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Tesla Powerwall set to electrify Canadian homes, but at a price
06/06/16
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June 6, 2016 - The Tesla Powerwall home battery system should finally be appearing in the basements and garages of Canadian homes this summer, giving people a chance to store solar power or time-shift their electricity consumption. But there may be sticker shock: Installation is likely to double the $3,000 (U.S.) hardware price.
Announced with great fanfare about a year ago, the sleek electrical storage units have been slow to trickle out of the “gigafactory” built by Tesla founder Elon Musk in Nevada. Just 2,500 were delivered worldwide in the first quarter, and Canada has received only a handful so far.
In Canada, the Powerwall is being distributed by NRStor Inc., the energy storage developer led by former Home Depot Canada boss Annette Verschuren, in a joint venture with smart grid software company Opus One Solutions Energy Inc.
Last spring, NRStor said it was going to sell the units here early in 2016, although that timetable has slipped.
“We’re working towards a public launch in the summer,” said Bob Atkinson, president of M Power Energy Solutions, the NRStor division that is distributing the Powerwall. “The focus now is really building out all the plumbing,” which includes making sure the product pipeline from the manufacturer is established, putting in place a payment and financing system, and ensuring installers know what they are doing.
The Powerwall isn’t just hung up on the side of a garage. The connections can vary depending on how the unit is being used and what the local electrical utilities require.
“Some [potential customers] have seen the Elon Musk video, and they think ‘I plug this in and I’m off the grid,’” Mr. Atkinson said. “It’s not quite that easy.” Installation must be done by a professional.
NRStor has lined up about 15 electrical contractors so far, and they are being trained to install the Powerwall. Some are already familiar with installing electric-vehicle chargers or solar panels, so have some experience with related technology.
NRStor has so far received about 25 Powerwall units and some are being installed in test situations before the larger volume of shipments from Tesla begins. That’s likely to happen within the next three months.
While Tesla set the price of a seven-kilowatt-hour Powerwall at about $3,000, that doesn’t include installation or the cost of an inverter – the device that switches power back and forth between direct current used in the battery and alternating current used by home appliances. The actual installed price has not yet been determined, Mr. Atkinson said, but it will likely be roughly double the hardware cost.
Despite that hefty price tag, “a few thousand” customers in Canada have expressed interest in buying a Powerwall, he said, although none has plunked down any money yet.
While the Powerwall can store electricity generated by solar panels for consumption at night, many people are expected to use the device as a backup system to maintain power flow in a power failure. Others, in places where there is time-of-use pricing, may use the Powerwall to store power when electricity is less costly, then use it when prices peak.
For some people who have older battery technology to store power from solar panels, the streamlined lithium-ion Powerwall could be a step up. “We are getting lots of inquires from [people with] off-grid cottages, where they have jerry-rigged the basement with lead-acid batteries and they are looking for a safer solution,” Mr. Atkinson said.
Critics have pointed out that with a capacity of just under seven kwh, the Powerwall will not hold enough electricity to run a home for a day. (In Canada the average daily consumption is about 30 kwh.) But it would be enough to keep crucial components such as lights, a refrigerator and cellphone chargers going for a period of time. There are also other backup batteries available, although they don’t have the cool look of the Powerwall.
And the unit isn’t small. It weighs almost 100 kilograms and is one metre wide and 1.5 metres high.
Shane Johnson, who runs SolarPanel.ca, an Alberta company specializing in off-grid solar installations, says he will remain skeptical of new products such as the Powerwall until the technology is proven. For most of his solar sites, he uses a kind of lead-acid battery called “absorbed glass mat” that he says is “really proven, sealed and maintenance free.” The battery arrays are heavy and take up a lot of space, he said, but that’s not usually an issue in a permanent off-grid solar setup. As for newer technology such as the lithium-ion Powerwall, “it has to go through the hoops before I get excited about it,” he said.
See also this article from jwenergy.com:
JUne 5, 2016 - At the tail end of a talk in Calgary recently, Harold “Skip” York, vice-president of integrated energy for Wood Mackenzie’s Americas research team, was asked what disruptive technologies might impact on the oil and gas industry in the coming years. York had a ready—and for some in Alberta a potentially disturbing—answer.
