{"id":12295,"date":"2015-02-19T11:13:13","date_gmt":"2015-02-19T16:13:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/?p=12295"},"modified":"2015-02-19T11:17:09","modified_gmt":"2015-02-19T16:17:09","slug":"tesla-opening-market-for-home-solar-batteries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2015\/02\/tesla-opening-market-for-home-solar-batteries.html","title":{"rendered":"Tesla opening market for home solar batteries"},"content":{"rendered":"

\r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\n

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

\r\nJohn McDuling, QZ, 30 July 2014,\r\n\r\nHow solar energy storage could make Tesla much more than an automaker<\/a>,\r\n

\r\n

\r\nHow lucrative could the solar energy storage business be for Tesla?\r\nAlmost as lucrative as selling cars.\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\nThat’s according to Morgan Stanley, which this week\r\n\r\n placed a\r\nfigure—$2 billion—on how much it thinks Tesla could make\r\nin annual revenue from solar energy storage. That’s assuming that\r\nits “gigafactory”—a massive lithium-ion battery\r\nproduction facility, which is currently still in the planning\r\nstages—is up and running by the end of the decade.\r\n<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

\r\nThat was six months ago.\r\nAnd for that matter, SolarCity already offers a home battery based on Tesla technology<\/a>:\r\n

\r\n

\r\nSolarCity’s residential battery system can help you keep the lights\r\non and fridge cold in a power outage or natural disaster while\r\npotentially saving you even more on your monthly utility bills. Our\r\nenergy storage systems are currently offered in select California\r\nmarkets.\r\n<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

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

\r\nThe battery Tesla’s working on will be less expensive\r\nand presumably will store more.\r\n

\r\nRecent coverage of Tesla’s proposed battery\r\nhave been all a-buzz about “off-grid”,\r\nwhich also misses the point, as partly explained by\r\nJohn McDuling, QZ, 18 February 2015,\r\n\r\nElon Musk is designing a Tesla battery to power your home<\/a>,\r\n

\r\n

\r\nThere’s a lot of hype about what kind of threat Tesla could pose to\r\nelectricity utilities by helping people go off the grid. Morgan\r\nStanley estimated last year that by 2028, Tesla’s US fleet of cars\r\nwill have an energy storage capacity of 237GW which it said was\r\nequal to 22% of US production capacity, and nearly 10 times larger\r\nthan existing US grid storage capacity. (That analysis doesn’t even\r\ntake into account batteries sold separately from cars).\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\nIn reality, mass defections off the electricity grid aren’t likely.\r\nSolar City CTO and Musk’s cousin Peter Rive has said he has\r\n“no interest” in such a scenario, because “the\r\ngrid is a network, and where there are networks, there are network\r\neffects.” Also, it seems to be illegal in some states.\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\nTesla is actually working closely with utilities on the home battery\r\nproduct. “There’s a lot of interest, and a lot of utilities\r\nworking in this space, and we’re talking to almost all of\r\nthem,” chief technology officer JB Straubel said on the\r\nconference call. More likely, the batteries will help people sell\r\nexcess energy back into the grid, and save money on their electric\r\nbills.\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\nRive envisages a scenario where batteries with storage capacity were\r\noptimized across the grid, allowing utilities to direct clean solar\r\nelectricity more efficiently, lowering costs for everyone and\r\nhelping the environment. “We can do so much more working\r\ntogether than we can working alone.”\r\n<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

\r\nAs\r\n\r\na veteran of the Internet<\/a>, I have no interest in being off-grid.\r\nI want to be able to continue to sell excess power through the grid; getting a fair market\r\nprice for it would also be good.\r\nAnd if I happen\r\nto have a short-term need for more power, I want to be able to draw it\r\nfrom the grid.\r\nThe 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.\r\n

\r\nThe real importance of Tesla’s house-sized battery is that it’s driving\r\na market for solar storage.\r\n

\r\nA year ago\r\nHarvard announced a no-metal organic battery<\/a>.\r\nIn their announcement was this<\/a>:\r\n

