Considering DB was one of the inv. banks involved in the IPO, I would most likely take what they say with a pinch of salt. A little more research into the price difference "claimed" between Tesla and other industry competitors shows that actually between 2007-2014 USD1000 per kWH to USD 410 kWh (study- http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v5/n4/full/nclimate25...) and even to USD300 kWh for some industry leaders. Even with installation costs and inverter costs excluded from these figures, I am not sure that Tesla has done something absolutely "staggering" as claimed in the article (although I absolutely enjoyed Elon's keynote!)
Did you read that Nature paper? The “some industry leaders” = Tesla. In any event, the whole chart is based on pretty few data points with highly heterogeneous sources, so I’d take the average numbers with a pinch of salt. Prices are clearly falling at a reasonably fast clip industry-wide though.
Yes absolutely. Agree on Tesla being one of the industry leaders driving the innovation on bringing down battery pack prices BUT my point was what you have re-iterated in your last line - prices are falling on an average industry wide and to attribute that success primarily to Tesla is gross overstatement
The fact that writers are actually having to drill down and do the math and see if Solar Power is less expensive in areas where power is cheap and available is mind blowing to me.
I find it fascinating, that, by 2017, there will be areas in Hawaii and Australia, in which you can make an argument that Solar Power is now less expensive that grid power.
What these authors seem to fail to recognize (or highlight) in their criticism - is that these lines are being crossed 10-15 years ahead of time. Nobody expected parity on these edge cases until at least 2025-2030, and we're going to see it in 2016.
And, what they also seem to fail to recognize, is that the curves for solar are going down. This is just the start.
"Deutsche Bank actually predicts that all 50 US states will be at grid parity by 2016 — that’s next year. (Note that it takes several years to build coal, natural gas, or nuclear power plants.)
Deutsche Bank also predicts that ~80% of the global electricity market will be at grid parity by 2017. This is why solar power is scaring coal companies, natural gas companies, and utilities so much, and why you see so many anti-solar myths out there being repeated over and over again… despite being several years out of date."
There isn't any reason for the author to bring up those points because they are irrelevant.
This article is about whether it makes sense to buy a tesla battery right now. It doesn't matter if solar will be half the cost in five years. If that's the case, just buy it then when the numbers make sense.
Let's say someone wrote an article reviewing a new apartment complex opening in the Tenderloin of SF. If they said that the crime there is terrible so people should look elsewhere, would you be complaining if they didn't provide in-depth projects of potential future crime rates in the same area?
It makes perfect sense to bring it up because the massive disruption this will cause to the global energy economy. Oil, coal, the structure of these are going to be altered massively. Think today how gas is used to blackmail the Ukraine and prop up autocratic political systems. There are very significant implications to all of this.
By the time it becomes 'relevant' it will be ancient news to those who appreciate what's going on here.
The interesting question for solar power is not "When will stand-alone solar power be cheaper than coal/gas?". It is "How high can we push the fraction of solar power / total power before the power distribution grid fails?". You need base power generation to augment solar/wind, there's not a serious scientist in the world denying that, and the numbers I've heard quoted say you can't average much more than 50-60% solar and wind combined.
Right now, Germany is charging ahead on solar. Their current peak record is 50.4% of total power from solar, on a sunny midsummer day with low power usage. Meanwhile, all of their neigbouring countries to the east are doing massive overhauls/reconfigurations of their power distribution grids just to be able to supply Germany with enough base power, mainly from nuclear.
The "We can't do everything with solar" was what everyone was saying (correctly) in 2005-2010. But, the entire point of the Powerwall product is that, today (not next year, today), in parts of Australia and Hawaii, it is now less expensive, and more efficient, to go 100% solar. As the prices of batteries drop, and solar becomes more efficient, the number of places where that is true will only increase.
From the perspective of watching trends back in 2005, this wasn't supposed to happen until 2025, so it's arriving 10 years early.
There's nothing that would prevent a good storage system + wind + power from supplying 100% of the power requirements reliably. You just need to scale your Storage system to handle the periods in which solar/wind aren't driving power.
