teslamotorclub: Tesla's new core business? CES Grid Storage Device For SuperCharger/SuperSwapper part 1

This thread is to specifically discuss the implications of Tesla's new grid storage business, as opposed to debate the particulars of SuperSwapping vs SuperCharging. Elon announced grid storage during the conference call on SuperChargers, so we can be certain that it is a reality.

He did not discuss the business aspect of it, which is our task here. Everyone needs to be clear, the amount of revenue potential for this business probably dwarfs any potential auto manufacturing business. Building electric cars will allow Tesla to bootstrap a capability that will eventually produce mind boggling revenues as the fleet of Tesla's grows into the millions or tens of millions.

Here is the patent that describes the management architecture for Tesla's new Grid Storage Business -

METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR EXTENDING LIFETIME FOR RECHARGEABLE STATIONARY ENERGY STORAGE DEVICES - Patent application

Here is the section linking this patent to SuperSwappers, but this patent is completely agnostic on architecture -

A context for one implementation is use of rechargeable Li-ion battery packs designed for plug-in electric vehicles (PH:EV, HEV, and EV and the like) as community energy storage (CES).
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Read more: METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR EXTENDING LIFETIME FOR RECHARGEABLE STATIONARY ENERGY STORAGE DEVICES - Patent application

The words "Metal-Air" are also in the patent. Any mention of that is off topic. This thread is about the business of grid storage. Same goes for SuperSwappers/SuperChargers or any other car related architecture.

Battery chemistry is relevant in terms of capacity, rechargability and life-cycle.

Here are background resources for competing uses, whether to support SuperChargers or SuperSwappers. The grid storage business is the same regardless -

Randy Carlson's post on the economics of how grid storage can make buckets of money for Tesla in the context of SuperChargers -

SuperCharging Tesla - Seeking Alpha

I've posted quickie models describing roughly the same thing at threads all over TMC, only in the context of SuperSwappers. I'm not going to link to all of them, but the best stuff is probably in the speculation thread on what the mystery announcement was (posted before we found the reference to swapping in the 8k) with my first post here, and discussion continuing forward until after the 8k was discovered -

CapitalistOppressor said: ?

JRP3 said: ?

Swapping is a huge investment and part of the reason I knew Better Place was going to fail. I hope that's not what Elon is talking about.
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I dunno about that. My reason for thinking Better Place was going to fail was the terrible cars they were offering along with how much they were shafting the consumer with their shady battery lease. If you looked at the car, and did the math it was just an incredibly bad deal all the way around.

In contrast, I did do some work on modeling a Model S battery swap program, modeling it on "In-Bay Automated Car Wash" systems like you see at a typical gas station. The capital costs weren't that bad, and you only need maybe 1,000 batteries to supply 100 stations. The biggest ongoing cost is you need a small fleet of trucks to constantly rebalance the battery inventory, and workers to do the balancing.

I even have toyed with patenting some of the mechano-logistical elements of the model I came up with. If Tesla is actively considering this I'd suggest they call me and see if any of my thoughts are of value to them.

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Doug_G said: ?

Man, you guys have all hyped this up to unbelievable levels such that any real announcement will seem like a disappointment.

It is sure to be some cool feature or other, but nothing on the order battery swapping or exotic new batteries!
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Yes, I pretty much agree, but Elon is making it hard not to dream with the tweets he is sending out.

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Banahogg said: ?

Assuming it is battery swaps (which I'm pretty convinced of at this point), it seems like one of the bigger questions is how it interacts with the supercharger network.

From the 10K, one of the risks to acceptance they list is:

"our capability to rapidly swap out the Model S battery pack and the development of specialized public facilities
to perform such swapping, which do not currently exist but which we may introduce sometime in 2013;"

And from another section:

"In addition, we designed Model S to incorporate a modular battery pack in the floor of the vehicle, enabling it to be rapidly
swapped out at certain of our service centers and specialized commercial battery exchange facilities that we anticipate may be available in the
future. "

So, sounds like they're introducing the facilities, including some at existing service centers. The use of the word "commercial" makes me think that the swaps won't be free like the supercharges. Maybe they're setting up superchargers as the baseline for shorter weekend trips and swaps as the premium solution for really hauling cross-country?

I feel like I'm going a bit beyond what the evidence shows, but what's the point of a forum if not speculation?
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No, that was my assumption when I looked at this last year. Tesla will clearly charge for battery swap.
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I then went on to describe more in detail how this would work further up the thread.

This concept then was discussed extensively in Citizen-T's thread, which was started after the reference in the 8k was found, where the architecture of the system was then debated -

Citizen-T said: ?

Battery swapping is coming. There is little doubt at this point that part 5 of Elon's trilogy is battery swapping.

Now, I know there are a number of threads that are discussing this, and debating the pros and cons of swapping, and arguing about whether or not it is a good idea. The fact of the matter is, none of that matters. Apparently they have found a way to make it work. So, I don't want to rehash any of those old arguments in this thread. I want to figure out what Elon and company know. If he found a way to make this work, then there is no reason we can't figure it out too. Let's do what we do best and scoop his announcement.

Let's start with what we know about Elon's strategy for dealing with these things. It seems to me that the way Elon attacks a problem is that he first studies the opposing arguments. He compiles them all together, then he ranks them and begins knocking out each leg of the argument one at a time. That's what this 5-part trilogy is all about after all: he's taking the bear case against Tesla and attacking each point one at a time.

So, let's do the same. Let's compile together the list of arguments against battery swapping, then let's figure out what Tesla could be doing to "solve" these problems.

This is what I've got to start. Let me know if I should add anything.

Swapping is too expensive

They need to have a ton of batteries on hand (to be able to handle the worst case) but most of the time they are sitting around doing nothing.

Why would they bother building out the Supercharger network if they are going to do swapping too?

I take really good care of my battery, I don't want to end up with someone else's random battery.

Swapping stations are too mechanically complex, would be a pain to maintain.

So, let's compile some potential answers to each of these arguments. Again, it doesn't matter whether you agree with these arguments or not, it only matters that some do. If anyone believes these things, they are an argument worth squashing in Elon's book (think about the bricked battery thing).

The Answer (a work in progress)

The Tesla Battery Swapping Network will be a subset of the Supercharger Network. This means that all battery swap stations will also be supercharging stations, but not all supercharging stations will be battery swap stations. The highest traffic supercharger stations will be selected for upgrade to battery swap stations to reduce the amount of time the average person needs to wait.

The stations will only have a limited number of batteries. Owners will be able to reserve a battery for up to 30 mins before their arrival at the station via their smartphone app or the center console in their Model S. This balances the desire of the owner to know ahead of time how long they will need to stop for with the station's goal to not have reserved batteries sitting idle when other owners could be using them. This also gives the station enough time to Supercharge a battery for the owner and have it ready just in time for the owner to swap.

If an owner is unable to reserve a battery, then they will need to use the superchargers that are available at the station. This should only occur when traveling at peak times and only for a minority of owners visiting the station.

There will be a per-use cost for battery swapping. This helps to offset the cost of maintenance on the stations, but more importantly, creates an economic incentive for owners to use the free Superchargers if they are planning on stopping for a while anyway. Tesla is trying to avoid having owners swap their battery, then immediately park to go use the restroom and grab a bite to eat. The Supercharger would have worked just fine for their use case, and a small fee is probably enough to make them behave in the way that we want.

Tesla already has the cheapest battery packs around, and by increasing their production of packs for these stations, they'll get even greater price reductions for the cells that they purchase for the packs (and other economies of scale). Furthermore, once they demonstrate the ability to battery swap, the Model S becomes eligible for even more ZEV credits per car. The added revenue from selling these credits also helps to offset the cost to build these stations. Finally, batteries at the station will not be sitting idle. They will store energy collected by the onsite solar arrays or the grid during times of low use and then they'll be drawn from for Supercharging (assuming they have not been reserved by an incoming owner). This will help reduce the operating cost of the superchargers.

Because Tesla warranties all batteries against anything at all (except intentional tampering) there is no reason to be concerned about what battery you end up with in your car. You can feel perfectly confident that your battery will perform and Tesla will take care of it if it doesn't.?

Alright. That's what I've got so far. Please contribute your own ideas or rip into mine. I'll update this story to reflect what I think are the best ideas emerging from the discussion.
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Fearless prediction. Tesla will finance these the same way that Solar City does with Solar Power installations. CDO's.
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The immediate thought I had when I first read this idea about grid level storage as a business - clearly the car battery packs, at 85kw each, are getting ganged together in astounding numbers to eventually have enough extra packs to actually do this. I don't know where the cost would need to be to make this work, but it seems to me that the cost for the packs would need to be a lot lower than we've been thinking its actually at right now, to make that feasible.

The basic business model is conceptually sensible to me - buy electricity when its cheap, sell electricity when its not. Grid providers are happy - with enough grid level storage, they can decrease or even start dismantling the generators that sit about waiting for peaks in demand, and operating the base load generators more consistently. You also have somewhere for the wind and solar power to go when their generation peaks.

At the level of a single pack, if this electricity arbitrage is worth $0.10 per kwh (say buy at $0.05, sell at $0.15), and if you move 50 kWh/day, then the pack is earning $5/day. That's around $1800/year. If the pack costs $400/kWh to manufacture (I've seen that number somewhere before), then you're into the $32k range. You need closer to 20 years to break even and that doesn't seem all that good. But if the packs cost more like $100/kWh to manufacture, then you're down to about 5 years to pay for the pack - that sounds really desirable.

I really don't know what to make of this, but if Tesla has figured out how to do production levels of grid level storage and make it pay, they can build the grid storage company themselves, or they can sell the packs to others to implement grid storage; either way, they're going to need a bigger battery pack manufacturing plant
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Perhaps we've already seen the battery swap business model foreshadowed in the loaner car program - if you like the loaner car better, keep it and pay the difference with an equation based on age and mileage. Why couldn't the same be accomplished with the battery? When you come to swap, they'll assess age and charge cycles and then give you a price for the swap. OK, seems a little messy, but it gets around the variability of battery pack quality when swapping.

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adiggs said: ?

The immediate thought I had when I first read this idea about grid level storage as a business - clearly the car battery packs, at 85kw each, are getting ganged together in astounding numbers to eventually have enough extra packs to actually do this. I don't know where the cost would need to be to make this work, but it seems to me that the cost for the packs would need to be a lot lower than we've been thinking its actually at right now, to make that feasible.

The basic business model is conceptually sensible to me - buy electricity when its cheap, sell electricity when its not. Grid providers are happy - with enough grid level storage, they can decrease or even start dismantling the generators that sit about waiting for peaks in demand, and operating the base load generators more consistently. You also have somewhere for the wind and solar power to go when their generation peaks.

At the level of a single pack, if this electricity arbitrage is worth $0.10 per kwh (say buy at $0.05, sell at $0.15), and if you move 50 kWh/day, then the pack is earning $5/day. That's around $1800/year. If the pack costs $400/kWh to manufacture (I've seen that number somewhere before), then you're into the $32k range. You need closer to 20 years to break even and that doesn't seem all that good. But if the packs cost more like $100/kWh to manufacture, then you're down to about 5 years to pay for the pack - that sounds really desirable.

I really don't know what to make of this, but if Tesla has figured out how to do production levels of grid level storage and make it pay, they can build the grid storage company themselves, or they can sell the packs to others to implement grid storage; either way, they're going to need a bigger battery pack manufacturing plant
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Perhaps his is part of a strategy to reduce pack costs through dramatic increase in production numbers - if the pack storage can at least break even in the short term while being a grid storage device, and their costs start to reduce by volume production, the gross margins on the car increase (it's the most expensive component of the car) and Gen3 starts to look more feasible without a battery breakthrough, simply with continued improvements.
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Woo-hoo! Just in time.

