This website and others that are mostly geared towards cars (pardon the pun) seem to be talking the most about this new offering from Tesla - makes sense since Tesla is primarily viewed as a car company.
Other news sites are picking up the story too of course, such as The Washington Post with this story. **Note: The following story at the original site has about 20 hyperlinks I didn't bother with - mostly to other WP stories. I re-linked two that were more prominently placed.Tesla Home Battery Details Emerge
Details about the Tesla home battery are beginning to emerge. Is that what Elon Musk was hinting at when he Tweeted a few days ago about a major, non-automotive announcement coming on April 30? We don’t know, of course, but most Musk watchers think that’s what the hoopla is all about.
According to Benzinga, Trip Chowdhry, a stock analyst for Global Equities Research, has sent a note to his investors with some details. He claims 230 California homes currently have a Tesla home battery installation and that there are another 100 in homes in other states.
Want details? OK. Here’s what one of the homeowers who claims to be testing the Tesla battery told Chowdry:
The Battery has to be installed 1.5 feet above the ground, and should have an open space of 1 ft on all sides.
The battery does not make any noise, does not need any maintenance, and has no drippings.
The Battery includes the inverter.
The battery is about 3 ft tall and 2.5 ft wide and looks good.
The installer offered a choice between a 10 kWh and 15 kWh. He opted for the 10 kWh battery.
Price for the 10 kWh battery is said to be $13,000. At present, the local utility, Pacific Gas & Electric, is offering a 50% rebate. This particular homeowner opted for a payment plan that called for a down payment of $1500 and monthly payments of $15 for 10 years. But here’s the kicker. He charges the battery at night when electricity costs are lowest and sells it back to PG&E during the peak demand times every day. He says he makes $12 – $15 a month doing that, which pretty much covers his monthly payment.
Here’s more interesting tidbits Chowdry says he learned from the Tesla battery customer:
The battery can be controlled from an iPhone, and has a web application also.
The battery is set to charge from a solar system until fully charged and then send energy back into the grid.
Fully off Grid. The battery can be charged by a regular generator also.
He has not had any problems with the Battery System…and gets over the air wireless software updates frequently.
That is all very exciting news. But be warned. Not every utility is as generous with its rebates or willing to take back electricity from homeowners as PG&E. Part of that willingness is spurred by mandates from the California government that require them to get 33% of their electrical power from renewable sources by 2020. Not every state is as focused on environmental issues as California is. And many utilities are outright hostile to home solar power in general.
In other words, as we car people are fond of saying: “Your mileage may vary. See retailer for details.”
Experts: Powering your home with batteries is going to get cheaper and cheaper
In the past few weeks, there’s been a battery of new studies on batteries. Not the kind in your cellphone, but a much more revolutionary make – the kind that is already powering many cars, and that might someday help power your home.
A recent study in Energy Policy, for instance, found that the cost of batteries for home systems (to store the energy collected by rooftop solar panels) is starting to decline – although even with these systems, it probably won’t be economically optimal for most people to ditch the grid entirely. Another report by the Rocky Mountain Institute similarly found that within 10 to 15 years in some places, the most economical choice for home energy could be a solar plus battery system, meaning that there could be a great deal of “load defection” from the traditional electricity grid.
Finally, a new study in Nature Climate Change documented that there has been a steep decline in the cost of lithium ion batteries for electric vehicles like Teslas – 14 percent per year plunge since 2007.
All of which is being hailed as pretty revolutionary. “Solar-plus-batteries is set to begin a dramatic transformation of human civilization,” wrote Bloomberg commentator Noah Smith recently, commenting not only on the declining price of batteries for electric vehicles, but also the potential for more batteries in homes.
But there’s a need for caution. People with home battery systems paired with solar panels certainly exist, but are quite rare for the moment. One problem is that right now, there just aren’t many ways to make a home energy storage system investment pay off.
So why do some analysts nonetheless think that solar plus battery systems could become quite prevalent in homes, and maybe sooner than we think? Here are some reasons:
1. Cost declines for solar are already a done deal. Batteries could be analogous.
The first reason is that rooftop solar has pretty much already arrived. The Solar Energy Industries Association found that rooftop solar grew by over 50 percent in each of the last three years (2012, 2013, and 2014), and a new report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance forecasts record growth for the market in 2015.
In-home batteries are definitely a lot further off for most people, but many analogies have been noted. The recent Energy Policy paper observes, for instance, that “it is anticipated that battery technology may follow the rapid downward price trajectory of PV [solar photovoltaic] as manufacturing scale increases.”
“Storage is kind of 10 years from where PV is today,” says Bodhi Rader of the Rocky Mountain Institute. “It’s along that same trend, and there’s constant innovations being made, but there’s still a bit of a battleground over what might be the technology or the chemistry that wins out.”
