* uses my zip code to figure out what my non-peak costs might be.
* allows me to optionally calculate solar energy capture (so I can see what impact having solar would be, given the average sunny days in my area)
* takes into account the wear and tear average cold weather would have on the lifetime of the batter and the payback period.
For example, I live in Michigan, and I don't know what my off peak cost is off the top of my head. I also have no idea how much sunshine I get, or how 10 degree lows for two months would impact the battery's ability to keep a charge.
Nice, that came in lower than I was expecting. I was thinking $5K for the 7kWh unit. Of course that is the "installers" price so who knows what those folks will consider the 'retail' price. My wife still has her solar installer certification so we could presumably get one that way.
It also makes for a really interesting opportunity for grid tied solar inverters. Now you want the inverter to power the house first, then push power to the batteries and only if they are full push it back to the grid. Software update for sure :-) of course it might make more sense to leave it DC for the push into the battery and only have the AC conversion happen post battery, so charge controller between the battery and the DC disconnect.
On a safety note I'd also really like to mount this outside, preferably against firebrick rather than my house. I realize the batteries are much safer than they have ever been, but still a cascading lithium battery failure inside my garage is not my idea of a party
On the grid tied solar inverter front - the spec sheet says the battery voltage is 350~450 V, so we're looking at 108 lithium ion cells (25 x 18650 cells?) at 400 VDC nominal. This is quite different from typical lead acid battery pack voltage of 12, 24, or 48VDC that's used for battery backup storage, so a lot of existing solar battery storage infrastructure may not even work... this means that people may need to buy a whole new set of supporting hardware to integrate this into the existing solar systems instead of being able to update the software on existing hardware.
Lithium Ion also has quite a different (and much less forgiving!) charging cycle that requires much more monitoring of things like temperature, though I'd imagine a lot of that would be built-in as a safety mechanism directly into the Powerwall.
What I've heard is that National Electrical Code becomes much more stringent on battery systems greater than 48V, with the line drawn at 48V due to it being used widely in the phone landline system. I'm not sure how true that story is, but I'd imagine extra care is probably warranted. 10kWh is about 9kg of TNT. :-)
But you might not want someone to vandalize or steal the battery either which can happen if it's outdoors. Maybe it would be best to put it in a separate shed with lock or something.
1) Immediate benefits to just about anyone. If you have your own solar panels, you need this (or something like it). Even if you don't, you can benefit by drawing more power during cheaper off-peak times.
2) If lots of people get in on this, we'll have the storage capacity we need on the grid to be more dependent on renewable energy. Lack of storage capacity is one of the biggest obstacles to increasing renewable generation.
3) If lots of people buy this, the price per unit goes down, and it's the most expensive component of Tesla's main product, their cars - which are effectively batteries on wheels.
One thing that might go overlooked: Load shifting could, in theory, lower electric bills such that there's ROI without solar panels.
---
Edit for why: On-demand power is expensive. "Spinning up" additional power during the day is more expensive than having certain types of power generation running all the time. In theory, pumping power into a battery at night during non-peak hours will cost less than consuming directly off the grid during the day.
I'm forgetting all the details of energy economics, but IIRC there would also be far less emissions by having consistent load on the grid all day long. Something about the ones we "spin up" also being the worst for the environment.
I could do this today. With my current time-of-use electric rate, I pay an average of $0.25/kWh more for peak power than I do for off-peak [the differential is larger in the summer, smaller in the winter]. If I shift 8kWh per day, then I would generate positive ROI in less than five years.
Your edit is spot-on. Utilities typically use natural gas "peaker" plants to meet mid-day spikes in demand, while nuclear plants are better suited to running at a steady state.
Economy 7 power is significantly cheaper in the UK than peak power. Charging overnight in the E7 period could save money long term depending on the lifetime of the battery.
Big cities are prone to brown outs on hot days in the summer due to air conditioners. The 2003 European heat wave killed thousands1. I could imagine mayors mandating use of this kind of technology in apartment buildings. Let them charge overnight to offset peak usage. You'd cover 100 or more people at a time.
