An 85kWh battery may be more useful in every garage than this article claims. The added expense is claimed to "keep consumers away", but really it means things like solar panels become more useful.
If you are able to charge your car via power you generate and it can supply enough power back to run your home, you can get some huge benefits. You can have power at night that you generated during the day. No need to suck power from the grid. During outages, you would likely still have a few days of power. And finally, if we actually take full advantage of this, our power infrastructure could directly use these cars to distribute and store energy and route around outages, increasing stability in a huge way.
All in all, this could usher in an era of crowd-sourced power generation. One of the primary reasons that hasn't been feasible was the ephemerality of power on the grid. You consume it just after it's produced. We have no good way to store it. But with hundreds of thousands of 85kWh capacity batteries plugged into the grid, we suddenly have a start.
I think paying an extra $20,000+ for a car if that's a potential outcome is worth every penny.
So how would this work? During the daytime, you have your car with you at work, away from your solar panels at home. When your car is at home, it is night, so it is not charging then. During a power outage, are you really going to drain your source of transportation to power your house? Especially if you don't know when the power is coming back on to refresh your car batteries? I know I wouldn't -- I'd just fire up a gas generator when the power goes out for an extended time, and use that to also recharge the electric car.
During the daytime, your solar panels are dumping power onto the live grid. The same grid your car at work is plugged into. And all your neighbors'. And every other car in the garage or parking lot.
During an outage, unless it's a weather-critical incident or a disaster, the convenience of not needing to go and power a generator (and thus mess with needing to refuel it, and depleting your supplies which will be more useful in a real disaster) would likely be better. If it makes sense to power up a generator, then do that. It would also be charging your car.
Solar panels dump power onto the grid and you get paid by industry electricity price. But at night solar panels don't produce and one has to pay "consumer" electricity price that is 7 times higher!
So a battery system that covers nights and that has a durability of at least 10 years and with a price tag that allow for a amortisation within 8 years would be the way to go.
>During a power outage, are you really going to drain your source of transportation to power your house?
It's important to look at the numbers here.
An 85 kWH battery can drive 300 miles, or power the typical household for 3 days. Why wouldn't you power your house for a day if only meant 100 miles less range? How long are you expecting the power to be out? You may have a gas generator, but not everybody does. And if your car could act as a UPS until the generator kicked back in, why not?
You don't just have one battery, you can have multiple. So for example first day you charge battery 1, next day you use battery 1 and charge battery 2, next day you use battery 2 and charge battery 1, etc...
It's not about "the" outage (a rare event), its about all of the batteries working together to make that event even rarer and make the grid more robust during normal operation.
"If you are able to charge your car via power you generate [...] During outages [...]"
What outages? If every house is self-supporting, I can think of few disasters that would simultaneously kill all those power sources, and those likely would kill your house and you, too.
The statement at the end of the article that "[e]ven if the company fails to sell 500,000 vehicles a year, some of the gigafactory’s batteries could be used in the stationary storage market (which helps explain why he wants to build in the southwest, where solar and wind power farms can be incorporated.)" doesn't make sense to me as a reason even worth consideration, especially given in the same article is the statement that "it would exceed production of every other battery factory in the world – combined". The importance of location in the southwest US for the fledgling alternative energy market seems completely irrelevant if one is striving to become the worldwide majority supplier of a multi-billion dollar market. The access to the port of Galveston would certainly be valuable in shipping that product to the likely majority market offshore, but many other states with ports would likely be interested in a multi-thousand job plant.
The value of a finished battery pack is about $20 / lb. Truck transport across the US costs about $0.35 / lb. So indeed, proximity to installation locations makes less than 2% difference.
Reno is ~235 miles from the Fremont factory, or about 4 hours.
The gigaplant is going to be a critical part of Tesla's supply chain, and distance is critical. Better to have your main component within a short drive, and let cells/packs destined for others make the long slog via rail or ship.
I'm a founder of an energy storage company, Lightsail Energy.
To say all government funded energy storage companies went belly up is an exaggeration. Many still survive, although you will note a strange anti-correlation between government funding and survival. In my opinion a lot of money did go in the wrong hands. The main problem is that the government is totally confused as to its actual funding strategy -- you need significant, continuous supplies of capital to develop and commercialize hard technology -- every time it fluctuates you impose major stresses and delays.
In at least a few cases, the problem was that the government provided support, and thereafter withdrew it. This was most problematic for the DOE Government Loan Guarantee program -- after Solyndra (a major recipient) went belly up, the government called on their debt in a series of energy storage companies, particularly A123 and Beacon Power. That was the bankruptcy trigger.
