It will get expensive by the time you actually have all the bits you need inside your house.
How is this better than deep-cycle batteries (with 20+ year lives) again? Why does it need to be slimline?
only 2kW? 2kW is enough to power any residential, single-family house for 95-98% of the time; you only need (a little bit) more than that at very short (few minutes) peak intervals - when heating up an oven, or some cycles of doing laundry. A second unit would provide that headroom, and otherwise (when the extra $5k for a second unit is prohibitive) you could still draw from the grid for peak loads and just not run an oven and washing machine at the same time during grid blackouts.
It does require a 21st century house - led lighting (but it's 2015 - who still uses incandescent except for those places where you don't turn on the lights more than 4 times a year anyway?), energy-conscious appliances, moderate need for A/C (sane insulation and ventilation, localized and intelligently controlled A/C needs - i.e. no 'bring all room in my 3000 square feet sheet rock and tin roof house down to 75 degrees when it's 110 degrees outside'). But whoever doesn't have that, has options to start reducing their bills that are much better than buying energy packs.
It's 2015 though - take a 20$ Philips Master LED for example (I decided upon those for myself so I looked into them more heavily; I have about 20 in use now, with another few boxes in my basement awaiting installation). The GU10 socket halogen-replacement version is available in 3 temperatures and 3 spread bundles, has a 20k burn hour rating (vs 1-2k for incandescent!) and can be dimmed very well using a 50$ leading edge electronic dimmer.
I'm no tree hugger - even purely economical (apart from the convenience of not having to replace lamps every year), in 2015 it doesn't make any economic sense to buy incandescent (in those places where it's possible to buy them at all...) for all purposes where the light is used on a 'regular' basis (more than an hour a day or so).
Of course it does require an initial 'investment'. But one that would be spread over 1 or 2 years - the normal replacement cycle of incandescent bulbs. Throwing out working incandescent bulbs to replace them with LED is not rational either, of course.
As always, there are people (analogous to 'vinyl produce a richer sound' idiots) who have 'opinions' on light quality, but well, we all know what they say about 'opinions'. In 2015, it's plain nonsense to take 'light quality' as a reason not to use LED light for domestic purposes, full stop.
There may not be a difference in "light quality", photons are photons, but if you convert a home from one to the other things will look different, and you may prefer one way or the other.
And don't forget about fixtures that were designed to work with clear incandescent bulbs for aesthetic reasons. LED bulbs will look downright hideous in those even when the lights are off.
There are people who like how vinyl sounds better because they like the hiss and the pops, not because they fall for audiophile silliness. The same holds for lighting.
Particularly if you ever use air conditioning.
(I know this reads like a sales pitch but I am genuinely just a fan)
It's "sunny middle of the day" light. It's brilliant and I love it. I could never use anything else now. Just make sure it's 4500k.
You obviously don't live where it's hot. I live in Houston, TX and while I rarely run the A/C right now, in another month it's going to run on average 15 minutes per hour, every hour, for 3-4 months straight. Highs in the low 90s to high 100s and lows in the 80s (F).
I have 2.5 tons of A/C which is pretty moderate. The condenser draws something like 3kW with an 8kW surge and the furnace fan is another 500 watts. I live in a fairly modest house compared to a lot of people, I'm sure there are places that 5 tons is more common.
In California where humidity isn't really a problem and it tends to cool off more at night and there's nearly always great solar, this seems like a great solution. But don't forget that not everywhere in the world is the target market. There are some places that are very different in terms of electrical consumption.
How much is your power bill in summer? Must be $300+, going on 500 during the hottest months? At that rate, you'll make back the $20k + $10k that 10k Wp + 2 of these batteries would cost you in what, 5 to 7 years? Add financing costs and you'll be at breakeven in 10 years, not counting possible government grants.
No, here in Houston we've got "deregulated" power in a completely reasonable way. One company owns the lines and handles recording the meters. They charge about $0.015/kWh for this. Then there are about 100 companies that offer electricity in a multitude of different ways. I'm paying $0.08/kWh delivered to my "door" so my worst months are only $150 or so.
Your idea is a nice one, except that I would need more panels and at least 2x the batteries/inverters. If I need 3kW CONSTANT to run the AC then 3kW PEAK doesn't do me any good.
> but that doesn't take away from the fact that with one extra of these units + 10k Wp of solar panels, you could power your AC's with power to spare to be stored in the battery pack
Not really. Look I know Tesla is awesome, and solar is awesome. I'm interested in both. But the economics really aren't here yet in Houston because of how cheap power is, because there's not a state owned utility screwing us bigtime. Houston has a lot of problems to be sure but power prices aren't one of them.
tl;dr Houston isn't California.
It's a really strange paradox that, in places where it gets very hot during the day, we're drawing tons and tons of energy from the grid to cool the house precisely at the time of the day when even more energy is pouring down on us freely from the skies.
Seriously, A/C is basically Universe's most heavy-handed hint that we should use more solar.
Of course, you could make a similar argument about needing artificial heat, but that's at least far more efficient!
Welp, I'll get right on telling 40% of the world that they're wrong, then.
https://tropicaldatahub.org/research-in-focus/people-and-soc...
"so you don't need a battery room" - Elon Musk
1.9kW for USD$1,678.
My point is that Tesla isn't really doing anything really unique here. Sure, they're giving it more press than anyone really has before, but the products aren't especially cheap, innovative or special.
Ahh! But that's the most important part! Elon's portfolio companies are a pieces of an incredible future machine, all working together. Solar City is able to draw on Tesla's batteries, Tesla was able to draw on SpaceX for some of its engineering capabilities.
Tesla made electric cars sexy. Now, its making energy storage sexy. Clearly, marketing is important, and will be necessary for convincing the world a clean energy future is the right direction.
What this product has is much better luxury marketing, and as part of that much better user experience.