Category: Batteries

Tesla’s Trojan Horse

Posted on by Carlos Enrique

There are two key takeaways from the article, aside from the obvious: *stationary* storage will be 10% of annual electric vehicle lithium-ion sales, and $44B will be invested in the next 8 years, with the bulk of it being in the last 2 years.

My guess is that storage on a massive scale is partly dependent on the adoption of electric vehicles. Tesla is banking on the adoption of private vehicles to Trojan Horse battery packs into homes that wouldn’t have them otherwise. This is why Tesla isn’t pushing their consumer home battery pack, but is pushing solar panels.

At the moment, combining solar panels and battery packs doesn’t make economic sense. The battery packs alone aren’t at the price point that would even break even in most markets, leaving early adoption to those that are ideologically committed to a cause, whether that’s environmental preservation, technological progression, or self-sufficiency.

That will never be the impetus behind mass-market adoption of new technologies or business models, which is why the Model 3 is important to Tesla for several reasons. The first, and most obvious, is that it’ll prove their mettle as an automobile manufacturer. The second reason is that it’s a way to get an expensive Tesla battery into a home while still being useful. Not only can it get the owner to their job and back home, it can also store energy generated and contribute towards load balancing.

This is going to be a massively difficult task, given that cars can be plugged and unplugged at any time and owners will expect their cars to be at full charge (or near it) when they use the car after leaving it plugged in. Some of this can be solved through predictive analytics (most people will leave their cars plugged in between 9-5, and again 8-7), but it can be handily solved by autonomous car fleets, yet another project Tesla is pursuing it.

If we put all these together, Tesla will be able to track electricity produced by their solar panels, monitor consumption and storage via their battery packs/cars, and actively manage usage/availability of those batteries through their autonomous fleet.

Tesla seeks to be more than a manufacturer of automobiles, battery packs, and solar panels, a utility monitoring system, and a transportation system. It seeks to be all of these in order to become the next generation of utilities, taking advantage of existing infrastructure and building a new infrastructure on top of it.

Tesla and SolarCity Agree to Combine Forces—Even as SolarCity Struggles to Meet Targets – Katherine Tweed – Greentech Media
The Global Energy Storage Action Is Heading East – Jason Deign – Greentech Media

The Winds Shift and the Sun Rises

Posted on by Carlos Enrique
A wind farm in Weatherford, Okla. In a study, the cost of wind power came in as low as 1.4 cents a kilowatt-hour. Credit: Paul Hellstern for The New York Times

Solar and wind generated electricity have reached price levels that are comparable, if not superior, to that of conventional fuels such as coal and natural gas. This is a wonderful and significant event, particularly because they are now price competitive without continued government support.

While continued government support would certainly be a boon to the industry and speed its adoption, the removal of government support would not be a death knell for the alternative energy industry. Unfortunately, the alternative energy industry has been stuck in a boom-and-bust cycle for the previous 44 years, mostly due to intermittent government support for both research and development, and deployment of alternative energy technologies. The fact that these technologies are finally commercially competitive sans government support means that, while the growth of the industry is impacted by government involvement, the industry is certainly not the risky investment it was before.

There is still one major issue to tackle, however. The current intermittent nature of solar and wind electrical power generation means that it is still very expensive for utilities (and individuals, but particularly utilities) to adopt alternative energy technologies wholesale. There are instances of utilities investing in large scale alternative energy power plants, but it is still necessary for utilities to have back-up, on-demand power plants based on coal or gas in order to smooth out the power generation curve. This is a very expensive set up, and so long as alternative energy generation has the intermittency issue, cost will remain a prohibitive barrier to the full-scale implementation of alternative energy around the country.

The solution? Utility-scale battery grids capable of storing and distributing the power generated by solar and wind. This would allow for solar and wind farms to smooth out their energy curve on their own, eliminating the need for expensive, massive back-up power plants.

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Solar and Wind Energy Start to Win on Price vs. Conventional Fuels

According to a study by the investment banking firm Lazard, the cost of utility-scale solar energy is as low as 5.6 cents a kilowatt-hour, and wind is as low as 1.4 cents. In comparison, natural gas comes at 6.1 cents a kilowatt-hour on the low end and coal at 6.6 cents. Without subsidies, the firm’s analysis shows, solar costs about 7.2 cents a kilowatt-hour at the low end, with wind at 3.7 cents.