2. The utility industry is taking this seriously.
The Rocky Mountain Institute report makes the case that the home solar plus battery combo, when it arrives, may challenge the traditional business model of many utilities. And is worth noting that voices from the industry itself have shown some concern.
In 2013, for instance, the Edison Electric Institute, the utility industry trade group, published a report on “disruptive challenges” to the industry, which noted:
…one can imagine a day when battery storage technology or micro turbines could allow customers to be electric grid independent. To put this into perspective, who would have believed 10 years ago that traditional wire line telephone customers could economically “cut the cord?”
Or listen to David Crane, the CEO of energy behemoth NRG, who says his company is headed “down the path towards a distributed generation-centric, clean energy future featuring individual choice and the empowerment of the American energy consumer.”
3. Tesla as the potential game changer.
Perhaps the biggest driver of battery enthusiasm, though, is the company that already sells sleek battery-powered electric vehicles – Tesla.
Not only has Tesla seen the cost of vehicle batteries decline, per the Nature Climate Change study cited above. That could be just the beginning, once the company, teaming up with Panasonic, opens its battery-building “Gigafactory” in Nevada.
[The gamble on Tesla’s gigafactory in the Nevada desert]
The company says this will further drive down battery costs – and thus, electric vehicle costs. And this could then spill over to home batteries as well. “Consumer electronics and EV, they’re the two industries that have been making storage economical,” said Bodhi Rader, “and continued consumer adoption in these related industries is going to continue to drive cost reductions.”
There is also a sense in which Teslas represent a kind of proof of principle for in home batteries. “It’s actually a lot easier to put it in a house than in a car. In a stationary application, weight doesn’t really matter that much,” said Peter Lilienthal of Homer Energy, which co-authored the Rocky Mountain Institute report.
Finally, there’s much talk about Tesla’s plans to introduce a home battery unit. If there’s anything like the amount of attention to such a product as there is currently to Tesla’s vehicles, then that adds another major, if somewhat more intangible factor – coolness.
[This new Tesla battery will power your home, and maybe the electric grid too]
The Rocky Mountain Institute’s Rader notes that in this case, people might be willing to pay quite a lot of money for home batteries, even before prices come down to levels where it would be “economically rational” to do so, in light of the expected return they would get on their investment (in the form of lower electricity bills).
“If companies can start presenting that coolness factor,” he said, “that I think would change the conversation completely.”
Such, then, is the optimistic case.
Lest we get too far out on skis, though, let us once again note that there are still many concerns and uncertainties. First, there are plenty of Tesla skeptics out there, including one commentator at the Energy Collective who noted,
Selling batteries to homeowners is not going to be easy. There’s a good reason why so few of us have large battery banks in our homes, and it’s not because there aren’t any for sale. Batteries are expensive, and the advantages they offer homeowners are few. The majority of homeowners with PV panels get most of the benefits of batteries by hooking up their panels to the grid at little or no cost. For homeowners without solar panels, the grid in most locations is sufficiently reliable that there’s little to gain from having battery backup. If Musk is going to sell those customers batteries, he’s going to have to sell them much more cheaply than current prices, and it’s not clear that a 30 percent cost reduction is going to be enough.
And besides technological pessimism about batteries themselves — or about whether their costs will come down enough to make them a viable option for most homeowners — one key question involves what a profusion of batteries does to the electrical grid.
The Rocky Mountain Institute report notes that widespread adoption of solar plus battery systems in homes could be a blow to grid upkeep. The reason is that we need a huge amount of investment in the grid, and customers whose electricity loads “defect” won’t be paying as much for electricity, and so won’t be contributing as much to the cost of these infrastructure improvements.
Basically, if utilities make less money because customers pay them less, then utilities may invest less. And a grid that’s less modernized could be less reliable.
But there’s also an argument that this trend could help with strengthening the grid. First, in addition to going into homes, much larger batteries could help back up the grid itself. James Mandel, of the Rocky Mountain Institute, noted that batteries could “do a lot of balancing and grid management services more cheaply.”
Moreover, added Homer Energy’s Lilienthal, solar plus battery homeowners might actually be able to help the grid in a crisis by temporarily ceasing to draw power from it. After all, at a time of power outage, they’d presumably still have charged home batteries. “When the grid can’t handle the demand, they could drop off,” said Lilienthal.
He added, though, that this might require putting these homeowners on what he calls an “interruptable rate,” meaning they’d be charged less for power from the grid but with the understanding that their service might stop at certain key times.
In summary, it is a heady time for battery forecasters, and there are a lot of trends that are getting people excited. But we can only know one thing for certain about the future — that it probably won’t look like anybody’s present day forecast.