I translated some parts of the SuperCharger announcement, that afterwards decided that it wasn't pertinent enough to my June 20th list. But they certainly belong here.

Elon, Supercharger Announcement, May 29 on Partnering:
Conceivably if we were to do a partnership with a major manufacturer that were interested in the SuperCharging system and are willing to use the same basic architecture, then it could be used by more than just Tesla. We're not closed to that idea. We're not trying to create some closed system as some sort of strategy or something like that. It's just that we need to solve the problem of long distance travel and we can't wait for others to agree with our strategy. If we wait for some sort of concensus, it's going to take too long. So we just need to keep going and then other manufacturers can either copy us or join us.
http://ir.teslamotors.com/releasedet...leaseID=767983
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/yozowduql4vggzq/rDQXdo7Hqm 38:30

Elon, Supercharger Announcement, May 29 on Solar Panels:
Q: Can you explain how the Solar works for the stations that do have solar?
The general principle is that we want to generate more energy from the sun over the cause of the year than is used by Model S's that
recharge at the station. The recharing tends to be concentrated during pretty obvious times, like on a Friday afternoon and evening and on
a Sunday afternoon and evening, cause people are going somewhere for the weekend or on holidays days - that kind of thing. Whereas it sees
relatively low usage during the week. The solar panels are generating energy throughout the course of the week, and it cummulatively adds
up to more than the energy that the car consumes.

And I was thinking of saving this bit of information for a future announcement, but you do make a good point, we've kind'a had too much
news. So I'll just pack it in here, which is that we actually have grid storage going on at sort'a our SuperCharging stations. So we got
stationary battery packs that take in energy through the week from the Solar Panels and - the Solar Panels actually charge the battery
pack and then that stationary battery pack charges Model S's, and so it's actually capable of going completely off grid. And this is
something we expect to probably roll out to all the SuperCharging stations, and I think it's something that's sort'a fairly cool. These
stations will then operate even if the entire national grid goes down.
http://ir.teslamotors.com/releasedet...leaseID=767983
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/yozowduql4vggzq/rDQXdo7Hqm 21:09

Q: So how many of the Grid Storage units do you have out there, and how big are they?
We've got 2 in operation right now. They are pretty sizable. Half a Megawatt Hour, and they're capable of putting out a Megawatt if need be.
Q: Where are they located?
Actually, I'd rather not say where they are located, because I'd rather not have people go and fudging around with them. I'll tell you they're in California - there's probably only a limited number of stations. And we're actually doing this in partnership with the utlities, btw, so. The grid storage is considered a helpful thing to the utilities cause it allows them to use that pack as a grid buffer. The utilities always have a challenge of dealing with too much or too little power generation at a time, so we're able to provide that buffering capability which they like.
http://ir.teslamotors.com/releasedet...leaseID=767983
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/yozowduql4vggzq/rDQXdo7Hqm 40:45
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adiggs said: ?

The immediate thought I had when I first read this idea about grid level storage as a business - clearly the car battery packs, at 85kw each, are getting ganged together in astounding numbers to eventually have enough extra packs to actually do this. I don't know where the cost would need to be to make this work, but it seems to me that the cost for the packs would need to be a lot lower than we've been thinking its actually at right now, to make that feasible.

The basic business model is conceptually sensible to me - buy electricity when its cheap, sell electricity when its not. Grid providers are happy - with enough grid level storage, they can decrease or even start dismantling the generators that sit about waiting for peaks in demand, and operating the base load generators more consistently. You also have somewhere for the wind and solar power to go when their generation peaks.

At the level of a single pack, if this electricity arbitrage is worth $0.10 per kwh (say buy at $0.05, sell at $0.15), and if you move 50 kWh/day, then the pack is earning $5/day. That's around $1800/year. If the pack costs $400/kWh to manufacture (I've seen that number somewhere before), then you're into the $32k range. You need closer to 20 years to break even and that doesn't seem all that good. But if the packs cost more like $100/kWh to manufacture, then you're down to about 5 years to pay for the pack - that sounds really desirable.

I really don't know what to make of this, but if Tesla has figured out how to do production levels of grid level storage and make it pay, they can build the grid storage company themselves, or they can sell the packs to others to implement grid storage; either way, they're going to need a bigger battery pack manufacturing plant
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The packs are very much cheaper than people think. Look at the battery Ip thread I just posted to get a partial sense of why. As to actual prices I'll be posting my estimates next week.

The $400/kWh price comes from the $10k difference in the price of the 85kWh and 60kWh packs, which works out to $400/kWh ($10k/25kWh). That is so much cheaper than anyone else in the industry can build these packs that everyone takes it at face value. It's off by a lot.

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deonb said: ?

Woo-hoo! Just in time.

I translated some parts of the SuperCharger announcement, that afterwards decided that it wasn't pertinent enough to my June 20th list. But they certainly belong here.
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They do belong in the June 20th thread. The June 20th announcement is about SuperSwapping, which is how grid storage is going to be practically implemented at the moment. (See, I broke my own rule. Do as I say, not as I do :smile

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Just to clarify the $10k price difference is the difference in the price of the cars not the price of the packs. ~$70k for the 60kWh car and ~$80k for the 85kWh car. For the $10k you get free supercharger + additional performance and range. So it was always just a loose way to calculate the underlying pack costs.
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Grid storage is actually an excellent use for battery packs at the end of their automotive life. A 25% reduction in capacity will probably be enough to get a Model S owner to buy a new pack. Tesla gets to use the 75% remaining capacity of the old pack for grid storage. This residual value of old packs might also explain why Tesla has offered replacement battery packs for $12,000.
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This all requires a daunting bit of hardware. Remember that that Megawatt of storage needs thermal management. Maybe they bury the batteries.
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CapitalistOppressor said: ?

They do belong in the June 20th thread. The June 20th announcement is about SuperSwapping, which is how grid storage is going to be practically implemented at the moment. (See, I broke my own rule. Do as I say, not as I do :smile
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Ok, you convinced me. I changed the "Prevailing Theory" to be SuperSwapper + Grid, and added the grid elements:
http://www.teslamotorsclub.com/showthread.php/17460-List-of-all-June-20th-announcement-hints
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C.O.

I think that Randy's article was a good jumping off place.

Superchargers are free to Tesla and to drivers for several important reasons:
1. Solar power fed into the grid for $0.30/kWh
2. Battery grid buffer. Tesla is selling their ability to back the grid during peak use so that the grid doesn't have to buy "peaker" power $0.15/kWh available
3. Time of Use. Tesla can "sell" power all day via solar and battery, and can charge back in the evening and "buy" for $0.05/kWh
Will all of the above generating revenue for Solar City, the Superchargers are going to be break-even OR make money for Tesla.

The value of the battery grid buffer will likely increase since peaker power is so expensive.
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Tesla just updated teslamotors.com to now have the SuperCharger first and formestly featured. (I think this happened within the last 2 hours). Model S is now in the background.

I think you're right on the new core business.

Wow. My GM-like investment just became an XOM-like investment.
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Does anyone else find it coincidental that Elon said there are two grid sites and Tesla happens to have two obelisks? Those black bases look awful big to me. Are they the right shape and size to contain battery packs?
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jeff_adams said: ?

Does anyone else find it coincidental that Elon said there are two grid sites and Tesla happens to have two obelisks? Those black bases look awful big to me. Are they the right shape and size to contain battery packs?
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I was thinking the same thing. Looks like it is big enough for 4 packs (2x2 base) but stacked up a few layers. Maybe 32 or so 85 kWh packs?
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dsm363 said: ?

I was thinking the same thing. Looks like it is big enough for 4 packs (2x2 base) but stacked up a few layers. Maybe 32 or so 85 kWh packs?
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They're going to have to have some pretty serious cooling equipment as well I'd think.
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RDoc said: ?

They're going to have to have some pretty serious cooling equipment as well I'd think.
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Why? The packs are liquid cooled, so all they need is to build a larger version of the chilling system in the Model S, and that's only when being charged or discharged at a high rate of current. If you read Randy Carlson "SuperCharging Tesla" article, he actually has pictures of the name plate data on the Inverters, I think he even mentions which site in CA it's at.. He has a nice diagram of it he drew as well.

The rate arbritrage and grid stabilization are only part of the strategy, also remember one function is to keep the demand charges down from the grid during multiple SuperCharger sessions. Teslas "end game" is, as Randy points out, in getting a one-time licensing fee from other manufacturers for lifetime SuperCharger access to EVs they make. Tesla will generate large amounts of revenue from this, but that's much further down the road, maybe 7-10 years. Elon is smart, this allows to you multiply your income without building a lot more cars. License your drivetrain, pack technology and SuperCharger access to major manufactures who can crank out millions of EVs per year.. This is Elons secret plan to monetize the replacement of the ICE, without requiring tremendous expansion of manufacturing facilities - prove it can be done, and collect licensing fees while others build the cars.
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I would think that Tesla would be providing batteries to Solar City and they would be the ones "running the grid" with panels, maintenance, selling and buying of power, ect. This would be a great package to sell to hospitals, police departments, hotels, ect. Anyone who wants constant power without worrying about a power outage and doesn't want the expensive of dealing with auxiliary diesel generators.
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It's too bad that the Energy Storage Association's annual conference just happened -- last week! In Tesla's back yard (Santa Clara, CA). Despite the fact that they were not speakers on the program, I'm sure there were folks from Tesla all over this event.

Conferences such as these are fantastic places to learn what's going on before it gets announced.

This would have been a great place to run the ideas presented in this thread by random attendees, who happen to be the very professionals working to create the kind of smart grid that the Tesla system would thrive in, and get their opinions.

I wonder if they have a message board or mailing list . . .
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jeff_adams said: ?

Does anyone else find it coincidental that Elon said there are two grid sites and Tesla happens to have two obelisks? Those black bases look awful big to me. Are they the right shape and size to contain battery packs?
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Wheres the other obelisk? This one's at Hawthorne.

Thx in advance
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So, I saw a pictire of a super,charger station. It has a pool. I was wondering why you need a pool? Can that be used to cool the batteries? like evaporative cooling. Now that the batteries are not stuck on a car. A sorts of liquid cooling are possible. Maybe even opening the pool as a heated pool for families when they take a break.
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FredTMC said: ?

Wheres the other obelisk? This one's at Hawthorne.

Thx in advance
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I think it's at the Freemont factory. That would make the most sense. If a power outage were to occur, they would want to keep Space X and NUMMI up and running. Do they have solar panels in Freemont? I know they have not put them on the roof
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jeff_adams said: ?

I think it's at the Freemont factory. That would make the most sense. If a power outage were to occur, they would want to keep Space X and NUMMI up and running. Do they have solar panels in Freemont? I know they have not put them on the roof
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Wasnt there a pic on the solarcity site showing a tesla battery box attached?
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I wonder if they'll be doing a combined optimization of regulation, reserves, and energy arbitrage with those batteries. You can make quite a bit more money if you do that than simple energy arbitrage.
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30seconds said: ?

Wasnt there a pic on the solarcity site showing a tesla battery box attached?
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A pack attached to the Obelisk? Haven't seen that one. Are the Obelisks lit up at night? Do the have lighting on them?
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callmesam said: ?

C.O.

I think that Randy's article was a good jumping off place.

