Carrerahill Posted December 5, 2019 Share Posted December 5, 2019 (edited) I was at a building and asset maintenance conference yesterday where Tesla had a stand with a Tesla battery, looks like a giant iPhone, fairly sleek white case about 1200mm tall, 1000mm wide and 200mm deep, this was a 13kWh battery complete with charger/inverter. Weighs about 120Kg and has a 10 year warranty with unlimited charge cycles. Cost currently was £7K however my discussion with the Tesla chap was that clearly this cost would fall within the next 3-5 years. Idea is to use on-site renewable to charge I assumed but this is not necessarily the only option and one that is foreign to me, having never had dual tariff electricity, is to use the battery to store electricity from low peak tariff then discharge during high peak tariff. Not sure how good the ROI would be on that to be honest but a local authority talking to me said she was getting 10K per battery to install them to save energy. Tesla's end game is actually using it as a means to attenuate power consumption on the network from EV charging. There is a gateway which hooks the battery up to the network and controls how it works depending on how it is commissioned, this gateway could allow for a lower current charge into the battery all day, then when you get home you can fast charge your car from the battery or it will supplement the grid power to ease loading. Edited December 5, 2019 by Carrerahill Spelling Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
epsilonGreedy Posted December 5, 2019 Share Posted December 5, 2019 20 minutes ago, Carrerahill said: ... has a 10 year warranty with unlimited charge cycles. Any mention of a guaranteed residual capacity after x thousand charge cycles? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ed Davies Posted December 5, 2019 Share Posted December 5, 2019 20 minutes ago, Carrerahill said: and 20mm deep 200mm? Is this the Powerwall (or Powerwall II) or something new? Say it, very optimistically, saved you 13 kWh/day for 10 years at 15p/kWh then I make that a saving of £7117.50 (ignoring leap days). Hardly a stunning ROI. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Carrerahill Posted December 5, 2019 Author Share Posted December 5, 2019 Just now, Ed Davies said: 200mm? Is this the Powerwall (or Powerwall II) or something new? Say it, very optimistically, saved you 13 kWh/day for 10 years at 15p/kWh then I make that a saving of £7117.50 (ignoring leap days). Hardly a stunning ROI. Yes, typo! I will edit my post to save others the confusion! Fancy a job as my editor? 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Carrerahill Posted December 5, 2019 Author Share Posted December 5, 2019 (edited) 5 minutes ago, epsilonGreedy said: Any mention of a guaranteed residual capacity after x thousand charge cycles? Good point and one question I sadly neglected to ask at the time. I simply asked the Tesla rep about longevity - he just said the battery was guaranteed for 10 years and unlimited cycles, it was a bit of a machine-gun fire Q&A I threw as much at him as I could, including asking for a free sample battery! I have his details and I am to email him for full literature and electrical details, I will ask then. I also asked about bolting a huge firework to the side of a building, he remarked that only batteries in transportation situations had suffered from the infamous "Tesla battery fires". Edited December 5, 2019 by Carrerahill Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Carrerahill Posted December 5, 2019 Author Share Posted December 5, 2019 (edited) 9 minutes ago, Ed Davies said: Is this the Powerwall (or Powerwall II) or something new? Say it, very optimistically, saved you 13 kWh/day for 10 years at 15p/kWh then I make that a saving of £7117.50 (ignoring leap days). Hardly a stunning ROI. Latest iteration I think - I wasn't fussed on what it was in all honesty, just how it worked, what was inside etc. I know, it doesn't really stack up does it! I think where it would be useful was for storing renewables and potentially allowing us to go off-grid. I think that is coming, centralised power generation is not going to be the norm going forward. More localised generation and storage will be the way forward, transmission is very expensive. My ROI would be terrible, I pay about 9p per kWh! I told him if he could do it for about £3K I would buy it! Edited December 5, 2019 by Carrerahill Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ToughButterCup Posted December 5, 2019 Share Posted December 5, 2019 8 minutes ago, Ed Davies said: [...] Say it, very optimistically, saved you 13 kWh/day for 10 years at 15p/kWh then I make that a saving of £7117.50 (ignoring leap days). Hardly a stunning ROI. Common sense always spoils a good story dunnit? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Carrerahill Posted December 5, 2019 Author Share Posted December 5, 2019 1 minute ago, AnonymousBosch said: Common sense always spoils a good story dunnit? It does, but prices have to fall and the story will sound sweet again. Look at USB sticks, I remember it was over £100 for 64Mb. Now they give away 2Gb sticks for free and a good quality 64Gb stick is £15.00 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ed Davies Posted December 5, 2019 Share Posted December 5, 2019 Also electricity prices (at least at peak times) have to go up. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SteamyTea Posted December 5, 2019 Share Posted December 5, 2019 (edited) 13 minutes ago, Carrerahill said: Look at USB sticks, I remember it was over £100 for 64Mb. Now they give away 2Gb sticks for free and a good quality 64Gb stick is £15.00 Not really comparing the same technology. The difference in price on my E7 tariff is about 12p/kWh. I consistently use less than 2 kWh during the peak rate period during the day. But the important thing is how much power can the inverter deliver. It would have to be around 6 kW to be any real use. 6 kW is the kettle and cooking lunch. No good saving up power but still having to import for a normal daily activity. Edited December 5, 2019 by SteamyTea Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MikeGrahamT21 Posted December 5, 2019 Share Posted December 5, 2019 51 minutes ago, SteamyTea said: Not really comparing the same technology. The difference in price on my E7 tariff is about 12p/kWh. I consistently use less than 2 kWh during the peak rate period during the day. But the important thing is how much power can the inverter deliver. It would have to be around 6 kW to be any real use. 6 kW is the kettle and cooking lunch. No good saving up power but still having to import for a normal daily activity. Cook your lunch first, and then make a cuppa afterwards ? Agreed though, going to be a long time before battery tech will be going in my house, if ever, if current electric prices prevail. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Carrerahill Posted December 5, 2019 Author Share Posted December 5, 2019 50 minutes ago, SteamyTea said: Not really comparing the same technology. The difference in price on my E7 tariff is about 12p/kWh. I consistently use less than 2 kWh during the peak rate period during the day. But the important thing is how much power can the inverter deliver. It would have to be around 6 kW to be any real use. 6 kW is the kettle and cooking lunch. No good saving up power but still having to import for a normal daily activity. It is just the principle, I think all will agree, tech is tech - the costs always do the same thing. Pick anything from TV's, a TV was over a years average salary, or mobile "car" phones, SSD drives. I am not going to defend a product I was only mentioning and posting on the forum for discussions sake, I didn't make it, I didn't buy one and I think at the price point it is not going to be a particularly good investment or money saving device. Regarding the inverter I will ask the rep when I email him for the PDF literature, although I sure it will be in the tech spec. I am looking at this battery for a commercial project of ours where if it all adds up it will save our customer about £3K system costs for his needs. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Barney12 Posted December 5, 2019 Share Posted December 5, 2019 There is another area that could make the Powerwall attractive to a some who perhaps have issues with quality of supply or have other reasons for not wanting to loose power (e.g. medical devises). That is the fact that they have now introduced a gateway with UPS functionality. https://www.solarpowerportal.co.uk/news/tesla_adds_backup_capability_to_powerwall_for_first_time Up on the moor we seem to suffer from more power outages than most and in today's modern world its a real PITA! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Carrerahill Posted December 5, 2019 Author Share Posted December 5, 2019 7 minutes ago, Barney12 said: There is another area that could make the Powerwall attractive to a some who perhaps have issues with quality of supply or have other reasons for not wanting to loose power (e.g. medical devises). That is the fact that they have now introduced a gateway with UPS functionality. https://www.solarpowerportal.co.uk/news/tesla_adds_backup_capability_to_powerwall_for_first_time Up on the moor we seem to suffer from more power outages than most and in today's modern world its a real PITA! It is for a similar application I am looking to deploy this battery. