Tesla Motors announces a new battery, production to begin in six months, no market-release date, which apparently you could use to power your home and live off the power grid, so long as you have solar panels or something to charge it.
Flashing on the “Shipstones” in Robert Heinlein’s Friday. Will this be that big a technological game-changer, I wonder?
Tesla has not made any fundamental breakthrough in battery tech. A dozen companies will be happy to sell you very expensive batteries that are at the leading edge of efficiency. Tesla might be the first to make the attempt with big brand recognition, is all.
… is that a picture of the battery pack from a Nissan Leaf? If so, that’s kinda funny.
I suppose a battery like that would be a good idea if one wanted to build a house that was disconnected from the grid.
But if you’re already on the grid and want to run your home off of solar panels, net metering makes a hell of a lot more sense: the power company credits you with the electricity your home’s solar panels pump into the grid during the day while you’re at work, and you only pay for the electricity you use in excess of what you provided to the utility.
I’m going to hop on my Segway scooter and go get one of those.
How is this better than deep cycle marine batteries?
What advantage is a lithium ion battery going to have when factors like weight and bulk are not an issue? Certainly not cost!
Not exactly.
I live in Arizona and the utilities are doing their best to kill net metering. Their argument is that they’re happy to credit the lowest possible off-hours industrial power rate to residential solar customers for excess production, but using the grid is expensive, so turning your meter backwards midday and getting free energy at night is actually costing them money. Instead customers should pay ridiculous grid fees to sell back excess electricity and grid fees to then buy it back, ultimately defeating any consumer benefit of net metering.
I thought I’d read that this was targeted at people who pay wildly different on- and off-peak rates. You can charge your battery at night when electricity is cheap, and use it during the day when it’s not. But I also read that there’s very few places in the country where the cost difference is large enough to make this remotely feasible.
This is a good point, in those areas mentioned above is there an existing lead-acid solution for this? I’m guessing most people would never think to bother, until they can buy an expensive Tesla brand battery and feel smug.
Shrug Tesla still isn’t turning a profit selling cars, so I guess they’ve got to diversify their product line.
Let me know when I can pick up some Tesla-brand AA batteries for my flashlight. A pair will probably cost about $20.
Lithium-ion battery costs are expected to drop somewhat once Musk doubles the world LI battery production.
Hmm, looks like there’s a number of products already on the market, including Li-Ion products, and from big names like Samsung. Seems like for businesses the benefits can include site-wide battery backup for data storage and critical systems without having to maintain generators, but they also sell a residential model and list off-peak storage and power from renewable sources as benefits.
My first thought was that this would work in very remote off grid locations. Island homes, mountain cabins etc. In those kinds of places lighter, efficient batteries may make economical sense considering the cost to transport them to the site.
If you’re in any location where you have regular power outages, this will make sense - as long as it is reasonably priced.
Besides, Tesla’s battery factory will double the world production of these things. They need new markets, and power regulation is a hot ticket.
Considering the fact that the utility took the financial risk and built the grid specifically to move power from their own generation sites to distributed customers they may have a valid point.
The price they are charging you at your meter includes the cost to transport it there from their generation sites. They aren’t willing to refund you those transportation charges when you output power through your meter. That power has to go somewhere and it uses the grid to get there. So why should the utility have to transport your excess electricity for free?
Net metering is a great way to promote the growth of renewable energy programs but it’s success relies on the utility providing its transmission and distribution lines to the customer for free. The money invested in those grid elements has to be recuperated somehow.
Why do they need new markets: won’t electrical automobiles soon absorb all this capacity?
I can’t see a house-scale UPS with any reasonable runtime being any more cost-effective than an automatic site generator. A 7-10kw partial-service one is now well under $2k, and a 17-25k whole-house one (including ovens, dryers and AC) is around $5k.
A silent UPS that could deliver even critical-circuits power for more than an hour would be a very costly device. Maybe there’s room in the market for one that can deliver 2kw for an hour but need no fuel, no generator/engine, etc. - high end apartments and condos, for example. But as for going off the grid because you put a battery in the garage… uh, no.
A modest cost drop won’t change the picture much. The DC-AC inverter is an expensive component, as well, especially if it delivers “pure power” that won’t choke electronic devices. Those are considerably more expensive and bulky than the ones used in RVs to power a few lights and so forth.
He’s not going to double the world’s production of lithium. Won’t basic supply-and-demand forces raise the cost of lithium if production of LI batteries doubles?