Letter in Cape Times 28th December 2015: "Year of the battery"

2016 will be the year of the battery, when Elon Musk uses his marketing and investment muscle to make battery usage widely used in home and commercial scale energy systems.

Embedded storage is just as important as embedded energy. Embedded means that the energy and storage is produced at the point of consumption, and it also means that if there is a fault at a large-scale nuclear or coal or hydro-electric or solar or wind power station, or on the electrical distribution network, that the embedded generators and storage can come into use.

Many parts of the US have realised how important embedded generation and storage is on their grids, especially in light of recent extreme weather events that they have been experiencing.

This makes our electrical grids much more resilient, increases security of supply and brings down the cost of production overall as our grids become more effective and efficient and because there is a lot less mismanagement of funds due to almost no possibility of corruption.

Our water grids already have embedded water in the form of peoples' pools and many 5 000 litre water tanks I see sprouting up in peoples' gardens and with pool covers and systems to make this water drinkable, the pools become much more effective and efficient at reducing the risk of drought and its associated effects.

Some pundits suggest that 30 percent of food is already grown in cities. This means that our food grids are becoming more resilient as well as the water and electricity grids, and therefore we should start seeing reductions in our cost of living over the next few years.

This cost of living is not only to ourselves, financially, but also to our planet, environmentally.

One should note that while Elon Musk has made the PowerWall well known world wide, it isn't the only battery that is available, although he is working hard to bring the price of lithium ion down.

Nicola Tesla and David Lipschitz : Powerful?

“All that was great in the past was ridiculed, condemned, combated, suppressed — only to emerge all the more powerfully, all the more triumphantly from the struggle.”

― Nikola Tesla.

Elon Musk's Tesla Energy Lithium Ion Battery Comments from David Lipschitz

PowerWall

Why Tesla is backing batteries

Did Tesla Just Kill Nuclear Power?

Elon Musk and Tesla aren't the first when it comes to home-scale battery backup systems. These are already available. It's just that in the energy world, Tesla's marketing is better than anyone else's in the world. Just like Apple's and Google's marketing.

Isn't it incredible that these companies can have such clean and uncluttered websites, even though they have so many products and so much information?

There are already great Lithium-Ion (LiOn) products in the marketplace, but everyone is now saying that Elon Musk and Tesla will change the world. And yes, they will, along with many other great companies and technologies. I think the thing with Elon is his openness and wanting to share his technology and his ideal that we can get off fossil fuels. That appeals to everyone, including many of the sceptics out there.​

My Lead Acid battery bank at the moment is 12 kWh of which about 4 kWh is usable on a regular basis. And cost about R18,000 (US$1,500). So the Tesla battery is about the same price if it lasts 10 years or more as claimed, or twice the price if it lasts 5 years. LiOn batteries have lots of great advantages such as lasting 4 times longer,​ fast charge, and fast discharge, ​without impacting the life of the battery. ​ Higher charging/discharging efficiency should actually make the LiOn battery cheaper than Lead Acid. And fast charging means that one can have a large PV array to ensure that the battery is fully charged every day, including on rainy days.​

We'll wait for more news once the system is in operation.

I've also been researching a Chinese LiOn battery for house-scale systems which is already available in South Africa at about the same price as the Tesla. See FreedomWon.

You can charge LiOn 1 to 1 under normal use, ie fast, ie if you have a 100 AH battery, you can put 100 Amps into it to charge it; with a 100 AH lead acid battery you can only put 20 Amps into it taking 5 hours to charge. And then another thing is that you can discharge a LiOn battery almost completely flat on a regular basis. With fast three-phase super-chargers one can actually charge LiOn 2 to 1, ie put 200 Amps into a 100 amp-hour battery bank.

​And then there is the efficiency. The charge/discharge cycle of a Lead Acid battery is about 56% efficient, whereas the charge/discharge cycle of a LiOn battery is claimed to be 96%. Therefore a smaller LiOn battery can be used, ie fewer AH (Amp Hours) and therefore the LiOn battery might finally be cheaper than the Lead Acid Battery. Up till now, LiOn has been about 2.5 times the price of Lead Acid.​

A LiOn battery takes up less space than Lead Acid, as can be seen in the size of Tesla's wall mounting.

Elon Musk and Tesla and companies like FreedomWon and maybe even My Power Station are changing the world, a step at a time, helping us all finally retire and become independent from the big corporations and big government upon whom we are all overly dependent.

Give me a call to do a presentation to your directors, company, organisation, community group, NGO, or family about your power station and your power needs.

PS: Batteries like these aren't the only kinds of storage we can use in a Decentralised Electricity with Embedded Generation. This mind map shows many different kinds of "batteries", all essentially storing electricity, energy and heat for later use.

PPS: One should note that both fossil fuel-based systems and renewable energy systems waste electricity and often have electricity when it isn't needed. In the past, this energy has been wasted in fossil fuel systems, but modern batteries can be used both by renewable energy systems and fossil fuel systems thus reducing our peak demand requirement and the need for so many power stations.