Originally published on Gas2.
Wall Street has not been kind to the idea of Tesla Motors buying SolarCity in a deal that would involve no cash but would pay the solar panel company with $2.8 billion in Tesla stock. Some analysts have even used words like “deranged” when referring to Elon Musk’s latest idea. But according to Bloomberg, Elon may be crazy like a fox. Here’s why:
Over 1.3 million households in Australia have rooftop solar power, so it only seems reasonable that Tesla has chosen this country as one of the first that will receive its 7-kWh Powerwall home energy storage systems. They could be available as early as December of 2015, though it had been predicted they will begin arriving in 2016.
A startup named Reposit Power based in Canberra is working with Tesla to distribute the Powerwalls. The company also has created technology that integrates solar power with energy storage and it can sell stored electricity back to the grid to make money. Reposit calls the technology an energy storage and trading system.
“The idea is to buy from the grid when prices are lowest, consume as much of your own solar as possible, and occasionally sell to the markets when prices spike. This will reduce or get rid of your power bills,” said Reposit director Dean Spaccavento.
The potential to sell electricity back to the grid is intriguing: could you make enough to cover the cost of the battery system by selling electricity? If it was possible, how long would it take?
The growth of energy storage is significant for a number of reasons, but perhaps none is greater than the ability for a whole country to shift away from fossil fuels. “Australia could reach that 50% target, it just requires well-designed policies and markets that allow a transition from centralised, large-scale fossil fuels to efficient but variable renewables. Storage is a key part to make that happen. The beauty of renewables is that once you’ve managed the capital cost, there is no fuel cost. There’s an energy security there you don’t get with fossil fuels,” explained sustainable energy expert Professor Anthony Vassallo.
Also just announced, in the Netherlands, Eneco will be the first Powerwall supplier.
Tesla obviously makes great cars, but it seems that because the Powerwalls are priced much lower, they could sell in greater volume, and Tesla’s brand recognition would only increase.
Image Credit: JJ Harrison, Wiki Commons
Vermont’s main utility is going to be providing Tesla Powerwall home battery systems to customers who want them. If the utility’s customer agrees to allow the utility to use electricity stored in a Powerwall at home, the customer will also get paid for its use. There are three ways a customer can pay for the Powerwall:
“GMP outlined to the Vermont Public Service Board its plan to offer three options to customers who want the Powerwall. Customers who share access of the battery will pay about $37.50 a month with no upfront cost, which equals $1.25 a day. Customers can also choose to purchase the Powerwall for about $6500, share access with GMP, and get a monthly bill credit of $31.76, which represents the value of leveraging the battery to help lower peak energy costs. And Vermonters can buy the Powerwall outright from GMP with no shared access for about $6500.”
Of course, the Powerwall battery system is meant to be paired with a solar power system to store excess electricity for periods when there is no sunlight, such as cloudy days and at night. The utility will be able to use some of the stored electricity to meet demand on the grid, rather than using conventional sources, like firing up a peaker plant, such as the Berlin plant. “The Berlin Gas Turbine facility is the largest peaking plant in Vermont, and consists of a Pratt & Whitney Twin Pack gas turbine generator and two Pratt & Whitney Simple Cycle FT4 engines. The unit has an approximate capacity of 50 MW at full output. Low-sulfur kerosene fuels the engines from two on-site fuel tanks.” Peaker plants can be expensive to operate and are typically not very environmentally friendly, because they use fossil fuels.
“This is community energy at the most local level, helping to increase resiliency for customers while we lower costs through innovations like battery storage. This ties into our eHome and eBiz program, as we work with Vermonters to accelerate the adoption of energy transformations in homes and businesses that are cost effective, use dramatically less energy and can operate more independently of the grid,” explained GMP president Mary Powell.
Using many home battery systems filled with electricity generated by solar panels is much better for the environment, and can be cheaper.
The utility will purchase 500 Powerwalls from Tesla in 2016 for the home energy storage program.
Of course, Vermont residents are still free to purchase and install other home energy storage batteries. The Powerwall seems to be the default option because of its low cost and high brand factor. In other words, the Tesla brand has become synonymous with boldness and quality in its niche.
Image Credit: Tesla
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently met Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk to discuss the implications of the Tesla Powerwall — the company’s battery energy storage technology — for India.
It was a simple official visit, and as per media reports, there was no talk of Tesla setting up manufacturing facilities in India. The company, however, stated earlier that India could be “one of the potential markets in Asia to have a local assembly plant” if the government moves towards a pro-electric vehicle policy.
Thanks @elonmusk for showing me around at @TeslaMotors.Enjoyed discussion on how battery technology can help farmers pic.twitter.com/r2YuSPPlty
— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) September 27, 2015
If and when that happens, the real opportunity for India here is to leapfrog the conventional grid and move straight to distributed generation (and consumption) of power, something similar to what happened in the telecom sector where most of the country got connected via mobile telephony, without having to go through the landline model.
