Sure. Are all of them competitive to batteries, leaving no room at all for little old us?
IMO, Tesla has hit on a spanking new line of industry here. Even a small portion of the electric energy market must be worth several fortunes.
Brilliant.
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Sure. Are all of them competitive to batteries, leaving no room at all for little old us?
IMO, Tesla has hit on a spanking new line of industry here. Even a small portion of the electric energy market must be worth several fortunes.
Brilliant.
None of them are competitive, or else you'd see solar and wind hitting 100% new installations in many parts of this country and the world. Unsubsidized wind is much cheaper than coal right now, subsidized solar is cheaper than coal--simple economics would make these forms of generation #1 if a competitive solution existed now.
The commercial market is definitely not a concern. There's a rather large commercial market out there right now, using inferior solutions that already last (in best case scenarios 3-4 years at maximum with far fewer shallow cycles. Data centers, cell phone providers, and other critical service commercial businesses are already forced into buying an inferior solution now and this market alone could max out gigafactory production with ease.
ZachShahan
Active Member
Utilities have various needs: peak shaving, frequency regulation, backup, and more. At a reportedly lower price for a quite proven and familiar technology, I think Tesla will find more business than it can serve for awhile, but I certainly think other storage companies with better features for some of utilities' needs will find plenty of business as well.
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Yes, exactly. And I was thinking this before, but since it was emphasized by JB in the CC, I think it's a really important one: this is a familiar technology, whereas many competitors and startups with competing prices are bringing new technologies to these utilities. Utilities are quite conservative.
Also, partnerships are key, and Tesla has built some strong partnerships over the past several years.
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Well, over 50% of new generation capacity the US installed in 2014 came from wind and solar, and it's even a much higher % so far this year (and yeah, coal can't compete, but natural gas has been the #1 single source of new capacity for a couple of years). But yeah, it's not until you get to ~20-30% market penetration of renewables before storage really needs to complement it. In places like Germany and Australia, storage is becoming very important since they are hitting %s like these, so it's no surprise Tesla is first targeting those markets and Hawaii. And there's plenty of $ to be made in those early markets.
ZachShahan
Active Member
I think Tesla's direct words are worth including here to clear up some confusion:
For utility scale systems, 100kWh battery blocks are grouped to scale from 500kWh to 10MWh+. These systems are capable of 2hr or 4hr continuous net discharge power using grid tied bi-directional inverters.
Systems support applications including peak shaving, load shifting and demand response for commercial customers while offering, renewable firming and a variety of grid services at utility scales.
Tesla Energy for Utilities is designed to:
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At 2 MWh of capacity, 5000 cycles, and $250/kWh, that's $0.05/kWh, which is very competitive. Even at 3000 cycles, that's $0.08/kWh.
(Of course, the total capacity doesn't really matter for this equation, just the $/kWh. Could be 10 MWh or 500 kWh and the result is the same.)
Tesla Energy for Utilities
For utility scale systems, 100kWh battery blocks are grouped to scale from 500kWh to 10MWh+. These systems are capable of 2hr or 4hr continuous net discharge power using grid tied bi-directional inverters.
Systems support applications including peak shaving, load shifting and demand response for commercial customers while offering, renewable firming and a variety of grid services at utility scales.
Tesla Energy for Utilities is designed to:
- Firm up renewable generation by reconciling the intermittency of power from these sources and storing excess capacity to dispatch when it’s needed.
- Increase resource capacity. Tesla Energy for Utilities acts as on-demand distributed power generation, contributing to the overall generating capacity while adding resiliency to the grid.
- Ramp Control. Tesla Energy for Utilities can act as a buffer while the power output from a large generation source is ramping up or down, delivering power instantly to smoothly transition output to the required level.
- Improve power quality by preventing fluctuations from propagating to downstream loads.
- Defer costly and time-consuming infrastructure upgrades.
- Manage peak demand by deploying power within seconds or milliseconds.
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At 2 MWh of capacity, 5000 cycles, and $250/kWh, that's $0.05/kWh, which is very competitive. Even at 3000 cycles, that's $0.08/kWh.
(Of course, the total capacity doesn't really matter for this equation, just the $/kWh. Could be 10 MWh or 500 kWh and the result is the same.)
ZachShahan
Active Member
Am taking a closer look at $/kWh generated (not capacity) using various assumptions gathered from Tesla, and the same for some top competitors. You can view & comment on the sheet here, but the results I've gotten so far on the utility-scale side of things are $0.05/kWh for Tesla, $0.05/kWh for Imergy now (with an assumed 30-year lifetime even though cycle life is reportedly unlimited), $0.03 for Imergy based on a projected capacity cost of $300/kWh (down from $500/kWh), and $0.02 for Eos Energy (which has won and implemented some pilot contracts, and is supposed to have a commercially available product in 2016).