Regarding the Germany Scenario - Let's see how much nuclear they are going to require after they add a few Terrawatt-Hours worth of battery storage to their grid.
Finally, commenting on your "so Serious Scientists" - there are a lot of them that have done the calculations and have come to the conclusion that only a solar solution will supply the world with the power it requires so that everyone can have an first-world lifestlye. In particular, check out Nate Lewis's introduction to Solar Energy - https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodca... ,He "provides a beginner's overview of the concepts behind solar energy generation as well as the current state of the art and its potential role in future energy production."
It's eye opening - even nuclear power plants don't stand a chance versus solar (which, to be honest, is just harvesting the output of a really, really, really big fusion generator)
The missing component has always been storage, and Elon has jumpstarted that conversation. The powerall is interesting, the gigafactory is more interesting, but the fact that he realizes Tesla is only going to be a tiny, tiny element of a much larger industrial transition, is, in my mind, the most important part of this story.
Sorry, that's just missing the mark. In northern latitudes, where most of the world's energy consumption is currently located, the seasonal variation in solar influx means a 100% solar solution needs to do energy storage for months at a time. Continuing with the Germany example, the monthly-average production of solar power in January is ~ 1/15th the production in July.
And I don't believe we will ever be able to get the whole world up to current western consumption levels. More to the point, we really shouldn't, as current consumption levels in the west are clearly unsustainable.
Not sure who downvoted you (I leveled you up) - I spent about 30 minutes researching seasonal variation of solar power in northern climates (http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/16/us-column-wynn-ren...) and your numbers check out. "For example, aggregate solar power generation in the first week of January was only 7 percent of peak production in the final week of May
The northern climates, then, are a challenge for solar, even with lots of storage. Fair point, and something to think about.
But, as to your second point, about how we shouldn't get the whole world up to current western consumption levels - I don't know about you, but I like hot water in the morning, air conditioning on a hot day, clean clothes from the washing machine, baked goods at home, and and a warm house on a cold winters day. I agree that efficiency is important (all of those things can be delivered more efficiently - same value with less energy), but I certainly wouldn't suggest that everyone in the world shouldn't have access to them, and more.
(I'm not able to reply to ghshephard, so I put it here.)
My point about not getting everyone up to western consumption levels isn't mainly about the things you mention. It's more about the use-and-throw-away culture, plus the general inability of people to make stuff themselves. Imagine the impact if people started mending stuff and clothes, cooking their own food, taking the bicycle with a trailer to the local market to do the weekly shopping, etc. Not just on reducing direct and (mainly) indirect energy consumption, but on public health and general happiness levels! There's so much of our energy consumption that doesn't improve our lives in any meaningful way.
I won't argue about how we live in a terribly consumer-fixated culture - totally agree with you. Ironically, at this exact moment, I'm writing a review on Amazon, about how much I like my 15 year old Kaito KA007 hand-cranked radio. It's never seen a single battery, yet I've had it with me on camping, business trips, burning man - everywhere. 60 seconds on the crank gets me 20 minutes of radio. I hope to have it with me another 15 years.
Likewise, my Mountain Equipment Co-Op Backpack that I've had for 18 years - I've had that with me every single day for 19 years, it's my laptop case, my tool case, my document holder - In the Amazon Jungle, Luxembourg, and with Network Engineers in London, Dubai and Singapore. I've used the heck out of it - and it's still going strong.
So, I'm totally on board with having a very few things, that you take good care of, and last a long time.
But - this is a separate conversation (somewhat) from energy usage. Heat, Pumping/Processing water, cooling - they all have some physical minimum amounts of power. And even if you are living a hyper-efficient 40 gallons/day life style (Northern California, see http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/01/us/water-use-i... ) versus the rest of the world (See: http://www.data360.org/dsg.aspx?Data_Set_Group_Id=757) - there are some physical limits as to how little energy you can use and still maintain a comfortable lifestyle. We can only be efficient so far - eventually we're going to have to find a way to provide lots, and lots, and lots of power to everyone in the world, if they want to live a comfortable lifestyle.
