The Electrical Industry I Was Waiting With Anticipation For Tesla’s Economical Batteries

We know the home battery is to be announced it’s the price tag on this battery system that wee are all waiting to hear. The other part of the announcement will be about a utility sized battery storage system. That news release will be equally important.

Nobody in the power industry has yet been able to come up with a cost-effective way to store large volumes of energy for later distribution. Tesla is making a bet that its huge $5 billion “gigafactory” currently under construction near Reno, Nevada, will enable the mass production needed to drive down the cost of batteries and make them competitive for a broad range of customers, including traditional suppliers of electricity.

Tesla has scheduled an event Thursday at its design studio in Hawthorne, California, to announce both a Tesla home battery and what it called last week in a note to investors “a very large utility scale battery.”

“Whatever Tesla announces on Thursday is just the beginning,” said Peter Rosegg, spokesman for Hawaiian Electric Co., where 12 percent of the utility’s customers have rooftop solar panels. “Tesla doesn’t have to go after the market — the market will come to them. We’re very eager to see what they have to say.”

Growth Business

Tesla, based in Palo Alto, California, has its eye on a business that’s poised for tremendous growth. As homes, businesses and utilities use more renewable energy generated by sun and wind, the need to provide for reliable power grows.

Thinking Bigger

But Tesla is thinking much bigger, saying in job postings that its energy-storage business will soon grow to billions in sales. Musk plans to combine the strengths of the company’s patented lithium-ion batteries, which currently can run a car for about 265 miles per charge, with its expertise in power management software.

Utility Customers

“Tesla isn’t just going to sell batteries to SolarCity,” said Ben Kallo, an analyst with R.W. Baird & Co. “They are going to sell to project developers, wind and solar developers, and directly to utilities. The residential product isn’t going to be a huge needle mover, but the numbers are very big on the utility side.”

Regulator Driven

In Tesla’s home state, a groundbreaking energy-storage mandate requires PG&E Corp., Edison International’s Southern California Edison and Sempra Energy’s San Diego Gas & Electric to collectively buy 1.3 gigawatts of energy storage capacity by the end of 2020. New York is also pushing utilities to use storage to relieve congestion on transmission lines

Read more about Tesla being in the right place at the right time — Original Article.

Image came from the original article.