Recent pictures of SolarCity’s ‘Gigafactory’ show that the solar panel plant is, at least from the outside, looking close to be ready for production. The Buffalo News managed to get a bird eyes view of the plant and compared the progress with pictures from a year ago.
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SolarCity, the biggest solar installer in the US, announced a new program to install solar for affordable housing communities. Under the new program, SolarCity will finance and install solar arrays for affordable housing developers, and then the company will distribute the energy produced by the solar panels to individual housing units.
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Chargepoint, one of the leaders in the commercial EV charging market, this week announced a new line of home chargers that are available at Amazon.com. The lineup starts at $499 for an indoor (garage) with a 16A/240V which can add 12 miles per hour of charge. This is a little over double the speed of 110V 15A plugs that go into regular 110V outlets.
Outdoor charging, hard/plug wiring, cord length and double speed 32A all raise the price in $50-$100 increments where a 32A Outdoor with a 25-foot wire cost $799.
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IDLMFS04Ug]
A quick look at Amazon’s best seller list (cached to the right) shows that a few days in, Chargepoint dominates EV charger sales at the online retailing giant.
Chargepoint also offers an attractive design (which I got to review at CES at the beginning of the year), integration with Nest and other home automation platforms and software updates over Wifi which will bring new functionality in the future.
At a starting price of $499, however, there are some better deals on the market and particularly at Amazon especially if you are looking at straight W/$.
One of my favorite chargers (and the only other in Amazon’s top 10) is the Electric Motor Werks Juicebox 40A/10KW with 24′ cable for $499 shipped. This is more powerful than Chargepoint’s by a significant margin (40A vs. 32A) and equivalent to Tesla’s home charger and gets outstanding 4.5/5 star reviews from Amazon’s customers. It is so small that it can be taken off its bracket and used as a Travel charger anywhere there is a NEMA 14-50 plug…
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Sungevity is on a roll lately. Earlier this week, the company announced a partnership with Viridian and today it introduces a new program with PlugShare to offer free charging stations for electric vehicles when buying a solar installation with the company in the Bay Area.
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Energy retailer Viridian announced today a partnership with solar provider Sungevity to offer solar energy though its network of associates. The arrangement is not new for Viridian which had a similar deal with SolarCity.
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SolarCity announced today that the company signed a power purchase agreement (PPA) with Kaua’i electric utility (KIUC). SolarCity already built a 12-megawatt solar array for KUIC which went into operation in September 2014 and now supplies 5% of the island’s electricity, but under the new deal, the California-based solar installer will develop a new solar array and a massive 52 MWh energy storage system to provide electricity when the sun is down.
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GTM Research is out with a new report on the US solar industry’s second quarter 2015 and according to the firm, by most metrics the industry had its best quarter ever. The firm says that 40% of new electricity generation installed in the US in 2015 is from solar energy.
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The Northern Pass is a Quebec–New Hampshire power line transmission project to distribute clean and cheap hydro-power from Canada to New England. Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island are about to finalize the guidelines for bidding on the massive contract estimated to be worth a total of $1.4 billion for the US side of the line alone. They will open the contract for bids next week.
Today, governors from New England states and prime ministers from eastern provinces are in St-John, Newfoundland for their annual conference. Hydro-Quebec, the front-runner for the electricity generation contract, decided it was good timing for updating its bid. The company announced 1 GW of capacity for the project.
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In an effort to promote renewable energies, Vector launched a new campaign this week to offer 130 free 3 KW solar installations each equipped with Tesla’s new stationary energy storage battery pack, the Powerwall.
Soon after Tesla unveiled its series of energy storage products in April, Vector announced a partnership with the Silicon Valley car manufacturer to make the new products available in New Zealand.
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SolarCity is the largest installer of residential solar so looking at their market performance is a useful indicator for the solar industry as a whole. This week, the company released their financial results for the second quarter of the year (April to June) and they achieved record bookings and installations.
Even though the company missed Wall Street’s expectations, they impressed the industry with 189 MW of solar power installed in just 3 months. I’m not overstating anything when I say this is impressive. For comparison, SolarCity installed more distributed solar power on rooftops than the capacity of a large solar power farm like the Centinela Solar Energy Project in California.
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[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZwguLJVxsM]
We’re mostly going to stay away from politics but this ad is very specifically on solar and renewables and it will hopefully kick off a debate on the energy sector that we’ll see in the run up to the 2015 elections. The 10 year goal of moving US residences to renewables is a worthy 1st step. More from her campaign page
A great ground look at what’s happening in Hawaii, the state where energy costs the most and where there is plenty of solar energy. Over 12% of Hawaiians have solar power which is 20x the US national average. If you count all the rooftops on Oahu together, Solar is a 300MW plant that is more than double the size of the next biggest plant on the island.
The problem is: That power plant dies when the sun goes down and the other plants have to crank way back up.
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If you are to set a goal for the production of renewable energy, why not make it 100% of total production? This is exactly what Hawaii did this week by enacting a law imposing requirements for electric utilities to supply the state with 100% renewable energy by 2045. Hawaii is already a leader in clean energy with 22% of their electricity production coming from wind, solar, geothermal, and other renewable energy resources. The new policy, Act 97, would require electric utility to produce 30% of their energy from renewable sources by the end of the decade and 100% within 30 years.
The Times published an article over the weekend titled “Elon Musk’s growing empire is fueled by government subsidies”. The article is well-researched and mostly accurate, but it conveys a clear disdain for the fact that Musk’s companies are taking advantage of the government subsidies available to them.
The publication compiled data from government programs and came to the conclusion that Tesla Motors, SolarCity and SpaceX, three companies Musk is involved in, have benefited from an “estimated $4.9 billion in government support”. I will not dispute the actual amount, but I’d like to bring up a few points which weren’t discussed in the article and that are highly relevant to the subject.