Superchargers are free to Tesla and to drivers for several important reasons:
1. Solar power fed into the grid for $0.30/kWh
2. Battery grid buffer. Tesla is selling their ability to back the grid during peak use so that the grid doesn't have to buy "peaker" power $0.15/kWh available
3. Time of Use. Tesla can "sell" power all day via solar and battery, and can charge back in the evening and "buy" for $0.05/kWh
Will all of the above generating revenue for Solar City, the Superchargers are going to be break-even OR make money for Tesla.

The value of the battery grid buffer will likely increase since peaker power is so expensive.
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Yes, I've figured for awhile that swap stations would do rate arbitrage and help reduce demand charges, but I wasn't thinking through the scale of the potential income from that until after I read Randy's piece. For that matter, Randy didn't write it up right. Elon is going for the jugular with this grid power gambit.

If you scale the grid storage capacity required to support 100 million automobiles (whether for swapping, or charging) you get hundreds of gigawatts of power storage. You are in the range of what is required to load balance a muti-terawatt national energy grid that is solely renewable sources, like solar/wind/hydro.

So Tesla is trying to simultaneously take over the auto industry, and a substantial portion of the energy industry (with grid storage), while enabling the near total destruction of fossil fuel interests (barring non-energy uses anyways) by players like Solar City (whose distributed utility model is also designed to put traditional utilities out of business). And technically speaking, the quantity of grid storage available on the cars themselves would allow only Tesla and Solar City to power the country (so screw those other renewable guys). The scope of the vision is just breathtaking. And Tesla is just going to do this as a byproduct of its "core" business.

Anyways, back to Randy's piece, when I read it, it seemed he was using a model based on the regulations where home solar users are able to sell power back to the grid at the prevailing rate.

But I know for a fact that peaker power is dramatically more expensive than the prevailing rate, and grid storage at sufficient scale can do the job of peaker plants, better. This is a high quality, on demand energy source that can be accessed at digital speeds. Seems like you should be able to get peakerish rates, which (if I recall correctly) are tens or hundreds of times the market price.

So I think the whole rate-arbitrage model needs some serious work. These grid storage devices shouldn't be operating under the same pricing conditions that were imposed on home solar users (who were kind of powerless in the regulatory wrangling that set up the system they operate under). Peaker rates are much more likely, and when it scales enough the rates should be more comparable to the large backup gas generators that take longer than peakers to get online (so less money than peakers, but more than prevailing market).

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emupilot said: ?

Grid storage is actually an excellent use for battery packs at the end of their automotive life. A 25% reduction in capacity will probably be enough to get a Model S owner to buy a new pack. Tesla gets to use the 75% remaining capacity of the old pack for grid storage. This residual value of old packs might also explain why Tesla has offered replacement battery packs for $12,000.
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Tesla offered battery replacement packs for $12,000 because they will make a big profit on that regardless of their future plans.
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here's the link to solar city / tesla "backup" device.

Home Energy Storage & Battery Backup System - SolarCity

"An additional benefit of energy storage is to reduce peak-usage charges on your utility bill. Some utilities offer Time-of-Use (TOU) rate plans in which the price of electricity varies based on the hour of the day. Rates are higher during the afternoon when electric demand is at its "peak" across all utility customers.
A storage system may help you save more money by drawing power from your battery instead of from the grid during higher rates peak hours. You can then recharge your battery during lower rate, off-peak hours. "

At the scale of the superchargers I'm sure they are working out deals directly from the utilities. If Elon is turning this into a distributed electrical plant w/ storage then he's going to need the utilities to stay in business and maintain their power lines. From what I understand this is very similar to SC plan, just with bigger equipment. So if you flip this back to SC, they may able to do installs on all those flat roofed industrial parks with the tesla batteries as well. Very interesting.

@CO - you are on fire! awesome posts on the batteries as well.
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callmesam said: ?

C.O.

I think that Randy's article was a good jumping off place.

The value of the battery grid buffer will likely increase since peaker power is so expensive.[/FONT][/COLOR]
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This. I just can't imagine why simple rate arbitrage should be how we should model this. The patent I referenced (which I recommend everyone read) mentions this type of summer arbitrage. But the real money (at the small initial scales) is the peaker rates.

In a few years, when Tesla is operating GW levels of storage they will grow out of the peaker business because those plants will all be out of business. Then the per unit income goes down because you are competing with larger semi-permanent sources. As you scale more you eventually are doing a tango with renewable sources to offer below market rates that put conventional power sources out of business.

So I think a proper model needs to look at this as a trajectory. And when you look at the trajectory, all of the incentives are aligned to help Tesla bootstrap this capability up the energy chain. This is completely aside from the market forces and incentives that are a result of their "core" auto business.

These things might be able to be making gobs of money right away, just from their grid storage business. The key to this being that Tesla has best in world large, rechargeable battery economics (thats a fact btw). By far. This is first mover advantage to the nth degree.

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deonb said: ?

Tesla just updated teslamotors.com to now have the SuperCharger first and formestly featured. (I think this happened within the last 2 hours). Model S is now in the background.

I think you're right on the new core business.

Wow. My GM-like investment just became an XOM-like investment.
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More like a Borg-like investment. Resistance is futile.

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rolosrevenge said: ?

I wonder if they'll be doing a combined optimization of regulation, reserves, and energy arbitrage with those batteries. You can make quite a bit more money if you do that than simple energy arbitrage.
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Also This.
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You make an interesting case, CO. How do we know that it would be Tesla profitting from this and not Solar City? I'm long TSLA, but no SCTY, maybe this will be my impetus to "diversify".
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adiggs said: ?

The immediate thought I had when I first read this idea about grid level storage as a business - clearly the car battery packs, at 85kw each, are getting ganged together in astounding numbers to eventually have enough extra packs to actually do this. I don't know where the cost would need to be to make this work, but it seems to me that the cost for the packs would need to be a lot lower than we've been thinking its actually at right now, to make that feasible.
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Run a quick model of how much pack capacity you need to support EITHER SuperCharging or SuperSwapping with millions of cars on the road (its a bit more with swapping) and you get astounding numbers. I hadn't really modeled the requirements of SuperCharging until recently, but it seems obvious that you need massive energy sources on site when you have millions of cars on the road on a holiday weekend. Tesla obviously isn't going to co-locate power plants at these sites, so batteries make sense. When you think about it, the power requirements needed for swapping and charging is identical, and the only difference is the rate at which you deliver the power to the cars.

At the level of a single pack, if this electricity arbitrage is worth $0.10 per kwh (say buy at $0.05, sell at $0.15), and if you move 50 kWh/day, then the pack is earning $5/day. That's around $1800/year. If the pack costs $400/kWh to manufacture (I've seen that number somewhere before), then you're into the $32k range. You need closer to 20 years to break even and that doesn't seem all that good. But if the packs cost more like $100/kWh to manufacture, then you're down to about 5 years to pay for the pack - that sounds really desirable.
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On its own, I agree, but I think we need to look at a trajectory model. The packs today cost more than $100kWh, but sub $100kWh packs will be available by Gen III at the latest. Even with the basic model, the current pack prices make the economics look favorable, even in the near term, and even ignoring the need to support SuperCharging/SuperSwapping, and possible swap fee income from SuperSwapping. This is a no-brainer from a business standpoint, even ignoring more lucrative trajectory models.

I really don't know what to make of this, but if Tesla has figured out how to do production levels of grid level storage and make it pay, they can build the grid storage company themselves, or they can sell the packs to others to implement grid storage; either way, they're going to need a bigger battery pack manufacturing plant.
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There have been discussions about how the battery operation is a "bottleneck" (with crews working 2 shifts) and that they will need to invest some money to expand it's capacity. The assumption was that it was a bottleneck at scales needed to support Model S production, but it now seems more likely that its a bottleneck at the scales Tesla needs for these CES activities (might as well move past "grid storage" folks. CES is easier to type, and more accurate, lol).

That said, the CES battery requirements to support SuperCharging/SuperSwapping are only ~5-10% (very rough guess) of the basic vehicle business. This is true scaled into the future. If every car was a Model S right now, you would have like 8-9TWh of storage on the cars themselves, while only needing 500-700GWh of CES capacity to support road trips. The current grid generates like ~4TW of power, so that gives you some scale. (all numbers for the U.S. btw)

Eventually, a REALLY smart grid will use the auto-fleet itself as a major power source and storage medium.

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MikeC said: ?

You make an interesting case, CO. How do we know that it would be Tesla profitting from this and not Solar City? I'm long TSLA, but no SCTY, maybe this will be my impetus to "diversify".
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Solar City will be on the other side of the renewable "tango". CES is a significant fraction of the future energy market, but power generation is always a much larger fraction. Fundamentally, Solar City can't grow really large without really large CES resources, and really large CES resources are only needed in order to do load leveling for a massive renewable infrastructure.

So Tesla's CES business can only grow REALLY large (beyond its pure automotive uses, which means the capacity will exist regardless) if solar and wind prices continue to fall until they beat out conventional sources.
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Let me throw out another mind blowing scenario. We know by factory tour stories that Tesla has been building far more battery packs than cars. It has been assumed that they were going to be sold to Toyota or Daimler for EVs or maybe the battery swapping idea proposed.

What if Tesla has been storing up a surplus of these things while the grid idea has been under R&D?

We know that Solar City got a big loan from Goldman Sachs. Wouldn't it be like Elon to have a big sale of packs right before 2nd quarter end? Maybe just enough to show a profit for the second quarter in a row? Sell more in the 3rd quarter and maybe he hits 4 straight quaters of profitablity? Isn't that one of his CEO requirements for stock options?
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jeff_adams said: ?

Let me throw out another mind blowing scenario. We know by factory tour stories that Tesla has been building far more battery packs than cars. It has been assumed that they were going to be sold to Toyota or Daimler for EVs or maybe the battery swapping idea proposed.

What if Tesla has been storing up a surplus of these things while the grid idea has been under R&D?

We know that Solar City got a big loan from Goldman Sachs. Wouldn't it be like Elon to have a big sale of packs right before 2nd quarter end? Maybe just enough to show a profit for the second quarter in a row? Sell more in the 3rd quarter and maybe he hits 4 straight quaters of profitablity? Isn't that one of his CEO requirements for stock options?
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Remember that Tesla has been providing battery packs for SolarCity home energy storage systems: http://www.solarcity.com/residential/energy-storage.aspx
Capacity for these should be around 50kWh (2kW continuous load for 24h)

No idea on the production volume, though.
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zeron said: ?

Remember that Tesla has been providing battery packs for SolarCity home energy storage systems: http://www.solarcity.com/residential/energy-storage.aspx
Capacity for these should be around 50kWh (2kW continuous load for 24h)

No idea on the production volume, though.
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Yes, you are correct. They have been selling a consumer version, I wonder if they will come out with a commercial version like the one envisioned for the supercharger network. Basically using the car batteries in an array
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CapitalistOppressor said: ?

Solar City will be on the other side of the renewable "tango". CES is a significant fraction of the future energy market, but power generation is always a much larger fraction. Fundamentally, Solar City can't grow really large without really large CES resources, and really large CES resources are only needed in order to do load leveling for a massive renewable infrastructure.

So Tesla's CES business can only grow REALLY large (beyond its pure automotive uses, which means the capacity will exist regardless) if solar and wind prices continue to fall until they beat out conventional sources.
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That would be true if the companies were hmmm-- stand alone. But I'm not so sure Elon will choose that division of capital and focus. Grid storage and power control (and associated revenue balance) is the domain of SCTY even if 1/2 enabled by Tesla battery production. The revenue transfer equation to form business and engineering focus would drive a license deal to favor SCTY - in fact, I would not be surprised to learn SCTY owns the core business revenue of Tesla Super-charging stations even now. This would portend a strong inclination for the holding company Elon has floated. It might be wise to carry long positions in both companies for a while imo.
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What a great post CO ... It is exciting you think this could be a bigger business than selling cars for them .... can't wait to see some of your numbers on this .
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blakegallagher said: ?