\r\n

\r\nBy the end of the three-year development period, Connecticut-based\r\nSustainable Innovations, LLC, a collaborator on the project, expects\r\nto deploy demonstration versions of the organic flow battery\r\ncontained in a unit the size of a horse trailer. The portable,\r\nscaled-up storage system could be hooked up to solar panels on the\r\nroof of a commercial building, and electricity from the solar panels\r\ncould either directly supply the needs of the building or go into\r\nstorage and come out of storage when there’s a need. Sustainable\r\nInnovations anticipates playing a key role in the product’s\r\ncommercialization by leveraging its ultra-low cost electrochemical\r\ncell design and system architecture already under development for\r\nenergy storage applications.\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\n“You could theoretically put this on any node on the\r\ngrid,” Aziz said. “If the market price fluctuates\r\nenough, you could put a storage device there and buy electricity to\r\nstore it when the price is low and then sell it back when the price\r\nis high. In addition, you might be able to avoid the permitting and\r\ngas supply problems of having to build a gas-fired power plant just\r\nto meet the occasional needs of a growing peak demand.”\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\nThis technology could also provide very useful backup for off-grid\r\nrooftop solar panels—an important advantage considering some\r\n20 percent of the world’s population does not have access to a power\r\ndistribution network.\r\n<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

\r\nSo if they’re on schedule, that’s two more years until you’ll see\r\ndemonstration versions of Harvard’s organic battery capable of\r\nstoring energy for a house.\r\n

\r\nTeresa Henry, IDTechEx PR, 24 June 2104,\r\n\r\nSupercapacitors can destroy the lithium-ion battery market<\/a>,\r\n

\r\n

\r\nAs tracked by market research company IDTechEx and further explained in the recently updated report\r\n\r\nElectrochemical Double Layer Capacitors: Supercapacitors 2014-2024<\/a>,\r\nsupercapacitors are improving faster than lithium-ion batteries in most respects.\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

\r\nThen there’s\r\n\r\nSouthern Company’s compressed air underground power storage project<\/a>.\r\n

\r\nAnd Georgia’s own Robert E. Greene will be presenting 18 March 2015\r\nat the\r\n\r\nGeorgia Association of Water Professionals<\/a> (GAWP)\r\nabout pumping water up additional water towers:\r\n

\r\n

\r\n…to see if we can smooth out the intermittent nature of solar energy\r\nby storing more elevated water than we do currently. You are able to\r\nbring more solar energy to bear on the total water demand if you can\r\nstore the solar energy in the form of elevated water. It is perhaps\r\nthe best form of a solar battery. It is just a ‘Physics to Finance’\r\ncalculation that should reveal how close we can come to operating\r\nwater treatment plants 100% on solar energy.\r\n<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

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

\r\nAnd we don’t even need to wait on new energy storage methods.\r\nWe already know\r\n\r\nhow to power each and every U.S. state<\/a> with sun\r\nwind, and water through a distributed smart grid.\r\nWe just need to stop listening to entrenched utility executives such as\r\nthe current head of the TVA<\/a>\r\nand get on with deploying solar and wind power,\r\nas\r\n\r\neven Georgia Power has finally sort of decided to do<\/a>.\r\n

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

\r\n -jsq\r\n<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"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 […]","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[14,8,18,24,449,55,36],"tags":[8704,1020,6131,8701,6132,8708,1300,8256,8702,12,7,8255,8259,8258,8260,98,8714,8812,108,1582,7281,8767,6,8727,8257,8716],"class_list":["post-12295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economy","category-georgia","category-georgia-power","category-solar","category-transportation","category-water","category-wind","tag-economy","tag-elon-musk","tag-gawp","tag-georgia","tag-georgia-association-of-water-professionals","tag-georgia-power","tag-harvard","tag-idtechex","tag-lake","tag-lowndes-area-knowledge-exchange","tag-lowndes-county","tag-morgan-stanley","tag-network-effect","tag-off-grid","tag-peter-rive","tag-robert-e-green","tag-solar","tag-solarcity","tag-southern-company","tag-stanford","tag-tesla","tag-transportation","tag-valdosta","tag-water","tag-water-tower","tag-wind"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-3cj","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12295","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12295"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12295\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12298,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12295\/revisions\/12298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}