We’re looking at renovating the kitchen this year and I’ve been looking at those Tesla Powerwall things.
Currently we run on gas for oven, hobs and hot water so it’d be a bit of extra work. But inevitably worth it in the long run.
I look at the information on Wikipedia and the Tesla web site and it’s all techy guff to me. Thought I’d run it past a few forums
Opinions?
I’ve heard AGL are looking to roll out a similar battery, is this going o revolutionise the industry like they’re saying?
When coupled with step-rates in your electricity and with Solar - I think the answer is yes, the industry is going to undergo a big shift if adoption of the technology is widespread.
For those of you playing at home:
That looks cool, combine a couple of those and 5kW of panels on the roof, and you’d be doing fine.
did you see the article on this yesterday?
seems the couple testing one are finding it pretty awesome…
I’m pretty intruiged by the new battery tech, really hoping it is the herald of a new renuable energy age.
I am wondering what is going to happen when the batteries eventually fail though?
Can the nasty chemicals in the battery cells be recycled or their toxicity neutralized??
Been following this. I reckon it’s a total gamechanger. Makes getting off the grid actually viable.
What are the $$ behind this. I’m about to drop some coin on Kitchen/Bathroom/Backyard reno’s so this intrigues me.
Off topic: if you find a good/local/reasonable$$ kitchen mob please keep me in the loop 
ABC link says $5500 per unit.
I think it’s a great idea. It won’t pay for it’s self in the short term but will be great for the environment with some solar panels.
Similar note, Nissan are working on a “leaf to home” where the car is charged off peak then runs the house if you’re not taking the car out during peak times. If only the car looked more like the concept.
Was interested…up to this point.
The $ numbers for an average suburban home.
Ignore the suspected typo where he says average daily consumption is 1216 kWh. I think he means 12.16.
I’d seen some similar breakdowns that showed it wasn’t worth it (given the current price of subsidised coal fired power).
If you can’t get a grid connect / are a dirty hippy / are an early adopter, go for it, but it’s not necessarily a money saver right now.
I can’t drop my current daily power use much below where it’s currently at, and there’s no point, because the cost to get further savings is multiple orders of magnitude higher than the cost of the saved kWH:
2 person house:
Fully 2/3 of my power bill is ‘poles&wires’ which is a scam foisted upon us by the privatised utilities, so the largest saving is disconnecting from the grid altogether, but even then the saving there is hard to claw back via a battery backed system (given above caveat)
I remember getting catastrophically angry when I listened to that podcast, $45B, bigger than the NBN, and basically no-one was talking about it, I’d never heard about it. Substations not even connected but more stuff being built? Jesus christ. This article is good too. Bring on the solar power “death spiral” (though it’s gonna hit renters and little old ladies super hard) for the utility companies. But we’ll probably bail them out, or “buy back” the infrastructure because it’s an essential service. And they call this shit capitalism.
(/endrant)
In the early days of electric power there was a sort of VHS/Beta or Apple/PC kind of battle going on between AC and DC. AC won because it was more efficient when transmitting power over long distances. But if you just have to go 10 or 20 metres from your rooftop solar or your Powerwall battery to your household equipment then DC would be fine. But the whole household appliance industry is built around AC so finding DC washing machines and refrigerators wouldn’t be easy.
With LED lighting now commonplace, it would be great to have a separate DC power circuit just for your house lighting, because LEDs run fine on low voltage DC. At the moment you would need a rectifier to turn your Tesla battery power to AC which you feed into the AC of the house, then when you get to the LED you have another one to turn it back to DC.
So there’s lots of inefficiencies.
I held shares in this company once. Just Racing | Horse, Greyhound and Harness Racing News, Tips and Bets They produce a ceramic fuel cell that runs on natural gas. Note that it doesn’t “burn” the gas, it feeds it through a fuel cell and is much more efficient. But they cost about $45,000 per unit although case studies show that if you built one into a new house then it would pay for itself over 10 years.
ahh, yeah, same author, better article.
The incentives for electricity operators are totally broken. The regulatory environment encouraged them to spend and charge, spend and charge.
There has thankfully been some changes that allows the regulator to set regulated revenues via a benchmarking process that requires each business to match the efficiency of industry leaders. The AER has just released regulatory determinations for NSW and ACT poles and wires operators that cuts their regulatory revenue by about 40% from previous cycles. Hopefully this will noticeably filter through to people’s bills but we’ll see (the NSW businesses have (unsurprisingly) appealed the determinations…). Other States are next up and facing similar cuts.
i drive past their offices in sandown park?/springvale?
i wondered what they did, now i know
If you think it’s better for the environment forgedaboutit