What a great post CO ... It is exciting you think this could be a bigger business than selling cars for them .... can't wait to see some of your numbers on this .
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+100 on that- thanks CO
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I definitely don't believe swapping is in the cards, but I'd love to be surprised.

However, this sort of overall thought on CES is just great. The seekingalpha.com article was great and it's a shame real media outlets, like the Wall St Journal or Times haven't put out an article detailing this concept....yet.

It's almost obvious and lends a lot of credibility to the Super Charger station land grab Tesla just pulled off in front of us.

Tesla is undervalued until it hits 20 billion cap at this point, considering these things. It's so much more than just the cars.

Not only massively disrupting how cars are made and sold but also the grid power system, oil cartels and getting a premium from other automakers. The Apple comparison gets thrown around a lot but it's like how they dominated the music, communication and home laptop (iPads killing home PC's) markets.
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Heh. I haven't really read this thread but it brought to mind Coda officially files for bankruptcy, shifts focus to energy storage. CODA Energy Launches Flexible and Reliable Energy Storage Solutions -- LOS ANGELES, Jan. 20, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- was supposedly "launched" on 1/20/12. Not sure how successful or not they've been, since I don't follow this space.

Not saying the idea is good or bad...
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After reading this thread I think "the way for the Tesla Model S to be recharged throughout the country faster than you could fill a gas tank" is through grid tied batteries at the supercharger stations.

What if Tesla has found that their packs are capable of safely charging and discharging at 6C (10 mins). This normally would require a massive substation feed from the utility. Not going to happen at the hole-in-the-wall locations of the Supercharger stations. But if they've got battery packs at the stations this won't be a problem as the battery will be the high current buffer. "Trickle" charge the station batteries from the grid at night and solar during the day. Then dump a massive charge into a car when it pulls up. If too many cars happen to stop by and deplete the batteries, no worries - just fall back to 120kW fed from the grid.
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EarlyAdopter said: ?

After reading this thread I think "the way for the Tesla Model S to be recharged throughout the country faster than you could fill a gas tank" is through grid tied batteries at the supercharger stations.

What if Tesla has found that their packs are capable of safely charging and discharging at 6C (10 mins). This normally would require a massive substation feed from the utility. Not going to happen at the hole-in-the-wall locations of the Supercharger stations. But if they've got battery packs at the stations this won't be a problem as the battery will be the high current buffer. "Trickle" charge the station batteries from the grid at night and solar during the day. Then dump a massive charge into a car when it pulls up. If too many cars happen to stop by and deplete the batteries, no worries - just fall back to 120kW fed from the grid.
Click to expand...

Assuming the battery chemistry is solved, you'd still have a problem that in order to charge at that rate you would have to supply 500 A or 2500 V power to the car. You can't lift a 1500 A cable by hand, and a 2500 V source will arc over everything.

So you'd need to install some sort of robotic way to get that power supply plugged into the car, say coming up from the bottom and then connecting under the nose of the car or something.
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CapitalistOppressor said: ?

Yes, I've figured for awhile that swap stations would do rate arbitrage and help reduce demand charges, but I wasn't thinking through the scale of the potential income from that until after I read Randy's piece. For that matter, Randy didn't write it up right. Elon is going for the jugular with this grid power gambit.

If you scale the grid storage capacity required to support 100 million automobiles (whether for swapping, or charging) you get hundreds of gigawatts of power storage. You are in the range of what is required to load balance a muti-terawatt national energy grid that is solely renewable sources, like solar/wind/hydro.

So Tesla is trying to simultaneously take over the auto industry, and a substantial portion of the energy industry (with grid storage), while enabling the near total destruction of fossil fuel interests (barring non-energy uses anyways) by players like Solar City (whose distributed utility model is also designed to put traditional utilities out of business). And technically speaking, the quantity of grid storage available on the cars themselves would allow only Tesla and Solar City to power the country (so screw those other renewable guys). The scope of the vision is just breathtaking. And Tesla is just going to do this as a byproduct of its "core" business.

Anyways, back to Randy's piece, when I read it, it seemed he was using a model based on the regulations where home solar users are able to sell power back to the grid at the prevailing rate.

But I know for a fact that peaker power is dramatically more expensive than the prevailing rate, and grid storage at sufficient scale can do the job of peaker plants, better. This is a high quality, on demand energy source that can be accessed at digital speeds. Seems like you should be able to get peakerish rates, which (if I recall correctly) are tens or hundreds of times the market price.

So I think the whole rate-arbitrage model needs some serious work. These grid storage devices shouldn't be operating under the same pricing conditions that were imposed on home solar users (who were kind of powerless in the regulatory wrangling that set up the system they operate under). Peaker rates are much more likely, and when it scales enough the rates should be more comparable to the large backup gas generators that take longer than peakers to get online (so less money than peakers, but more than prevailing market).

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Tesla offered battery replacement packs for $12,000 because they will make a big profit on that regardless of their future plans.
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CO,

I dont' know how much THIS has been discussed, but what about an install by Solar City that would a Tesla buyer to plug their car into the grid and use ITS battery pack as grid storage/buffer/TOU for all the time that the car is home.

That might only amount to 50% of the hours during a week/month, but still the arbitrage/peaker funding could offset the cost of charging and ultimately, the Model S.

The other service I think we will see (or hope) will using the car for home power backup (a la Solar City) but connecting to the car directly.

If Tesla sells 25,000 cars x 70kwh = 1.75 GW of available battery backup
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deonb said: ?

You can't lift a 1500 A cable by hand, and a 2500 V source will arc over everything.
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I know I'm dating myself but this reminds me of the Star Trek original TV series episode of the M5 computer, which was so hungry for power it decided to just go straight to the source and arc a gigantic beam of voltage right across the room (vaporizing one of the red-shirted security personnel in the process).
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MikeC said: ?

You make an interesting case, CO. How do we know that it would be Tesla profitting from this and not Solar City? I'm long TSLA, but no SCTY, maybe this will be my impetus to "diversify".
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The Numbers Behind Tesla and SolarCitys Home Energy Storage Play : Greentech Media

This article from about a year ago says that both Tesla and Solar City are submitting applications to Pacific Gas & Electric under California�s Self-Generation Incentive Program. SGIP provides $ credits for site generated and stored energy with capacity to discharge. Not clear if it's joint apps or what.

Lessons Learned From SolarCitys First Home Energy Storage Installs, Updated : Greentech Media

This article from a few days ago mainly talks about Solar City's applications to the SGIP program.

I've been wondering how grid storage tech was going to get widely adopted given it's cost. Seems like Tesla/Solar City have found a way to finance it -- through the supercharger network! Pretty cool stuff!
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deonb said: ?

So you'd need to install some sort of robotic way to get that power supply plugged into the car, say coming up from the bottom and then connecting under the nose of the car or something.
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If this is the 5th announcement and demonstration, then it would be truly revolutionary. I'm hoping it is.

But I'm wondering how difficult is it to theoretically charge at 6c speed? Are we talking about something that is possible now or are talking about several years out?
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kenliles said: ?

That would be true if the companies were hmmm-- stand alone. But I'm not so sure Elon will choose that division of capital and focus. Grid storage and power control (and associated revenue balance) is the domain of SCTY even if 1/2 enabled by Tesla battery production. The revenue transfer equation to form business and engineering focus would drive a license deal to favor SCTY - in fact, I would not be surprised to learn SCTY owns the core business revenue of Tesla Super-charging stations even now. This would portend a strong inclination for the holding company Elon has floated. It might be wise to carry long positions in both companies for a while imo.
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It's possible, and it fits well with my suspicion that these might end up being financed by CDO's, just like Solar City does with their solar installations. The core IP for the batteries is Tesla. I need to re-read the CES patent I linked at the beginning of this thread so I can squeeze some of the nuance out of it, but off hand I think the patent covers all of the bases for buying power when prices are low, and selling when they are high, regardless of the actual pricing.

I haven't tried looking at SCTY IP to see what they have that might be equivalent. But I could see Solar City purchasing the storage device from Tesla and then making all of the money off of it, while providing support to the core SuperCharger/SuperSwapper functionality.

However, it might be that the CDO model is a poor fit if investors aren't going to be tolerant of variable income that will decline over time as this concept scales. Of course, its always possible that Tesla will finance it solely out of pocket (I don't think Solar City is capable of that). If so, then all of the profits need to find their way back to Tesla or there will be some angry shareholders.

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ShortSlaver said: ?

I definitely don't believe swapping is in the cards, but I'd love to be surprised.

However, this sort of overall thought on CES is just great. The seekingalpha.com article was great and it's a shame real media outlets, like the Wall St Journal or Times haven't put out an article detailing this concept....yet.

It's almost obvious and lends a lot of credibility to the Super Charger station land grab Tesla just pulled off in front of us.

Tesla is undervalued until it hits 20 billion cap at this point, considering these things. It's so much more than just the cars.

Not only massively disrupting how cars are made and sold but also the grid power system, oil cartels and getting a premium from other automakers. The Apple comparison gets thrown around a lot but it's like how they dominated the music, communication and home laptop (iPads killing home PC's) markets.
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If massive CES and grid leveling is Tesla's end state on this concept they will make Apple look like a niche company.

You really, have to hand it to Elon, he loves to go for the jugular. Even now, when you ask him in interviews about Paypal he is angry at E-Bay for basically neutering the concept. He straight up thought Paypal would replace banks. All of them.

Even when he was doing Zip2 he probably had the same mindset. I was working for a competing company at the time, doing the same stuff, but for USA Today, etc. instead of NY Times, etc. And every one of us spent hours each day saying how the work we were doing was making the newspaper business redundant. Heck, that's basically the entire Silicon Valley culture in a nutshell.

All your business are belong to us.
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deonb said: ?

Assuming the battery chemistry is solved, you'd still have a problem that in order to charge at that rate you would have to supply 500 A or 2500 V power to the car. You can't lift a 1500 A cable by hand, and a 2500 V source will arc over everything.

So you'd need to install some sort of robotic way to get that power supply plugged into the car, say coming up from the bottom and then connecting under the nose of the car or something.
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2500V is about the breakdown voltage across a distance of 1 millimeter at normal atmospheric conditions. Also, in the off-state the charging cable only has a minimal voltage to sense a plugging process. After that, the "juice" gets activated and the electric field is guided through the cable without arcing .

Maybe some of the bolts holding the battery in place are actually double purpose?

1) Hold the battery.
2) Act as screw-in charging contacts for high current.

Perhaps that's the way to charge quicker than filling a tank of gasoline, by using like 10 charging power electronics of the SCs at once instead of the one or two built-in in the cars. If there are additional cooling channels in the packs, then a quick-charger could flood the pack with coolant during the 3 minutes or so it takes.
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given that a CES solution with batteries would have no weight requirements and are stationary, are the current cells ideal? or would other technologies/ batteries be better? I ask b/c this also impacts any drive down of production cost of car batteries
�

One dynamic that might be overwhelming other factors 30seconds, is that by using the current cell technology they are using, Tesla can ride the coattails of what is currently a much larger business (consumer electronics) to drive down the cost and improve power / effectiveness of their cells. Even if the resulting battery isn't the ideal solution for an automotive or stationary battery design, the cost advantages of being part of such a huge market might be outweighing the technical disadvantages.