If what you say is true, then with better economies of scale and longer investment horizons, utilities would quickly erase any peak-vs-non-peak arbitrage opportunities.
Can grid arbitrage and time-shifting solar co-exist? Some clever software might be able to predict your energy demand (e.g. based on seasons and past usage patterns) and your likely solar output (this time based on seasons and weather forecasts) and make the maximum use out of the battery.
I'm also wondering if the same software is going to be rolled out to Tesla's cars so that they act like Tesla Energy when plugged in overnight.
Doesn't this ignore completely the efficiency of the batteries? These batteries aren't ideal, you won't get out 100% of the energy that is put in. I don't know the efficiency rating, and I haven't done the math, but I suspect that the losses will cut into the savings significantly.
(Posting from my phone after the event). If you are excited about this and want to work on it then please email me at [email protected]. We are very excited about the technology and future!
$3,500. That's crazy good for your average household, on par with natural gas backup generators with half the logistics. I might just be ordering sooner rather than later given some of the grid instabilities in my area over the past year, and through the mid-term in preparation for a solar switch here in Chicago.
While Elon might not be the best orator, you can easily derive his authenticity and belief in the product by virtue of his delivery. You can't do that with accuracy in the canned and carefully rehearsed.
$3500 doesn't include the inverter or transfer switch. Transfer switch is maybe $200, and it's not clear what the inverter might cost. It's a nontrivial part, since it would be responsible for daily cycle estimation and cost optimization.
For $3300 you can get a 17 kW generator with inverter and transfer switch [0], which will run for days on a house-sized propane tank. At my house in the woods, we do sometimes get multi-day power outages after storms. Though, to be fair, you need a concrete pad and 30 square feet to install the generator.
It doesn't seem like a competitive backup system, but load shifting is still appealing.
That's crazy cheap. The closest competitor which comes into my mind is probably SMA Sunny Boy Smart inverter with lithium battery, costing more than double while offering only 2 kWh of energy (but includes a solar inverter).
I don't think most households (in the US at least) could run off a single unit. You would need three units, and they would only give you 1 days capacity, compared to a natural gas generator which could keep running indefinitely.
1. How is this different from a UPS? (Similar capacities can be obtained for less money.)
2. How many cycles can we expect to get out of these? (One assumes these are designed to be cycled more often than a UPS)
3. What are the risks when temperature is outside the operating range? (If non-negligable, the stated operating range of -20C to +43C limits use in some applications, such as field stations without heating (or AC, depending on locale).
4. Is this technology viable on the scale of an entire powergrid? If it's advantageous for individual users, one would think economy of scale would make this more efficient to implement grid-wide.
5. Do these present an additional hazard in the case of fires, floods, etc.?
only 2kW? 2kW is enough to power any residential, single-family house for 95-98% of the time; you only need (a little bit) more than that at very short (few minutes) peak intervals - when heating up an oven, or some cycles of doing laundry. A second unit would provide that headroom, and otherwise (when the extra $5k for a second unit is prohibitive) you could still draw from the grid for peak loads and just not run an oven and washing machine at the same time during grid blackouts.
It does require a 21st century house - led lighting (but it's 2015 - who still uses incandescent except for those places where you don't turn on the lights more than 4 times a year anyway?), energy-conscious appliances, moderate need for A/C (sane insulation and ventilation, localized and intelligently controlled A/C needs - i.e. no 'bring all room in my 3000 square feet sheet rock and tin roof house down to 75 degrees when it's 110 degrees outside'). But whoever doesn't have that, has options to start reducing their bills that are much better than buying energy packs.
I have four rack-mount uninterruptible power supplies that provide battery backup to my workstations and servers in my house. My curiosity here is whether this Tesla battery pack will obviate those UPSs, providing automatic and immediate in-line switching to battery whenever there is an interruption.
That alone would be compelling at this price.
Edit: Incidentally, when I submit the reservation form, there is no confirmation.