There has been a lot of uninformed banker-speak in the media about Tesla’s battery including by Bloomberg here. The problem is these folks don’t understand the new market that Tesla is opening up.
But I’m also turning to Bloomberg for the first smart analysis and that’s not surprisingly from Solar City’s Lyndon Rive (who happens to be Elon Musk’s Cousin – perhaps you noticed the accent?).
The complaints have been that the battery wall doesn’t make economic sense – that for the average household to go off the grid with these combined with solar (or wind), it would be incredibly expensive.
That’s correct…
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picture via Mark Gurman on Twitter
Thursday night, Tesla unveiled its home battery system starting at $3,000 for a 7kWh pack. Tesla also offers a 10kWh pack for $3,500. These prices don’t include the inverter nor the installation. Today, SolarCity confirmed to Bloomberg that they are selling the new 10kWh battery pack with inverter and installation for $7,140.
Following Tesla’s introduction of a new selection of battery packs for residential, commercial and industrial use, SolarCity announced the integration of these batteries to their solar system offering. This new offering will include the option to go completely off-grid for select customers starting by home owners in Hawaii.
Combining photovoltaic panels with Tesla’s battery packs will allow home owners to power their house on sunlight day and night.
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKORsrlN-2k]
Until Tesla updates their Youtube channel, here’s the short video if you weren’t able to stay up that late last night. My big takeaway was the price. I had expected to see something in the $$5-$10,000 range though for bigger homes that have electric cars, you will need 2 or more of these so the price starts creeping up.
https://twitter.com/markgurman/status/593995583733379074
Also, from the way Musk talks, he believes that they are going to make a ton of these. It will be interesting to see how battery stocks react today…and home generator companies.
[tweet https://twitter.com/llsethj/status/593991515602583553]
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Earlier today, Tesla filed their notice with the SEC for their 2015 annual shareholders meeting to be held on June 9th. In these filings, Tesla is required to review transactions with related parties. Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors, is Chairman and an important shareholder of SolarCity. Therefore Tesla needs to publicly acknowledge transactions between the two companies.
Tesla recently confirmed in an email to investors that their announcement on April 30th will indeed be a home battery system and an energy storage system for utilities. It has been known for a while that Tesla was testing these home battery systems through SolarCity. In the same filings last year, the company confirmed approximately $1.6 million in revenue from SolarCity during fiscal year 2013 for the sales of stationary batteries.
Today, Tesla confirmed that the revenue from SolarCity for stationary batteries went up to $2.7 million for the fiscal year 2014.
According to Rod Lache from Deutsche Bank, if SolarCity were to reach their goal of 1 million customers by 2018 and if Tesla would equip half of their customers with home battery systems, Tesla could generate $1.5 billion of revenue through 2018 from SolarCity. Tesla made $3.2 billion in revenue last year.
Tesla is going to make a home battery announcement on April 30th. It will be a big deal. But it isn’t hard to find some of the details on the batteries Tesla is going to offer. Analysts, like above^ are claiming to have “secret info” on the announcement: Tesla secretly tested its battery solution with 300 customers.
But that info and much more is available on Solar City’s website. In fact, Tesla’s Home Batteries including pictures and lots of details are all hidden in plain sight:
Tesla will announce a consumer battery pack for running a house in the coming months
— Seth Weintraub (@llsethj) February 12, 2015
Tesla also gave plenty of details on their earnings call in February where Musk talked about releasing a consumer battery project:
Yes, we’re going to do — we’re going to unveil some of the Tesla home battery consumer battery that will be for you using and people’s houses or businesses, fairly soon. We have to design and it should start going into production probably about six months or so. We’ll probably got to wait to have sort of product availing it’s probably in the next month or two. It’s really great. I’m really excited about it.
If you’ve talked to Solar City, they may have provided you with the specs of Tesla’s prototype battery:
Tesla will certainly announce some new innovations that perhaps differentiate them from other batteries. Being able to Supercharge your Model S at home would be nice. Perhaps a Webb/App controller with some novel uses would be good.
I’d like to see it compared against home generators which cost a lot more, even before considering the savings against time of use metering in power. We’ll be on hand on the 30th to see what is on offer.
In a new paper in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology, Tugce Yuksel and Jeremy Michalek at Carnegie Mellon University have shown the average energy usage per mile of electric cars across the US. You’ll note that warm but temperate climates like the California Coast and the Deep South especially Florida fare the best. Very hot desert areas like Arizona don’t do well because of the energy required to cool off bith the batteries and cabin. The North does poorly because batteries lose power as weather gets cooler. Below, a Nissan Leaf efficiency is graphed at different temperatures which illustrates this disparity more clearly. The optimum range for operation is between 45 and 82 degrees where the 300W/mile threshold is beaten.
This all translates to CO2 emissions obviously and with the West making their energy much cleaner, they produce about 1/3rd the CO2 emissions as the north Midwest which is basically one big coal plant. In fact, that area’s energy is so CO2 intensive that running an electric car there (assuming you don’t have your own solar/wind) rivals the CO2 emissions of a fuel efficient car like a Prius.
The big takeaway is that moving to electric cars isnt enough. The grid also needs to move to cleaner power like wind and solar.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqxtaVkhmUI&feature=youtu.be]
Good interview with SolarCity’s CEO on the big planned build out. The goal: Reducing solar to below the cost of fossil fuels.
June 17 (Bloomberg) — SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive comments on the company’s acquisition of Silevo, a producer of photovoltaic panels, his relationship with billionaire Elon Musk, the company’s chairman and biggest shareholder, and the future of solar energy. He speaks with Pimm Fox on Bloomberg Television’s “Taking Stock.” (Source: Bloomberg)
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