Another brick in the renewable energy wall
COMPARISONS have been drawn between Apple CEO Steve Jobs’s unveiling of the first iPhone and Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk introducing the Powerwall last week.
The technology immediately captured the public imagination in Musk’s home country of South Africa, currently saddled with another period of rolling blackouts — but it might not yet provide the solution for going fully off the grid.
Chris Yelland, an energy analyst and MD of EE Publishers, said the Powerwall was a logical extension of the burgeoning electric car industry.
The need to deliver power to vehicle engines in a controlled and sustained way has led to “visionaries” such as Musk developing other practical applications.
“It is the beginning of energystorage batteries being manufactured at big scale. Major manufacturers . . . are coming out with electric vehicles and battery technology that is starting to come of age.
“As these things get manufactured at scale, prices will start to come down dramatically. Musk has seen the prospect of opening up markets domestically and commercially, and for public utilities and municipalities who might use large versions of these batteries in their distribution networks.”
That might excite the average South African, but Yelland said we would be slow off the mark as adopters of such technology. The major constraint is affordability.
“The Powerwall comes in two versions: the 7 kilowatt-hour unit and 10kWh unit, which is about R40 000. A 10kWh unit is not a lot. A typical middle-class house consumes . . . 30kWh a day. This battery will not supply a house for a day.
“If you wanted to get off the grid, you’d need two or three of these units plus inverters and solar panels to charge it, so that might be hundreds of thousands of rands. At the domestic level, this will not be an option of going off the grid but as an option of standby power.”
Yelland said South Africa could be expected to follow other countries in introducing peak-hour and off-peak elec- tricity tariffs, which would further open up the market.
Homeowners or small businesses could charge batteries during off-peak times — from the grid — and save on bills during peak hours by running off such a device.
Frank Spencer, chairman of the embedded generation subcommittee of the South African Photovoltaic Industry Association, said it was clear that Tesla had made significant advances in battery technology and lifespan, and in low interest-rate environments financing these batteries could be easy.
“It is arguable that Tesla have made batteries last three times longer . . . In South Africa it about halves the cost of storage.
“Off-grid systems would cost around R3.50 per kilowatt-hour; that cost has dropped to R2.50 per kilowatt-hour as a rough long-term fixed cost,” Spencer said. “Going off-grid is nearing current residential tariffs. That should scare municipalities.”
The Powerwall is deployed with electronics that manage the controlled charging and discharge of the batteries — which has enabled Tesla to offer a 10-year guarantee on battery function.
Spencer expects the private sector and high-end residential sector to adopt it faster than municipalities. “Our energy mix is dictated by the Integrated Resource Plan, and this is hopelessly out of date, with a ridiculous focus on nuclear.”
Greg Austin, MD of juwi Renewable Energies, agreed that Musk’s position of being able to manufacture such batteries at scale was exciting.
Analysts agree that prices will fall as manufacturing to scale begins in earnest, but Austin said that in the face of load-shedding the price of a Powerwall or competing unit was not strictly a price question — being able to run business-essential equipment during a power failure made the calculation look very different.
“We’re presented with a picture of the future . . . The addition of appropriately priced storage linked with generators means our reliance on conventional fossil fuels can be reduced quickly,” Austin said.
He added that the Department of Energy has sent positive messages with its Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer programme.
“There are increasing allocations for renewables, particularly solar and wind.
“The beauty of the South African scenario is that it’s a purely competitive private market system where the developer and investor agree a power purchase agreement with the buyer, Eskom, which is fixed for 20 years. The public doesn’t pay for the build, only for what we consume. That’s not true for Medupi or Kusile and other similar builds.”
As they get manufactured at scale, prices will start to come down dramatically
ELON Musk’s keynote address last week, at which he took the wraps off a muchanticipated battery technology, was fascinating to watch.
Here was a South African-born entrepreneur and inventor — his accent still giving away his heritage, despite 27 years living in Canada and the US — attracting the interest of millions around the world.
The Pretoria-educated Musk, 43, who left South Africa in 1988 when he was 17, is now regularly compared to great inventors such as Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. Some have called him the next Steve Jobs.
Yet Musk’s address was almost the antithesis of what we’ve come to expect in the hi-tech industry. His presentation lacked the stage-managed theatrics of Apple, Google and Microsoft keynotes. Instead, he looked slightly nervous and stammered a little throughout.
He still managed to crack a few jokes, though, and kept the audience lapping up his every word.
Musk’s performance was by no means off the cuff, but it lacked bombast. The keynote was the better for it. After all, Musk wasn’t debuting the latest iteration of a metoo smartphone, but rather something that has the potential to change the world.
His stated goal is no less than weaning humanity off planet-warming fossil fuels. And why not? After all, this is the man who builds advanced space rockets and who wants to help colonise Mars to ensure mankind becomes an interplanetary species.
Tesla Energy’s Powerwall, the subject of Musk’s keynote, is by no means revolutionary. Countless South Africans have already reduced their reliance on the grid by installing similar solutions, usually involving inverters and car batteries.
But Musk’s wall-mounted battery solution for homes and businesses is the first such product that could gain meaningful scale globally and, when tied to solar panels, could have a real impact on minimising millions of people’s reliance on dirty energy sources.
The Powerwall is a rechargeable lithium-ion battery designed to store energy at a residential level for load shifting (using battery power when grid prices are higher, for example) as well as for back-up power and self-consumption of solar power generation.
To South Africans fed up with Eskom’s rolling blackouts, this must seem like manna from heaven. With prices starting at R36 000 (excluding taxes, duties, inverters, installation and optional solar panels), the Tesla technology is likely to prove a popular way among well-to-do South Africans of lessening their reliance on Eskom.
Available in 7 kilowatt-hour and 10kWh configurations, it consists of a lithium-ion battery pack, liquid thermal control system and software that receives commands from a solar inverter.
The wall-mounted unit is integrated with the local grid.
The company is developing bigger and more robust solutions for business customers, too. Indeed, Musk’s technology is highly scaleable and could even be used by utility companies to provide electricity to entire cities.
Tesla is grouping 100kWh “battery blocks” to scale from 500kWh to 10 megawatt-hours and more. Musk says it’s designed to be “infinitely scaleable”.
Utilities will be able to store solar power and offer it into the grid at peak demand times, for example. They will also be able to use the technology as a buffer while power output from a large generation source, such as a power station, is brought up or down.
Musk has open-sourced the patents behind the technology, allowing other companies to build similar systems of their own. In his keynote, he actively encouraged this. He seems genuinely interested in developing the global market as quickly as possible to lessen the reliance on fossil fuels, even if that means handing a big slice of it to other companies.
“Once we’re able to rely on renewable energy sources for our power consumption, the top 50% of the dirtiest power generation resources could retire early. We would have a cleaner, smaller, and more resilient energy grid,” Tesla said in a statement.
For many South Africans, the first prize will be having a reliable source of power. Helping save the planet may be a secondary consideration.