The wall mount surprised me, but 10KWh at the same density as the Model S battery should be only 155lb. That's not too bad, although you need a solid connection to the building structure. Having it above floor level is a good thing, since it won't be shorted out by minor flooding.
If you get a new solar installation, installing one of these seems an obvious win. The solar installation already includes the inverters and control gear. Without solar, it's probably not worth the trouble for residential.
The average American house uses 30 KWh per day. If you have daily sun and a low nighttime air conditioning load, 10KWh should get you through the night. Hawaii - perfect. Southern California - looks good. Texas - get two to get you through the night with A/C.
As I've learned more about heat pumps I've been wondering why we all use air-source cooling for central A/C. We are cooling our condensers with hot summer time air when the temperature is much lower just four feet under the yard.
The energy requirements would drop way down by cooling the condenser with a water ground loop.
Ground loops are seen as expensive for installation, but I don't understand why. It's just plastic tubing buried in the yard. I've been wondering if a hole digging robot could lower the price. The carbon and money savings would be huge if we could bring down the cost of ground loop installation.
I wish the thing was built in such a way as to allow it to sit on a raised pedestal of sorts, with only lightweight bolts into the wall. That would address the flooding concern just fine.
I am just going to cut and paste my previous comment on Musk.
The Musk M.O:
1. Identify industry with big inefficiencies that depends on huge government subsidies. That's cars, commercial space vehicles, mass transit and now: colonizing another planet with the 0.1%.
2. Convince the media and envious government officials you are Tom Swift, boy inventor. Have these governments fight over how many billions to give you to build your space car factory.
2. Use these taxpayer dollars and gigantic tax breaks to create iconic products and services for the elite class, effectively transferring huge dollars from the poor to the rich.
3. Rinse and repeat.
I see no evidence at all that Musk cares any more about technologies to enable several billion of us to live together without slaughtering each other than he does about money.
Add the utility business to the growing list of government supported industries Musk wants to "disrupt" by which I mean establish a publicly funded, government subsidized mechanism to siphon off dollars for himself, just like Tony Stark in fact. The electricity generating and distribution system is one of the most provably useful "common goods" in the history of the human race-- why not convince people to spend more than 10 grand to power their house for 24 hours?
His reasons:
Load Shifting - residences generally have NO economic incentive to ride the demand curve, only businesses do in some cases. It is one of the most important things about the electrical system--these huge monopolies manage that curve collectively for us. Sure, transmission is inefficient, but so is decentralizing that task, while adding the risks of keeping your battery from breaking/catching fire.
Increasing self consumption- a battery does not stimulate this at all - the grid needs your power most when the sun is shining. Solar power and an inverter provides that incentive today.
Backup - One day of power in the event of a true natural disaster for $10,000 is expensive and not sufficient.
I am not a Luddite and I am a libertarian, and certainly our society needs technology visionaries right now, but I find Musk's increasingly cynical ploys and the adulation they receive pretty annoying. They seem designed to distract from the overall failure of his businesses, even if he continues to generate ideas and hype.
Your comments on his reasons are clearly counter-factual:
Load shifting on a consumer scale has been happening for decades in various places around the world (e.g. cheap nuclear energy at night powering storage heaters)
Self-consumption: in a grid increasingly fed by solar power all those peaks hit at the same time and there's been multiple recent news stories about power prices going negative at those peaks.
Backup - no-one said anything about "true" natural disasters. Backup from short power outages is already an established market in many outlying areas and a fringe benefit for almost anyone. And no-one said that you had to buy it and use it for this single purpose.
This whole area has been predicted as a growing market for years, there's others in this thread complaining that it's nothing new compared with less famous competitors, so complaints that it's a product dreamt up to soak up subsidies is a bit odd.
Having said that, if I was in charge of a government, I'd be subsidising these kinds of decentralised grid backup right now as they are already useful when viewed at a national scale. It seems likely that in a few short years they'll make economic sense for more and more people without any subsidy though.