York said the electric vehicle (EV), and in particular Tesla’s game-changing EVs and the company’s strategy to couple them with residential battery systems could prove disruptive not only for the oil industry, but the entire power sector.
For his Calgary audience, York expanded on a blog he wrote for Forbes magazine in February, in which he described the Tesla plan as a potential “black swan” event (an event that comes as a surprise to conventional wisdom, has a significant impact and is often rationalized after the fact).
He said that from an oil perspective, the disruptive technology would be in transportation, and from the natural gas perspective, the disruption would come from energy storage—Tesla’s strategy could be transformative on both counts.
“The key to electric vehicles is cost effective range, and if you look at Tesla’s Model 3 they are getting darn close what it takes for electric vehicles to be competitive in a mass market. At 220 to 250 miles (350-400 kilometres) at $35,000, that’s getting darn close to the sweet spot of where automobiles sell globally,” he said.
“Here is the black swan event for the petroleum industry, in terms of disruptive technology: Tesla’s strategy works. Tesla’s strategy is not the vehicle; it is the vehicle plus another battery in the garage. The Tesla strategy is, you have a car that drives 200-250 miles, and every night you pull it in and you plug it into the battery that is sitting in the garage. Now if you have got a battery in the garage, you can now put in solar or wind, on your rooftop, and generate your own electricity to charge that battery.
“So the Tesla Model 3, the Tesla car, attacks oil demand, [and] the battery sitting in the garage attacks coal and natural gas demand because that household takes itself off the grid. If they can succeed in that entire value proposition, I wouldn’t say it is the death knell, but it is a critical threat to the hydrocarbon industry,” York said.
“However, that threat still gets measured in decades,” he added.
It could take decades because the EV, while growing rapidly in sales—increasing almost 80 per cent per annum since 2010—is starting from such a distant second to internal combustion engine-powered vehicles. There are over one billion gasoline and diesel powered vehicles on the roads globally, compared to just over one million electric vehicles.
“In order to turn the oil demand curve over, we need electric vehicles to be about 15 per cent of the vehicle stock, which is growing about 70 million vehicles per year. So it’s not that electric vehicles don’t have a role, but they are starting at a billion vehicle disadvantage, and it just is going to take a long time to close that gap and in a meaningful way.”
Meanwhile, as Tesla rolls out its Powerwall home battery packs, shipping 2,500 in the first quarter, Nissan is moving apace to market its own home energy storage product, using repurposed, or “retired” batteries from its Leaf EVs, which have been on the market for six years. After installation cost, its xStorage units cost about the same as Tesla’s Powerwall—around US$4,500.
Such units can store renewable power and be hooked up to the grid, enabling them to both sell power at a premium when prices peak and take energy from the grid during non-peak periods—some utilities are actually giving excess power away for free during peak production times for wind and solar power generation. According to Nissan, xStorage unit owners can generate over $1,100 annually by selling power back to the grid at peak periods.
New bi-directional charging technology could also go a long way to filling the gaps in energy production resulting from the intermittent nature of renewables like wind and solar. In May, Nissan launched a vehicle-to-grid pilot in the U.K. that allows Leaf owners to sell power directly from their vehicles to the grid at peak times. If all of the 18,000 Leaf EVs in the U.K. were connected, they would have a capacity of 180 megawatts of energy, equivalent to two power plants, said Paul Willcox, chairman of Nissan Europe. If all vehicles in the U.K. were electric and were connected, it would create a virtual power plant of 370 gigawatts—enough power to cover the U.K., Germany and France, he said.
Of course, disruption caused by EVs has been predicted before and they have yet to have any discernible impact on the status quo. Only time will tell if we are on the cusp of a black swan event.
But as the evidence accumulates suggesting it is a definite possibility, it would be wise to consider that sticking with conventional wisdom—that the boom and bust cycle in the oilpatch will continue indefinitely and it’s only a matter of time before the boom returns in full force—could itself be a risky strategy for any petroleum-producing jurisdiction.
[Original of the above article at http://www.jwnenergy.com/article/2016/6/electric-vehicles-may-be-startin... ]
