Alternative Energies
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Title: Tesla's Powerwall: 12 important facts to know
Source:
Orange County Register
URL Source: http://www.ocregister.com/articles/battery-660298-musk-tesla.html
Published: May 2, 2015
Author: RINGO H.W. CHIU,
Post Date: 2015-05-02 08:24:17 by Willie Green
Keywords: Battery, Duracell, DieHard
Views: 13163
Comments: 29
Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur who unveiled his Powerwall home battery Thursday, already is offering the devices to SolarCity Corp. customers seeking backup supply when the grid goes down. SolarCity expects to deliver them in October. Musk, whose Tesla Motors developed the product, is also chairman of the San Mateo-based solar supplier. Poster Comment: Powerwall (Tesla) The Powerwall is a rechargeable lithium-ion battery product manufactured by Tesla Motors for home use. It can store energy for domestic consumption, load shifting, and backup power. It was announced on April 30, 2015, and will retail at prices starting at US$3,000 for a 7kWh model beginning summer 2015. The device will be sold to companies including SolarCity. SolarCity is running a pilot project in 500 California houses, using 10-kilowatt-hour battery packs. Hmmmmm... lithium-ion batteries are interesting technology, but not without concerns regarding their safety. But aluminum batteries being researched at Stanford may eventually provide a competitive alternative.
Tesla gave us its first look at a new stackable battery system to store electricity for homes, businesses and the grid. It’s a product that Tesla said soon will bring in billions of dollars in annual revenue.
Here’s what Musk revealed:
• 1. The home battery version is called the Powerwall. It looks like this:
And it can be stacked, sideways, like this:
• 2. It’s cheap (but not too cheap). Powerwalls cost $3,500 for a 10-kilowatt-hour version that will allow you to run a handful of home appliances for a few days in case of an outage. That’s consistent with the general trajectory of falling battery prices – great for people who want to live off grid with solar power, but not yet cheap enough to make economic sense for most grid-connected customers.
• 3. Notably, that doesn’t include the cost of the inverter or installation. In a conference call a year ago, Musk gave his first hint of what he wanted the Powerwall system to look like, including an “integrated bidirectional inverter, and it’s just plug and play.” The inverter and installation can more than double the price of a home storage system.
• 4. It’s thin. The battery is designed to be hung on a garage wall, or even on an outside wall. It’s 220 pounds but just 7.1 inches deep. That’s 2 inches deeper than what Musk had hoped for, but it’s still pretty sleek.
• 5. "The issue with existing batteries is that they suck.” That’s Musk’s characteristically colorful take on the competition. “They’re expensive, they’re unreliable … stinky.”
• 6. The larger version is called the Powerpack. Musk’s biggest immediate opportunity is in commercial and utility-scale storage. The Powerpack is “infinitely scalable,” he said. It consists of 100-kilowatt-hour blocks that can be clustered to meet any project size.
• 7. Customers are waiting.Tesla already has been approached by a utility that wants a 250-megawatt-hour installation, Musk said, without naming the utility. That’s 2,500 Powerpack towers. Nonutility customers include Wal-Mart, Amazon and Target.
• 8. This is what a utility-scale project looks like:
• 9. Powerpack costs weren’t provided. It’s worth noting that even before this event, Tesla was already the biggest provider of battery storage under California’s generous subsidy program for storage projects. The Powerpack isn’t really a new line of products for Musk, just a streamlined one.
• 10. The event was run entirely on batteries. “This entire night, everything you’re using, is stored sunlight,” Musk told the crowd.
• 11. The spirit of open source continues. Tesla’s open patent policy has been extended to both the battery technology and the design of the company’s $5 billion gigafactory. What’s open patent policy? Tesla says it will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use its technology.
• 12. It has a local connection. Tesla already has three demonstration projects in the works with Southern California Edison – one for homes, one for businesses and one for electric vehicles.
The residential project targets homes with solar panels; the commercial one is for higher storage capacity. Those two projects, which would test the utility’s ability to coordinate battery charging and grid reliability, are expected to be operational this year. The third would allow Edison to control electric vehicle charging rates depending on the needs of the electric grid at the moment. That is expected to come online in 2016.
Edison’s current battery storage projects include the nation’s largest battery project, the Tehachapi Energy Storage Project in Kern County. That facility’s 605,000 lithium-ion battery cells, supplied by LG Chem, will be able to supply 32 megawatt-hours of electricity, or 8 megawatts of power for four continuous hours. That’s enough to power 1,600 to 2,400 homes.
Bloomberg News and staff writer Aaron Orlowski contributed to this report.
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#2. To: Willie Green (#0)
I think the tie-in with Musk's Solar City and their financing options and installer network will help sell these. To begin with, they have a huge base of installed solar panels on houses already and a relationship with the homeowners. I think the web app control for these units and the options of charging locally and supplementing with utility power bought at cheap overnight rates will contribute to widespread adoption for home solar. I think the stackable design makes these units very different from the competition with their boutique designs, few of which can scale up to provide industrial levels of power. And Musk did reveal a number of industries and smaller utility companies that are quite interested in stacking fields of Tesla batteries, something I hadn't read much about in other recent articles. These will be the industrial Tesla batteries with 100kW capacities, not these smaller home units. And I see these as a likely bridge technology. Aluminum batteries may be the future but you can use a set of these for 10 years until the aluminum batteries are ready. And Musk will be ideally positioned to be the key player for aluminum batteries as well with his Tesla/Solar City brand loyalty. I think these batteries will save a modest amount over 10 years. At worst, they will be a break-even solution. However, for people who want to live in more remote locations like mountain cabins or ranches in remote areas, these will be more than a break-even. They'll save considerably over the cost of paying to run power lines to their location. For instance, I know a guy in central Texas who has a remote ranch. The nearest power lines are over 25 miles from his little ranch house. At present, he has solar panels and he's using one of the boutique lead-acid battery setups. For someone like that, Tesla batteries and their service network will be a compelling solution. All over rural and mountainous America, these batteries provide a missing link for solar/wind at a very reasonable cost (relative to the costs of installing the solar/wind generation). They make off-the-grid affordable and modern. And they don't require vast REA subsidies for rural electricity.
I'd need to know more specifics about expected lifetime and battery-replacement costs before getting interested.
#5. To: Hank Rearden (#4)
You can search for cost estimates on a number of web sites. They have the results of their 500-unit test group and, as for duty cycle and lifetime of the battery, they have pretty good data from the Tesla cars since these are largely the same batteries. I would guess that Solar City will be issuing a lot of detailed info to promote their sales of batteries for their solar units. I would look there to get some practical real-world info on battery performance and longevity.
Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/LatestHmmmmm... lithium-ion batteries are interesting technology, but not without concerns regarding their safety. But aluminum batteries being researched at Stanford may eventually provide a competitive alternative. (4 images)
#4. To: TooConservative (#2)
(Edited)
Replies to Comment # 4. I'd need to know more specifics about expected lifetime and battery-replacement costs before getting interested.
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