Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Elon Musk has announced the release of a new storage battery for home use. The new battery in principle dramatically reduces the cost of going “off grid” – powering your house entirely from solar or wind, and using the battery to provide backup power, to ensure continuous supply.
According to The Guardian;
The electric car company Tesla has announced its entry into the energy market, unveiling a suite of low-cost solar batteries for homes, businesses and utilities, “the missing piece”, it said, in the transition to a sustainable energy world.
The batteries, which will retail at $3,500 in the US, were launched on Thursday at a Tesla facility in California by the company’s ambitious founder, Elon Musk, who heralded the technology as “a fundamental transformation [in] how energy is delivered across the earth”.
Wall-mounted, with a sleek design, the lithium-ion batteries are designed to capture and store up to 10kWh of energy from wind or solar panel. The reserves can be drawn on when sunlight is low, during grid outages, or at peak demand times, when electricity costs are highest.
The smallest “Powerwall” is 1.3m by 68cm, small enough to be hung inside a garage on or an outside wall. Up to eight batteries can be “stacked” in a home, Musk said, to applause from investors and journalists at the much-anticipated event.
I’m excited by this announcement, not because I’m currently considering buying a Tesla battery, but because of the potential this announcement has, for exerting downward pressure on household electricity bills.
Assuming the battery has around 1000 charge / discharge cycles, paying $3500 every 3 years is approaching price parity with some of the more ridiculous electricity utility charges. When you factor in the satisfaction of tearing up your last electricity bill, there is a real chance a significant number of people will be tempted to make the leap.
How will utility companies respond? I suspect they will be forced to cap household bills, to put as much price distance as possible, between the Tesla option, and staying connected to their grid. It will no longer be possible to make electricity rates skyrocket, to treat household electricity consumers as an inelastic revenue source – because now householders have an alternative, to putting up with endless price rises.
The biggest losers from this potential game changer, in my opinion, might be large scale renewable energy providers. Since households now have an alternative to paying ever larger electricity bills, electricity utilities will be forced to keep costs down – they will no longer be able to ignore costs imposed by government mandated renewable schemes. Either the government will be forced to provide higher subsidies, or large scale renewable schemes will have to be scaled back, to keep grid electricity price competitive.
Batteries
What’s old is new again. The comments remind me of when I was a tiny tot on the farm west of Calgary in the late 40’s, early 50’s before there were graded gravel roads or power lines. My grandfather had a separate building full of lead acid batteries and 12 volt lighting in the log farm house. The electric lighting was generally only used intermittently because you had to use an old one lung four stroke with a belt to a generator to charge the battery bank (and you could move the belt power a saw for cutting lumber). There was minimal electric lighting, mostly in the kitchen. Oil lamps were the main lighting and I still have one in the basement today. No inside water, no inside toilet, I have the old scrubbing board on my porch, and the drier was a line outside; refrigeration was from ice cut and stored under sawdust in an ice house, heating was wood (somewhat the same as now); AC was sitting in the shade of a tree.
I have pictures somewhere. It was really exciting when electricity and real roads came to the region. A 10kw battery bank would have lasted a long time in those days except when you really needed it in the middle of winter in the dark at 40 below …
Glad to pay my current utility bill. And even though my bill has doubled in the last 15 years, it is still cheaper than running my 12 kW propane backup generator full time or installing solar panels, inverters, battery back up, etc. And, at 12kW, only half the house lighting is connected to the gen set. I live in the country. There are two wells (3kW) and a water to water heat pump (4kW) and other pumps (livestock) to run when the utility power regularly disappears for hours at a time, and at times for more than a day. The 12kW gen set is stressed at times as noted by the dimming of the lights when the refrigerator or deep freeze kicks on when the pumps are running.
So much better than the old farm house of 65 years ago.
In another 65, maybe there will be batteries or other technology that will work. My grand kids may look back with wonder at my farm house just as I look at my grand parents farm houses. Though I actually think we may be living in the best of times. No more late night frosty trips to the outhouse.
I hope future generations are as fortunate as most of us living in the developed countries today.
The big lie is this is new tech that allows for off-grid solar. Of course not, it’s been available for 40 years.