But the important thing which the visit did achieve was to start discussions on Powerwall usage in India. As a proof, you can look at the comments from those discussing the (un)economics of the battery and spammers trying to drive some traffic to their sites. Even at its launch, the Powerwall was discussed in the niche forums in India quite extensively.
At both times, the battery got dismissed outright as “a too costly to consider” solution.
I have one small issue (and one big rant) with these (as I call them) pseudo-economic-experts. The problem with their discourse is that, to use an idiom, they miss the forest for the trees. They have no idea of the future and certainly no understanding of how technology pricing works.
At least for us in the cleantech space, this has become a regular (boring) cycle now.
Think of any new development — and all these people want to talk about is its cost right now. If the current costs are high (which, unsurprisingly, they are), the product/technology gets labeled as just another toy for rich green people.
Don’t get me wrong — the cost is a very important issue. But it is insane to dismiss the whole idea as forever infeasible.
World’s first hard drive with a mighty 5 MB storage via Wired
Orison is a San Diego–based technology company that offers customers a 2 kilowatt-hour plug & play battery that fits into a standard wall outlet and can keep an electrical circuit hot for several hours or more if a power outage strikes. It comes in two styles — the tower looks like a simple floor lamp while the wall unit resembles a sleek picture frame on the wall.
The concept Orison home battery was introduced on August 20 at the University of California San Diego. Len Hering, executive director of the Center for Sustainable Energy, praised the 2-year-old startup’s efforts in a news release, according to the San Diego Tribune.
Orison CEO and cofounder Eric Clifton, drawing on seven years of experience in green technology startups, believes the battery tower and wall unit can play a prominent role in the emerging Internet of Things, just like the Nest smart thermostat. “The way we look at it, we are the Nest of the energy industry,” he says.
Clifton believes that other household battery entries — most notably the Powerwall from Tesla — miss the mark when it comes to bringing energy storage to the masses. That’s because Tesla’s home battery requires its own inverter and has to be professionally hardwired into the household circuity, potentially involving inspections and permits.
With the Orison home battery, customers don’t have to own a home, or even live in one. The units are perfect for apartment dwellers as well as suburban homeowners. Wireless controls and smartphone-connected software set the Orison battery apart from utilitarian emergency batteries like a Duracell Powerpack, and, at under 40 pounds, it is light enough to ship by mail.
How much electricity can it hold? It can easily keep lights on through the night, or run a dishwasher four times. “Two kilowatt-hours works well if you’re trying to offset a fridge and a television,” Clifton says.
Originally published on EV Obsession.
Tesla Motors CTO JB Straubel was the headliner at Intersolar North America last week. He talked about the transition to lithium-ion batteries and how that opened the floodgates for electric cars and stationary storage (eventually); the synergy between EVs, solar, and grid storage; the growth of solar power and grid storage; blah blah blah.
I know, I actually love all that stuff as much as the rest of you — it’s what I read, edit, & write about every day(!) — but it’s basically all general history and trends we know all about. But then JB dropped the awesome-bomb:
“I think we’re at the beginning of a new cost-decline curve, and, you know, this is something where there’s a lot of similarities to what happened with photovoltaics. Almost no one [would have predicted] that photovoltaic prices would have dropped as fast as they have, and storage is right at the cliff, heading down that price curve. It’s soon going to be cheaper to drive a car on electricity — a pure EV on electricity — than it is to drive a gasoline car. And as soon as we see that kind of shift in the actual cost of operation in a car that you can actually use for your daily driver, you know, from all manufacturers I believe we’re going to see electric vehicles come to dominate the whole transportation fleet.
“Also, that same battery cost decrease is going to drive batteries in the grid. There’s going to be much faster growth of grid energy storage than I think most people expected. You suddenly get to have energy that’s 100% firm and buffered from photovoltaics that’s cheaper than fossil energy. And we’re within sort of grasping distance of that goal, which is very, very exciting.
“Because once we get to that, and there really is no going back, it will make sense to do this economically without any environmental consideration whatsoever. So that’s the amazing tipping point that’s going to happen within I’m quite certain the next 10 years.”
The next 10 years!
Word.
Mic drop.
(Though, he didn’t actually drop the mic.
You can watch the highlights via Intersolar on YouTube — video below or just start here to jump to JB.
Another great quote, however, was this gem: “It’s not going to be many years before Tesla will have a million cars, or 70 gigawatt-hours of storage.” (That quote wasn’t in the highlight video above for some reason!)
One million cars. Can you imagine? Will you have a Tesla by then?
Right after the start of the summer season, solar business heated up when SEC filing news noted that Elon Musk’s SpaceX would be purchasing an additional $75 million in solar-backed bonds from SolarCity (of which Elon is Chairman), boosting its total investment to $165 million.
Elektrek writer Fred Lambert recently reported this investment comes “just after a major setback for SpaceX, its Flacon 9 rocket exploded Sunday morning on a mission to resupply the International Space Station.”
SpaceX was started by Musk in 2002, and has a goal of “making humans a multi-planetary species.”