Thankfully, much of that comes from having warm homes, and hot water - something that Solar does an admirable job of providing (bringing it all back to the original thread).
I agree wholeheartedly with all of this. But I think reducing consumption is probably the most significant thing a person can do to lower their CO2 footprint. My rule of thumb (which is fairly good across a surprising range of goods for ones that I've tested) is that at least 500g of CO2 is emitted for every dollar you spend, whether that's on electricity with our current typical fuel mix or on a cheeseburger or a plane journey. So if your electricity bill is say 5% of your monthly expenditures, electric energy usage is just responsible for 5% of your total CO2 emissions. This is very ballpark, but you get the idea.
"There's nothing that would prevent a good storage system + wind + power from supplying 100% of the power requirements reliably. You just need to scale your Storage system to handle the periods in which solar/wind aren't driving power."
Nothing, except for costs. Those are going down and are becoming competitive for many parts of the world, but costs will be prohibitive for some climates for quite a while. For example, if you have lots of snow and strong winds in winter, you may need to have _weeks_ of power storage to get reliable power.
Keeping a grid connection for those cases will help, but if lots of people do this, the price of power in those peak periods may surge a lot as your electricity supplier will have to recoup the costs of keeping its plant on standby year round in a few weeks.
That seems fixable by connecting solar/wind systems over large distances, but we have to work on getting a grid that is fed by thousands of suppliers and in which the direction power flows can vary more.
But yes, I think solar and wind are the future and even the near future, even in the less sunny parts of the world.
If everyone took that attitude, Solar would have never have advanced. It's a combination of first-adopters, and strong government support that's gotten us where we are today. I'm not opposed to a writer talking about the practical facts today - I encourage it. But, unless you are a paid advocate of the Koch brothers, you are somewhat obliged to balance out such an article with some context in how far we've gone and are likely to go.
Taking your example - Oakland near Lake Merrit in 17th has some significant crime, but any writer worth their salt taking about it, would compare it to when I lived there, back in 1996-1998, to discuss how far it has come in the last 20 years, and what the general trend is.
If there was massive investment in police and other anti crime initiatives, now would be the right time to buy, by not providing analysis the might be trying to hide those facts for the benefits of others.
Solar skeptics are fascinating. They've been saying the same thing since solar was $1/KWh and they'll keep saying it until solar is $0.05/KWh. However, that won't stop solar adoption from growing, maybe it will just slow it down slightly. The more solar panels (and now batteries) drop in price, the quieter those voices will become. I think in 10 years they'll all just about shut up.
Have a look at Dave Jones' EEVblog video about his solar install, it include numbers from a year on his roof. He exported around $185 worth of power at 6c/kWh. The price of buying from the grid is 25.5c/kWh. In principle with a battery system that would be a saving of $786, assuming optimal charge/discharge (it's about 80-90% efficient I believe).
If you run the numbers, the battery slightly decreases the payback time for that system to ~7 years vs 7.5 with the panels alone. However, once its paid off, it could save almost $1000 a year if you live in somewhere like Sydney. This does make the big assumption that you store the electricity and use it optimally, but it's not unreasonable.
I would argue that in this case, it's definitely worth buying.
It's all about pack life and capacity decrease over time. Those you really need to factor in otherwise the calculations make no sense. Storing and retrieving a KWh from a battery pack has a cost associated with it in terms of wear on the pack.
Even if it is worth buying, the capital costs are steep.
Chris's main allegation seems to be that you have to have a hell of a lot of cash to even hope to make it worthwhile- and considering it's $5k for the cheapest battery setup, plus anywhere from $5-30k for your panels, I think he's not wrong, no matter what your electricity prices are.
Dave's 3kW system apparently cost $5k (Australian) and that included the inverter and decent panels. So call it $10k which puts in on par with a cheap new car or a nice kitchen makeover.
You can think of it as an investment which will take 5-10 years to mature with a secondary benefit of backup power if the grid goes down. Not everyone can afford it, but that's the nature of investment.
Also in Chris' scenario, he's using America as the model. Electricity costs there are just over half those in Australia.
