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It seems they could have a more sophisticated approach to capacity sharing. A fixed 8kWh per participant is not optimal when one has 10 kWh to store and another has just 6 kWh. There should be some way to trade this capacity and optimize the utilization of the battery. At a minimum, what one pays for their share of the battery could be prorated on the amount of capacity used.
 
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It seems they could have a more sophisticated approach to capacity sharing. A fixed 8kWh per participant is not optimal when one has 10 kWh to store and another has just 6 kWh. There should be some way to trade this capacity and optimize the utilization of the battery. At a minimum, what one pays for their share of the battery could be prorated on the amount of capacity used.

The 8kW is the evenly divided capacity, so they need to start with that. 420 kWh capacity and 8kWh per house * 52 houses = 416kWh.
And that is daily storage, 2kW of solar panels will average at least 8kWh a day almost 8 months of the year. Need to adjust for house usage during the day, but it seems easy for everyone to max out...
 
Bloomberg New Energy Finance is out with a new update on battery storage, predicting $1.2T in storage investment by 2040.

They acknowledge that “costs have come down faster than expected” and now predict 50 GWh of storage will be installed in 2020 — three years earlier than they previously expected.Bloomberg - Are you a robot?

They also predict that battery storage installations will primarily be utility scale until the mid-2030s when the majority will be behind the meter.

Look forward to their next update, moving up all the timelines again.;)
 
The 8kW is the evenly divided capacity, so they need to start with that. 420 kWh capacity and 8kWh per house * 52 houses = 416kWh.
And that is daily storage, 2kW of solar panels will average at least 8kWh a day almost 8 months of the year. Need to adjust for house usage during the day, but it seems easy for everyone to max out...
Yes, my point is simply that such an even allocation is not optimal. Dynamic allocation has advantages.
 
Gigantic PG&E contract.

Tesla and others to deliver over 2 GWh of energy storage in California project to replace 3 gas plants

They actually hired four companies, and Tesla isn't even supplying the largest of the four batteries, but it'll still be bigger than the Australian project.
How much current solar/wind curtailment will this soak up? I'd be interested to see the total retail value of those kWh vs simply wasting it. Might just pay for the install within 4-5 years on its own.
 
Any idea if Tesla is a source for the other subcontractor's batteries?
I tried to find out who is supplying Dynegy / Vistra with 300 MWh of Lithium ion batteries. There are only 3 vendors I think - Tesla / Pana, LG Chem, and Samsung - The last 2 with an integration partner, that will provide a turnkey solution for Vistra to manage the contract. My cursory search didn't reveal who it might be. in any case, that's a big number for one project.
 
I tried to find out who is supplying Dynegy / Vistra with 300 MWh of Lithium ion batteries. There are only 3 vendors I think - Tesla / Pana, LG Chem, and Samsung - The last 2 with an integration partner, that will provide a turnkey solution for Vistra to manage the contract. My cursory search didn't reveal who it might be. in any case, that's a big number for one project.

And Tesla is known to use Samsung cells....
 
I tried to find out who is supplying Dynegy / Vistra with 300 MWh of Lithium ion batteries. There are only 3 vendors I think - Tesla / Pana, LG Chem, and Samsung - The last 2 with an integration partner, that will provide a turnkey solution for Vistra to manage the contract. My cursory search didn't reveal who it might be. in any case, that's a big number for one project.

I'd be curious too. That's a big number, not just on its own, but also in terms of fraction of annual cell production for that single project. There's not a lot of options for getting a noticeable fraction of worldwide annual production.
 
All of them appear to be 4 hour projects -- the discharge rate of the Tesla-made batteries. It seems possible that Tesla is the source of all of these batteries. Does anybody else have this kind of spare manufacturing capacity?
 
