Tesla Motors Club
I have a family member who is running an HOA in South Africa, consisting out of around 800 fairly upscale homes.
As some of you may know from the New York Times article over the weekend, South Africa has had rolling blackouts (load shedding) for the last few years, and is expected to have that until the end of the decade. The blackouts last from 2 to 4 hours every day or two.
A lot of people are now turning to generators and individual solar/battery solutions to augment the grid, but we were wondering what the economics would be of doing a Powerpack solution instead for this whole estate. So I want to help put a slide-deck together for the HOA. (This is just for them to justify the time & cost of getting an Engineer out to do a formal assessment, not for anything more than that).
Can someone comment on whether my assumptions are reasonable?
I figured to sustain 800 houses for 2 to 4 hours you would need around 2 MW of peak supply capability, and around 4 MWh of stored energy. I'm using the 400 house/MW model, which is probably overkill. However, load shedding happens during peak times, so that would need to be considered.
To store 4 MWh of energy, at 80% efficiency, one would need 50 Powerpacks.
That would work out to be around $1.25m. Add ~$50k for shipping + insurance, and you get ~$1.3m.
Then for the inverters I haven't seen a price for a 2 MW inverter, but I can see a 1 MW inverter here for $250k. I suppose they'll need 2 of them, so $0.5m? Is this a reasonable quote? I've seen inverters as high as $150k for 100 kW (it would be scary if I need to budget $3m for the inverters!)
Let's add $250k for taxes, $200k for installation, and $150k for unforeseeables (e.g. "convincing" the utility to do proper billing for this), and this looks like to be around a $2.4m project.
There is a lot of empty land available on the estate to host these, as long as the Powerpacks don't need to be indoors (I don't think they do).
Did I miss anything else?
If this is accurate, it would mean around a $3000 one-time levy per house, which should be a fairly easy sell to the HOA board.
As some of you may know from the New York Times article over the weekend, South Africa has had rolling blackouts (load shedding) for the last few years, and is expected to have that until the end of the decade. The blackouts last from 2 to 4 hours every day or two.
A lot of people are now turning to generators and individual solar/battery solutions to augment the grid, but we were wondering what the economics would be of doing a Powerpack solution instead for this whole estate. So I want to help put a slide-deck together for the HOA. (This is just for them to justify the time & cost of getting an Engineer out to do a formal assessment, not for anything more than that).
Can someone comment on whether my assumptions are reasonable?
I figured to sustain 800 houses for 2 to 4 hours you would need around 2 MW of peak supply capability, and around 4 MWh of stored energy. I'm using the 400 house/MW model, which is probably overkill. However, load shedding happens during peak times, so that would need to be considered.
To store 4 MWh of energy, at 80% efficiency, one would need 50 Powerpacks.
That would work out to be around $1.25m. Add ~$50k for shipping + insurance, and you get ~$1.3m.
Then for the inverters I haven't seen a price for a 2 MW inverter, but I can see a 1 MW inverter here for $250k. I suppose they'll need 2 of them, so $0.5m? Is this a reasonable quote? I've seen inverters as high as $150k for 100 kW (it would be scary if I need to budget $3m for the inverters!)
Let's add $250k for taxes, $200k for installation, and $150k for unforeseeables (e.g. "convincing" the utility to do proper billing for this), and this looks like to be around a $2.4m project.
There is a lot of empty land available on the estate to host these, as long as the Powerpacks don't need to be indoors (I don't think they do).
Did I miss anything else?
If this is accurate, it would mean around a $3000 one-time levy per house, which should be a fairly easy sell to the HOA board.