> Chris's main allegation seems to be that you have to have a hell of a lot of cash to even hope to make it worthwhile
Or cheap financing. Other examples of assets that are extremely useful that can be inexpensively financed would be housing or a car. Why would solar be different?
Here in the UK, you can get free solar panels installed in return for cheaper electricity bills, with most of the funding coming from pension companies.
An interesting take, and good to read some skeptical views.
But the economies break down slightly if you are not paying 10c/kWh for electricity. In Australia we pay more than double that, even taking currency exchange into account.
Also, we have to pay a 70-80c AUD "connection charge" for the privilege of paying them for electricity.
Basically, while prices are falling slightly, they won't forever.
I agree that letting others take the risk early on, and hopefully push the storage price down, is a good move though.
I've always opposed selling off NSW's state-owned electricity networks, because that will just lead to price rises in short order (well above the already-high cost of power). However, if storage plus home generation takes off, those networks are going to be worth pennies on the dollar, and we should probably sell them off as quickly as possible... then buy them back when the investors are ready to take a bath.
I appreciate that link. Currently, Solar and energy storage is at 30kwh. I'm sure within five years it will be competitive with the current grid we have in America. First gens are always expensive but at 3k usd, no one was expecting that yet. Tesla looks like they are accelerating the trends.
To add more to the energy debate, I haven't seen too many people talk about replacing ships fuel, since that accounts for ~20% of our CO2 pollution, from sources I read a few years back.
Maybe replacing our grid and all grids is a feasible goal which is why companies are tackling it now?
Trucks, ships, and rockets consume a lot of fuel and are horrible polluters. When we can replace perishables fuels with renewables we will finally see the light at the end of the tunnel.
"I’ll say it another way: unless your solar-powered home is entirely disconnected from the grid, or your solar system is big enough to provide for all your electricity needs, an expensive battery backup system like Powerwall does not make economic sense.
No doubt battery technology is important for the management of the power grid of the future, but at this time the average homeowner should let the big power generation utilities take the risks and bear the costs of perfecting the technology."
The numbers in that article are/were badly wrong. Many numbers are now changed (lines drawn through the old numbers). In particular, the numbers for solar generation have been 'corrected' by factor of 6.7 - the author says he used obviously wrong numbers because the website he copied them from had them wrong.
Although the author has 'corrected' his numbers, he has not modified his conclusions. Someone who does that is not worth paying attention to.
I would like to read a sober and accurate accurate article on Tesla's powerwall, this one is not.
I still think there is a fundamental need to re-think the energy market though - specifically on the role the power utility plays. Clearly they won't be selling a great deal of power but they play a key role in absorbing spikes (both up and down) and stepping in when the grid needs to be balanced. Somehow they need to be fairly compensated for that universal arbiter role & charging per unit of electricity doesn't seem to work well on this new landscape.
Not all electricity is consumed by homes or properties where "the amount of local energy resources" is within an order of magnitude of "the amount of power used by the facility". "Companies who provide lots and lots of electricity" aren't going anywhere; you're not going to run an aluminum smelting plant off of a local, plant-owned installation of solar panels, if for no other reason that it is a poor use of capital as a plant would not be able to invest to keep up in the changing landscape of energy generation.
While change is happening and change in inevitable I think you're greatly overestimating the rate of the change and badly misunderstanding the quality.
"You are probably going to move where the power is cheap though"
Yes, as my pre-comment scan of the Wikipedia article on aluminum smelting (to double-check I had the right electricity-intensive industrial process) said in the second paragraph [1]. I didn't think it worth adding to the comment.
Of course aluminum plants move to where electricity is cheap, all else being equal... exactly what alternative do you think I was proposing?
Further, geothermal is significantly different for this use case, as geothermal can be used for base load applications where solar can not. Since such plants tend to run without regard for where the sun is in the sky, this sort of industry would be very difficult to run off of solar power without absurdly overprovisioning for power storage, which remains a significant problem at this scale. You are also not going to run your aluminum smelting plant for 18 hours out of the day on battery power!
