Yes, Your phone or laptop though... that we dont have regulations that at least require manufacturers to give users the option to not charge to 100% is beyond me.
Many billions of batteries and thus billions of devices needlessly scrapped.
We need all the renewables we can get, and I think you can have both -- utility-scale and rooftop. Rooftop solar (and battery storage) just needs to be cost efficient to offset the rising cost of electricity and make it a good return on investment.
The "attacks on net metering" are merely acknowledging that the proportion of renewables on the grid is high enough that balancing grid supply and demand is becoming an issue. I'm a big proponent of rooftop solar, but the reality is that 1:1 net metering just doesn't make sense once there's a critical mass of solar installed (the duck curve problem). This is not a problem unique to California or the US. If you look at other places with high solar adoption (Australia, EU), you'll find even stricter policies like negative feed-in tariffs: the utility will charge you for exporting solar to the grid.
Battery storage is a solution to that problem, but that's where prices are still too high. I'm actually surprised that battery storage is not mentioned in the article, because that's a critical component of allowing solar/wind to grow further.
I agree about home batteries being too expensive, hopefully prices will come down with scale.
But the part about battery degradation is not true. Tesla Powerwall has a 10 year warranty[1] with 70% capacity retention. This means that Tesla has data showing that the battery will have higher capacity than 70% after those years. That's a lot of cycles and a lot of renewable energy that the battery will provide in its lifetime.
There's a reason why Tesla picks 10 years (8 years for car batteries) as a warranty period. Ask yourself: why 8 years and not 10 for cars? Why 10 years and not 15 or 20 years for home batteries? It's not arbitrary.
Battery degradation is not linear. It's not like: 10 years = 70%, 20 years = 40%. It's probably closer to 20 years = 20 % capacity left. The decay becomes exponential-like after a relatively linear period of roughly 10 years.
The Tesla warranty will fall under "first life" in the image in the link above.
So batteries (even Tesla Powerwalls) do degrade and do degrade to the point where you need to replace them a bunch of times during lifetime of a house.
Tesla and other car makers set their warranties at the mandatory minimums. Why would they offer more when they don't have to and consumers find them long enough and/or other car makers aren't competing on warranty length? That doesn't tell you anything about battery longevity.
Edit: Does my MacBook Pro die after 1 year when it's applecare warranty is over?
The mandatory minimums? Got a source of the mandatory minimum for cars (US and/or EU) as well as power walls?
The fact that other car makers aren't competing on warranty length seems to me to prove my point, but you seem to think it doesn't? What I mean is: if battery degradation for cars isn't that bad after 8 years, then why are other brands not offering significantly longer warranties to compete with the Tesla one?
Not sure about the competition argument anyway, since Tesla didn't have any competition initially and arguably still doesn't have real competition (depending on what features of the car you value most).
Edit: Does my MacBook Pro die after 1 year when it's applecare warranty is over? --> Pretty close yes IMO. My personal experience is that my laptop and phone battery capacities degrade very fast after 1 year and need to be replace after about 2 years, 3 years if you really really push it and are OK with constantly charging.
RE: MacBook Pro dying close to a year right after it's warranty it over --> well now you're just trolling. My iPhone 15 pro battery still maintains 100% battery health a year after its manufacturing date. It obviously won't need replacing in 1-2 more years even if I "really really push it and are OK with constantly charging". I used an iPhone XS until last year after it was about 5 years old, 5x longer than your supposed device-dead date. I don't think this is unusual.
Dynamic tariffs (aka real-time or wholesale plans) are becoming more common in the UK an EU. These are usually priced by 30-min periods and announced 24h in advance. More modern utilities will offer apps that control when your car is charged (in exchange for cheaper rates). But I agree, optimizing this is fun too. I'm building support for configuring Tesla Powerwall systems based on dynamic tariffs.
If you have the option, the best time to charge your car would be during the day when there is abundant solar.
In the long run, it makes sense to consume power when renewables can supply it, instead of having to store it in a battery and use it later.
In the short term however, renewables can't scale up in demand, so you're actually likely to require that the load is served from dispatchable power, which is probably either gas, hydro, or battery.
I don't think there's really any good time to charge it then. If solar was ever underutilized, I would assume there would be no gas in the mix at that point in time, but there is no such time.
On gridstatus, you can see how much renewable power is being curtailed (purposefully lowering output below what could be produced): https://www.gridstatus.io/live/caiso
Its... several GW in the middle of the day recently. So, this suggests charging EVs during this time would actually allow for better utilization of available renewables.
Another metric you can look at is if the grid scale batteries are currently charging or not. If they are charging, this suggests there is excess capacity available (or at least inexpensive capacity). The hours when grid batteries are charging are probably also good hours to charge EVs.
Yes and no. It gives you an idea of average production. What it does not tell you at all is the day-to-day reality, which can be dramatic (check out the screen shots I posted in my comment).
I used PVWatts and other tools extensively while designing my system many years ago. They are helpful, yet, again, none of them expose you to the reality of living with solar. In statistics, it is well known that applying averages to the entire population is a bad idea. Any single day, you can have one cloud kill half your system for hours. You'd be surprise to learn how often clouds --not even rain-- cause you to have to buy energy at the most expensive rate of the day. You quickly learn to hate clouds.
Tesla Powerwall is probably the most commercially successful home battery. It comes with a warranty guaranteeing 70% capacity after 10 years, which is not to say it has a 10 year lifetime. It's still early to determine its actual lifetime, but the battery technology is also rapidly improving due to the EV transition.
- What is your energy usage and peak demand during that time?
Peak demand is a big factor: a single Tesla Powerwall 2 for example has 13.5 kWh of capacity but only 5kW of continuous power. A heat pump or AC can exceed that, which is why many people stack multiple batteries to be able to power their homes. (The new Powerwall 3 can supply more power.)
Irritates the shit out of me that my Solar Edge inverter cannot give me a data feed without talking to the company. I want to run the data collection and presentation service locally, not on their cloud.
- The Tesla Powerwall 2 battery warranty[1] is for effectively 3650 cycles (daily cycle for 10 years).
- Many cases of Tesla cars at 200k mileage (~1000 cycles, depends on battery size) with less than 15% capacity loss[2].
And these batteries didn't die after reaching the high number of cycles, they just retained less capacity.
[1] https://energylibrary.tesla.com/docs/Public/EnergyStorage/Po...
[2] https://insideevs.com/news/723734/tesla-model-3y-battery-cap...