This is much more groundbreaking than it may appear. The innovation is entirely in the price.
At $3500, you can put in two and be entirely off grid. Solar panels are cheap enough you only need batteries to last one night, as you can size the array to operate your loads even on cloudy days.
2 is not enough. 4kW seems to be the maximum potential drain from the battery. That wouldn't power an oven… let alone anything else at the same time.
4kW inverters seem to be around the $1000 mark… but they don't seem to increase linearly (10kW inverter $4000 for example).
Of course you could go totally off-grid, but the cost isn't going to be just $7k… it's likely to be at least $15-20k by the time you get everything you need and installed. At that price, you could've bought a larger capacity deep-cycle storage solution already readily available on the market with batteries that will last 20+ years.
This thing could sell like crazy in places like India. 10 kwH is enough to power an Indian home for more than a day and at 3500 dollars most middle class people would consider buying it seeing how frequent power cuts here are.
Really? According to wiki, India's middle-class makes anywhere from $10 to $50 per day. When you factor in that this will cost a lot more than $3500, would these really sell like crazy?
10 kWh is good spec. But $3500 is around Rs. 2.1 lakhs. That's a way too costly UPS(inverters) considering a 1kWh one costs within Rs. 25k and bumping it two more car batteries.
$3500 is 217000 Rs and $5000 is 310000 Rs. That's simple too expensive for a Battery pack. The prices need to be far lower with a good ROI for this to work in India.
I'm going to install a 9kW solar grid on my roof in the next couple of months - capital cost is ~$40K USD. Without the Power Wall, I'd be selling power back to the utility at around $0.10 / kWh, and buying it back at $0.09 / kWh in the evenings. The Power Wall will also let me endure grid outages as well (you can't run your house on your solar panels directly).
I'm really curious about what the end-user cost is going to be for one of these batteries, after distributor markup and utility company rebates. Would be interesting to see if it pays for itself over the 10 year lifespan of the batteries.
Open sourcing the patents to build fully solar-powered electrical grids around the will be a paradigm shift in the power structures of the world. I expect from today onward there will be a full-scale attack from those who stand to lose because of the reduced dependency on oil.
As someone who avoided the startuposphere so that I could focus on climate change activism and pricing carbon, seeing Elon Musk implore the world to avoid winning a Darwin Award was so incredibly rewarding and validating.
He will most certainly be fought tooth and nail, but he has allies.
> I expect from today onward there will be a full-scale attack from those who stand to lose because of the reduced dependency on oil.
Maybe. But remember we don't have the technology yet to completely move away from fossil fuels. The biggest issue I know of is making Airplanes electric which so far has not proven really feasible (as far as I can find anyway). This solves a huge chunk of issues but there are still plenty more before we can claim we have the technology to completely transition.
[+] [-] wiremine|11 years ago|reply
* uses my zip code to figure out what my non-peak costs might be.
* allows me to optionally calculate solar energy capture (so I can see what impact having solar would be, given the average sunny days in my area)
* takes into account the wear and tear average cold weather would have on the lifetime of the batter and the payback period.
For example, I live in Michigan, and I don't know what my off peak cost is off the top of my head. I also have no idea how much sunshine I get, or how 10 degree lows for two months would impact the battery's ability to keep a charge.
Anybody know if something like this exists?
[+] [-] spiritplumber|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|11 years ago|reply
It also makes for a really interesting opportunity for grid tied solar inverters. Now you want the inverter to power the house first, then push power to the batteries and only if they are full push it back to the grid. Software update for sure :-) of course it might make more sense to leave it DC for the push into the battery and only have the AC conversion happen post battery, so charge controller between the battery and the DC disconnect.
On a safety note I'd also really like to mount this outside, preferably against firebrick rather than my house. I realize the batteries are much safer than they have ever been, but still a cascading lithium battery failure inside my garage is not my idea of a party
[+] [-] miratrix|11 years ago|reply
Lithium Ion also has quite a different (and much less forgiving!) charging cycle that requires much more monitoring of things like temperature, though I'd imagine a lot of that would be built-in as a safety mechanism directly into the Powerwall.
