SolarCity is currently building a solar panel factory in Buffalo. The construction site is not unlike Tesla’s Gigafactory under construction in Nevada. SolarCity’s facility, which could also be dubbed a “Gigafactory” since its planned output is also estimated in gigawatts, has a similar 2-storey steel structure as the one Tesla is building for its battery factory.
Update: SolarCity and Tesla are not sharing any designs or contractors for their respective factory projects according to Kady Cooper, Director of Communications at SolarCity.
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.
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.
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.
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] Expand Expanding Close
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
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.
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)
Bloomberg Television offers extensive coverage and analysis of international business news and stories of global importance. It is available in more than 310 million households worldwide and reaches the most affluent and influential viewers in terms of household income, asset value and education levels. With production hubs in London, New York and Hong Kong, the network provides 24-hour continuous coverage of the people, companies and ideas that move the markets.
Tesla just announced details of the Battery Gigafactory to be located in the Southwest US. The location hasn’t yet been selected but will provide 6500 US jobs and, in 2020, enough batteries for 500,000 electric vehicles.
Tesla also announced a $1.6B convertible notes offering to fund the Gigafactory and other ramping.
As we at Tesla reach for our goal of producing a mass market electric car in approximately three years, we have an opportunity to leverage our projected demand for lithium ion batteries to reduce their cost faster than previously thought possible. In cooperation with strategic battery manufacturing partners, we’re planning to build a large scale factory that will allow us to achieve economies of scale and minimize costs through innovative manufacturing, reduction of logistics waste, optimization of co-located processes and reduced overhead.
The Gigafactory is designed to reduce cell costs much faster than the status quo and, by 2020, produce more lithium ion batteries annually than were produced worldwide in 2013. By the end of the first year of volume production of our mass market vehicle, we expect the Gigafactory will have driven down the per kWh cost of our battery pack by more than 30 percent. Here are some details about what the Gigafactory will look like.
If you wonder about the Solar future of vehicle transportation, this is where you should start. The World Solar Challenge has a great deal of innovation in the solar field as well as pushing innovation in efficiency and recovering electricity for electric cars.
In friendly competition with others attempting the same goals, the teams depart Darwin aiming to be the first to arrive in Adelaide, some 3000km to the south.
It’s all about energy management! Based on the original notion that a 1000W car would complete the journey in 50 hours, solar cars are allowed a nominal 5kW hours of stored energy, which is 10% of that theoretical figure. All other energy must come from the sun or be recovered from the kinetic energy of the vehicle.
These are arguably the most efficient electric vehicles.
Having made the journey to Darwin by successfully navigating quarantine, customs, scrutineering, safety inspections and undertaken event briefings, participants are ready to start their epic journey.
The elite Challenger class is conducted in a single stage from Darwin to Adelaide. Once the teams have left Darwin they must travel as far as they can until 5pm in the afternoon where they make camp in the desert where-ever they happen to be. Other classes have different requirements, but all teams must be fully self-sufficient and
for all concerned it is a great adventure – many say the adventure of a lifetime.
During the journey there are 7 mandatory check points where observers are changed and team managers may update themselves with the latest information on the weather and their own position in the field. Here teams may perform the most basic of maintenance only – checking and maintenance of tyre pressure and cleaning of debris from the vehicle.
There are also undisclosed check points which may be imposed by the event officials to ensure regulatory compliance.
Will a future Leaf or Tesla be solar powered? Probablynot any time soon, but slapping solar panels on top of electric cars can only help improve their efficiency, extend their range and rely less on the grid. If it is any indication how far we need to go, the Prius had a short lived solar panel that only cooled the car.
The AP reports today that IKEA will begin selling solar panels. Not just a back up iPad battery but like whole house to grid assemblies.
Swedish flat-pack furniture giant IKEA will start selling residential solar panels at its stores in Britain, the first step in its plan to bring renewable energy to the mainstream market worldwide. The company started selling solar panels made by China’s Hanergy in its store in Southampton on Monday. It will sell them in the rest of Britain in coming months, it said.
A standard, all-black 3.36 kilowatt system for a semi-detached home will cost 5,700 British pounds ($9,200) and will include an in-store consultation and design service as well as installation, maintenance and energy monitoring service.
Getting Solar in front of more eyes and making it easier for consumers to swallow is a big step in improving consumer adoption. If the UK test run is successful (and if you can sell solar in cloudy Britain, why not?) then I’m hoping to see a wider rollout globally.
Even in Britian, the break even point for solar is 7 years so I’d imagine sunnier places, like *everywhere*, will be more successful. The UK does have a solar friendly environment however:
The U.K. government offers private solar panel owners the opportunity to sell back electricity to the grid on days when they have surplus production and has a financing plan for solar power investments, which means residents can buy a system for no upfront cost and pay it off gradually.
