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.
Gaelectric Group CEO, Brendan McGrath and Gaelectric Head of Energy Storage, Keith McGrane at the Tesla Energy event last month
Ireland’s Gaelectric Group entered into an agreement with Tesla Motors to build a 1 MW demonstration utility-scale project. The project is expected to be deployed in 2016. The company is among the firsts to sign a “utility-scale” deal with Tesla. Executives from Gaelectric were among the electric utility industry specialists invited to the event introducing Tesla Energy at Tesla’s design studio in Los Angeles. Here’s Brendan McGrath, Gaelectric Group CEO, on the deal:
We are delighted to be associated with Tesla in introducing its battery systems to Ireland. As a renewable energy group with a pipeline of 500 MW of wind power in Ireland and energy storage projects in Ireland and Europe, Gaelectric has an obvious incentive to drive the adoption of technologies that facilitate the economic dispatch of wind and other renewable sources.
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.
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.
