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: 13438
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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#1. To: Willie Green (#0)
Good to see the downward price trajectory. But I agree about the safety concerns for LI and share the hope for an alternative. The tech is still in its infancy. Have you seen this? Pretty cool.
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.
The tech stuff is mostly still in its fantasy.
I'd need to know more specifics about expected lifetime and battery-replacement costs before getting interested.
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.
How long have your laptop batteries lasted? The warranty might be for 10 years but when you replace your Tesla Battery pack the "savings" go up in smoke. Panasonic's Ene-Farm is going to render this battery nonsense obsolete Japan Promotes Home Fuel Cell on Path to Hydrogen Society Dec. 9 (Bloomberg) -- Japan is working on doing for the hydrogen fuel cell what it accomplished with computer chips and cars in the last century, slashing costs to make them more appealing to consumers. As fuel-cell technology finds its way into factories and commercial buildings, Japanese manufacturers including Panasonic Corp. are working to make them small and cheap enough for the home. The country has set a goal of installing them in 5.3 million homes by 2030, about 10 percent of all households... Panasonic Ene-Farm http://panasonic.co.jp/ap/FC/en_doc03_00.html Battery Boy Musk should know about the Ene-farm- Panasonic is part of his Giggle-Factory. Hydrogen is a better battery- this will become very clear over the next ~5 years. No leaks, no degradation, no replacement, no recycling. Does the US want millions and millions of pounds of spent lithium batteries lying around -either waiting to be recycled or dumped into a landfill?
Chances are at least as good that the upcoming aluminum battery will be the industry choice. Musk has an advantage of being a known and respected name with a reputation for nice electric cars and SpaceX. He also has his Solar City network to install/service these battery systems. Musk is also a connected businessman with access to venture capital. Lots of people want to be in business with Elon Musk. This is what happens when a new technology goes mainstream. At present, nothing else is as ready as Musk's offering to make a real dent in home and commercial storage systems. It's ready now.
Panasonic is selling the Ene-farm NOW- in Japan. They HAVE SOLD many- I don't have the figure at the moment- but they've sold more Ene-farms than Tesla's latest battery ripoff. When does the Musk-Rat start flogging his laptop batteries for homes?
Like the 4 ghz midtower desktop computer I am assembling
Junk.
Don't piddle with the computer when you can diddle with the housekeeper.
Like the 4 ghz midtower desktop computer I am assembling on my dining room table? Eh? Do you think four gigs will improve the quality and relevance of your posts here or elsewhere? As far as I'm concerned, for serious scientific or engineering work, a two gig computer armed with 64 bit DOS BC7 professional BASIC, if we could get it, is sufficient to do anything imaginable.
Absolutely not.
Willie - she has FIVE kids. FIVE.
Yep. Quite a ways from the 8088 project I put together 20 years ago for fun... on a breadboard. Today's efforts in EVs are on the level of the early days of PC Clones. Parts are becoming available for hobbyists and entrepreneurs to build the future industry from. If the Apokeetards don't manage to incinerate us all first, the future is promising.
Was that Baja EV racer a fantasy when it finished the race?
Most scientific computing today involves analyzing terabytes or even petabytes of data. You are not going to do that with basic on a desktop PC.
Most scientific computing today involves analyzing terabytes or even petabytes of data. You are not going to do that with basic on a desktop PC. ------------------------------------- Today's desktops have far more computing power and storage capacity than Crays of not many years ago.
I bought one of the first IBM PCs back in 1981.
The Hitachi HD64180 (a kick-ass Z80 clone) I had the thing hooked up to a high-end (for the time)
But Cray's of "not many years ago" weren't processing peta-bytes of data.
But Cray's of "not many years ago" weren't processing peta-bytes of data. You are kidding. Right? In 1988 a Cray was used to compute Pi to 1032 power decimal places, a number so large there wasn't enough paper in the world to print it and nobody was capable of reading in six lifetimes. You don't appear to me knowledgable about computers or computation application.
No, I'm not kidding. You in the other hand are confusing two completely different things -- the precision of a single floating point calculation versus processing very large amounts of data.
No, I'm not kidding. You in the other hand are confusing two completely different things -- the precision of a single floating point calculation versus processing very large amounts of data. When is the last time you did programming accessing peta bytes of data? And for what purpose? I don believe you have any conception of the power of the modern PC.
Today. Most large organizations regularly analyze hundreds of terrabytes to petabytes of information. This requires parallelism across dozens to hundreds of servers. The Internet of Things (IOT) will quickly turn petabytes of data into exabytes. It's a very different world than when you were programming.