I think of Tesla's solution as the Hadoop of battery storage solutions - use many commodity batteries that will fail (and are priced accordingly), and build a hardware and software layer on top of them that accounts for and plans for those eventual failures. The end result is a much more cost effective system that also appears to be more robust and reliable too.
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jeff_adams said: ?

What if Tesla has been storing up a surplus of these things while the grid idea has been under R&D?
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Knowing that these cells can be bought at a 7% discount with 8% higher capacity next year? That sounds like a terribly bad idea to me.

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adiggs said: ?

... by using the current cell technology they are using, Tesla can ride the coattails of what is currently a much larger business (consumer electronics) to drive down the cost and improve power / effectiveness of their cells.
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I understand that Tesla is having automotive cells manufactured by Panasonic. Tesla has been doing extensive testing with modified Li+ chemistries and the one most suitable for Tesla is used. I have no idea to what extend Tesla benefits directly from advances in laptop cells (which are never discharged at 4C, for example).

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Royal TS(LA) said: ?

Perhaps that's the way to charge quicker than filling a tank of gasoline..
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I am pretty certain (read: I have no proof, whatsoever) that the cells cannot accept a 20C charge. Multiple connections could solve a power distribution problem but if you can't charge a single cell in 3 minutes you can't charge a pack in 3 minutes either.

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30seconds said: ?

given that a CES solution with batteries would have no weight requirements and are stationary, are the current cells ideal?
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Technically: No. Financially: Yes, because over time many, many 70%-capacity cells will flood the market. At that time, say 7 years after manufacturing, these cells only have use for grid-backup as car batteries by then will have higher capacity, lower price and less weight.

Even at 10% of their original capacity these cells will be of (some) value as grid-backup.

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DaveT said: ?

But I'm wondering how difficult is it to theoretically charge at 6c speed?
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No biggie. Some Li+ cells can be charged at 20C. The only question is how much damage this would cause to the cells. If only I could get my hands on a new pack I could easily try this out: keep the cell at, say, 25 degrees C (using some liquid bath), charge up to 80% SOC at 6C, discharge at 0.5C, repeat (1000x).
Have a small circuit that does this to 4 cells (to filter out anomalies) at 6 charge rates and come back in 3000 hours (4 months) and I can draw you a nice graph of the damage of fast charging.

Tesla must be doing this sort of thing 24/7.

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adiggs said: ?

At the level of a single pack, if this electricity arbitrage is worth $0.10 per kwh (say buy at $0.05, sell at $0.15), and if you move 50 kWh/day, then the pack is earning $5/day. [...] But if the packs cost more like $100/kWh to manufacture, then you're down to about 5 years to pay for the pack - that sounds really desirable.
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20.000 S-es per annum, 70 kWh avg could in, say, seven years time flood the market with 20.000 x 70 kWh x 70% capacity = 1 GWh every year. That's 1GWh in very cheap cells because not many would want these cells as newer cells are cheaper with a higher capacity.

I can certainly imagine these second-hand packs going for $100/kWh or less by then. I the game of World Domination seven years isn't all that long.
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The future is gonna be one load of sheer awesomeness if we got electric cars, supercharging, distributed energy generation in combination with grid energy storage and a frggn self-powered hypersonic mode of transportation. Oh and electric planes. Oh and one more thing, you'll be able to move to Mars if you've had enough.

Well the US, at least. Here in the Netherlands we lack this sort of vision. Drugs are legal though.

--edit.... aaand back on topic:
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raymond said: ?

20.000 S-es per annum, 70 kWh avg could in, say, seven years time flood the market with 20.000 x 70 kWh x 70% capacity = 1 GWh every year. That's 1GWh in very cheap cells because not many would want these cells as newer cells are cheaper with a higher capacity.

I can certainly imagine these second-hand packs going for $100/kWh or less by then. I the game of World Domination seven years isn't all that long.
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Droool....

There is another severely cool aspect in play here. One of the major concerns people have with EV's are battery pack degradation. What if Tesla creates a tradeup model for battery packs the same as they did for the loaner cars?

So e.g. if you have a battery pack that degraded by 10%, you can exchange it for a brand new pack for 10% of the price - so $4000.

No biggy for Tesla - they were manufacturing batteries anyway for grid storage, so things work out the same for them. For each 10 batteries they were going to use for storage, they now will need 11 due to 10% degradation. However, it only costed them the price for 10 due to the battery exchange program. So no hair off Tesla's back.

However, from a customer satisfaction and sales pitch perspective it is HUGE.

Tesla will will even come out slightly positive on this deal since batteries don't cost them $40k to make.

And the best thing is - no other competitor will be able to do this. (Well they can... by making checks out to 'Tesla Motors').

Now combine that with some battery swapper at the charge station where you drive up with your 95%'er, enter your VISA card number on the touch screen, and $2000 later you're the owner of a brand new battery.

Game, set and match.
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30seconds said: ?

given that a CES solution with batteries would have no weight requirements and are stationary, are the current cells ideal? or would other technologies/ batteries be better? I ask b/c this also impacts any drive down of production cost of car batteries
Click to expand...

The current cells are ideal, if for no other reason than they appear to be the most economical way to accomplish the task. A better "technical" solution is not better if you can't make a profit off of it. That said, one of the reasons that Tesla's solution is so great for this is because of it's fundamental technical excellence. Outside of substituting a steel housing for the aluminum one, I am not certain what else you would bother to change about the design if weight is no factor.
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EarlyAdopter said: ?

After reading this thread I think "the way for the Tesla Model S to be recharged throughout the country faster than you could fill a gas tank" is through grid tied batteries at the supercharger stations.

What if Tesla has found that their packs are capable of safely charging and discharging at 6C (10 mins). This normally would require a massive substation feed from the utility. Not going to happen at the hole-in-the-wall locations of the Supercharger stations. But if they've got battery packs at the stations this won't be a problem as the battery will be the high current buffer. "Trickle" charge the station batteries from the grid at night and solar during the day. Then dump a massive charge into a car when it pulls up. If too many cars happen to stop by and deplete the batteries, no worries - just fall back to 120kW fed from the grid.
Click to expand...

deonb said: ?

Assuming the battery chemistry is solved, you'd still have a problem that in order to charge at that rate you would have to supply 500 A or 2500 V power to the car. You can't lift a 1500 A cable by hand, and a 2500 V source will arc over everything.

So you'd need to install some sort of robotic way to get that power supply plugged into the car, say coming up from the bottom and then connecting under the nose of the car or something.
Click to expand...

Yep. You'd need something exactly like this:
ABB demonstrates technology to power flash charging electric bus in 15 seconds

Ladies and Gentlemen, I introduce to you Supercharger station v3.0:
Flash charging an electric bus in 15 seconds - YouTube
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That's very cool. But "power flash" charges how much power in 15 seconds?

Sounds like as the bus makes its stops on its route, it slurps up a little bit of power at each stop.

The Tesla model is different: you drive long distances between each stop and we're talking minutes not seconds and kilowatts not watts, right?
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The ABB system is a 400kW charger, as opposed to the recently upgraded Superchargers which are 120kW. At each stop the bus charges for as long as it's there or until it tops off. In 15 seconds at 400kW you'd pick up 1.6kWh - enough for a bus to travel a couple of miles. At the end of the line the bus charges longer, more like the Supercharger model, 4-5 minutes they say to completely recharge.

The point being that not only is a >120kW charger possible, there's one in operation right now. The 20 minutes it takes a Model S to gain 150 miles at a 120kW Supercharger would be down to 6 minutes at 400kW.
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The bus uses SuperCapacitors. Not batteries. if you were to add 85kWh of SuperCapacitors to a Model S, using state of the art Graphene supercaps, it will add over 10'000 lbs of weight to the car.
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deonb said: ?

The bus uses SuperCapacitors. Not batteries. if you were to add 85kWh of SuperCapacitors to a Model S, using state of the art Graphene supercaps, it will add over 10'000 lbs of weight to the car.
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The article specifically mentions on-board batteries, though I suppose it could be the copywriter over-simplifying what's onboard. http://www04.abb.com/global/seitp/seitp202.nsf/0/0ab5645292440a99c1257b7a0053b328/$file/13_25+Tosa+e-bus.pdf
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From what I'm reading, each stop (where the bus gets 15 seconds of 400kW power) uses a 3 kWh super-capacitor. The last stop tops off the onboard storage in 3-4 minutes at 200kW. Last link shows there is 40kWh of capacity on the bus, so it might be a fast charging battery (400kW/40kWh = 10C charge which is still possible on batteries, although not the high energy density ones on the Model S).

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2013/05/abb-20130531.html

http://www.uitpgeneva2013.org/ckfinder/userfiles/files/Articles/PTI%201_2013_TOSA.pdf

But the key point that this shows is that like I mentioned last time, once you reach over 250kW, it's really not practical to have cables to charge (which is why the buses use an overhead bar).

Also the same amount of power (400kW) will still take 13 minutes to fully charge a 85kWh battery (longer if you factor in tapering).
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CapitalistOppressor said: ?

It's possible, and it fits well with my suspicion that these might end up being financed by CDO's, just like Solar City does with their solar installations. The core IP for the batteries is Tesla. I need to re-read the CES patent I linked at the beginning of this thread so I can squeeze some of the nuance out of it, but off hand I think the patent covers all of the bases for buying power when prices are low, and selling when they are high, regardless of the actual pricing.

If massive CES and grid leveling is Tesla's end state on this concept they will make Apple look like a niche company.
You really, have to hand it to Elon, he loves to go for the jugular. Even now, when you ask him in interviews about Paypal he is angry at E-Bay for basically neutering the concept. He straight up thought Paypal would replace banks. All of them.
Even when he was doing Zip2 he probably had the same mindset. I was working for a competing company at the time, doing the same stuff, but for USA Today, etc. instead of NY Times, etc. And every one of us spent hours each day saying how the work we were doing was making the newspaper business redundant. Heck, that's basically the entire Silicon Valley culture in a nutshell.
All your business are belong to us.
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I wonder how this patent might effect Tesla's plan in grid storage leveling, it seems to have an earlier priority date. METHODS AND SYSTEMS FOR BIDIRECTIONAL CHARGING OF ELECTRICAL DEVICES VIA AN ELECTRICAL SYSTEM
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CapitalistOppressor said: ?

Eventually, a REALLY smart grid will use the auto-fleet itself as a major power source and storage medium.
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Wouldn't that cause wear on the car batteries?
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JRod0802 said: ?

Wouldn't that cause wear on the car batteries?
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Sure. As battery prices will come down more it's just a question of time until the battery is depreciating less than what you can earn with power-arbitraging.
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Some data might be helpful in your revenue models. Any grid storage device will be on the wholesale market, so forget about your retail rates. The gap between on- and off-peak wholesale prices is far smaller than you are supposing. Here are numbers for purchase today of annual strip power products for 2014:

PJM PJM CAISO CAISO CAISO

East Hub West Hub CA/OR Border NP15 SP15
On-Peak 52.71 47.93 40.98 45.84 51.90
Off-Peak 35.75 33.43 29.33 35.72 38.60
Delta 16.96 14.50 11.65 10.12 13.30
These prices are $/MWh, so we're looking at 1.0 to 1.7 cents/kWh of price swing. Admittedly, you can do better than this: there are some hours when the prices go way above the average on-peak price. But you'd be lucky to get $0.03/kWh on average with storage.

OTOH, there is additional value in providing synchronous reserves and regulation; these are typically priced around $4/MW/hour, though, so we're not talking big bucks (except in times of extreme scarcity).

If you are banking on scarcity to make your bucks, remember that the scarcity you're hoping for begins to disappear as you add more resources to the bulk power system that can respond to the potential shortfalls.
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This is really great information/discussion. I need to process some more, but there's one thing that I haven't seen mentioned yet which we've been discussing in my thread on swapping which might be of interest to you guys.

