Oz battery bossmen: Fingers will be burned in the Tesla goldrush If Elon Musk does spark a market shakeup in home power storage, one of the battlegrounds will be between mature and emerging technologies. With that in mind, The Register spoke to Stuart Smith, CEO of Redflow, and Bruce Ebzery, vice president of business development). Yes, Redflow is a battery company, which means it has its …
As an ex-battery & SOFC guy, the real elephant in the room with the Powerwall and any battery backup is number of charge/discharge cycles the battery can do in it's lifetime vs the number of charge/discharge cycles per unit time the application requires. It's hard to see where batteries with only a few hundred cycle lifetimes will make sense in the US home market.
" It's hard to see where batteries with only a few hundred cycle lifetimes will make sense in the US home market."
Or in any mature electricity market. You'll know the arguments, not sure many of the battery fanbois do: Ignoring out-of-balance charges and annual peaks, peak to off peak arbitrage isn't great enough to deliver returns. Aim for seasonal peaks and you get poor asset utilisation, aim for daily peaks and the price difference isn't there (and you've trashed your asset in two or three years of heavy cycling).
Where it might make financial sense is in niche markets where incompetent regulators have gifted fat feed in tariffs to (say) solar PV, and there's no local demand, or where the incompetence extends to subsidising both crappo renewables and storage. It'll push up system costs for electricity (or require subsidy from taxation), but that's rarely a problem when regulators and politicians are pretending to save the planet.
"....the real elephant in the room with the Powerwall and any battery backup is number of charge/discharge cycles the battery can do....." Agreed, the cost of replacement batteries is what looks to be killing the secondhand electric car market. My old physics lecturer had a pet project he was trying to develop for Third World countries which used solar electricity during the day to pump water up into a tank on top of a tower, then the water ran down to a ground-level tank through a turbine at night to provide a mini hydro-electric powerstation. The resulting system had a continual and predictable level of output (unlike batteries which lose efficiency over time) for the lifecycle of the solar panels. The problem that eventually killed the project was that the people in most Third World countries were more interested in drinking the water out of the tank than having lighting.
Then dig a big hole (let's call it a well) and put a tank over that - pump up to the tank and drain to the well, then let the residents use a hand pump to raise water for drinking....
Of course there is the mechanical version of this, where they lift a bag of rocks up, and that gradually falls, providing a few watts for LED lights... Rocks aren't as satisfying to drink.
"Then dig a big hole (let's call it a well) and put a tank over that...." His test kit went out to India (he was co-developing with an Indian scientist), the idea being they would combine the tower with the tank and solar panels with an electric pump and a borehole. The only problem was Western charities had been over-drilling wells in their target area, lowering the water table to such an extent that the cost of drilling down to a usable water level (plus the cost of the bigger electric pump to draw the water from greater depth, plus the knock-on requirement for bigger panels to power the bigger pump, and therefore a stronger and more expensive tower) made the project exorbitantly expensive, and any water they did draw up was promptly pinched by the desperate locals. Him and his colleague identified that problem - falling water tables due to too many wells - in the '70s, yet no-one in the "green" science community took note until this century (http://www.treehugger.com/corporate-responsibility/as-countries-over-pump-aquifers-falling-water-tables-mean-falling-harvests.html).
The Power Wall is a status symbol. It is something for the e-hipster to buy.
The numbers don't have to stack any more than the numbers have to stack up for buying any other status symbol. Why buy a BMW-i8 when a Hyundai can provide the same - if not better - functionality at one tenth the price.
is that a lot of claims and debate and such is being made about a product that isn't available and will be made from a factory that isn't even built yet, much less turning out physical product in any scale to talk actual prices or functional performance parameters.
tech blogs need to stop hyping future product benefits as if they're already in production and already being used by consumers. All we have now is advertising copy-and we all used to understand how worthless ad copy really is.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but although the Tesla Powerwall may not be immediately available to you, equivalent products are widely available. My employers are flogging them in the German market. We looked at Tesla's offer, it didn't work for us at grid scale. And outside of Germany's looney tunes subsidies any make of battery storage doesn't work for grid connected consumer installations.
Ignoring the ancillary costs (installation, inverter, etc) a $3,000 7kWh Powerwall cycled 80% (5.6 kWh) per day for 10 years costs $0.1468/kWr in wear and tear (assuming no interest, no degradation until total failure on the day after warranty expires). My daily driver is a Tesla Model S 85 which is a heck of a lot of fun but also not a good economic proposition. I don't see any fun in having a Powerwall through which power costs half again more than I get from the grid.