SebastianR
Active Member
Interesting. I'm not sure the comparison holds perfectly well - for instance Imergy gives only 5 years of warranty (10 years extended warranty) so I'm not sure if unlimited cycles is really 30 years of lifetime. At face value, the Imergy solution is twice as expensive in terms of $/kWh storage so the business case really depends on the cycling profile.
A lot of stuff that happens at grid / utility level is also "just in case" - so at least for that portion, Tesla should be dramatically cheaper.
jhm
Well-Known Member
Well, if the warranty is good for 10 years, at 3 cycles per day, that's 11k cycles. It seems like that should work fine for the utilities. By the time they need to replace the batteries, the price will be half what it is today. The acual facilities set up for batteries may last for many decades, and those facilities may be half the cost of the original installation. Utilities buy lots of fuel that only last for 1 cycle, so I'm not sure why a Powerpack that yields 5000 cycles would be a problem. It's important that the packs are designed so they are easy to install, maintain, and replace.
solar and wind have been over 50% of new power generation for the past 5+ years:
surfside
jhm
Well-Known Member
Global Electricity Market
On April 30, Musk claimed that 900M Powerpacks, 90 TWh of storage, would suffice to enable 100% penetration of renewable power generation. To put this into perspective, in 2012 global power capacity was at 5.55 TW. Given the rate of growth in recent years, I suspect the current capacity is about 6 TW. Thus, 15 TWh of storage represents about 15 hours of storage at peak output.
I am trying to understand what this path to 15 hours of storage may look like. Clearly it is going to take many year just to produce these batteries. Even at some future steady state, a 10 year life cycle on batteris would imply a need of about 9000 GWh per year just to replace old batteries. Suppose that Tesla and other stationary batter makers reached 50 GWh annual capacity in 2019. The industry would need to grow 50% annually for 13 years to reach this 9 TWh capacity milestone by 2032. This can of course happen if the economics are favorable. Also note that the rate of growth should not continue much beyond this milestone or else the industry as a whole risks over shooting long-term demand. Realistically, I think this give Tesla another 7 to 10 years to keep growing at close to 50% a year past 2025, Musk's $700B market cap target year. Good news for anyone worried Tesla may have to slow it's growth after 2025.
So quantitively we see that it will take about 2 decades to get enough storage online to wean the world off of fossil fuels for power. But qualitatively how will the grid change. Consider that in 2012, there was 5.55 TW of capacity which generated 21,532 TWh of energy of which 19,710 TWh was consumed. This works out to an average daily utilization of 10.6 hours of generation for 9.7 hours of consumption. Apparently, most generation capacity is not being utilized anywhere close to 24 hour per day. Naturally solar has a utilization of about 5 hours per day owning to the rotation of the earth, and wind is intermittent too. But wind and solar capacity in 2012 was still a tiny portion of total capacity. So a mere 10 hours of utilization reflects more on the traditional fleet than new renewables. Alot of this lightly utilized capacity is just there for peak power needs. As the first "hour" of battery storage is deployed, about 6 TWh, I suspect that fossil peakers will be the first capacity displaced. Consider that 6 TWh should provide +/- 2 GW of power/load, respectively. This could potentially retire 2 GW of fossil peak capacity. The remaining 4 GW of (mostly fossil) generation capacity will have 50% better utilization, about 15 hours per day. I figure that, given growth trajectory above, this first hour should be installed by about 2028. I would also point out that the +2 GW of battery discharge is mostly what put 2 GW of peak plants out of business. The -2 GW of battery charge is load to absorb a surplus of upto 2 GW of solar during sunlight and base load at night. So while grids without batteries can handle upto 1/3 renewables (about 2 GW ), with thus first hour of batteries another 1/3 can be integrated. Thus, renewables can provide maybe 4 GW of power by 2028. While this may be true from just an excess power point of view, it probably does not work from an energy point of view. Hypothetically if you had 4 TW of solar, you'd get around 20 TWh on an average day. You would need to store about half of that, so now we are looking at needing around 12 GWh of storage. That's the second hour of storage, and it arives in about 2030. So the milestone here is about that about 2/3 of power generation is renewable. There is a qualitative difference between the first hour and second hour. The first hour need heaving cycling batteries, say 2.5 cycles per day to put fossil peak power generators out of work, while the second hour is more focused on daily cycling to capture the daily supply solar energy. We can envision this theme continuing where incremental renewable capacity is the driver of incremental battery installation. Eventually you get to a place where back up power to cope with weather and seasonal supply are the drivers of incremental energy storage.