If you are already going to have a ton of batteries on hand to support grid storage, then the incremental cost to enable swapping is small relative to the cost of a grid storage enabled supercharger station. This is also another good reason for Tesla to use the exact same packs it is building for Model S rather than engineer a new pack specifically designed for grid storage.
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Robert.Boston said: ?

Some data might be helpful in your revenue models. Any grid storage device will be on the wholesale market, so forget about your retail rates. The gap between on- and off-peak wholesale prices is far smaller than you are supposing. Here are numbers for purchase today of annual strip power products for 2014:

PJM PJM CAISO CAISO CAISO

East Hub West Hub CA/OR Border NP15 SP15
On-Peak 52.71 47.93 40.98 45.84 51.90
Off-Peak 35.75 33.43 29.33 35.72 38.60
Delta 16.96 14.50 11.65 10.12 13.30
These prices are $/MWh, so we're looking at 1.0 to 1.7 cents/kWh of price swing. Admittedly, you can do better than this: there are some hours when the prices go way above the average on-peak price. But you'd be lucky to get $0.03/kWh on average with storage.

OTOH, there is additional value in providing synchronous reserves and regulation; these are typically priced around $4/MW/hour, though, so we're not talking big bucks (except in times of extreme scarcity).

If you are banking on scarcity to make your bucks, remember that the scarcity you're hoping for begins to disappear as you add more resources to the bulk power system that can respond to the potential shortfalls.
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My analysis of ERCOT shows that there are enough large price swings plus high enough ancillary services prices to make a couple million a year playing the optimal storage game. It could help increase Tesla's revenues but not be one of the larger sources of revenue. At most $10-$20 million a year if you covered all of the nation.
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Robert.Boston said: ?

Some data might be helpful in your revenue models. Any grid storage device will be on the wholesale market, so forget about your retail rates. The gap between on- and off-peak wholesale prices is far smaller than you are supposing. Here are numbers for purchase today of annual strip power products for 2014:

PJM PJM CAISO CAISO CAISO

East Hub West Hub CA/OR Border NP15 SP15
On-Peak 52.71 47.93 40.98 45.84 51.90
Off-Peak 35.75 33.43 29.33 35.72 38.60
Delta 16.96 14.50 11.65 10.12 13.30
These prices are $/MWh, so we're looking at 1.0 to 1.7 cents/kWh of price swing. Admittedly, you can do better than this: there are some hours when the prices go way above the average on-peak price. But you'd be lucky to get $0.03/kWh on average with storage.

OTOH, there is additional value in providing synchronous reserves and regulation; these are typically priced around $4/MW/hour, though, so we're not talking big bucks (except in times of extreme scarcity).

If you are banking on scarcity to make your bucks, remember that the scarcity you're hoping for begins to disappear as you add more resources to the bulk power system that can respond to the potential shortfalls.
Click to expand...

There are gas-powered power plants that stand by to rev up on 15 minutes notice to provide those last MW required during the annual global peak - they are active a few hours per year. The cost of this marginal power is astronomical. The need for such balancing capacity will increase sharply when integrating renewables into the grid. This is why grid storage has such a high economical power. Consumption-side on-peak/off-peak rates (whether retail or wholesale) have no meaningful granularity, and will not reflect the economic benefit of grid storage.
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Robert.Boston said: ?

Some data might be helpful in your revenue models. Any grid storage device will be on the wholesale market, so forget about your retail rates. The gap between on- and off-peak wholesale prices is far smaller than you are supposing. Here are numbers for purchase today of annual strip power products for 2014:

PJM PJM CAISO CAISO CAISO

East Hub West Hub CA/OR Border NP15 SP15
On-Peak 52.71 47.93 40.98 45.84 51.90
Off-Peak 35.75 33.43 29.33 35.72 38.60
Delta 16.96 14.50 11.65 10.12 13.30
These prices are $/MWh, so we're looking at 1.0 to 1.7 cents/kWh of price swing. Admittedly, you can do better than this: there are some hours when the prices go way above the average on-peak price. But you'd be lucky to get $0.03/kWh on average with storage.

OTOH, there is additional value in providing synchronous reserves and regulation; these are typically priced around $4/MW/hour, though, so we're not talking big bucks (except in times of extreme scarcity).

If you are banking on scarcity to make your bucks, remember that the scarcity you're hoping for begins to disappear as you add more resources to the bulk power system that can respond to the potential shortfalls.
Click to expand...

This is true, which is why I think the model will end up generating relatively high returns per MWh stored initially, which will then decrease as capacity increases, and CES moves up the chain (down the chain?) from grid buffering to load leveling.

But the other thing to keep in mind is that the need for CES increases in direct proportion to renewable adoption. So there is a synergistic relationship between wind/solar and CES. CES actually increases the value of the renewable energy, which must be sold at a discount because of the technical problems that a lack of storage creates. (I'm not sure how this discount works in the marketplace, but it must exist because of the technical resources that must be devoted to solve the variability problems)

Without CES, there is a real upper limit on how big of a market share renewables can get, regardless of how much the notional per/MW cost of renewables falls (or conventional increases). With CES, renewables have more market power, which allows them to capture market share, which then allows you to monetize a larger CES capacity.

Current rates, or discussions of the different flavors of peaker power (there are sources that operate for hours each year, and larger sources that operate for portions of each day, etc) are relevant for the initial business. But the end state is the renewable+CES combo going head to head with conventional sources. If/when the combo is able to profitably offer a lower price than conventional sources, it will displace conventional sources and earn vast sums of revenue for CES operators, and vaster sums for the renewable generators.

In the mean time, there are existing mandates and subsidies for renewables that offers a market opportunity for CES. The minimum opportunity lies in eliminating the costs incurred by the various workarounds being implemented to support renewables. If Tesla's CES is more economical than the current kludge, then they should be able to do quite well.

So, aside from simple rate arbitrage, I see two opportunities at the moment. Fixing the renewable kluge, and replacing peaker sources. How to properly characterize the size of those opportunities, now and in the future, seems to be the path we need to take. Do we see other additional opportunities?

(Edit: it occurs to me that renewables are mandated, so we wont necessarily see a discount in the "market" price, but the costs are still there, and thus the opportunity)
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Ancillary markets: Frequency regulation up and down, responsive (spinning) reserves, non-spinning reserves are rather lucrative and can easily be performed with batteries. You could also supply black start services and voltage regulation as well as backup power to the shopping complex.
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Here's a simple to read explainer -
Explainer: Base Load and Peaking Power | Explainers | KCET

Here's nugget of a datapoint -

'Peakers' plants provide electricity when it's hot, but at the highest price | NJ.com

It costs ratepayers about $13 million annually for PSEG to keep the plant operational. That cost could vary depending upon how many days of the year PJM decides the plant is available to operate. The more days it�s available, the higher the charge to ratepayers.
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And a research opportunity (PSEG Fossil) for a company in the peaker business and is operating the plant in question.

Here is a Greentech article from 2010 on the subject. I strongly recommend reading it. The link for the Strategen and CEC papers are broken, so we should find them -

How Storage Can Help Get Rid of Peaker Plants : Greentech Media

Key nugget -

Using assumptions taken from a recent California Energy Commission (CEC) study, our analysis found a levelized cost of generation for the simple cycle gas-fired peaker plant of $492 per megawatt-hour (MWh), or $203 per kilowatt-year (kW-yr). In comparison, the energy storage plant demonstrated significant savings, with a levelized cost of generation of $377 per MWh ($155/kw-yr).
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This study was apparently done between 1988 and 1996, using lead acid batteries. Electricity rates have changed (at a guess they are much higher, but I am biased because I live in California, and I remember Enron). 30 Model S batteries is probably ~2,670kWh of storage (based on my simulation of the Model S battery anyways). Elon mentioned that ~500kWh of storage could generate 1MW of power at need. So lets give the 30 battery plant a peak output of 5.3MW, and the ability to average 1MW over the year.

That gets us to the $203/kW-yr vs $155/kW-yr estimate which seems to imply that you can make ~$48/kW-yr, or ~$48,000 for the 1MW plant in this example. If each pack is $17,000 (my model, my rules, feel free to substitute your assumptions) then the cost for the batteries for the plant is $510,000. As a stand-alone product, this plant needs to be operational for a very long time just to recoup the initial investment (~11 years). But for Tesla, this is all free money because they need to build these things anyways for their automotive business.

BTW, this model is literally being transferred from the back of a napkin into my iPad in real time, and I haven't even fully read the Greentech article and examined its graphs (I was actually just trying to find some quick links, lol), so be gentle

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rolosrevenge said: ?

I wonder how this patent might effect Tesla's plan in grid storage leveling, it seems to have an earlier priority date. METHODS AND SYSTEMS FOR BIDIRECTIONAL CHARGING OF ELECTRICAL DEVICES VIA AN ELECTRICAL SYSTEM
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Interesting bit of IP. Seems focused primarily on maximizing the value of the trade between profits and battery degradation. Probably some overlap with Tesla, but I don't see either Tesla's IP or this IP being particularly critical. In the case of Tesla, its just a roadmap to their thinking (and proof that they have been at least thinking about the concept).
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I had a conversation today with some solarcity employees today. I get the feeling like they basically feel like solarcity/tesla is already one company in a lot of ways. Anyway, they were discussing how they figure tht the battery packs could basically be sold seperately for helping people with solar systems go off the grid. I told them to count me in... Anyway, it would seem that there could be some serious revenue waiting for Tesla just by selling the batteries. After my conversation with them, it almost felt like Tesla's cars could all just be a front while Elon masterminds his way to take over the energy industry. i know that's not true, but there is more potential then I ever realized...
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Kraken said: ?

I had a conversation today with some solarcity employees today. I get the feeling like they basically feel like solarcity/tesla is already one company in a lot of ways. Anyway, they were discussing how they figure tht the battery packs could basically be sold seperately for helping people with solar systems go off the grid. I told them to count me in... Anyway, it would seem that there could be some serious revenue waiting for Tesla just by selling the batteries. After my conversation with them, it almost felt like Tesla's cars could all just be a front while Elon masterminds his way to take over the energy industry. i know that's not true, but there is more potential then I ever realized...
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I believe you might not be far off. In fact I just posted in another thread (Elon's multi-business strategy) on this: What if in 5 years the Nummi factory is in full use with 30% of it manufacturing cars and the other 70% of it spitting out battery packs for a wide range of uses: automotive both for Tesla and other car manufacturers, energy storage for individual's with solar power, large grid storage/grid balancing applications for utilities, batteries for electric airplanes etc. etc. etc??? With economics of scale the cost would only come down further...
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A few more points about reality vs. theory on the power grid:

1. The cost of peaking plants is not covered by energy prices during demand spikes in US markets (except, maybe, in Texas). The system operators / utilities sign enough "capacity contracts" to meet expected peak load + a planning reserve margin; these capacity payments cover peaking plants' fixed costs. During the operating day, plants are limited to offering energy at their incremental operating cost (fuel + O&M) plus a small margin (~10%). Some areas have put in a scarcity adder that forces energy prices up during scarcity conditions. These kick in rarely--here in New England, about 3 hours a year.
-- Takeaway: if a resource doesn't qualify as a capacity resource, it won't get paid the big bucks that these peaking plants cost (cited by @CapitalistOppressor). Storage can qualify as a capacity resource, but it's a more complex process than just showing up to provide peaking power when it's convenient for you.