I don't know about aluminium smelters specifically, but I personally expect solar to invert the definition of off-peak electricity. Right now, electricity is cheaper at night because the demand is lower and coal plants have a minimum output, so anyone who needs a lot of electricity and can pick a time of day will use it at night. As solar becomes cheaper and more widespread, night-time electricity will become more expensive, because it is either stored in expensive batteries or generated from more expensive non-solar sources. So it seems likely to me that 10 or 20 years from now, electricity will be cheapest at noon and more expensive after dark.
Here's another fun thought: 6% of electricity is lost due to transmission costs. Will it be more efficient (in some cases, at least) to physically move charged batteries from solar fields to (nearer to) end users than to send it over the wire?
>Here's another fun thought: 6% of electricity is lost due to transmission costs. Will it be more efficient (in some cases, at least) to physically move charged batteries from solar fields to (nearer to) end users than to send it over the wire?
No, not in this universe, anyway.
The most basic power distribution in the world is people with Ox and cart distributing lead/acid batteries to remote villages. Transmitting power this way is the least efficient way possible.
I was thinking more like barges / rail cars that were essentially one giant battery, cycling back and forth. Even the most optimistic figure for current technology is still too high, about 0.03% / mile, so you only get about 200 miles (round trip) on a 6% budget. I suspect over-the-wire transmission losses are lower over that distance, but it's only a little impossible.
Regarding the 6% transmission costs, if you have 17 charged batteries and use 1 of them to power a self-driving vehicle with negligible maintenance costs (and in a future where all vehicles are electric), it would make sense to haul the other 16 within whatever distance the vehicle can manage on a charge.
It looks like a Tesla S battery pack is a little over 1,200 lbs. So for a rough estimate, consider the distance a Tesla S can tow 20,000 lbs. Probably not very far.
Unless I botched my reasoning somewhere, it looks like battery energy densities would have to increase by an order of magnitude or two for this to become a thing.
This has already happened somewhat in Germany. Solar panels have completely disrupted midday wholesale electricity prices. The effect is so strong that occasionally the spot price goes negative: if you're not producing renewable energy, you have to pay to put your energy into the grid.
In 1977, USA Built the world's largest "battery" at 30 GWh. That's right, 30 gigawatt hours. And yes, that's right, 1977... almost 40 years ago. It's not a chemical battery, but its a "battery" nonetheless in that it very efficiently stores electrical power.
Yep, those are nice - Bath Country is of course not the only one out there - but they don't come without their side effects. You need to construct a dam and sacrifice some area to be used as the reservoir. Those pesky environmentalists, you know...
I would be shocked if Tesla Energy isn't assembling entire systems cargo container by cargo container in Reno and shipping them by rail across the country in the next 2-3 years.
Aluminium smelters typically sign long term power agreements at a fixed price anyway. They typically cannot take advantage of increasing production in times of cheap power because of their agreements.
Besides, an ability to increase production implies idle production capacity, which, as you state, is a poor use of capital allocation.
Lots of people see a few solar panels and tesla announcing sleek batteries, and think a new age is upon us. Not yet.
> think you're greatly overestimating the rate of the change
Take a look at Hawaii - the "rate of the change" is so big the utility pretty much stopped connecting people's PV panels because the grid couldn't deal with it.
As the percentage of renewables increases the fluctuations grow bigger. e.g. Germany already has 40GW of solar installed...so if its overcast then you need an entire fleet of nuclear plants to pick up the slack (sure it doesn't drop to 0GW but you get the point).
Those companies you mentioned that will still need power - not sure how that is relevant to the fluctuations? Or do you propose that they carry to cost for everyone?
Do heavy industrial concerns with high power usage not already usually have an on-site gas or oil turbine to generate their own power and, often equally important, steam?
That's the situation I'm familiar with, but that may be a peculiarity of the under-developed grid in my area.
Turning bauxite into aluminum is an electrical process (they don't run on direct heat, steam, or mechanical power) and they use a lot of electricity (one reason aluminum-can recycling is such a big deal). Aluminum plants tend to end up in places with cheap electricity (especially hydroelectric) where they can absorb a lot of off-peak capacity as the power customer of last resort.