I hope this stimulates some thoughts. I'd like to hear more ideas about how energy storage needs may evolve over time.
On April 30, Musk claimed that 900M Powerpacks, 90 TWh of storage, would suffice to enable 100% penetration of renewable power generation. To put this into perspective, in 2012 global power capacity was at 5.55 TW. Given the rate of growth in recent years, I suspect the current capacity is about 6 TW. Thus, 15 TWh of storage represents about 15 hours of storage at peak output.
I am trying to understand what this path to 15 hours of storage may look like. Clearly it is going to take many year just to produce these batteries. Even at some future steady state, a 10 year life cycle on batteris would imply a need of about 9000 GWh per year just to replace old batteries. Suppose that Tesla and other stationary batter makers reached 50 GWh annual capacity in 2019. The industry would need to grow 50% annually for 13 years to reach this 9 TWh capacity milestone by 2032. This can of course happen if the economics are favorable. Also note that the rate of growth should not continue much beyond this milestone or else the industry as a whole risks over shooting long-term demand. Realistically, I think this give Tesla another 7 to 10 years to keep growing at close to 50% a year past 2025, Musk's $700B market cap target year. Good news for anyone worried Tesla may have to slow it's growth after 2025.
So quantitively we see that it will take about 2 decades to get enough storage online to wean the world off of fossil fuels for power. But qualitatively how will the grid change. Consider that in 2012, there was 5.55 TW of capacity which generated 21,532 TWh of energy of which 19,710 TWh was consumed. This works out to an average daily utilization of 10.6 hours of generation for 9.7 hours of consumption. Apparently, most generation capacity is not being utilized anywhere close to 24 hour per day. Naturally solar has a utilization of about 5 hours per day owning to the rotation of the earth, and wind is intermittent too. But wind and solar capacity in 2012 was still a tiny portion of total capacity. So a mere 10 hours of utilization reflects more on the traditional fleet than new renewables. Alot of this lightly utilized capacity is just there for peak power needs. As the first "hour" of battery storage is deployed, about 6 TWh, I suspect that fossil peakers will be the first capacity displaced. Consider that 6 TWh should provide +/- 2 GW of power/load, respectively. This could potentially retire 2 GW of fossil peak capacity. The remaining 4 GW of (mostly fossil) generation capacity will have 50% better utilization, about 15 hours per day. I figure that, given growth trajectory above, this first hour should be installed by about 2028. I would also point out that the +2 GW of battery discharge is mostly what put 2 GW of peak plants out of business. The -2 GW of battery charge is load to absorb a surplus of upto 2 GW of solar during sunlight and base load at night. So while grids without batteries can handle upto 1/3 renewables (about 2 GW ), with thus first hour of batteries another 1/3 can be integrated. Thus, renewables can provide maybe 4 GW of power by 2028. While this may be true from just an excess power point of view, it probably does not work from an energy point of view. Hypothetically if you had 4 TW of solar, you'd get around 20 TWh on an average day. You would need to store about half of that, so now we are looking at needing around 12 GWh of storage. That's the second hour of storage, and it arives in about 2030. So the milestone here is about that about 2/3 of power generation is renewable. There is a qualitative difference between the first hour and second hour. The first hour need heaving cycling batteries, say 2.5 cycles per day to put fossil peak power generators out of work, while the second hour is more focused on daily cycling to capture the daily supply solar energy. We can envision this theme continuing where incremental renewable capacity is the driver of incremental battery installation. Eventually you get to a place where back up power to cope with weather and seasonal supply are the drivers of incremental energy storage.
I hope this stimulates some thoughts. I'd like to hear more ideas about how energy storage needs may evolve over time.
I'l try to do some convincing :smile:
First, I do not believe that above calculation of the longevity of Tesla batteries is correct. The basic assumption that the morning and afternoon peaks will require 2.5 cycles per day is not accurate, because the full cycle of the battery is a charge from 0% state of charge (SOC) to 100% SOC and then discharge 100% to 0% of SOC. The utility grade batteries will not be seeing such duty cycling on a daily basis. The thing that is missing is that batteries need to be sized to take largest historical peak, plus margin, plus allowance for future increase in peak capacity. The average peak over a period, say one year, will be fraction of the largest peak of the year, so average cycling of the battery will be a fraction of the total battery capacity, i.e much less than 2.5 cycles per day.
During the ER Elon mentioned that Power Packs have design life of about 15 years (warranty is less at 10 years). At 3,000 to 5,000 cycles life expectancy the battery will last 15 years if daily cycles will be limited to about 0.55 to 0.91 cycles. (3,000/15/365=0.55 5,000/15/365=.92). So in order to last about 15 years above daily discharge cycles will need to be 0.55/2.5=22% to 0.91/2.5=37% of your assumed 2.5 cycles per day.