2. While intermittent resources do cause more system strain, and therefore the value of grid storage should be going up, current market designs are masking this value. The California ISO is "buying" a FlexiRamp product from generators at confiscatory prices, while PG&E is refusing to allow CAISO to schedule its hydro system to provide any flexibility. When Bonneville had the temerity to attempt to value its integration costs for wind, the value it came up with (~$15/MWh) that political forces kicked in and forced BPA to back-pedal.
-- Takeaway: although reserves should be increasingly valuable, this economic reality may not be reflected in prices.

3. Demand response providers will hop into the regulation market if it ever gets lucrative. Currently, DR isn't allowed to provide reserves in most markets. This will be changing over the next few years; New England, e.g., is scheduled to bring on DR reserves in 2017. This change would likely strip out the high-value hours for grid-tied storage.
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Robert.Boston said: ?

A few more points about reality vs. theory on the power grid:

1. The cost of peaking plants is not covered by energy prices during demand spikes in US markets (except, maybe, in Texas). The system operators / utilities sign enough "capacity contracts" to meet expected peak load + a planning reserve margin; these capacity payments cover peaking plants' fixed costs. During the operating day, plants are limited to offering energy at their incremental operating cost (fuel + O&M) plus a small margin (~10%). Some areas have put in a scarcity adder that forces energy prices up during scarcity conditions. These kick in rarely--here in New England, about 3 hours a year.
-- Takeaway: if a resource doesn't qualify as a capacity resource, it won't get paid the big bucks that these peaking plants cost (cited by @CapitalistOppressor). Storage can qualify as a capacity resource, but it's a more complex process than just showing up to provide peaking power when it's convenient for you.

2. While intermittent resources do cause more system strain, and therefore the value of grid storage should be going up, current market designs are masking this value. The California ISO is "buying" a FlexiRamp product from generators at confiscatory prices, while PG&E is refusing to allow CAISO to schedule its hydro system to provide any flexibility. When Bonneville had the temerity to attempt to value its integration costs for wind, the value it came up with (~$15/MWh) that political forces kicked in and forced BPA to back-pedal.
-- Takeaway: although reserves should be increasingly valuable, this economic reality may not be reflected in prices.

3. Demand response providers will hop into the regulation market if it ever gets lucrative. Currently, DR isn't allowed to provide reserves in most markets. This will be changing over the next few years; New England, e.g., is scheduled to bring on DR reserves in 2017. This change would likely strip out the high-value hours for grid-tied storage.
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OT: The more I read about the US economy, the more surprised I am how less it is like a free market economy than Norway. We're supposed to be communists over here (as classified by the US right wing), but we out-free market you guys any day of the week. In this case, electric power is traded on a common Nordic power exchange, allowing prices to accurately reflect scarcity at any given point in time. As consumers, we can buy at spot prices (+small admin fee), or we can buy fixed-price (or other) packages from any utility. The dealership issue (TX, NC and so forth) is another case in point.
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Yep, the US power market is pretty screwed up in many ways. Far better than it used to be. There are two layers: First, the federal layer the regulates the wholesale power markets and requires that all prices be "just and reasonable" which, if there's any risk of there being market power, means something linked to marginal costs. Second, the state layer, which determines what prices consumers actually see. State regulators are generally very paternalistic and use retail tariffs to accomplish many goals, including wealth redistribution and subsidies. It's a mess of cross-wired incentives.

As a great example, recently someone posted how his local utility rates, which are tiered depending upon your monthly usage, made it more profitable for him to put PV on the north side of his house (which has a high load) than for a neighbor to put PV on the south side of his (because he has a lower load). This violates at least two fundamental economic principles.
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You'll find that most 100ish year-old industries in the U.S. have very anti-capitalist characteristics. Another two I can think of in addition to autos and energy: railroads and landline telephone operators.
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Wow, awesome thread. Love it that TM is also going into the grid storage space. I have been looking at developments for CES for a few years now, and nothing big is happening. Most solutions do target the pov of the classic energy producers, few are catering for the CES scenario.

I must say that this does re-enforce my guess that the 'under your nose' announcement could well be that all Model S cars have a 85kWh battery. It provides TM with a simplified production line and supports the SuperSwapper idea. All batteries being equal, the stock required at a swapping station also becomes much less of an operational hassle. Furthermore it could (can it really?) allow a current 60kWh Model S owner to upgrade to a 85kWh, just by buying the upgrade. (Swipe credit card, wait for the OTA update sent to the car, and tadaa, extra range)

Given that an 80% 85kWh battery pack still has enough power for a 60kWh car, the lifetime for the current battery packs move into the timeframe of the GenIII car, allowing Model s drivers to upgrade to newer more powerful packs while TM can repurpose the 'used' ones for the GenIIII.
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Robert.Boston said: ?

As a great example, recently someone posted how his local utility rates, which are tiered depending upon your monthly usage, made it more profitable for him to put PV on the north side of his house (which has a high load) than for a neighbor to put PV on the south side of his (because he has a lower load). This violates at least two fundamental economic principles.
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The primary being that things facing south are always more profitable ... :tongue:
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EarlyAdopter said: ?

After reading this thread I think "the way for the Tesla Model S to be recharged throughout the country faster than you could fill a gas tank" is through grid tied batteries at the supercharger stations.

What if Tesla has found that their packs are capable of safely charging and discharging at 6C (10 mins). This normally would require a massive substation feed from the utility. Not going to happen at the hole-in-the-wall locations of the Supercharger stations. But if they've got battery packs at the stations this won't be a problem as the battery will be the high current buffer. "Trickle" charge the station batteries from the grid at night and solar during the day. Then dump a massive charge into a car when it pulls up. If too many cars happen to stop by and deplete the batteries, no worries - just fall back to 120kW fed from the grid.
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Elon just hinted at this at the shareholders meeting.
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EarlyAdopter said: ?

Elon just hinted at this at the shareholders meeting.
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He did say that they have the ability to upgrade the SuperChargers. And since they have the grid storage batteries there it gives them the ability to put out more than 120kWh. And as I said before, as far all the futures in the multiverse, this is my favorite one.

HOWEVER, when you look at Elon during the stockholder meeting, he spoke 3 times about fast charging (only #2 is an exact quote, the rest I took down live, but should be close):

1) He was talking in regard to getting a 99% score from Consumer Reports - the only American car that has ever achieved that. And mentioned (which I jotted down as):
Elon: The reason we didn't get 100 was because of charge time and range. I'm wondering if we address those issues (smile) - whether a score of 100 is possible. I don't know if they'll give us a 100. But we will try and address those issues. (Smirk). (Smile). (Grin)

2) During Q/A:
Q: You recently tweeted about that it may take less time charging a Model S would take actually less time than filling a tank of gas. Is the recent announcement that it is 20 minutes. Is that it now?
Elon: No. That is not it. That is not it. I would say, you should... I mentioned there will be an announcement on June 20th, in fact, not an announcement, but a demonstration. Live demonstration.

3) Q/A question about the SuperCharger speed:
Q: Is there any concern that with the rapid rollout, SuperChargers will be obsolete by the time you deploy them?
Elon: We're going to upgrade the SuperCharger technology over time. [He mentioned the stationary storage again]. Combined with Solar - we charge battery packs with solar power during the week. That unlocks even more power potential by drawing from the batteries. In the future we can potentially go above 120 kW, without having to necessarily lose our existing hardware investment. Long term goal is even with Zombie Apocalypse, the SuperChargers will still be functional.

On #1 and #2 he was positively giddy. He was like a child that bought a Christmas present for her dad and can't wait for him to open it and see the look on his face. [ Aside: Don't you just absolutely love the excitement that this man has for his field? ]

On #3 he was much more subdued, like he had to think about the question for a while. And he answered this in the tone of the engine noise question question he received with his directional pleasant sound solution solution. Yes, it's something that they're thinking about doing, but I don't get the feeling it's something he's just bursting to tell us about.

So sadly, I think one of the two battery-theories are going to win out on this one. But I'll keep rooting for charging!
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deonb said: ?

So sadly, I think one of the two battery-theories are going to win out on this one. But I'll keep rooting for charging!
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What if it's a non-cable special connector for flash charging from a battery source? (Perhaps even also with flush coolant connectors)
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kenliles said: ?

What if it's a non-cable special connector for flash charging from a battery source? (Perhaps even also with flush coolant connectors)
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To me, that is the only "SuperCharging" option that ever made sense. Leverage the fast removal and replacement of the battery that is possible with SuperSwapper, and instead of swapping, just hook up a mondo charge connecter directly to the battery, and a SuperCooling system directly to the cooling ports, and flood the battery with electricity/coolant until it is charged.

Then replace the battery in the car, and drive off.

I don't know if its possible from a technical, charging point of view. But as an engineering fix, the hardware and processes are even simpler than SuperSwapping (no need to move batteries around). You still require massive CES infrastructure as well, because otherwise you need a miniature power plant on site to provide the massive power quantities available.

But I've never seen comments from users that show this is possible without destroying the battery. If you can't resolve charging issues with massive cooling systems, than its pointless to consider, which leaves SuperSwapping or the Aluminum Air concepts.

I gave up on arguing with the AA guys because I realized you need CES regardless of the method you choose. The electrical grid just isn't equipped to allow for millions of automobiles to do MW levels of charging on a Memorial Day weekend. You need to store the energy on site, and then give it to the cars mechanically (by swapping, either conventional packs, or AA) or by SuperCharging (at whatever really high speed you can do).
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CapitalistOppressor said: ?

To me, that is the only "SuperCharging" option that ever made sense. Leverage the fast removal and replacement of the battery that is possible with SuperSwapper, and instead of swapping, just hook up a mondo charge connecter directly to the battery, and a SuperCooling system directly to the cooling ports, and flood the battery with electricity/coolant until it is charged.

Then replace the battery in the car, and drive off.

I don't know if its possible from a technical, charging point of view. But as an engineering fix, the hardware and processes are even simpler than SuperSwapping (no need to move batteries around). You still require massive CES infrastructure as well, because otherwise you need a miniature power plant on site to provide the massive power quantities available.

But I've never seen comments from users that show this is possible without destroying the battery. If you can't resolve charging issues with massive cooling systems, than its pointless to consider, which leaves SuperSwapping or the Aluminum Air concepts.

I gave up on arguing with the AA guys because I realized you need CES regardless of the method you choose. The electrical grid just isn't equipped to allow for millions of automobiles to do MW levels of charging on a Memorial Day weekend. You need to store the energy on site, and then give it to the cars mechanically (by swapping, either conventional packs, or AA) or by SuperCharging (at whatever really high speed you can do).
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agree with your analysis- and agree it's the best option if they cold pull it off-- thanks cappy;
and thanks for your great analysis of the battery costs (other thread) while I'm at it...
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Robert.Boston said: ?

A few more points about reality vs. theory on the power grid:

1. The cost of peaking plants is not covered by energy prices during demand spikes in US markets (except, maybe, in Texas). The system operators / utilities sign enough "capacity contracts" to meet expected peak load + a planning reserve margin; these capacity payments cover peaking plants' fixed costs. During the operating day, plants are limited to offering energy at their incremental operating cost (fuel + O&M) plus a small margin (~10%). Some areas have put in a scarcity adder that forces energy prices up during scarcity conditions. These kick in rarely--here in New England, about 3 hours a year.
-- Takeaway: if a resource doesn't qualify as a capacity resource, it won't get paid the big bucks that these peaking plants cost (cited by @CapitalistOppressor). Storage can qualify as a capacity resource, but it's a more complex process than just showing up to provide peaking power when it's convenient for you.
Click to expand...