LearnBonds provided this perspective on the SEC filing:
There is no major business link between SolarCity and SpaceX and the two firms operate in very different sectors. One thing they do have in common, however, is that those with cash, or emotional investment, behind them tend to believe in the vision of Elon Musk.
Those with shares in Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) and SolarCity Corp believe deeply in the future that he has outlined, and they think they can make money by getting there.
The influence of 43-year old Elon Musk’s investment vision is something to be reckoned with. As writer Jay Taylor puts it, “Shares of Tesla and SolarCity are up around 84% and 65% respectively over the past year, so I know I’m not the only one who believes in the Elon Musk future.”
Image: Elon Musk via Shutterstock
When Tesla announced the Powerwall, its home energy storage product, it was stated that SolarCity* would be offering the Powerwall to its customers in Hawaii and California. However, details were slim.
Now, SolarCity has officially announced “energy storage for new homes and a special low, fixed-rate solar power offering for California homebuilders and their buyers.”
The SolarCity Homebuilder Program, launched in 2011, is now taking orders for the storage product. Here are some more details:
“The new energy storage service, in conjunction with solar power, includes the Tesla Powerwall battery pack, advanced hybrid inverter, monitoring and control systems and a warranty and service agreement. While battery backup is the primary application, depending on utility service territory, SolarCity’s management system may in the future enable the Powerwall to be configured for a broad range of uses including time-of-use shifting and grid response.”
The financing is, of course, part of the offering. SolarCity’s big selling point to most of its customers is that it allows them to go solar for little or no money down (without getting a loan) and then pay monthly less than they’d pay the utility. There’s plenty of criticism out there that customers would save more by getting a solar loan, but that’s certainly not always the case, and SolarCity’s key selling points (and selling tactics) have made it far and away the home solar power leader in the United States. This is the heart of SolarCity’s newest offering as well.
SolarCity’s Homebuilder Program now offers solar energy through homebuilder partners at a cost equivalent to the lowest standard residential electricity rates of California’s largest utilities. This new program provides the benefits of solar energy at no upfront cost to the builder or homebuyer. It also allows new homebuyers who are customers of California’s largest utilities to lock in a fixed solar energy rate for the next 20 years at the lowest standard, tier 1 rate their utility offers at signing.
SolarCity makes it possible for homebuilders to allow many buyers to go solar with no upfront cost and no escalator on annual solar energy costs. The program can provide homeowners in California with security from rising utility rates and significant savings with solar power for the next two decades.
*Full Disclosure: I’m long SCTY.
We are all familiar with the old expression, “Don’t raise the bridge; lower the river.” That’s exactly what 24M, a startup company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has done.
24M was formed in 2010 by Dr. Yet-Ming Chiang and a group of researchers at MIT. Chiang’s name should be familiar to anyone who has followed the lithium-ion battery business over the past decade. He also founded A123, an advanced battery company that led the way toward more affordable lithium-ion batteries. It soared to great financial heights before it crashed back to earth. It finally went bankrupt and its assets were purchased by China’s Wanxiang.
But Chiang and his group didn’t give up. They turned their attention to researching flow batteries which use liquid electrolytes stored in tanks. Need more storage? Just make the tanks bigger. Unlike lithium-ion batteries, a flow battery is temperature stable, can withstand far more discharge cycles and uses environmentally friendly electrolytes. But they tend to be quite large and heavy.
Eventually, Chiang’s team turned their attention back to lithium-ion batteries and came to a startling conclusion. Says Chiang, “The lithium-ion battery is a brilliant, enabling technology, but its economics are flawed. It’s prohibitively expensive; it’s cumbersome and inefficient to make; and today’s version is approaching the limits of its cost reductions.”
Today’s batteries are manufactured using techniques left over from the days of making cassette tapes. When CDs replaced cassettes, Sony was left with lots of unused manufacturing capacity. It figured out how to convert that equipment to making electrodes for lithium-ion batteries using lots of thin plates. Each plate needed a spacer to keep it separate from the others. Those non-conductive spacers took up a lot of room in the completed batteries.
Advanced Microgrid Solutions and Tesla will work together to provide up to 500 megawatts of battery backup capacity for utilities and large commercial buildings in California, according to recent news. The Tesla batteries will be used first to provide 50 megawatts of power storage for Southern California Edison.
AMS CEO Jackalyne Pfannenstiel, a former Assistant Secretary of the US Navy, told Bloomberg Business in an interview: “It was very clear from the beginning that Tesla’s was just a standout technology. We intend to use Tesla batteries on a huge number of our projects going forward, and our pipeline is a lot bigger than just the Edison project.”
Kennedy says her company uses the best technology from the best suppliers it can find. “What I like about the Tesla batteries is that they’re so versatile,” she said. “But we’re technology agnostic. We can choose any type of technology.” AMS may use batteries from other manufacturers in the future if they can out-perform Tesla products for particular applications. Kennedy would not reveal the price her company is paying for the Tesla batteries.