In another words, if one assumes that average daily peak is about 22 to 37% of the maximum peak that the battery is sized for - a very reasonable expectation - the Tesla Power Packs will easily last 15 years.
Regarding the expectation of utilities, while the power plants overall life expectancy is indeed 30-40 years, a lot of components would need to be replaced during this life span. The closest example are lead acid batteries used in DC systems and UPS of all large power plants. Their typical life expectancy is 15-20 years.
Also, Tesla actually mention the control of the batteries for various tasks, including peak shaving multiple times. During one of the presentations by JB, there was couple of presentation slides discussing use of Tesla batteries at the Fremont factory, complete with the power profiles of the factory before and after, showing how software controlled batteries allowed to shave peaks. Elon discussed this at one of the ER CC (I believe Q4 2014). Finally, JB indicated that power packs will have a master computer per several power packs, in addition to the BMS contained in every one:
It seems that Tesla's revelation that they basically have 3GWh (about 1.5GW for a two hour discharge power rated battery) and $800M worth of orders in just one week after the "Missing Piece" presentation need to be put in further context so we can grasp the epic significance of this. So I thought that some stats on last year's energy market are in order here:
I truly believe that we've witnessed a birth of new enormously more valuable company during the "Missing Piece" presentation.
- Total US deployment of Li-Ion batteries for energy storage in 2014 was 43.3MW. Tesla one week orders eclipsed last year US deployment more than **34** times.
- According to US US Energy Storage Monitor report from GTM Research and Energy Storage Association (ESA) US Energy storage market was to grow 250%. Tesla one week battery orders, even assuming that some of these orders might have been overseas completely blows this projection out of the water.
- The same report estimated 5 year growth (in 2019) produce market sized at 0.861GW. Tesla one week orders blew this number out of the water as well.
- The installed weighted average cost of the Li-Ion battery based storage in 2014 was $2,064/kW. Tesla Power Pack cost is $500/kW ($250/kWh). **Conservatively** assuming that installation could double this cost means that total estimated cost of the installed Power Pack is about two times less that average installed price last year.
I truly believe that we've witnessed a birth of new enormously more valuable company during the "Missing Piece" presentation.
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What do you guys think of this? Apparently Tesla batteries will be sold under the name Panasonic abroad.
Also, where is that announcement from Enel Green Power?
Also, where is that announcement from Enel Green Power?
It looks to me like they are confusing Panasonic's energy storage pack with Tesla's Powerwall that happens to use Panasonic's cells. The picture is clearly not a Powerwall. That would be like saying that Mercedes is selling the Model S under Tesla's name because Tesla supplies the batteries for the B-class.
Excellent article on Tesla/Kendall-Jackson partnership. If they have 21 Powerpacks at $25,000 each, or $525k cost plus installation...and they look to save $200k/yr (don't know if that is just their share?), then their ROI crossover on the batteries alone is about 2.5 years. Not sure about other costs, but even at 50% of PowerPack costs would lead to an ROI of 4 years. Not bad.
Tesla batteries pair well with wine-making - MarketWatch
Tesla batteries pair well with wine-making - MarketWatch
Interesting that Tesla paid for the Kendall-Jackson installation. 200k seems to be their split of the savings. I wonder if splitting the savings is going to be one of Tesla's method of installation/financing, kinda like Solar City, or if it was just for the pilot project.
JRP3
Hyperactive Member
I would just like to make note that grid power is not currently being supplied to my house by the utility. It's been off for about 10 minutes. It would be really nice to have a power wall right now...
Ok, power back on, but it was really weird having the power out, not knowing why it was out, nor how long it would remain off. While I was overall pretty chill about it, it is weird and if it had interrupted my day I would have been really frustrated. I think the hardest part is having no idea when it will come back.
Ok, power back on, but it was really weird having the power out, not knowing why it was out, nor how long it would remain off. While I was overall pretty chill about it, it is weird and if it had interrupted my day I would have been really frustrated. I think the hardest part is having no idea when it will come back.
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You know you are the belle of the ball when other companies mention you in their earnings report "optimistic" that Tesla will work with us....
"Hi, Elon....call me! It's Manz. Let's have coffee sometime :love:."
Manz ‘Optimistic’ It Will Take Part in Tesla Energy-Storage Push - Bloomberg Business
"Hi, Elon....call me! It's Manz. Let's have coffee sometime :love:."
Manz ‘Optimistic’ It Will Take Part in Tesla Energy-Storage Push - Bloomberg Business
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