Some do, but that implies on-site supply of gas (oil would not be used for aluminium production much).
Building smelters next to coal fields is a way of producing cheap aluminium. Coal is still the cheapest way to make electricity - it's only places where the government has explicitly made this not the case that coal is expensive.
Generally unfavourable government regulations simply moves production to places without the regulation - for no net change in production or coal consumption. Sometimes it's a net negative if the new location has lower local emissions standards and technology.
If you have a good location for a hydroelectric reservoir, apart from it being remote from population areas and existing generation capacity, you might well stick a smelter and some solar next to it.
You are greatly underestimating the production and distribution of power. Worldwide, solar and wind produces about 1% of energy.
The majority of energy usage is in commercial processes - factories and commercial buildings.
Think about an airline. To make money it has to fly when it's customers want to take a flight - not when the spot price of jet fuel is advantageous. An airline which flew when the price of flying was cheap would attract a niche market of price sensitive travellers. Everyone else wants the flight at a set time.
The same goes for industrial production. If you spend money building a large commercial business which has specific energy needs, you want that asset producing a return as close as possible to 24x7x365. There are very few types of industry that lend themselves to batch production (which implies spending capital to create overcapacity to absorb spikes).
The need for baseload generation is not going anywhere. The more advanced and productive the society, the higher the need for baseload power.
> The need for baseload generation is not going anywhere.
Yes, it is. Baseload is a principle you can take advantage of to introduce massive plants that need to output at 100% almost all the time, like nuclear plants. There's no intrinsic need for baseload. What matters is always matching the demand curve. You can do that with variable sources like wind and solar with a dispatchable source like hydro or gas, just as in the baseload + peak situation.
Look around you at the things which are consuming power 24/7. Look beyond your dwelling at the street, the neighbourhood, the city and the country.
All those things require constant power 24/7, without interruption. That is what baseload is. It's not some invention of the existing generation industry, it's a function of demand. It's not some conspiracy theory dreamt up by the nuclear power industry.
Cities without baseload power have long periods of blackouts and intermittent power. These are places of lower standard of living.
Agreed, also need to keep in mind that "power utility" can describe 3 discrete agents in electricity markets: the generator, distributor and retailer. The distributors may find themselves with a more active role to play as everyone becomes a sporadic generator.
If only Enron was still a company as they were really good at seeking fair compensation for utility providers. I believe they would have found a way to do that again on this new landscape. </sarcasm>
From a friend who is in the battery business: "LIB loses capacity over time and cycle. Grid storage requires extremely large cycle life, cheap and high power capability for all the flow of renewable energy source. LIB only has the last one. Maybe Elon Musk can make it cheap but cycle life is still gonna be the problem needs to be solved."
Musk will warranty the hell out of batteries. Maybe they'll wear out in 5 years, but he'll have a giant battery factory in full swing by then.
Tesla cars are warrantied the same way. He over promises now to get traction, then uses the profit at volume to cover any gaps in initial deployments. It's a pretty solid plan, but you have to deliver or you lose your reputation. Musk knows he can do it.
Musk's batteries are the entire definition of a disruptive product. They're certainly not better than most energy solutions, but it'll be cheap and useful for a non-trivial sector of the market.
We haven't even begun to see the real advances in economies of scale for batteries, let alone the technologies that have been in development in the last decade.
There is some chatter that the 10 kWh battery is actually larger, under the hood, so deep-cycle discharges never occur.
Anyways - the entire purpose of the 10 kWh battery, is to be used in scenarios in which you fill them with Solar during the day and (potentially) drain them at night. So, unless someone states otherwise, I'd presume daily full discharge of the 10 kWh for that 10 year warranty.
It will not. Coal generation is still cheap and will remain so because it is simple to build and operate, and capital invested lasts for decades.
It is only expensive in places where the government has decided to force it out of business via taxes and regulations. That's not true for most of the world, and the future of coal production is certainly up.
> It is only expensive in places where the government has decided to force it out of business via taxes and regulations. That's not true for most of the world, and the future of coal production is certainly up.
You mean "properly include the cost of it's externalities".