On the other hand, it is not exactly like those companies were doing so well anyway. They were fragile, though they might have had a bright future.
> This was most problematic for the DOE Government Loan Guarantee program -- after Solyndra (a major recipient) went belly up, the government called on their debt in a series of energy storage companies, particularly A123 and Beacon Power. That was the bankruptcy trigger.
Is it possible Tesla paid their DOE loan back early to prevent any volatility from that liability hanging out there?
As a user of an off grid solar system I would like to replace my lead batteries with your compressed air solution, even with efficiency of less than 70% it will work for my needs, because with larger capacity I will be able to collect a lot of energy during summer and use it during cloudy winter.
Also I think you should consider doing a MVP (minimal viable product) with less efficiency but fully functional (as I understood from your blog you're struggling now with improving efficiency) and test it in real life, I think there are a lot of off the grid users in US who would like to test it, because real usage is very different than testing it in lab. You'll be able to test a lot of hardware components and be prepared for larger adoption.
An MVP is a totally different think when you're talking about electromechanical equipment that needs to attach to the grid. You need to work so hard just to get something out of the door, you might as well make it good.
Luckily, the market is decently easy to figure out by discussions and logic.
Speaking as a engineer who generally applauds the competitive attempts but is sometimes freaked out by the technical challenges they put ahead of themselves...
Gravity Power: I hope they have a good idea for how they can make and seal a giant concrete piston and boreshaft. I think engineered pumped hydro has a major edge on these guys -- and energy cache.
Isentropic: potentially lower cost than us (gravel's not too expensive), but significantly more loss channels, so a tougher efficiency problem. Serious loss channel potential in the thermal gradient, plus both heat stores need to be pressurized in their main design.
Wouldn't trade places with them, but maybe they'd say the same.
We might eventually do a ~10kw version for homes or a ~100kw version for cars but that is very speculative / in the future.
I am modestly excited by Ambri, Aquion, and Tesla.
Random question after reading a bunch about your company: Are you working at all on using wind turbines to compress the air directly, instead of converting it to electricity first? Seems like that could improve efficiency? Although it seems like your goal is scaling, so maybe it makes sense to stay focused on single product line.
I don't know the details of these government funded companies, but it doesn't seem to surprising. I wouldn't expect a government funded restaurant to be able to compete with privately funded restaurants either. It's pretty basic economics regarding how incentives work.
Cosmin Laslau, Lux’s energy storage specialist, said there are profound differences between the past failures and Tesla’s new lithium-ion production effort. “Most importantly, the likes of A123 built Li-ion capacity first, and then waited forlornly for demand and partnerships that never came,” he said. “Tesla has taken the opposite approach: It started by creating the demand, unearthing a niche for luxury EVs powered by massive battery packs.”
This makes sense. Domestic Li-ion manufacturing would be nice, but you won't generate more demand for batteries just by building new factories. What we need to spending money like those federal grants is on battery research. Capacity and charge time are major limiting factors on the growth of electric vehicles (not to mention the primary limiting factors in mobile computing performance as well). Finding new battery tech and improving existing tech is where the federal money should be flowing.
"Is it because of the sheer difficulty of such ventures?"
Keeping R&D alive is difficult, especially in a competitive market. You need to keep momentum going. One way to help success rate is through economies of scale. If you know or have a hunch you can sell huge volumes, then you can more safely put money towards the infrastructure that will bring down cost per unit - whether that's for a full vehicle, or individual parts like batteries for a vehicle.
An 85kWh battery may be more useful in every garage than this article claims. The added expense is claimed to "keep consumers away", but really it means things like solar panels become more useful.
If you are able to charge your car via power you generate and it can supply enough power back to run your home, you can get some huge benefits. You can have power at night that you generated during the day. No need to suck power from the grid. During outages, you would likely still have a few days of power. And finally, if we actually take full advantage of this, our power infrastructure could directly use these cars to distribute and store energy and route around outages, increasing stability in a huge way.
All in all, this could usher in an era of crowd-sourced power generation. One of the primary reasons that hasn't been feasible was the ephemerality of power on the grid. You consume it just after it's produced. We have no good way to store it. But with hundreds of thousands of 85kWh capacity batteries plugged into the grid, we suddenly have a start.
I think paying an extra $20,000+ for a car if that's a potential outcome is worth every penny.