance of being quite superior for this application in just about every way: http://www.eosenergystorage.com/technology-and-products/ http://www.ambri.com/t…

Very rarely the best solution wins.

Agreed. Also, which definition of 'win' is agreed upon here. Win by efficiency? Win by market cap?

Edit: hint, look out for the very talented marketers

Re: Tesla Motors Announces a New Home Battery

#146

Post by Spooky23 »

Already__Taken wrote: post #4

Can 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?

Think of it as a CDN for energy.

The grid will become less reliable over time as utilization increases, and in many cases we have fundamental limitations that make broad-scale robustness difficult to implement.

So fake it out. If I have a reliable local power source, I can easily take short outages without user impact.

Re: Tesla Motors Announces a New Home Battery

#147

Post by sah88 »

IgorPartola wrote: post #114
jacquesm wrote: post #59

It's very hard to beat lead-acid on: - $/Wh - number of cycles - ability to be recycled at eol - loss of capacity over the lifetime of the battery (or beyond!) - safety It is easy to beat on - power density - weight - maintenance - mechanical stability (especially for fluid based cells) - installation cost (lead/acid requires a sealed enclosure venting to the outside to get rid of free oxygen and hydrogen) The same b…

Energy density is a big one. To store 5 kW * 24 hours (barely enough to power my house's essentials), I would need 286 of these ( http://www.amazon.com/VMAX857-Battery-Performance-minnkota-t... ). They are not small. Also, that would cost me nearly $32,000 in just batteries. My ideal setup for this would be something like 20 kW * 7 days. That would fill my basement pretty easily.

~30kwh is the national average for daily use. 120 is crazy high unless your blasting an AC or heat all day. At 12 cents a kilowatt hour that's a $438 monthly bill.

Even 30 is pretty damn high. For someone living off grid with a purpose built/renovated structure ~5kwh a day gives you quite a lot to work with.

Re: Tesla Motors Announces a New Home Battery

#148

Post by innguest »

balabaster wrote: post #144
davegardner wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same issue exists with grid connected solar panels. My solar panels are designed to stop working whenever there is a power outage. This is a legally mandated requirement here and is very annoying when it happens on a beautiful sunny day. A solar panel installer told me that if I add a battery backup to my installation, then at least it'll still charge the batteries during a power outage.

This is the dumbest mandate I have ever heard of. Part of the installation of such power systems should have a mandate that in order for an off-grid power system to be connected to your box, your breaker to the grid must be off before you can enable your off-grid system. Why isn't there a mandate for this? It seems like the mandate was written entirely to protect the power company's profits hiding behind a thin veil…

It's BS as you rightfully detected but that doesn't stop the State cheerleaders above from giving us 1001 reasons why this is bad and we must protect the lives of electrical workers, firefighters, and even the lofty goal of protecting the hand-wavy "public commons" itself!

Yeah, it's not the power company's fault for endangering the lives of their workers, it's our fault, you and I regular Joes, for daring to want electricity in case the power company can't supply us with any. How dare you?

Re: Tesla Motors Announces a New Home Battery

#149

Post by dpark »

phkahler wrote: post #140

When will homes be built with sensible electricity distribution? So often they put the breaker panel in the basement. I want a small utility room or closet where I can install inverters or this battery. I want to be able to run 220V to my stove, laundry, garage (car charging), battery storage, and AC relatively easily - none of these is in the basement (except the laundry in some home I've lived in). Also, if a basem…

What's up is that most people don't want a big breaker panel in a room they spend time in. It's ugly.

Sticking the panel in a closet doesn't work, because it generally violates codes twice, once for the fact that all the clothes/random junk in the closet blocks access to the panel, and a second time for the fact that even empty, most closets don't provide sufficient clearance all around the panel to meet code requirements.

If I were building a new house, I'd consider putting the panel on the main floor and just hanging a big painting to hide it (which still violates code, but it's pretty trivial to take down a painting).

Re: Tesla Motors Announces a New Home Battery

#150

Post by schiffern »

IgorPartola wrote: post #114
jacquesm wrote: post #59

It's very hard to beat lead-acid on: - $/Wh - number of cycles - ability to be recycled at eol - loss of capacity over the lifetime of the battery (or beyond!) - safety It is easy to beat on - power density - weight - maintenance - mechanical stability (especially for fluid based cells) - installation cost (lead/acid requires a sealed enclosure venting to the outside to get rid of free oxygen and hydrogen) The same b…

Energy density is a big one. To store 5 kW * 24 hours (barely enough to power my house's essentials), I would need 286 of these ( http://www.amazon.com/VMAX857-Battery-Performance-minnkota-t... ). They are not small. Also, that would cost me nearly $32,000 in just batteries. My ideal setup for this would be something like 20 kW * 7 days. That would fill my basement pretty easily.

>To store 5 kW * 24 hours (barely enough to power my house's essentials)

So based on 5 kW average, your electric bill is… 3650 kWh/mo? That's about 4x the U.S. national average for a household (903 kWh/mo).

Is this correct, or is 5 kW an overestimation?

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