Coal is the epitome of "tragedy of the commons". The faster a stake is driven through its heart, the better off the world will be.
Drive coal out of production now and you'll cause a lot more problems than you solve. Lots of activists like to do their ten minutes of hate on coal, but they never stop and think about all the good that it does. It's a case of 'what has coal ever done for us'. Apart from all the lighting, refrigeration, production, water distribution, heating, cooling and computing it enables throughout the world.
The age of coal will eventually end. It is best managed rather then fervently trying to prevent.
I don't dispute coal had a time and a place, just as rock did during the stone age. We've evolved past it though, and the time for its graceful bow of the world energy stage has arrived.
When every single village and town has reliable and cheap electricity supply and their productivity has been raised to the point where they can afford cheaper replacements, then coal still has a place.
All those TV adverts for villages with no clean water - what they first need is a power station to power pumps and filtration. When you see kids that have no education, what they first need is electricity so their parents don't have to make the kids work all day, and lighting so they can read at night.
Those places, if they don't have hydro available, need coal fired electricity capable of being delivered at 10c/kWh. They don't need a tesla battery pack and solar panels any more than they need a tesla model s.
I think most of them would trade a bit of coal pollution for the pollution from burning wood and dried out cowshit inside their homes. And it's downright wrong for people in rich countries to out their nose in the air and try and tell them they can't.
> Those places, if they don't have hydro available, need coal fired electricity capable of being delivered at 10c/kWh. They don't need a tesla battery pack and solar panels any more than they need a tesla model s.
Distributed solar with batteries is still cheaper than coal plants and running power distribution all over the third world.
> I think most of them would trade a bit of coal pollution for the pollution from burning wood and dried out cowshit inside their homes. And it's downright wrong for people in rich countries to out their nose in the air and try and tell them they can't.
It would be more effective for us in the first world to subsidize solar technology for the third world, instead of the terribly pathetic idea of continuing to build coal plants.
I agree that subsidising solar for the developing world is probably the best way forward. What interests me most about this is the parallels that can be drawn with telephone networks.
Many developing nations skipped out on landlines and jumped straight to mobile. Instead of a nation-wide power distribution network with coal-fired generators, perhaps we will see some countries jumping straight to distributed solar.
> Wind power, on average, sold for 2.5¢ per kilowatt-hour in the US in 2013, when looking at PPA prices (2014 numbers are due to come out this week). That’s the average for all reported PPAs, which means they’re a bit under 4¢ per kilowatt-hour without subsidies. These super-low prices are extremely hard to beat, and demonstrate why so much of the electricity generation capacity added in the past few years has come from wind power plants.
The article also has several examples of utility scale solar already producing power below 6 cents/KwH.
Energy is taken on and off the grid all the time. Generators that cost 10 dollars per megawatt-hour will be taken offline as soon as the price is projected to be $9.99/MWh for longer than the projected shutdown-startup time of the generator. Which in the case of fossil fuel-powered generators is minutes.
Coal (and oil) have powered almost all of the progress in manufacturing, food production and distribution, health care, and science/engineering in the last century. It has unquestionably been a net positive. Will alternate forms of energy generation eventually displace it? That seems to be the trend. But if that happens, coal itself will have powered the progress necessary to create its own replacement.
I don't understand your comment. The death of coal is not a single step. It's already been happening because of cheap natural gas.
Look at this chart for a coal company[1]. It's already been almost dead and a major chunk of the coal GHG emissions are already cut way back (albeit at the expense of natural gas emissions).
Is that just US usage? World consumption appears to have risen until 2012. That's the truly meaningful stat. So I agree with you, and it looks like the world situation is worse.
>Why post a stock chart for a coal company, when we have actual usage data for coal:
Sorry if it wasn't obvious, but coal companies have to make money. They are at the point now where they are on the verge of being wiped out by natural gas.
It will reach a point where coal makes absolutely no sense to invest in and the game will stop there. It's already at the point where nobody in their right mind is putting money into new large coal prospects.
As has been already pointed out, the domestic coal market is not indicative of the entire coal market.