What I've heard is that National Electrical Code becomes much more stringent on battery systems greater than 48V, with the line drawn at 48V due to it being used widely in the phone landline system. I'm not sure how true that story is, but I'd imagine extra care is probably warranted. 10kWh is about 9kg of TNT. :-)
[+] [-] freshyill|11 years ago|reply
From further down the comments, this is a rebranding of a battery already offered to SolarCity customers.
http://www.solarcity.com/residential/backup-power-supply
The image on SolarCity has been updated to show Tesla branding.
[+] [-] will_hughes|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yason|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZoFreX|11 years ago|reply
1) Immediate benefits to just about anyone. If you have your own solar panels, you need this (or something like it). Even if you don't, you can benefit by drawing more power during cheaper off-peak times.
2) If lots of people get in on this, we'll have the storage capacity we need on the grid to be more dependent on renewable energy. Lack of storage capacity is one of the biggest obstacles to increasing renewable generation.
3) If lots of people buy this, the price per unit goes down, and it's the most expensive component of Tesla's main product, their cars - which are effectively batteries on wheels.
[+] [-] colinsidoti|11 years ago|reply
---
Edit for why: On-demand power is expensive. "Spinning up" additional power during the day is more expensive than having certain types of power generation running all the time. In theory, pumping power into a battery at night during non-peak hours will cost less than consuming directly off the grid during the day.
I'm forgetting all the details of energy economics, but IIRC there would also be far less emissions by having consistent load on the grid all day long. Something about the ones we "spin up" also being the worst for the environment.
[+] [-] URSpider94|11 years ago|reply
Your edit is spot-on. Utilities typically use natural gas "peaker" plants to meet mid-day spikes in demand, while nuclear plants are better suited to running at a steady state.
[+] [-] hackerboos|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tootie|11 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_European_heat_wave
[+] [-] kmod|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eatmyshorts|11 years ago|reply
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/Bring-on-the-ene...
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|11 years ago|reply
I'm also wondering if the same software is going to be rolled out to Tesla's cars so that they act like Tesla Energy when plugged in overnight.
[+] [-] amass|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tarmigan|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vanadium|11 years ago|reply
While Elon might not be the best orator, you can easily derive his authenticity and belief in the product by virtue of his delivery. You can't do that with accuracy in the canned and carefully rehearsed.
[+] [-] tlb|11 years ago|reply
For $3300 you can get a 17 kW generator with inverter and transfer switch [0], which will run for days on a house-sized propane tank. At my house in the woods, we do sometimes get multi-day power outages after storms. Though, to be fair, you need a concrete pad and 30 square feet to install the generator.
It doesn't seem like a competitive backup system, but load shifting is still appealing.
[0] http://www.costco.com/Honeywell-17-kW-Automatic-Standby-Gene...
[+] [-] Yaggo|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greedo|11 years ago|reply
http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=97&t=3
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] amai|11 years ago|reply
In fact they seem to be ahead. Sonnenbattery offers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery since 2011 in Germany.
For technical details see http://www.sonnenbattery.com/strom-energie-speicher/sonnenba...
[+] [-] beloch|11 years ago|reply
1. How is this different from a UPS? (Similar capacities can be obtained for less money.)
2. How many cycles can we expect to get out of these? (One assumes these are designed to be cycled more often than a UPS)
3. What are the risks when temperature is outside the operating range? (If non-negligable, the stated operating range of -20C to +43C limits use in some applications, such as field stations without heating (or AC, depending on locale).
4. Is this technology viable on the scale of an entire powergrid? If it's advantageous for individual users, one would think economy of scale would make this more efficient to implement grid-wide.
5. Do these present an additional hazard in the case of fires, floods, etc.?
[+] [-] frakkingcylons|11 years ago|reply
AWS will be running a 4.8 megawatt hour pilot program with Tesla's batteries in the us-west-1 AZ (Northern California).
