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PowerWall and "The Missing Piece..." Event
- Thread starter SabrToothSqrl
- Start date
CapitalistOppressor
Active Member
Seems reasonable. The battery he analyzes only advertises itself as a souped up UPS system, and it's great for that application. In the "power generation" role it's probably not so great.
He didn't analyze the daily cycler or the commercial grid storage solutions.
The grid storage version is revolutionary, especially if it's being sold at $250/kWh like the Wall Street Journal reports.
jeff_adams
Member
cdub
OG 2011 Leaf / 2023 Model Y LR
He said it didn't make and he said that's coming from someone who owns a space company.
dauger
Member
Awesome. I'm began research for my solar install last week and solaredge inverters looked pretty good so I'm even happier now that I saw they are partnering with tesla on this.
Not sure about that. The last backup generator I bought, with auto-transfer switches, ran to roughly $30,000 total installed cost. The great thing was that it ran on natural gas from a pipe, not a tank, so it could run forever... and I did once run on it for a full three weeks. The downsides were the CO2, the pollution, the noise, the space it took up, and of course the $30K in cost.
For our next installation (we just moved), we want to go a different path. I wonder what percentage of our total power-out time each year we would cover with the ~80 KWh of Powerwall storage that we could buy with that same $30K...
I like the idea, but like everything else, it is a product that only makes sense for some people and not others. Living in Utah, this is not a product for me. Our rates do not change according to time of day. I have solar with net metering. From April to June I am "banking" with the power company, accumulating credit. I use most of that credit in July and August when I'm running 4 A/C units (really big house). I then bank again September/October. When the snow flies, I end up using all my credits and have electric bills December-February. At our old house, we had an extended power outage in the middle of winter, and relied on gas fireplaces to keep warm. I would need 60kw back-up for just one day. We have a back-up Generator now that runs off the natural gas line. The only maintenance it needs is an oil change once a year. It runs automatically 15 minutes each week so stay in top shape. If I lived in a place like Arizona, and could count on solar every day all year, I would consider powerwall and try to get off the grid completely.
I've had SolarEdge for a year and am very happy with it, except for their iPhone app being a few OS versions old.
I don't own an RV, but the PowerWall seems like it could be quite a nice option for an RV. A few solar panels on the roof of the RV to supply charge while tooling down the road or sitting in the RV park, you could plug-in and top up (maybe, not sure of the technical aspects) while at the RV park, but then have a ton of charge in the battery when you were somewhere that you couldn't plug in. Would be a lot more reliable, cleaner and quieter than a generator and probably provide more power than most of the little ones carried by RVs.
I suspect that you're looking at similar $/kw as with the smaller ones. So likely around 30K.
jgs
Active Member
It was listed as $25k in one report I read. Sorry, I forget where, but at any rate the numbers are about right.
beeeerock
Active Member
Absolutely... I've never seen the appeal of sitting in a dusty field with a bunch of other people, listening to all the generators buzzing away! Sort of misses the point of 'getting away from it all'! A silent system like this is sure to have some real appeal. And the power used in a typical RV is that much less than a house... so even more feasible.
Thanks. This was a great presentation.
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I still think it's possible to assign sources to each unit of charge energy, and not allow "Supercharger" sourced energy into the home (actually, for accounting reasons, parity can be used a lot). It's just a simple accounting calculation. Put in some terms of use that merely make you consent to the accounting, and you can supercharge and power your house off your car all you want. If you want to use the power that the supercharger gave you, the accounting program in the battery would give you two extremely and obviously simple options: (a) pay whatever the accounting program provides as a price for you to pay, to compensate the Supercharger energy cost (and YES different charges at supercharges will cost DIFFERENT amounts, because of peak demand, which sources are working at that moment (wind, sun, battery, conversion losses, broken equipment, location, etc.)), - OR - (not necessarily exclusively) (b) the battery stops giving you juice when you start to cut into the UNPAID Supercharger energy (virtual, accounting-controlled). (b) scenario either means you have to get your energy elsewhere, or your electricity shuts off. THAT'S FINE!
This isn't as simple as John running down to the corner market and stealing an apple and eating it, but it is very simple from an accounting standpoint. I'm just trying to say it is POSSIBLE, not that anybody's going to actually do it.
Someone's going to ask: what about those who try to arbitrage all their driving miles from Superchargers, and use the rest of their battery for their solar panels? That can either (a) be accounted for in some additional way and charged for, (b) what's to stop anybody from doing that now? Maybe it's part of the current deal, or (c) they'll just never offer the option to run homes from Tesla superchargeable car batteries.
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