Could Tesla Powerpack Do Away With the Need For Power Stations
Energy news has been dominated recently with last week’s unveiling of Tesla Energy’s Powerwall & Powerpack battery storage units.
Whilst the Powerwall is fantastic news for home owners & small business, it is the Powerpack that is attracting the attention of big business & industry.
This is largely due to the ramifications of its cost which works out to $250/kWh which is significantly cheaper than any other utility scale battery which come in around twice that amount & some almost 10 times the Powerpack rate.
Analysts did predict that these battery prices would fall to around $350/kWh by the 2020 this is still way higher than Tesla’s Powerpack which could possibly fall once they are in full production.
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There has been such a rush for them that demand has taken care of production until mid 2016.
You could be thinking that with such high demand prices are sure to rise but with Elon Musk’s (Tesla CEO) commitment to providing reliable, clean energy for the world he will do his best to keep these battery units affordable & cheap enough for anyone to use.
Furthermore, nuclear critic Arnie Gundersen has predicted that Tesla’s new utility-scale batteries would provide a far cheaper alternative to nuclear energy & could therefore render plans for new nuclear plants obsolete.
A couple of Cinemark Theaters in California in the US, has installed Tesla power batteries to ensure a reliable power supply during times of power outages
He went on to say that Tesla’s batteries would be cheap enough & a far more practical solution to solving the reliability problem of intermittent solar & wind energy.
Cost Of Fuels vs Cost Of Technology
Whilst the cost of extracting fuels from the earth & processing them into providing energy is increasing, the cost of technology to provide clean energy is decreasing.
Furthermore, clean energy in the form of solar, wind & batteries are technologies rather than fuels and are therefore not a finite resource as is the case of fuels that are extracted & provided by our planet.
Regarding the cost of the power provided by the Tesla Powerpack it seems as though it could be in the region of 2¢/KWh but this all depends on the number of cycles that can be provided by one Powerpack battery.
It isn’t clear yet how many cycles a battery will be able to provide the user or what cycling improvements Tesla has built into the Powerpack.
Tesla has yet to clarify this issue which is all important when calculating the cost, practicality & efficiency of using Powerpacks in place of grid power.
In conclusion, energy production & consumption can be categorized as follows;
- Utilities
- Commercial
- Residential
The national grid supplies power as its needed without paying much attention to energy storage which is exactly what large batteries could bring to the party.
If large batteries, such as Tesla’s Powerpack batteries, were to be built into the national grid, at the utility scale, they would have the effect of balancing power supply & demand which would provide more stability to the grid as well as rendering it more resilient.
In fact having battery storage capacity, as could be supplied by the Powerpack units, power utilities such as Eskom would have additional energy reserves to draw on when demand is high & store energy at times of low demand thereby increasing the stability & reliability of the national grid.
So instead of viewing Tesla Energy’s new Powerpack invention as unwanted competition, they could actually save money for power utilities as well as reduce electricity costs for the consumer.