Hopefully this allows AWS and other hosting providers to use intermittent, renewable sources of energy more often.
EDIT: I'm guessing AWS will be using a cluster of 48 power packs (100 kilowatt hours each).
[+] [-] prostoalex|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Qualman|11 years ago|reply
[1]: http://store.storeimages.cdn-apple.com/4572/as-images.apple....
[+] [-] BorisMelnik|11 years ago|reply
"What if we could move the electricity grid off of fossil fuels" (Tesla)
vs
"Be prepared the next time the power goes out."(Solar City)
[+] [-] kondro|11 years ago|reply
It will get expensive by the time you actually have all the bits you need inside your house.
How is this better than deep-cycle batteries (with 20+ year lives) again? Why does it need to be slimline?
[+] [-] roel_v|11 years ago|reply
only 2kW? 2kW is enough to power any residential, single-family house for 95-98% of the time; you only need (a little bit) more than that at very short (few minutes) peak intervals - when heating up an oven, or some cycles of doing laundry. A second unit would provide that headroom, and otherwise (when the extra $5k for a second unit is prohibitive) you could still draw from the grid for peak loads and just not run an oven and washing machine at the same time during grid blackouts.
It does require a 21st century house - led lighting (but it's 2015 - who still uses incandescent except for those places where you don't turn on the lights more than 4 times a year anyway?), energy-conscious appliances, moderate need for A/C (sane insulation and ventilation, localized and intelligently controlled A/C needs - i.e. no 'bring all room in my 3000 square feet sheet rock and tin roof house down to 75 degrees when it's 110 degrees outside'). But whoever doesn't have that, has options to start reducing their bills that are much better than buying energy packs.
[+] [-] uberdog|11 years ago|reply
"so you don't need a battery room" - Elon Musk
[+] [-] sidcool|11 years ago|reply
0. Tesla will open source its patents for the Gigafactory.
1. Elon thinks all the world's energy needs can be served with 2 billion Tesla GW powepacks.
2. Elon: "This is something we can do, need to do and should do."
It's over.
[+] [-] bhauer|11 years ago|reply
That alone would be compelling at this price.
Edit: Incidentally, when I submit the reservation form, there is no confirmation.
[+] [-] Animats|11 years ago|reply
If you get a new solar installation, installing one of these seems an obvious win. The solar installation already includes the inverters and control gear. Without solar, it's probably not worth the trouble for residential.
The average American house uses 30 KWh per day. If you have daily sun and a low nighttime air conditioning load, 10KWh should get you through the night. Hawaii - perfect. Southern California - looks good. Texas - get two to get you through the night with A/C.
[+] [-] willholloway|11 years ago|reply
The energy requirements would drop way down by cooling the condenser with a water ground loop.
Ground loops are seen as expensive for installation, but I don't understand why. It's just plastic tubing buried in the yard. I've been wondering if a hole digging robot could lower the price. The carbon and money savings would be huge if we could bring down the cost of ground loop installation.
[+] [-] Florin_Andrei|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] billiam|11 years ago|reply
The Musk M.O: 1. Identify industry with big inefficiencies that depends on huge government subsidies. That's cars, commercial space vehicles, mass transit and now: colonizing another planet with the 0.1%. 2. Convince the media and envious government officials you are Tom Swift, boy inventor. Have these governments fight over how many billions to give you to build your space car factory. 2. Use these taxpayer dollars and gigantic tax breaks to create iconic products and services for the elite class, effectively transferring huge dollars from the poor to the rich. 3. Rinse and repeat.
I see no evidence at all that Musk cares any more about technologies to enable several billion of us to live together without slaughtering each other than he does about money.
Add the utility business to the growing list of government supported industries Musk wants to "disrupt" by which I mean establish a publicly funded, government subsidized mechanism to siphon off dollars for himself, just like Tony Stark in fact. The electricity generating and distribution system is one of the most provably useful "common goods" in the history of the human race-- why not convince people to spend more than 10 grand to power their house for 24 hours?