In the ten year period between 2002 and 2012 (the only figure I have the most recent numbers for) coal consumption went from 5 and a half billion tons to over 8 billion tons, and it's slated to hit 9 billion tons by 2019.
This. The number one influencer of grid tech investment is energy prices before politics (not going to discuss nuclear). Cheap gas -> we build more gas generators. Expensive gas -> we build fewer generators and even try to schedule less use of the ones we've already built, and bring online cheaper fuel sources (ie coal), etc.
Yes, but natural gas is not a magical solution for CO2 reduction. It's substantially better given the reduced particulates emissions, but you're still spewing tremendous amounts of GHG into the atmosphere.
It is hard to overstate the impact of this announcement.
Just as solar panels were not expected to reach $0.70/watt until 2030 (reached it last year), batteries were not expected to reach $400/kWh until years from now.
It is now quite possible that off-grid will make economic sense across wide swaths of the globe for new construction, across a subset for retrofits.
> batteries were not expected to reach $400/kWh until years from now.
What? Your ordinary starting battery for a medium-sized car has 65 Ah @ 12 V. That is 780 wH. They cost here < 60 € or about 65 $.
So they are significantly less than $100/kWh, and the technology has been around for more than a hundred years.
(These are starting batteries, not entirely suitable for storing e.g. solar which are currently a bit more expensive, but not nearly twice as expensive, and the difference in price comes just from manufacturing and sales volume).
Here [0] is a lead-acid storage battery, UK price £90 ($135) for 1.26kWh. That is $107/kWh.
You do not use the whole 1.26kWh each cycle - you only want to use e.g. 50% of that, so that you get reasonable battery life (fully discharge your lead-acid batteries, and you won't have any electrodes left). So $208/kWh might be the 'actually usable' value.
The harder number to find is battery lifetime - it depends on many factors (discharge depth, number of cycles per year, storage temperature, exact battery type, etc). And when you are doing cost-benefit analysis, this number is a vital part of your calculations. You also want to know 'if I wait x years, will the price of Tesla batteries have dropped so much that I would be better holding cash now, and buying Tesla batteries in the future).
This headline number is not the total cost of course, you need charge controller, inverter, building to house the batteries, etc.
BTW that £90 clearly includes VAT, but is the VAT on home battery systems in UK 20 % or 5 %? Domestic fuel is 5% but that doesn't necessarily mean that the same reduced rate applies to replacement energy devices?
For ballpark numbers, I am not worrying about 15%. e.g. will your batteries last 10yrs, 20yrs, or more, is a bigger unknown.
But to try answering your question, here [0] the UK govt says it is 5% for battery banks for wind power, and for hydro power. Solar is not mentioned, my guess would be that the rate on the battery we are discussing is 5%.
Yes, this is not at all relevant for ballpark numbers, I was just interested whether the VAT rules appreciate the fact that these batteries are for alternative energy and not just generic consumer goods.
I'm afraid my country (Finland) taxes them with 24 % VAT just like almost everything else.
I think they can do it as a free service for consumer volumes, but if we talk about recycling the local power station's storage batteries, your local IKEA won't accept them. The question is more like "what kind of industry do we need to build to recycle the materials, and how to manage its emissions".
The definition is the relevant one for the context. The definition of affordable here is relative to the people who may buy it. If it is affordable for >50% of new homebuilders in US, Europe, Japan, etc, and for the minority middle classes in middle income countries (china, Brazil..) then it is "affordable" in the context that we are talking about.
In the City with many high rise building, installing Solar Panel in lower rise building causes horrible concentrated Light reflection. Generally I would rather have utility making solar farm then roof top solar panel.
I've always thought that was an indication of poor efficiency on the part of the PV Solar Panel module. Wouldn't you expect to see, on very efficient Panels, no reflection? Indeed, isn't the ideal to see dark black pools where the panels are doing their best work?
Typical sunglasses absorb 90% of light. Therefore two sunglasses on top another would absorb 99% and let 1% through. Is the remaining light enough to blind you when looking directly at the sun? I assumed yes, but I might be wrong. I'll have to find a second pair of shades to test.