Good to see someone getting to the actual numbers. For some people the numbers come out better than you suggest though, I think. For us in the UK, for instance, electricity costs rather more than the price you imply. And for someone with enough renewable power that they're close to being able to go off-grid, there's the standing charge that can also be avoided. Numbers like these also help to apply a ceiling to the prices that the grid suppliers can charge in the longer run. If they know that the substantial increases that were being predicted a few years ago would lead to many people going off-grid, then the prices for grid electricity aren't likely to rise too much. In turn this helps to cap the wholesale price of gas and ultimately of crude oil.
Not sure where Redflow are claiming ZnBr is only a few years old as this was being developed in Western Australia in the late 90's - 20 years ago now. That's not to say it has had the development time of Li, but it smacks a bit like the cellulosic ethanol story which has been "5 years away" from commercial release for the last 20 years!
Elon Musk's home battery Biz model is not likely to succeed because his product is impractical for 95% of potential consumers. Emergency or standby generators are far more practical and cost effective so unless you have some application where these options are not possible, you'd be foolish to purchase a Giga farce battery system. You could build your own solar charged standby lead-acid battery back-up system for about what Musk wants for his impractical system.
"....his product is impractical for 95% of potential consumers...." if you're going to insist on practicality then you have to ask yourself why we aren't all driving Toyota Priuses. The Tesla S is proof that Elon is very good at reading his market - over-rich, faux greens. The reason is that practicality is rarely a top consideration for many consumers, fashion and ideology often being more important. Just look at the vast number of people that buy into so-called "green" marketing - for them a stinky, noisy, fume-belching, dinojuice-drinking generator is just unacceptable. But a flash, "clean", wall of high-tech batteries (which they constantly mention as costing them x thousands of dollars, daahhhhhling) is right up there with Givenchy. And lead-acid? That would be so last century.
I thought Musk was a forward thinker. This company's product is what's going to be powering my home here in the boon-docks soon: http://www.aquionenergy.com. We have brownouts and blackouts throughout the year, on a fairly regular schedule. These AHI batteries are non-toxic (non-hazardous to ship even), safe, long lasting, can sustain daily charge cycles if needed, and can do 100% depth of discharge. And to cool it, I just keep it, you know, in the shade. :-|
If it's sunny, then use passive solar for space heating.
I do. About 250-square feet of south facing glass (many kilowatts of 'free' heat), fully shaded by the overhanging roof in the hot summer.
Using photovoltaic power for space heating is utterly mad. You'd get (much!) more heat (much!) cheaper with passive solar of the same area.
>Smith says for most people the addition of a backup battery isn't a great value proposition.
>“By and large, most residential customers in cities and urban areas have a pretty robust connection,” he said.
That is not the issue, the problem is any power you produce is being sold to the power company and a crap rate, you then buy it back at a much higher rate.
At least with a battery you can use all of then power you generate so in effect you are getting full retail price for what you generate rather that the minuscule amount that the power company will pay.
So you want your cake and eat it and be paid for it and not pay for the equipment that you are using as a big battery.
Bloody solar greedy twats forcing the poor to pay for their power....
If you have solar and have not installed batteries you are being subsidized by everyone else (usually the poor!)
>If you have solar and have not installed batteries you are being subsidized by everyone else (usually the poor!)
BS! The rate at with they buy your solar power is less than the wholesale rate! No one is subsidising you! If you have solar cells in Aus you are a sucker as you are a supplier of cheap power to the retail companies.
Richard thanks for the article.
RedFlow is one of those companies I've been keeping an eye on precisely for the same kind of use target that Powerwall wants to be.
As far as I can tell RedFlow has just done a ZBM3 which is intended for 'home' use. However at a $9,500 USD purchase price it costs $0.44/kWh which is a fair bit more than the Powerwall.
Still if the reg has time I'd love to read like a 'battery technology round-up' that talks about price per kWh, cycle depth, effective price kWh, number of cycles etc etc. How many http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/24/vulture_central_standards/ grapefruit of volume I'd need to store it and all that kind stuff.
I think the real usage scenario for these things is slightly different to what most people predict.
These will be bought in huge numbers by energy companies. They'll charge them during quiet periods and they'll use the stored energy at periods of high demand to supplement grid power. The restriction on instantaneous power output is less of an issue in that model.
The reason power companies will do this is to avoid using their most expensive and dirtiest plants to cover demand peaks. This kit lets them run a much smoother output profile, regardless of the peaks and troughs of demand.
the cost of a few poles and transformer has an increasing number of tree changers choosing off-grid. The large annual "service fee" is also an inducement to avoid the grid. An installer I know states that a 2 - 5 KW solar with optional 2 KW wind generator and enough deep cycle lead-acid battery for 3 days of normal household use is very saleable. About $40,000. No aircon in house. The fall back is a 10KW diesel generator.. Definitely not an urban solution, but any improvement in the economics of grid disconnection will show up at the edges of built-up areas quickly.
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