His reasons:
Load Shifting - residences generally have NO economic incentive to ride the demand curve, only businesses do in some cases. It is one of the most important things about the electrical system--these huge monopolies manage that curve collectively for us. Sure, transmission is inefficient, but so is decentralizing that task, while adding the risks of keeping your battery from breaking/catching fire.
Increasing self consumption- a battery does not stimulate this at all - the grid needs your power most when the sun is shining. Solar power and an inverter provides that incentive today.
Backup - One day of power in the event of a true natural disaster for $10,000 is expensive and not sufficient.
I am not a Luddite and I am a libertarian, and certainly our society needs technology visionaries right now, but I find Musk's increasingly cynical ploys and the adulation they receive pretty annoying. They seem designed to distract from the overall failure of his businesses, even if he continues to generate ideas and hype.
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|11 years ago|reply
Load shifting on a consumer scale has been happening for decades in various places around the world (e.g. cheap nuclear energy at night powering storage heaters)
Self-consumption: in a grid increasingly fed by solar power all those peaks hit at the same time and there's been multiple recent news stories about power prices going negative at those peaks.
Backup - no-one said anything about "true" natural disasters. Backup from short power outages is already an established market in many outlying areas and a fringe benefit for almost anyone. And no-one said that you had to buy it and use it for this single purpose.
This whole area has been predicted as a growing market for years, there's others in this thread complaining that it's nothing new compared with less famous competitors, so complaints that it's a product dreamt up to soak up subsidies is a bit odd.
Having said that, if I was in charge of a government, I'd be subsidising these kinds of decentralised grid backup right now as they are already useful when viewed at a national scale. It seems likely that in a few short years they'll make economic sense for more and more people without any subsidy though.
[+] [-] bronz|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marze|11 years ago|reply
At $3500, you can put in two and be entirely off grid. Solar panels are cheap enough you only need batteries to last one night, as you can size the array to operate your loads even on cloudy days.
[+] [-] kondro|11 years ago|reply
4kW inverters seem to be around the $1000 mark… but they don't seem to increase linearly (10kW inverter $4000 for example).
Of course you could go totally off-grid, but the cost isn't going to be just $7k… it's likely to be at least $15-20k by the time you get everything you need and installed. At that price, you could've bought a larger capacity deep-cycle storage solution already readily available on the market with batteries that will last 20+ years.
[+] [-] thewarrior|11 years ago|reply
This thing could sell like crazy in places like India. 10 kwH is enough to power an Indian home for more than a day and at 3500 dollars most middle class people would consider buying it seeing how frequent power cuts here are.
[+] [-] latch|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] morekozhambu|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kamaal|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] localhost|11 years ago|reply
I'm really curious about what the end-user cost is going to be for one of these batteries, after distributor markup and utility company rebates. Would be interesting to see if it pays for itself over the 10 year lifespan of the batteries.
I just reserved one.
[+] [-] milesf|11 years ago|reply
Open sourcing the patents to build fully solar-powered electrical grids around the will be a paradigm shift in the power structures of the world. I expect from today onward there will be a full-scale attack from those who stand to lose because of the reduced dependency on oil.
First they ignore you.
Then they laugh at you.
Then they fight you. <--- WE ARE HERE
Then you win.
[+] [-] ridicter|11 years ago|reply
He will most certainly be fought tooth and nail, but he has allies.
[+] [-] BinaryIdiot|11 years ago|reply
Maybe. But remember we don't have the technology yet to completely move away from fossil fuels. The biggest issue I know of is making Airplanes electric which so far has not proven really feasible (as far as I can find anyway). This solves a huge chunk of issues but there are still plenty more before we can claim we have the technology to completely transition.
I'm excited for the possibility however.
[+] [-] seanp2k2|11 years ago|reply
What do you do with the batteries and the toxic materials inside when you're done with them (and how long do they last)?
What do you do with all the toxic materials produced during mining, refining, and production of batteries and materials?
How do you deal with these same issues as they affect solar panels, which are made of silicon?