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Tesla Motors Announces a New Home Battery

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Re: Tesla Motors Announces a New Home Battery

#21

Post by johnward »

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?

I don't have water or sewage at my house. I have a well and septic system. I also have a propane generator but it's only for power outages, that happen more frequently when you live in the country. I do have a private company collect my garbage.

I live in the Ohio Valley, near Pittsburgh, so we get some of the lowest amount of direct sunlight in the US. I'm not sure if solar is viable in my area yet.

Re: Tesla Motors Announces a New Home Battery

#22

Post by Johnythree »

LeonM wrote: post #2

I'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…

Like many others, I've lived on solar power (no grid, no generator) for two decades now. No problems, no fuss.

In rural areas, wind powered battery storage was commonplace 100 years ago.

Perhaps if you bothered to do a little research....

Re: Tesla Motors Announces a New Home Battery

#23

Post by brudgers »

So, where does lithium come from? It comes from the Earth, of course, but it doesn't require strip mining or blowing the tops off mountains like other resources do...most often, lithium is found in briny underground ponds. The liquid is pumped out and left to dry in the sun.

TANSTAAFL

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=lithium+pond+photos&iax=1&ia=image...

Mining is mining. There isn't a "green" form. Tearing holes in the earth is not the worst ecological damage or the great health risk. The big problem is the water...and it will run downhill from the Andes and wherever else Lithium is mined and into the Ocean.

The house off the grid is built on industrial infrastructure.

Re: Tesla Motors Announces a New Home Battery

#24

Post by nhaehnle »

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?

Those batteries can come in useful even when you're still connected to the grid.

Right now, some locations have laws and/or regulation that force grid companies to buy solar-generated electricity from home owners at fixed rates. This makes a lot of sense right now as a measure to encourage the adoption of solar, as a way to get off fossil fuels. In the long term, it might become a less useful measure, and we might want to allow market mechanisms for time-of-day-based pricing. This is already happening on the big players' market, where you see drops of the spot price of electricity at noon on sunny days. Extending these market mechanisms to individual homes makes sense, as long as home owners are empowered by technology to make use of it.

A large battery is an important piece of such empowering technology (combined with being able to set a smart policy for when to run off the battery, when to run off the grid, and when to feed back into the grid).

Re: Tesla Motors Announces a New Home Battery

#25

Post by deelowe »

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?

Well. Broadband is available wirelessly either via cell, wifi, or satellite, so there's not a requirement for a physical connection. Water and sewer have localized options with wells and septic, but they are also extremely inexpensive to build and maintain and have a relatively small environmental impact.

Electricity, on the other hand, has no viable localized option today. It's also the only one of these that has a significant drop in efficiency due to the distribution itself and has a significant impact to the environment.

Local power storage means that grid can balance the load between peak and non-peak times. Also, local power storage means that wind/solar now has a solution for time where power output is reduced.

Having a battery that can power a home for a week is huge, if it's affordable. This could significantly reduce power generation costs.

Re: Tesla Motors Announces a New Home Battery

#26

Post by angrybits »

skrause wrote: post #17
oloboWd wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's an independence thing. If that isn't important to you, none of this is going to seem terribly useful.

Re: Tesla Motors Announces a New Home Battery

#27

Post by pjc50 »

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?

I note that people replying to this are saying that you can avoid those things (if you live sufficiently rurally, which is only true of a fraction of the population), but not really saying why you'd want to.

Here in Scotland it's the other way round. Orkney is detached from the grid and trying to get itself connected, so it can better balance local renewable generation with the rest of the UK (and thence ultimately the European grid as a whole). Maybe they'll go to municipal batteries but the cost is still not attractive.

Re: Tesla Motors Announces a New Home Battery

#28

Post by vetler »

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?

I don't see the big benefit here being living off any grid. To me, the benefit could be to charge battery when electricity is cheap, and also - if the battery is portable - to easily get a power source places where there is none.

Re: Tesla Motors Announces a New Home Battery

#29

Post by pbowyer »

repsilat wrote: post #16
LeonM wrote: post #2

I'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 themse…

> 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.

They're trialling that right now in the UK: http://www.itv.com/news/anglia/2014-12-15/power-boost-as-big... http://www.edie.net/news/6/Smarter-Network-Storage-Energy-ba...

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