Tesla Tees Up To Mass Produce Energy Storage For Green-Centric Utilities.
Tesla Energy’s new foray into providing energy storage products to service not just homes but also utilities is bringing much-needed attention to the accompanying technologies. That, in turn, may attract new capital and help bring about economies of scale that would further reduce those prices.
In the end, it’s about making the concept of energy storage both accessible and affordable. Most people associate the technology with taking electric power off the grid at night and storing it in a battery, releasing it later on when the demand for power is highest and when the sun may be hiding. But the more prevalent use is to infuse the grid with electrons when the switches trip or the voltage sways. That keeps the lights from flickering out.
“We applaud Tesla’s entry into the energy storage market,” says Jostein Eikeland, chief executive of the Alevo Group in Charlotte, NC. “Together with Solar City, it will bring more electricity from renewables direct to consumers and onto the grid. And, adding distributed resources is a good thing for the environment as well.”
Eikeland, who participated in a panel discussion sponsored by Accenture and moderated by this reporter in Chicago this week, went on to say that it is too soon to judge Tesla’s technology, although he feels that the high-profile endeavor gives energy storage the shot that it needs to increase production and bolster efficiencies.
As many people know by now, Tesla’s Chief Executive Elon Musk is constructing a “Gigafactory” to mass produce batteries for the company’s electric car. But the devices that it will soon start making may also be used for utility-scale grid storage as well as residential storage, which SolarCity SCTY +2.6% Corp. has been doing since 2013, on a limited basis; Musk is chairman of its board.
Residential devices are
smaller systems that produce 5-10 kilowatts of electricity and often
installed in garages. More expensive per kilowatt hours, they are
typically used for backup power (instead of generators) or to maximize
rooftop solar production. Grid-scale storage is 1 megawatt or more and
sold to utilities by storage developers, typically through requests for
proposals. They are used for frequency regulation or renewable smoothing – the most prevalent use today.
As for Tesla, it will sell
its residential storage batteries for about $3,500, although the cost
does not include “inverters” that manage voltage levels during charging
and discharging. They are lithium-ion batteries, which can discharge for
an hour.
forbes.