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Sure, but with dynamic allocation, no one can be sure of what they will get. Alternative would be to split at different level to begin with, but is there a threshold below which it's not worth it?
Yes, some consumers would see it that way because we tend to think more in terms of private ownership than in terms of maximizing the value of an asset (i.e. minimizing cost to all participants). The question is, who gets the value of unused/residual capacity? I suspect that this is key to the business model. You have an owner of the batter who sells subscription to fixed parcels of capacity. The participants extract whatever value they can from their parcel, but the owner has access to all that is left over. So the owner can use the battery to trade power on the unutilized portion of the battery. So they are selling grid services and providing peak power to the grid. So if a participant is using say only 6 kWh of their 8 kWh parcel, the owner gets to use the other 2 kWh for no marginal cost. But it is a bigger deal than this. Suppose you've got 6 kWh stored, but the owner think you will only use 4kWh over the next few hours. So there is an extra 2 kWh of stored power that the owner could sell and replace before you are likely to actually use it. The owner only needs to keep enough charge in reserve to satisfy the contingent demand of the participants. This is very much like fractional reserve banking. You deposit 6 kWh of charge, the bank reserves a portion of it and makes money "lending" out the rest. Worse case scenario for the "bank", if all participants demand more than the reserve, the bank has to buy power from the grid make good on the "deposits". The key difference with a bank is that the bank is not going to limit a depositor to only a 8 kWh parcel and is not going to charge you for the fraction of 8 kWh capacity that you don't actually use. From the view point of the battery owner "bank", this is a pretty sweet deal. They can get participants to pay for the battery, while they get to trade much of the capacity and charge for a profit. So as a shareholder, I love it. As a consumer, I think we can do much better. When the utilities figure out how this works, they're not going to like Tesla and others cutting into their nice little monopolies.
 
The primary cost issue for solar panel installations right now is marketing, which Tesla just slashed. Followed by red tape, which Tesla can't slash; if they did their homework they could get it down to a smooth operation, but it's well outside their area of competence. They're just awful with paperwork stuff. Third cost issue is supplier margins, which vertical integration should help with.

So we'll see whether the cut in marketing costs (and possibly in supplier margins) allows them to undercut local solar installers on price, when the local installers probably have a much smoother and lower-cost system for handling the red tape.
 
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Tesla won't need to under cut local installers, that'll be nearly impossible one a market is scaled. What they can offer is a lean zero down lease-to-own product.

Think of their original product, lower the contract to 6-9 years, and they'll be the #1 installer with ease. Purchases will be mostly done by local installers, Tesla will own the solar-as-a-service half of the market. And of course the storage and energy aggregation market.
 
California recently passed legislation that requires the PUC to develop rules that facilitate the development of clean microgrids.

Microgrid Legislation in California Could Become National Model
http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201720180SB1339

Depending on how the legislation is interpreted and rules are structured, it may permit Tesla and other companies to install solar and storage at residential and commercial customers and provide a wide range of grid services. This could make home solar/storage much more affordable and accelerate adoption.

Hopefully the PUC rules will encompass virtual powerplants. Maybe @jhm or one of our other technically savvy members can weigh in on whether a Tesla managed solar/storage VPP would qualify as a microgrid under the legislation:

"(d) “Microgrid” means an interconnected system of loads and energy resources, including, but not limited to, distributed energy resources, energy storage, demand response tools, or other management, forecasting, and analytical tools, appropriately sized to meet customer needs, within a clearly defined electrical boundary that can act as a single, controllable entity, and can connect to, disconnect from, or run in parallel with, larger portions of the electrical grid, or can be managed and isolated to withstand larger disturbances and maintain electrical supply to connected critical infrastructure."

Given California's strong policy in favor of developing robust distributed energy resources hopefully the PUC will find another way to develop rules and regulations that support VPPs even if they don't meet the definition of a microgrid. Seems insane not to.
 
All of them appear to be 4 hour projects -- the discharge rate of the Tesla-made batteries. It seems possible that Tesla is the source of all of these batteries. Does anybody else have this kind of spare manufacturing capacity?
"A trip at KIUC’s Kapaia Power Station at 12:04 p.m. this afternoon led to a power outage affecting all of KIUC’s 25,800 members. Power continued to be supplied to the grid for approximately nine minutes following the trip, in large part due to KIUC’s battery storage facilities."

http://website.kiuc.coop/sites/kiuc/files/documents/pr2018-1105-Islandwide outage.pdf
 
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