I am thinking that now that Solar City is part of Tesla we could see a team at Tesla exclusively focused on the design and sale of fully integrated solar power plants to utilities and governments to directly compete against Coal/Gas/Nuclear/Hyrdo power plants.
I would bet that Tesla will design some small flexible 100MW to 500MW power plant solutions with off the shelf Tesla solar panels and batteries that could be deployed and built in under 1 year if the land is available.
Of course I am not a power plant design engineer, however the smart people at Tesla could probably easily come up with the right number of solar panels and batteries to provide an extremely reliable source of energy no matter what climate.
Obviously these type of plants would probably roll out in sunny parts of the world first but the fact that Tesla now has the opportunity to directly compete with huge power plant manufacturers opens an extremely lucrative new market. It is going to be very hard for a electric utility provider or government to ignore a Tesla power plant bid that could supply a reliable green energy electric plant at the same cost or less than a dirty coal plant or dangerous nuclear plant and be built in a fraction of the time.
Some quck and dirtly calculations for a 100MW Tesla plant using 200MW of solar and 200MW of batteries:
Solar panels: 200,000,000 watts @ 0.55 cents per watt = $110,000,000
Batteries: 200,000KW @ $150 per Kw = $30,000,000
Infrastructure: $60,000,000
Total: $200,000,000
Are my numbers off? Doesn't matter, it is the discussion that counts.
I would bet that Tesla will design some small flexible 100MW to 500MW power plant solutions with off the shelf Tesla solar panels and batteries that could be deployed and built in under 1 year if the land is available.
Of course I am not a power plant design engineer, however the smart people at Tesla could probably easily come up with the right number of solar panels and batteries to provide an extremely reliable source of energy no matter what climate.
Obviously these type of plants would probably roll out in sunny parts of the world first but the fact that Tesla now has the opportunity to directly compete with huge power plant manufacturers opens an extremely lucrative new market. It is going to be very hard for a electric utility provider or government to ignore a Tesla power plant bid that could supply a reliable green energy electric plant at the same cost or less than a dirty coal plant or dangerous nuclear plant and be built in a fraction of the time.
Some quck and dirtly calculations for a 100MW Tesla plant using 200MW of solar and 200MW of batteries:
Solar panels: 200,000,000 watts @ 0.55 cents per watt = $110,000,000
Batteries: 200,000KW @ $150 per Kw = $30,000,000
Infrastructure: $60,000,000
Total: $200,000,000
Are my numbers off? Doesn't matter, it is the discussion that counts.