>Load shifting on a consumer scale has been happening for decades in various places around the world (e.g. cheap nuclear energy at night powering storage heaters)
Sorry, but as a consumer I pay the same rate day and night, and I think most in the US are like me. I personally have no incentive for load-shifting. Why do I need PowerWall?
>Self-consumption: in a grid increasingly fed by solar power all those peaks hit at the same time and there's been multiple recent news stories about power prices going negative at those peaks.
Solar, including concentrated solar which is outside this discussion, is currently 0.48% of all US electricity generation. Not a big effect for many years, unless one of the other Musk businesses (Solar City) gets a big boost.
>Backup - no-one said anything about "true" natural disasters. Backup from short power outages is already an established market in many outlying areas and a fringe benefit for almost anyone. And no-one said that you had to buy it and use it for this single purpose.
Okay, but it seems like a pretty expensive way to ride out a few hours of blackout.
> This whole area has been predicted as a growing market for years, there's others in this thread complaining that it's nothing new compared with less famous competitors, so complaints that it's a product dreamt up to soak up subsidies is a bit odd.
I've been called worse, but my point here is that these predicted schemes haven't taken off because they would depend on MASSIVE subsidies, and Mr. Musk does dream big.
The main point is that everyone should probably have a battery in their garage, but that battery should be in a car, and since business is not working out so well for Musk he is trying to access another source of regulated government support. The economics/policy of electric cars seem much better than home electricity storage, and all the benefits of PowerWall, if they materialize, can and hopefully will be delivered by lithium under your hood. Battery-powered cars will take over America, I just doubt most of those batteries will be made by Tesla.
> Sorry, but as a consumer I pay the same rate day and night, and I think most in the US are like me.
Where do you live? I pay the same rate 24 hours/day as well, but I could switch to a plan with different rates if it provided value to me. I suspect most power companies provide the option at this point.
> Okay, but it seems like a pretty expensive way to ride out a few hours of blackout.
Is there actually a cheaper option, aside from sitting in the dark with flashlights and making sure that no one opens the fridge or freezer? If you want to ride out a blackout without basically sitting in the dark, you need either a big battery backup or a generator. My in-laws put in a whole-house generator and I think the total cost was nearer to 30K than 3K. (Edit: Actually, just looked at generators and they seem closer to 3K, so I have no idea why their setup would have cost nearly 30K. Edit2: They probably installed something closer to a 25kW generator, which would explain much of the cost.)
> The economics/policy of electric cars seem much better than home electricity storage, and all the benefits of PowerWall
A battery in my car will spend a large chunk of its time somewhere else. It's in intriguing idea to use the car battery this way, but it means when I take my car out, my backup power is gone. If I have solar panels, it also means my daylight charging is also gone (assuming I'm gone, with my car, during the day). So I think this would be great, but would not obviate most of the value of a home battery.
With respect to blackouts, I guess it depends on what's the typical pattern where you live. If it's a short outage (<= few hours), my personal reaction is "who cares?" The main one I worry about, living in the Northeast, is an extended outage in winter that could result in frozen pipes. Spoiled food due to an extended outage in the summer would be annoying but that's a much more bounded cost associated with a rare event. And a battery probably wouldn't last long enough to help in a > 24 hour outage situation--which is when protection would be needed.
I agree that $30K sounds like a lot for a generator. I periodically think about looking into it; I've never seriously priced the whole thing out--generator, connection to house, installation, enclosure--but my expectation us that it would be less than $10K. In such an event I certainly have no problem minimizing my electricity use so long as there's enough juice for the furnace in the winter and the refrigerators.
I'm not aware of an option for non-fixed rate electricity where I live.
>Load shifting on a consumer scale has been happening for decades in various places around the world (e.g. cheap nuclear energy at night powering storage heaters)
Sorry, but as a consumer I pay the same rate day and night, and I think most in the US are like me. I personally have no incentive for load-shifting. Why do I need PowerWall?
>Self-consumption: in a grid increasingly fed by solar power all those peaks hit at the same time and there's been multiple recent news stories about power prices going negative at those peaks.
Solar, including concentrated solar which is outside this discussion, is currently 0.48% of all US electricity generation. Not a big effect for many years, unless one of the other Musk businesses (Solar City) gets a big boost.
>Backup - no-one said anything about "true" natural disasters. Backup from short power outages is already an established market in many outlying areas and a fringe benefit for almost anyone. And no-one said that you had to buy it and use it for this single purpose.
Okay, but it seems like a pretty expensive way to ride out a few hours of blackout.
> This whole area has been predicted as a growing market for years, there's others in this thread complaining that it's nothing new compared with less famous competitors, so complaints that it's a product dreamt up to soak up subsidies is a bit odd.
I've been called worse, but my point here is that these predicted schemes haven't taken off because they would depend on MASSIVE subsidies, and Mr. Musk does dream big.
The main point is that everyone should probably have a battery in their garage, but that battery should be in a car, and since business is not working out so well for Musk he is trying to access another source of regulated government support. The economics/policy of electric cars seem much better than home electricity storage, and all the benefits of PowerWall, if they materialize, can and hopefully will be delivered by lithium under your hood. Battery-powered cars will take over America, I just doubt most of those batteries will be made by Tesla.