Tesla Energy Is About To Take Over Texas

tesla energy is the quiet revolution in sustainable electricity that is about to get a whole lot louder this is one of those major shifts in the industry that has been building for years now first tesla put a battery in your car then they put a battery in your house then they figured out how to run a city on batteries and then a whole county but for their next trick tesla energy is about to become a statewide electric utility provider and what comes after that world domination obviously let's talk about how we get there tesla is currently in the process of expanding from making and storing electricity to actually selling electricity directly to customers they're able to do this because of the state of texas and its undying commitment to deregulation texas is a bit of a strange anomaly even for the united states because the texas energy grid is isolated from the rest of the country so power cannot flow in or out from other state providers and within that isolated grid tesla has deregulated the energy industry to the point where pretty much anyone can set up their own utility company and start selling power in theory this means that the free market takes over and the consumer gets a great deal because competition will push the price down which it has electricity in texas is very cheap but this also led to something like 120 electricity retailers creating a patchwork of service that was barely held together by a central management agency called the electric reliability council of texas until it wasn't held together anymore february 2021 comes along and all it takes is a few days worth of snow to throw the whole operation into shambles power is knocked out for days and even weeks in some areas hundreds of people die either from exposure to the cold or in desperate attempts to stay warm that only result in carbon monoxide poisoning it could be said that this was just a freak occurrence for a state that is generally pretty hot on average and never could have expected a multi-day cold snap and winter storm onslaught but that would be ignoring the fact that the exact same thing happened 10 years prior in 2011 temperatures dropped and power generators failed the ercot were given a whole list of recommendations back then about how to make changes in the way the grid was managed and maintained that would prevent that disaster from happening again none of those changes were made and this isn't even just a symptom of the modern day these problems for texas started with a cold snap back in 1989 that they could have learned from and didn't the same generating stations that failed in 1989 failed again in 2011 and again in 2021 anyway all of that to say that the stage is set in texas for somebody to come in and start doing things differently because the status quo is literally killing people and that cannot stand so we enter tesla energy ventures a company subsidiary that filed in mid-august with the public utility commission of texas to sell electricity in the retail market but where does the electricity come from well tesla is developing a two-pronged approach to energy supply that involves both a centralized and decentralized storage and delivery model that in combination with green energy generators like solar and wind farms will provide the foundation for our transition to sustainable energy for home electricity the tesla mega pack is the workhorse of this whole operation in a simple sense mega pack is a big ass battery 3.1 megawatt hours of energy and 0.8 megawatts of power that sounds weird right what's the difference between power and energy in very simple terms energy is the capacity to store electricity and power is the capacity to output energy so the mega pack battery is built for large storage and slow release of electricity that's why tesla has recently shifted the chemistry of their mega pack from traditional lithium ion cells to a lithium iron phosphate chemistry also known as lfp the advantage of lfp chemistry is a very low cost at the cell level because iron is an extremely common and accessible element the downside to lfp is a relatively low power output which makes it less than ideal for sports cars but perfect for residential electricity but there's a lot more to these shipping container sized units than just battery cells each mega pack is a self-contained power generator with fully integrated battery modules inverters and thermal systems so all that the consumer needs to do is wire a power source into that input and a destination for that power to the output and you have a working power plant and all this is for the low price of 1.2 million dollars that's the cost of one megapack but they're kind of pointless just on their own the tesla configurator page starts you off at a quantity of 10 mega packs for 10 million dollars and 30 megawatt hours of energy storage the power that goes into the mega pack can come from any source you could plug your mega packs into the grid and draw power from an existing power plant during off-peak hours like the middle of the night when utility rates are low then you could send that power out to consumers during peak demand times when the utility rates are at their most expensive kind of like trading stocks you buy low and you sell high this kind of system can also prevent short-term blackouts by releasing stored electricity during a generator failure and maintaining flow until the mains come back online but the mega pack system is the most effective when it is paired with a green energy source like solar or wind power because the long-standing failure of green energy has been its fleeting nature meaning the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow that's a big problem in a society that demands a constant supply of electricity but a big battery can be used to regulate those ebbs and flows of nature and allow sustainable energy to function in pretty much the exact same way as your traditional power plant in the course of just a few years tesla has deployed these big battery solutions to projects all over the world and