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IPFS News Link • Energy

SolarCity, Tesla roll out batteries that store sun's energy for nighttime

• http://www.buffalonews.com

Battery costs, while falling rapidly, still are too high for them to be adopted widely. Tesla's Powerwall battery costs $3,500 for 10 kilowatt-hours worth of energy or $3,000 for 7 kilowatt-hours. That's what suppliers pay, and it doesn't include the cost of installation and a power inverter, so the cost to consumers is higher.

SolarCity offers to bundle battery storage with a rooftop solar system for an extra $5,000 – an offering aimed mostly at consumers who are mainly interested in having a source of backup power during a power outage. The company describes its battery offering as a "battery backup service" that can replace "noisy, dirty fossil fuel generators with zero-emission storage technology." It's not designed to store and discharge electricity on a daily basis.

But the potential of battery storage still has excited early adopters. After Tesla unveiled its two new battery storage products in May, one for homeowners and the other for utilities – the response was electric. Within a week, Tesla sold a year's worth of batteries, with orders for 38,000 of its Powerwall residential batteries and 2,500 for its Powerpack, the utility-scale batteries.

Rive expects battery prices to keep falling rapidly.

"Storage over the last two years has reduced by more than 50 percent. Over the next two years, it will reduce by another 50 percent," he said. "That's when it hits the game-changing outcome."

The Tesla batteries now bundled with SolarCity's rooftop solar systems cost about $350 per kilowatt-hour – about 60 percent less than prior systems, said Patrick Jobin, an analyst at Credit Suisse.

That's still too high for most solar energy consumers. But with Tesla building a massive battery "gigafactory" east of Reno, Nev., the company is hoping that bigger scale and continued improvements in technology will keep driving down costs. By the end of the decade, the price of Tesla's Powerwall battery system could drop to $100 to $150 per kilowatt-hour, said J.B. Straubel, Tesla's chief technology officer and co-founder, during an energy conference in Washington, D.C., during June.


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