The standard battery for doing this is the 220Ah * 6V = 1.3KWh deep cycle battery. The lowest price I found was $130. Put 8 in series and you get 10KWh for $1000, less than a 1/3 the cost. A 48V inverter/charge-controller is cheap today. The 3-4KW of solar panels will cost much more than the rest.
This system will not power the kitchen range and water heater, you need gas for that.
Salt water batteries…
http://www.aquionenergy.com/sites/default/files/styles/standard_feature/public/s10-008f_700x260_product_page_m-line.png
Our patented Aqueous Hybrid Ion (AHI™) battery technology provides high performance, safe, sustainable, and cost-effective energy storage for long-duration stationary applications.
http://www.aquionenergy.com/
Aqueous Hybrid Ion (AHI™) battery , Just as bad as Musk. How does it work – give us all your details. performance data – thats a secret, Cost – Well dont ask…………….. Just what is it with these people.
To be fair, they do give some description of the process here.
w.
Only after yo have handed over all your personal details, why?
As always this new development benefits the rich ahead of the poor. Great if you can afford it, but it leaves the electricity standing charges shared by the remaining customers with the inevitable effect – more low income households disconnected because they can’t pay their bills.
Thanks, Old Ranga, but you’re missing the point entirely. This new development benefits NEITHER the rich nor the poor. It is a more expensive solution than the solution we have now (lead-acid batteries), and is also much more dangerous. So it’s not “great if you can afford it”, it’s a rip-off whether you can afford it or not.
w.
Potential v. reality: Musk himself was a bit more circumspect in a quote in an article I looked up. He sounded like it was more like a battery back up. I’ve been seeing some bandwagon, “get ii on the ground floor” investment promotion for Musk based on this. Based on the post and the comments and the article , it sounds pretty limited. And the stock price went down ahead of the anticipated announcement. It still requires higher utility prices and some crony government market interference – the story of low density, “free” production and storage since Day One.
In terms of plentiful , cheap energy and compared to fracking, methane hydrates, nuclear, and/or coal, it’s a popcorn fart in the wind.
10kWhrs?
That is about enough to run my house for about 6 hours on average, or about 2 hours when we are heavily active.
While it is nice I can stack 8 of them, 8 of them will run in the neighborhood of $30,000.
Also note that the batteries do not CREATE energy. They are not going to take you off the grid. For that you need something else to charge them.
That something else is going to cost you money. It is going to be intermittent. It is going to have to provide significantly more energy than you need at any given point in time so you can also charge for that period.
While solar and wind might be cheap to the end user, they certainly are not cheap. The end user gets the benefits of massive PC alternative energy save gaia subsidies in order to get to somewhat reasonable costs.
But even if the rated costs seems cheap, most of America is not in a sun belt and many homes do not have south facing clear views to the sun to make collection or most places do not have reliable winds and when you need the wind the most, when it is hot, it is not likely to be there for you.
Stick it to the utility companies, why? Because they are apparently evil. I certainly thought better of Watts Up With That than to have this pure garbage strewn about.
Someone above already talked about standard batteries doing this for the last 40 years plus for about a quarter of the cost. So I did not say anything in my statement above. But it is also another point against this stupid advertisement!
What will insurance companies think of their customers hanging large firebombs in their garages? What will it cost to dispose of old batteries? How recyclable are these battery carcasses? How much charging capacity does each unit have? It needs to exceed the average load, including charging the batteries. What is peak capacity for those times extra heating is needed over night when temperatures fall? How do they perform during short winter days?
Truth is I really don’t care what the answers might be because I already know you cannot replace grid power from any other source as economically and reliably as the grid already in place. Anything done to impact the economies of scale of the grid will send industry off shore and we’ll all become burger flippers. This same reality also applies to diesel and gasoline fuel. Trucking is affordable because our fuel costs are affordable and that is true only because of the efficiencies of large scale production.
I’m amazed that in my lifetime I’ve lived with the “Greatest Generation” and the wondrous creations they’ve given us, and the most ignorant generation which seeks to tear it all down. I much preferred the former.
http://www.thegwpf.com/the-silliness-of-teslas-battery/
Costs may be more than quoted above.