{"id":3827,"date":"2015-06-12T07:58:32","date_gmt":"2015-06-12T07:58:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=3827"},"modified":"2016-08-29T19:11:18","modified_gmt":"2016-08-29T19:11:18","slug":"the-tesla-battery-heralds-the-beginning-of-the-end-for-fossil-fuels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/the-tesla-battery-heralds-the-beginning-of-the-end-for-fossil-fuels\/","title":{"rendered":"The Tesla battery heralds the beginning of the end for fossil fuels"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Mathews<\/a><\/p>\n

Wind and solar power have made great strides in recent years, accounting for 56% of net additions to global power capacity in 2013<\/a>.* What holds them back is their transience and intermittent character. The sun doesn\u2019t shine at night and the wind doesn\u2019t blow year-round \u2013 these are the mantras of all those opposed to the progress of renewables.<\/p>\n

Now the renewable power billionaire Elon Musk has just blown away that final defence. Last Thursday in California he introduced to the world his sleek new Powerwall \u2013 a wall-mounted energy storage unit that can hold 10 kilowatt hours of electric energy, and deliver it at an average of 2 kilowatts, all for US$3,500.<\/p>\n

That translates into an electricity price (taking into account installation costs and inverters) of around US$500 per kWh<\/a> \u2013 less than half current costs, as estimated by Deutsche Bank.<\/p>\n

That translates into delivered energy at around 6 cents per kWh for the householder, meaning that a domestic system plus storage would still come out ahead of coal-fired power delivered through the conventional grid.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s more, Musk is going to manufacture the batteries in the United States<\/a>, at the \u201cgigafactory\u201d he is building just over the border from California in Nevada. He is not waiting for some totally new technology, but is scaling up the tried and tested lithium-ion battery that he is already using for his electric vehicles.<\/p>\n

Not just for homes<\/h2>\n

Now the fossil fuel companies \u2013 from fuel suppliers such as coal miners to coal-burning electric power utilities \u2013 will be on the defensive, fighting the new normal of cheaper renewable supplies and storage. Instead of asking \u201ccan we have our own energy system?\u201d communities will be asking \u201cwhy can\u2019t we have it?\u201d<\/p>\n

The Tesla Energy system launched last week is comprehensive, with global ramifications. The Powerwall system offering 10 kWh is targeted at domestic users. It is complemented by a commercial system termed the Powerpack offering 100 kWh storage, and a stack of 100 such units to form a 10 megawatt hour storage unit that can be used at the scale of small electricity grids.<\/p>\n

Whole communities could build micro-grid power supply systems around such a 10 MWh energy storage system, fed by renewable energy generation (wind power or rooftop solar power), at costs that just became super-competitive.<\/p>\n

At his launch last week, Musk maintained that the entire electric power grid of the US could be replicated with just 160 million of these utility-scale energy storage units. And two billion of the utility-scale units could provide storage of 20 trillion kWh \u2013 electric power for the world.<\/p>\n

The revolution begins<\/h2>\n

It is instructive to put these numbers in context. There are already around 2 billion cars and commercial vehicles on the world\u2019s roads, and nearly 100 million new vehicles are being added every year.<\/p>\n

If it\u2019s feasible to build these exhaust-pumping complex machines, it\u2019s certainly feasible to build the storage units that will help to make them unnecessary. What\u2019s more, Elon Musk has just announced that he intends to do so.<\/p>\n

Musk is a Henry Ford-style figure who takes others\u2019 innovations and scales them up, taking the breathtaking entrepreneurial leaps that others can only dream about. Suddenly the world of renewable energy just moved to become the new normal \u2013 because when combined with cost-effective storage it becomes unbeatable.<\/p>\n

Musk will not be alone. Already China is gearing up to be the world\u2019s renewable energy superpower, with the largest installed base of wind power and probably by this year the world\u2019s largest installed base of solar photovoltaic (PV) power, as well as by far the world\u2019s largest manufacturing system for wind turbines and solar photovoltaic cells<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There are already Chinese companies such as BYD<\/a> producing their own energy storage units based on lithium ion technology for both domestic and commercial usage \u2013 although not as sleek nor as cheap as the new Tesla offering.<\/p>\n

But give them time and they will be producing at comparable scale and cost, or bettering it. This is capitalist competition \u2013 and its propagation is what makes Tesla\u2019s announcement the start of the real renewables revolution.<\/p>\n

No going back<\/h2>\n

What about Australia and the sorry state of affairs in which the Abbott government can see nothing beyond coal exports and does everything it can to halt the transition to renewables? Tesla\u2019s announcement has just shifted the ground beneath their feet.<\/p>\n

No longer can anyone in Australia claim that renewables would be \u201cnice\u201d if only they came with storage. Now they do.<\/p>\n

A smart government in Australia would be looking to ride this wave and promote Australian renewable technology as a source of wealth for the country in a post-fossil fuel era.<\/p>\n

Finally we would be able to move beyond the fruitless debates in Australia over whether to have a carbon tax or not, and move to the more immediate and practical issue of promoting renewable industry and technology.<\/p>\n

China has given the world a huge lesson in the business-like way it has gone about building and promoting its renewable energy industries, importing technology from around the world and now improving on it as well, and scaling up production so as to drive down costs.<\/p>\n

Now Musk and his Tesla Energy have just taken that process one decisive further step, to encompass storage as well as renewable power generation. From here there is no going back.<\/p>\n

*This article was updated on May 19 to more accurately reflect the uptake of renewable energy.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

John Mathews<\/a> is Professor of Strategic Management, Macquarie Graduate School of Management at Macquarie University<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This article was originally published on The Conversation<\/a>.
\nRead the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Mathews Wind and solar power have made great strides in recent years, accounting for 56% of net additions to global power capacity in 2013.* What holds them back is their transience and intermittent character. The sun doesn\u2019t shine at night and the wind doesn\u2019t blow year-round \u2013 these are the mantras of all those […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":7410,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3827"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3827"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3827\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3828,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3827\/revisions\/3828"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7410"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}