the scale of these battery farms is ramping up fast we're all probably familiar with the hornsdale power reserve in southern australia this was launched in 2017 with 100 megawatt hours of capacity in 2022 this expanded to 194 megawatt hours but that was just the start in the first half of 2021 tesla deployed 1790 megawatt hours of battery storage around the world including a 142 megapack installation in ventura county california with 400 megawatt hours of capacity that has eliminated the county's need for a natural gas-powered peaker plant and it gets even bigger with the moss landing california project where tesla has installed 256 mega pack batteries in partnership with pacific gas and electric company it took just four months to install all of the batteries and when the project comes fully online it will reach a capacity of 730 megawatt hours the two companies already have plans to expand this up to 1.1 gigawatts of capacity in the near future california has been the boom for tesla energy but they are slowly expanding their capacity in texas as well by ramping up their big battery projects in the state in march 2021 tesla began construction on a 100 megawatt hour battery project near houston yes it's much smaller than the mega projects we were just talking about on the west coast but 100 megawatt hours is still enough capacity to power about 20 000 homes on a hot summer day and they are also in the planning phase for an even bigger battery near their gigafactory in austin texas that will ramp up to 250 megawatt hours tesla's secret weapon in their takeover of the electricity industry is going to their network of decentralized energy storage or virtual power plants so we know that one whole field of big batteries works great but what about a whole city filled with little batteries how does that work it's something that tesla has just started to experiment with the tesla powerwall is the at-home version of the mega pack it has a storage capacity of 13.5 kilowatt hours which is enough to run your house for about a day maybe two if you're conservative but you can link multiple power walls together up to 10 of them if you want to go nuts the tesla powerwall is now available exclusively with the tesla solar roof system and the two of them working together can essentially make your home self-sufficient energy from the sun gets converted to electricity by your roof and fed into your power wall which sends electricity into your house so we can look at each powerwall and solar equipped house as its own self-contained power plant but we can also widen that perspective and look at each tesla energy equipped house as one piece of a network of solar generation and battery storage that's spread throughout a whole city and that is the virtual power plant tesla is exploring this idea with a beta test in california power wall owners can opt into a system that will use stored energy in their home to help stabilize the grid on the state level one little battery on its own can't make a difference but when thousands of them work together tesla believes they can prop up the system enough to avoid or reduce blackouts in emergency situations there are something like 50 000 power walls currently operating just in the state of california and that number is growing of course this whole concept is relying on the supply of energy from power walls to be large enough to make a difference the demand for the power wall is actually way beyond what tesla has the capacity to make they are extremely popular in california but tesla has also seen a massive spike for these systems come up recently in another state you guessed it texas bringing it back to texas being the perfect testing ground for these disruptive energy technologies texans are none too pleased with their existing electricity providers and they are eager for something new and more reliable and that's sending them straight into tesla's open arms so in addition to big battery projects tesla will have that network of home battery storage and solar generation distributed all throughout the state that's where tesla as an electricity retailer comes into play to date the company has just been building and selling the batteries and letting established utilities providers take care of the rest but they're leaving a lot of money on the table when they do that the whole reason that these utility providers are spending tens of millions of dollars on tesla mega pack projects is because they know they can make that money back plus a large profit by selling the electricity in the batteries so there's an opportunity there for tesla to just eliminate that middleman and take all of the profits for themselves like we said off the top the business of electricity is basically the same business as day trading with stocks or cryptocurrency it's all buying and selling tesla could not only sell electricity to customers but it could also broker customers selling their excess energy generated from tesla powerwall or solar panel products back to the grid so they have this really unique position of being able to play both sides of the system and never coming up short on supply because they would never have all of their eggs in one basket the eggs are spread out over multiple decentralized and self-sufficient baskets make money and save the world all at the same time it's a beautiful thing right of course there is more to it than that so drop your comments below is tesla going to take over the electricity industry or is this one just too ambitious even for elon for more tesla news delivered straight to your inbox make sure to subscribe to our tesla space newsletter we keep you up to date on all things elon musk tesla spacex neuralink and boring company in one quick and fun to read package link in the description to sign up it's the teslaspace.com and make sure to 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Channel: The Tesla Space

Views: 197,996

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Id: h8iiVgFW2qk

Length: 13min 53sec (833 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 17 2021