Those of us who grew up in the business have been continually awed by the advancement in PC capability. I rember gettin my first 386. It ran at a clock speed of 67 times that of an XT and had an open bank for 32 one meg memory cards. I had a wonderful 120 meg hard disk. In the 90's I bought five CD's with every published phone number in the U. S, complete with names and addresses. I found old army buddies with it. My brother has a PC with a clock speed of about three gigs and a 800 gig hard drive. He has no idea what to do with it. He just wants to say he has one.
Today. I don't believe you. You dance around the issue with jargan and indirect implication that your experience and expertise is central to the issue. Something's missing.
Across two sites, I have tried to be really helpful to you by educating you on how things in computers work today. But you are too stubborn to learn. Now you accuse me of lying. I'm done with you.
You hint or exaggerate your role in playing a game where you have never really stepped out on the field to any extent.
$3,500 for a 10-kilowatt-hour version
#2. To: Willie Green (#0)
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. (4 images)
#3. To: VxH (#1)
The tech is still in its infancy.
#4. To: TooConservative (#2)
(Edited)
#5. To: Hank Rearden (#4)
I'd need to know more specifics about expected lifetime and battery-replacement costs before getting interested.
#6. To: Willie Green (#0)
lithium-ion batteries are interesting technology, but not without concerns regarding their safety
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-12-09/japan-promotes-home-fuel-cell-on-path-to-hydrogen-society 
#7. To: Operation 40 (#6)
Hydrogen is a better battery- this will become very clear over the next ~5 years. No leaks, no degradation, no replacement, no recycling. Does the US want millions and millions of pounds of spent lithium batteries lying around -either waiting to be recycled or dumped into a landfill?
#8. To: TooConservative (#7)
#9. To: VxH, rlk (#1)
The tech is still in its infancy.
on my dining room table? Eh?
#10. To: Willie Green (#0)
Tesla gave us its first look at a new stackable battery system to store electricity for home
#11. To: Chuck_Wagon (#9)
Like the 4 ghz midtower desktop computer I am assembling on my dining room table? Eh?
Spend the $40 at Staples and get 'er done.
#12. To: Chuck_Wagon (#9)
The tech is still in its infancy.
#13. To: rlk (#12)
Do you think four gigs will improve the quality and relevance of your
posts here or elsewhere?
#14. To: Willie Green (#11)
...when you can diddle with the housekeeper....
She is quite attractive - but am I going to
get involved with THAT mess?
Heck no.
#15. To: Chuck_Wagon (#9)
(Edited)
Like the 4 ghz midtower desktop computer I am assembling on my dining room table? Eh?
#16. To: rlk (#3)
The tech stuff is mostly still in its fantasy.
#17. To: rlk (#12)
a two gig computer armed with 64 bit DOS BC7 professional BASIC, if we could get it, is sufficient to do anything imaginable.
#18. To: cranko (#17)
a two gig computer armed with 64 bit DOS BC7 professional BASIC, if we could get it, is sufficient to do anything imaginable.
#19. To: VxH (#15)
...the 8088 project I put together 20 years ago ...
The thing had TWO 360K floppy drives! WOW!
Cost about $3000. Insane amount of money.
But it worked.
And I didn't have to assemble it!
#20. To: VxH (#15)
...put together ... on a breadboard ...
made the absolute best CP/M computer available.
Actually the Hitachi and ZCPR3 (CP/M clone) was best.
But the thing eventually died - so I threw it in a dumpster.
This was decades ago, of course.
Televideo dumb terminal. Woo Hoo! 
#21. To: rlk (#18)
Today's desktops have far more computing power and storage capacity than Crays of not many years ago.
#22. To: cranko (#21)
Today's desktops have far more computing power and storage capacity than Crays of not many years ago.
#23. To: rlk (#22)
(Edited)
You are kidding. Right?
#24. To: cranko (#23)
You are kidding. Right?
#25. To: rlk (#24)
When is the last time you did programming accessing peta bytes of data? And for what purpose?
#26. To: Chuck_Wagon (#19)
I bought one of the first IBM PCs back in 1981. The thing had TWO 360K floppy drives! WOW! Cost about $3000. Insane amount of money. But it worked.
#27. To: cranko (#25)
When is the last time you did programming accessing peta bytes of data? And for what purpose?
#28. To: rlk (#27)
(Edited)
I don't believe you.
#29. To: cranko (#28)
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