If Tesla were to promise a certain quantity of power be available on demand by the utility, would that allow them to be eligible for a capacity contract? Let's set aside the small potato plants we will see during the initial rollout, which only need a small capacity to support a national vehicle fleet of under 100k, and look ahead to 2025.

Assume 32 GWh of storage are built to support a vehicle fleet of 5 million Tesla's (purely hypothetical), and that capacity is broken up into five hundred 64MWh plants, Each of which is capable of 128MW of output. If only half of the plant capacity is needed to support the automotive fleet, could Tesla contract with the utility to offer 34MWh of capacity, on demand, year round? With the understanding that it's a finite resource, and needs to be replenished when exhausted?

Or do you sell this capacity at the network level, by looking at the regional capacity of the CES stations?

2. While intermittent resources do cause more system strain, and therefore the value of grid storage should be going up, current market designs are masking this value. The California ISO is "buying" a FlexiRamp product from generators at confiscatory prices, while PG&E is refusing to allow CAISO to schedule its hydro system to provide any flexibility. When Bonneville had the temerity to attempt to value its integration costs for wind, the value it came up with (~$15/MWh) that political forces kicked in and forced BPA to back-pedal.
-- Takeaway: although reserves should be increasingly valuable, this economic reality may not be reflected in prices.
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Yes, I was concerned about the possibility that these costs are hidden away from the "market". Nevertheless, everyone is is aware of them, and regulators can adopt new rules to facilitate the market entry of a major new CES capacity that is going to come into existence regardless of what the energy market thinks (thanks to the core charging requirement).

3. Demand response providers will hop into the regulation market if it ever gets lucrative. Currently, DR isn't allowed to provide reserves in most markets. This will be changing over the next few years; New England, e.g., is scheduled to bring on DR reserves in 2017. This change would likely strip out the high-value hours for grid-tied storage.
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I'm not familiar with Demand Response. Reading up on the Wikipedia entry here -

Demand response - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Can anyone enlighten me about the purpose of the "clusters" of superchargers in the projected 2015 supercharger map that are not located near large metropolitan areas? In Michigan, there is a cluster of 3 proposed superchargers in South Central Michigan, - on the rough map, near Jackson, Mi. - headquarters for Consumers Energy. There are also 2 clustered near Luddington, Mi - population ~20k on the NW side - near Consumers stored power facility. There are similar clusters near Burlington, VT, in Massachussets, and in Georgia, near Augusta. There look to be 2 just North of Indianapolis, roughly the site of a major wind farm, and a bunch near Jacksonville, Fla and strung across Az (solar?). I get locating along Interstates and near population centers, but these seem to be built in the middle of nowhere. Not sure if I'm looking for patterns in randomness. Thoughts appreciated.
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For clarification, there are 4 superchargers proposed between Tucson and El Centro by Winter of 2013 (about 290 miles) and 2 proposed for the 250 mikes between Dallas and Houston....and none along the 360 miles of I-70 from Indy to Pittsburg. It looks like the Tucson - El Centro is close to the Mesquite Solar project. Thoughts?
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Bgarret said: ?

For clarification, there are 4 superchargers proposed between Tucson and El Centro by Winter of 2013 (about 290 miles) and 2 proposed for the 250 mikes between Dallas and Houston....and none along the 360 miles of I-70 from Indy to Pittsburg. It looks like the Tucson - El Centro is close to the Mesquite Solar project. Thoughts?
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The plot thickens? Lol.

The proposed dots are not necessarily where the actual SuperChargers will be located. It would be best to hear what folks who live near these locations think.

I doubt these are being grouped near renewable generation sources (as opposed to on key routes). But again, someone who lives in the area would know the highway system better than I would. The charger locations I've been to here in California seem to be in logical locations. Though I would have preferred route 99 over Interstate 5 for the Central Valley, since its just a more interesting drive (if somewhat longer and out of the way).

It's an interesting line of thought though. CES is going to happen. If there are logistical reasons for a CES site to favor one route over another, then I could see Tesla adjusting the planned routes to accommodate this.
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Bgarret said: ?

Can anyone enlighten me about the purpose of the "clusters" of superchargers in the projected 2015 supercharger map that are not located near large metropolitan areas? In Michigan, there is a cluster of 3 proposed superchargers in South Central Michigan, - on the rough map, near Jackson, Mi. - headquarters for Consumers Energy. There are also 2 clustered near Luddington, Mi - population ~20k on the NW side - near Consumers stored power facility. There are similar clusters near Burlington, VT, in Massachussets, and in Georgia, near Augusta. There look to be 2 just North of Indianapolis, roughly the site of a major wind farm, and a bunch near Jacksonville, Fla and strung across Az (solar?). I get locating along Interstates and near population centers, but these seem to be built in the middle of nowhere. Not sure if I'm looking for patterns in randomness. Thoughts appreciated.
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The superchargers look to be closer to Battle Creek and Jackson and would be easily accessible from Chicago with a 85kWh battery and Benton Harbor (on the west side) would make travelling with a 60 kWh battery very feasible. But I agree that I am confused as to why a Jackson station would help any more than the BC one...
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kcveins said: ?

The superchargers look to be closer to Battle Creek and Jackson and would be easily accessible from Chicago with a 85kWh battery and Benton Harbor (on the west side) would make travelling with a 60 kWh battery very feasible. But I agree that I am confused as to why a Jackson station would help any more than the BC one...
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Could there be local incentives at the city, county or utility level? I'm pretty sure there are large financial incentives at the state level in California, though I haven't gotten around to researching that yet.
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Bgarret said: ?

Can anyone enlighten me about the purpose of the "clusters" of superchargers in the projected 2015 supercharger map that are not located near large metropolitan areas? ... There are similar clusters near Burlington, VT, in Massachusetts. ... Thoughts appreciated.
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The VT cluster appear to be one in VT on I-89 and another in NY on I-87, with Lake Champlain in between. Very different travel corridors.

The Southern New England cluster is a little more challenging to decipher.
. The Summer 2013 map adds three dots: I-95 near Stamford, Merritt Parkway near Stamford, and Providence RI. The two CT locations are on different travel routes; the Merritt allows no commercial traffic and is by far the more pleasant route into the NYC area. Why we need another SC on I-95 is a mystery to me, though perhaps the CT highway department has simply proved easy to deal with. Providence is a good link on the way to Cape Cod.
. Fall 2013 adds three new points in New England: Charlton MA, Concord NH, and Portland ME. Charlton is a great location, just east of the I-90/I-84 interchange but west of the I-90/I-495 split. Lots of long-distance travel through here. Concord and Portland both open up the New England ski areas and, generally, northward travel into areas with few EV charge options.
. Winter 2013 adds West Lebanon NH, at the junction of I-89/I-91. It's really essential for lots of routes, particularly to Montreal.
. 2014 adds Springfield MA, the Lake Champlain pair, and Bangor ME. The Springfield SC appears puzzlingly close to Charleton SCs, but it's real function is on the N/S drive on I-91, not the E/W drive on I-90. Bangor extends the end of the line.

The plethora of Michigan SCs has me puzzled.
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My parents live close to the clump of two near Augusta, GA. I really don't know about why they need two there any more than any other location.
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Jonathan Hewitt said: ?

My parents live close to the clump of two near Augusta, GA. I really don't know about why they need two there any more than any other location.
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I agree, I would like to see on of them used for a SC site west of Atlanta on I-20, perhaps near the GA/AL state line.
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All things being equal, it has to be better to build SC's near renewable power. They could probably contract quite cheaply to make use of the lumpy wind and solar power being generated if they are storing in captive battery packs, which I think they will. I wouldn't read into it a plan to build out grid storage necessarily. If they believe so strongly in the economics of grid storage for renewables, they can just build grid storage facilities and not call them superchargers.
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Bgarret said: ?

Can anyone enlighten me about the purpose of the "clusters" of superchargers in the projected 2015 supercharger map that are not located near large metropolitan areas?
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Its quite possible that this doesn't have anything to do with grid storage or renewable sources. We see this clustering in Northeast Florida. Short of outright graphical errors, I am of the opinion that Tesla is smart enough to avoid unnecessary clustering of Supercharger stations. So I assume there is a "method to their madness". We don't know how many Supercharging positions have been granted at each proposed location. It may be as simple as the host at one or more locations doesn't permit sufficient spaces and therefore clustering is needed to obtain sufficient spaces in a region on a well-traveled route in order to avoid congestion. Another possible explanation is that this is merely redundancy to allow for the failure to get approval of certain locations in a region. In other words, Tesla doesn't necessarily plan to install all of the dots in a cluster.

Larry
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I haven't seen this anywhere posted yet. But take a look at this article:

Power grid getting smarter with big battery in Salem
http://www.pnnl.gov/news/release.aspx?id=990

So it looks like PGE just paid $23 million for 5 MW of grid storage.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that's 5 MWh for now (I sent a mail off to the authors to clarify as well as to try and get a breakdown of the $23 million).

So PGE just spend $23 million for 5 MW. How much would Tesla's cost be to provide that capacity?

Let's see...

To get 5 MW of storage capacity you would need 63 x 75kWh batteries (discarding top and bottom of a 85). Let's just round that up and call it 100 batteries.

Now let's pretend they're $40'000 each. That would be $4 million. And PGE just paid $23 million for it??

This fruit is so low-hanging it's practically lying on the ground...

Ok, let's say the PGE number is actually 5 MW load for 12 hours. So 60 MWH. That would require 756 batteries. Round up to 1000 (swapper usage and what not).

Now we need to start looking at more worldly numbers. Let's say the batteries are $22k each * 1000 = $22 million. Still a deal and plenty of buffering built into my calculations.

With CO's battery cost math at $12'000 each, you can build 20 swapper stations around Salem with 50 batteries each and it will still be $1m cheaper than what PGE just spent on this.
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deonb said: ?

With CO's battery cost math at $12'000 each, you can build 20 swapper stations around Salem with 50 batteries each and it will still be $1m cheaper than what PGE just spent on this.
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Reading through the article, the $23M is the total project cost, not just the battery cost. The total includes rectifiers, inverters and software/hardware enabling automatic economic dispatch - deciding the best time when to charge/discharge the battery banks.

While your particular calculation seem to be off, I am sure that Tesla could be quite competitive in this field, if and when it decides to participate.

Based on EM remarks during and after the SC announcement, Tesla currently focuses on using storage battery systems to decouple their plans for potential quick expansion of SC from the limitations imposed by local utility connections.
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vgrinshpun said: ?

Reading through the article, the $23M is the total project cost, not just the battery cost. The total includes rectifiers, inverters and software/hardware enabling automatic economic dispatch - deciding the best time when to charge/discharge the battery banks.
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Totally agree - I've followed up with PGE. They've pointed me to someone else and asked them to send me the breakdown, but I haven't received it yet.

At least we know that the SuperChargers + Battery Swappers + 50 batteries also already have the same rectifiers, inverters and hardware (and software is a fixed R&D cost) - and even with the swapper + chargers in there, it's still competitive.
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Here is a techcrunch report detailing process to install SC. A lot of this is already known.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/26/inside-teslas-supercharger-partner-program-the-costs-and-commitments-of-electrifying-road-transport/
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teslamotorclub

Chủ Nhật, 29 tháng 1, 2017

Tesla's new core business? CES Grid Storage Device For SuperCharger/SuperSwapper part 1

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	PJM	PJM	CAISO	CAISO	CAISO
	East Hub	West Hub	CA/OR Border	NP15	SP15
On-Peak	52.71	47.93	40.98	45.84	51.90
Off-Peak	35.75	33.43	29.33	35.72	38.60
Delta	16.96	14.50	11.65	10.12	13.30