Elon Musk’s recent reminder that Tesla is working on a house-sized battery
has caused quite a stir, but not enough. Tesla alone isn’t the significant part:
Tesla opening a market for inexpensive home solar storage methods is.
And not all those methods will be batteries: also coming are capacitors,
organic vats, compressed air, and water pumped up towers,
for storage to car- and house- size to municipal- and utility-scale,
all of which will drive solar and wind deployment even faster.

John McDuling, QZ, 30 July 2014,

How solar energy storage could make Tesla much more than an automaker,

How lucrative could the solar energy storage business be for Tesla?
Almost as lucrative as selling cars.

That’s according to Morgan Stanley, which this week

placed a
figure—$2 billion—on how much it thinks Tesla could make
in annual revenue from solar energy storage. That’s assuming that
its “gigafactory”—a massive lithium-ion battery
production facility, which is currently still in the planning
stages—is up and running by the end of the decade.

That was six months ago.
And for that matter, SolarCity already offers a home battery based on Tesla technology:

SolarCity’s residential battery system can help you keep the lights
on and fridge cold in a power outage or natural disaster while
potentially saving you even more on your monthly utility bills. Our
energy storage systems are currently offered in select California
markets.

For that matter, I’ve had that kind of battery storage on my solar
panels since 2005, and they’re nothing but four deep-cell marine batteries.
Most people don’t have them because they’re expensive if you want enough
of them to handle much power.

The battery Tesla’s working on will be less expensive
and presumably will store more.

Recent coverage of Tesla’s proposed battery
have been all a-buzz about “off-grid”,
which also misses the point, as partly explained by
John McDuling, QZ, 18 February 2015,

Elon Musk is designing a Tesla battery to power your home,

There’s a lot of hype about what kind of threat Tesla could pose to
electricity utilities by helping people go off the grid. Morgan
Stanley estimated last year that by 2028, Tesla’s US fleet of cars
will have an energy storage capacity of 237GW which it said was
equal to 22% of US production capacity, and nearly 10 times larger
than existing US grid storage capacity. (That analysis doesn’t even
take into account batteries sold separately from cars).

In reality, mass defections off the electricity grid aren’t likely.
Solar City CTO and Musk’s cousin Peter Rive has said he has
“no interest” in such a scenario, because “the
grid is a network, and where there are networks, there are network
effects.” Also, it seems to be illegal in some states.

Tesla is actually working closely with utilities on the home battery
product. “There’s a lot of interest, and a lot of utilities
working in this space, and we’re talking to almost all of
them,” chief technology officer JB Straubel said on the
conference call. More likely, the batteries will help people sell
excess energy back into the grid, and save money on their electric
bills.

Rive envisages a scenario where batteries with storage capacity were
optimized across the grid, allowing utilities to direct clean solar
electricity more efficiently, lowering costs for everyone and
helping the environment. “We can do so much more working
together than we can working alone.”

As

a veteran of the Internet, I have no interest in being off-grid.
I want to be able to continue to sell excess power through the grid; getting a fair market
price for it would also be good.
And if I happen
to have a short-term need for more power, I want to be able to draw it
from the grid.
The more people who do that, the more robust the grid is; way more robust through distributed generation than currently through a small number of fossilized centralized fossil fuel and nuke plants.

The real importance of Tesla’s house-sized battery is that it’s driving
a market for solar storage.

A year ago
Harvard announced a no-metal organic battery.
In their announcement was this:

By the end of the three-year development period, Connecticut-based
Sustainable Innovations, LLC, a collaborator on the project, expects
to deploy demonstration versions of the organic flow battery
contained in a unit the size of a horse trailer. The portable,
scaled-up storage system could be hooked up to solar panels on the
roof of a commercial building, and electricity from the solar panels
could either directly supply the needs of the building or go into
storage and come out of storage when there’s a need. Sustainable
Innovations anticipates playing a key role in the product’s
commercialization by leveraging its ultra-low cost electrochemical
cell design and system architecture already under development for
energy storage applications.

“You could theoretically put this on any node on the
grid,” Aziz said. “If the market price fluctuates
enough, you could put a storage device there and buy electricity to
store it when the price is low and then sell it back when the price
is high. In addition, you might be able to avoid the permitting and
gas supply problems of having to build a gas-fired power plant just
to meet the occasional needs of a growing peak demand.”

This technology could also provide very useful backup for off-grid
rooftop solar panels—an important advantage considering some
20 percent of the world’s population does not have access to a power
distribution network.

So if they’re on schedule, that’s two more years until you’ll see
demonstration versions of Harvard’s organic battery capable of
storing energy for a house.

Teresa Henry, IDTechEx PR, 24 June 2104,

Supercapacitors can destroy the lithium-ion battery market,

As tracked by market research company IDTechEx and further explained in the recently updated report

Electrochemical Double Layer Capacitors: Supercapacitors 2014-2024,
supercapacitors are improving faster than lithium-ion batteries in most respects.

Then there’s

Southern Company’s compressed air underground power storage project.

And Georgia’s own Robert E. Greene will be presenting 18 March 2015
at the

Georgia Association of Water Professionals (GAWP)
about pumping water up additional water towers:

…to see if we can smooth out the intermittent nature of solar energy
by storing more elevated water than we do currently. You are able to
bring more solar energy to bear on the total water demand if you can
store the solar energy in the form of elevated water. It is perhaps
the best form of a solar battery. It is just a ‘Physics to Finance’
calculation that should reveal how close we can come to operating
water treatment plants 100% on solar energy.

I don’t care which one wins: I hope they all do, for power storage from
car-size to house-size to municipal to utility-scale.

And we don’t even need to wait on new energy storage methods.
We already know

how to power each and every U.S. state with sun
wind, and water through a distributed smart grid.
We just need to stop listening to entrenched utility executives such as
the current head of the TVA
and get on with deploying solar and wind power,
as

even Georgia Power has finally sort of decided to do.

And affordable energy storage, whether batteries or capacitors or grown in vats or pumped up water towers, will drive solar and wind deployment even faster.
I look forward to the warm clean breeze of a sun, wind, and water-powered world.

-jsq