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SteamyTea Posted December 5, 2019 Share Posted December 5, 2019 1 hour ago, Carrerahill said: tech is tech I seem to remember a quote from, or about Bill Gates. Went something along the lines that if cars were computers they would travel at 1000 MPH, do 500 MPG and cost $10. (here was a reply that all the controls would be in different places each time there was an update). I think our @Ed Davieslooked into comparing the price of PV modules and double glazed windows a few years back. Seem to remember that they were about the same price per square metre. Bricks are technology, why do they not cost a penny each. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Carrerahill Posted December 5, 2019 Author Share Posted December 5, 2019 (edited) 1 hour ago, SteamyTea said: I seem to remember a quote from, or about Bill Gates. Went something along the lines that if cars were computers they would travel at 1000 MPH, do 500 MPG and cost $10. (here was a reply that all the controls would be in different places each time there was an update). I think our @Ed Davieslooked into comparing the price of PV modules and double glazed windows a few years back. Seem to remember that they were about the same price per square metre. Bricks are technology, why do they not cost a penny each. You are trying to transpose the logic too linearly, you accused me of not comparing similar tech and now we are comparing Tesla batteries to computers & cars, but you, in your discussion found that it was a comparison worth making so at some level you believe that the principle of tech pricing is the same and it is. We could compare mobile phones to Tesla batteries, or central heating boilers or cordless power tools. There is a minimum price point of any product, that true price is often only known by a producer/manufacturer who controls the whole production/manufacturing process which is rare. For example, just how much is a barrel of crude oil, really, and I don't mean daily barrel price - about $55-60 today. We know that is just an average price, some oil, North Sea, is more expensive to extract that the Texas land oil fields using nodding donkeys. Gold extraction, again only really the operators who actually run that operation on their claim/lease will know what it actually costs them per oz. they will always suggest more. So all these manufacturers need "x" for their commodity or product and each has a minimum margin they need to make, so something like a car will never cost $10 - what Gate's would have been better providing is the % cost reduction and applying that to a car and actually it may be comparable given that in today's money the first car cost $95K. You probably couldn't cast the engine block for $10 - so there will always be a minimum price. A brick probably does only cost about a penny, a common is about 17p from my local merchant, but how much of that is profit margin and transport? You load them onto a wagon at the factory and they go to a depot, then another wagon takes them to a merchant, or B&Q and each time that brick moves, due to size and weight, it accrues more cost and transport for that type of load is expensive. How many people had a TV in their living room in say 1960? How many people have a TV in each lounge, bedroom and maybe kitchen and a few spare disused ones in the loft in 2019? The same will go for the Tesla battery, once every street in the UK has at least 1 Tesla battery, the price will fall. So the price will fall, and then it will be affordable and ROI's will be acceptable. Edited December 5, 2019 by Carrerahill Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scottishjohn Posted December 5, 2019 Share Posted December 5, 2019 as an old fart i could look at it different and say do i want to pay £30k+for a mains supply ,when maybe a big battery set-up + solar array and a generator for depths of winter could actually end not that bad ,assuming i,m only going to live another 20 years . suppose it will depend how quick batteries+solar stuff drops some more in price Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pocster Posted December 5, 2019 Share Posted December 5, 2019 7 hours ago, Carrerahill said: It does, but prices have to fall and the story will sound sweet again. Look at USB sticks, I remember it was over £100 for 64Mb. Now they give away 2Gb sticks for free and a good quality 64Gb stick is £15.00 ? or £50 for 16k RAM . It won’t take that long for batteries of this type to be a no brainier. I plan to buy one for sure . Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Create an account or sign in to comment
You need to be a member in order to leave a comment
Create an account
Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!
Register a new accountSign in
Already have an account? Sign in here.
Sign In Now