Comment by billiam | Hacker News Reader

Comment by billiam | Hacker News Reader

I am just going to cut and paste my previous comment on Musk.

The Musk M.O: 1. Identify industry with big inefficiencies that depends on huge government subsidies. That's cars, commercial space vehicles, mass transit and now: colonizing another planet with the 0.1%. 2. Convince the media and envious government officials you are Tom Swift, boy inventor. Have these governments fight over how many billions to give you to build your space car factory. 2. Use these taxpayer dollars and gigantic tax breaks to create iconic products and services for the elite class, effectively transferring huge dollars from the poor to the rich. 3. Rinse and repeat.

I see no evidence at all that Musk cares any more about technologies to enable several billion of us to live together without slaughtering each other than he does about money.

Add the utility business to the growing list of government supported industries Musk wants to "disrupt" by which I mean establish a publicly funded, government subsidized mechanism to siphon off dollars for himself, just like Tony Stark in fact. The electricity generating and distribution system is one of the most provably useful "common goods" in the history of the human race-- why not convince people to spend more than 10 grand to power their house for 24 hours?

His reasons:

Load Shifting - residences generally have NO economic incentive to ride the demand curve, only businesses do in some cases. It is one of the most important things about the electrical system--these huge monopolies manage that curve collectively for us. Sure, transmission is inefficient, but so is decentralizing that task, while adding the risks of keeping your battery from breaking/catching fire.

Increasing self consumption- a battery does not stimulate this at all - the grid needs your power most when the sun is shining. Solar power and an inverter provides that incentive today.

Backup - One day of power in the event of a true natural disaster for $10,000 is expensive and not sufficient.

I am not a Luddite and I am a libertarian, and certainly our society needs technology visionaries right now, but I find Musk's increasingly cynical ploys and the adulation they receive pretty annoying. They seem designed to distract from the overall failure of his businesses, even if he continues to generate ideas and hype.

Your comments on his reasons are clearly counter-factual:

Load shifting on a consumer scale has been happening for decades in various places around the world (e.g. cheap nuclear energy at night powering storage heaters)

Self-consumption: in a grid increasingly fed by solar power all those peaks hit at the same time and there's been multiple recent news stories about power prices going negative at those peaks.

Backup - no-one said anything about "true" natural disasters. Backup from short power outages is already an established market in many outlying areas and a fringe benefit for almost anyone. And no-one said that you had to buy it and use it for this single purpose.

This whole area has been predicted as a growing market for years, there's others in this thread complaining that it's nothing new compared with less famous competitors, so complaints that it's a product dreamt up to soak up subsidies is a bit odd.

Having said that, if I was in charge of a government, I'd be subsidising these kinds of decentralised grid backup right now as they are already useful when viewed at a national scale. It seems likely that in a few short years they'll make economic sense for more and more people without any subsidy though.

Not at all trying to pick a fight. But:

>Load shifting on a consumer scale has been happening for decades in various places around the world (e.g. cheap nuclear energy at night powering storage heaters)

Sorry, but as a consumer I pay the same rate day and night, and I think most in the US are like me. I personally have no incentive for load-shifting. Why do I need PowerWall?

>Self-consumption: in a grid increasingly fed by solar power all those peaks hit at the same time and there's been multiple recent news stories about power prices going negative at those peaks.

Solar, including concentrated solar which is outside this discussion, is currently 0.48% of all US electricity generation. Not a big effect for many years, unless one of the other Musk businesses (Solar City) gets a big boost.

>Backup - no-one said anything about "true" natural disasters. Backup from short power outages is already an established market in many outlying areas and a fringe benefit for almost anyone. And no-one said that you had to buy it and use it for this single purpose.

Okay, but it seems like a pretty expensive way to ride out a few hours of blackout.

> This whole area has been predicted as a growing market for years, there's others in this thread complaining that it's nothing new compared with less famous competitors, so complaints that it's a product dreamt up to soak up subsidies is a bit odd.

I've been called worse, but my point here is that these predicted schemes haven't taken off because they would depend on MASSIVE subsidies, and Mr. Musk does dream big.

The main point is that everyone should probably have a battery in their garage, but that battery should be in a car, and since business is not working out so well for Musk he is trying to access another source of regulated government support. The economics/policy of electric cars seem much better than home electricity storage, and all the benefits of PowerWall, if they materialize, can and hopefully will be delivered by lithium under your hood. Battery-powered cars will take over America, I just doubt most of those batteries will be made by Tesla.

> Sorry, but as a consumer I pay the same rate day and night, and I think most in the US are like me.

Where do you live? I pay the same rate 24 hours/day as well, but I could switch to a plan with different rates if it provided value to me. I suspect most power companies provide the option at this point.

> Okay, but it seems like a pretty expensive way to ride out a few hours of blackout.

Is there actually a cheaper option, aside from sitting in the dark with flashlights and making sure that no one opens the fridge or freezer? If you want to ride out a blackout without basically sitting in the dark, you need either a big battery backup or a generator. My in-laws put in a whole-house generator and I think the total cost was nearer to 30K than 3K. (Edit: Actually, just looked at generators and they seem closer to 3K, so I have no idea why their setup would have cost nearly 30K. Edit2: They probably installed something closer to a 25kW generator, which would explain much of the cost.)

> The economics/policy of electric cars seem much better than home electricity storage, and all the benefits of PowerWall

A battery in my car will spend a large chunk of its time somewhere else. It's in intriguing idea to use the car battery this way, but it means when I take my car out, my backup power is gone. If I have solar panels, it also means my daylight charging is also gone (assuming I'm gone, with my car, during the day). So I think this would be great, but would not obviate most of the value of a home battery.

With respect to blackouts, I guess it depends on what's the typical pattern where you live. If it's a short outage (<= few hours), my personal reaction is "who cares?" The main one I worry about, living in the Northeast, is an extended outage in winter that could result in frozen pipes. Spoiled food due to an extended outage in the summer would be annoying but that's a much more bounded cost associated with a rare event. And a battery probably wouldn't last long enough to help in a > 24 hour outage situation--which is when protection would be needed.

I agree that $30K sounds like a lot for a generator. I periodically think about looking into it; I've never seriously priced the whole thing out--generator, connection to house, installation, enclosure--but my expectation us that it would be less than $10K. In such an event I certainly have no problem minimizing my electricity use so long as there's enough juice for the furnace in the winter and the refrigerators.

I'm not aware of an option for non-fixed rate electricity where I live.

his reasons: load shifting, self consumption, backup, (saving the planet from global warming)

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