Am I in the wrong line of business?

[JustJoe]

Six years ago, we saw presentations by Ubiquiti that made us feel like we could change the world.

Then you watch this video announcement and hear Elon Musk, a true visionary, talking about things like open source patent processes of his technology and I start to wonder if I placed my hopes and dreams in the wrong place?

http://www.teslamotors.com/powerwall

[Dave]

yup, he has a good vision, but he doesn't give details on why his "battery's" don't suck like the "normal" battery's he trashes....

[JustJoe]

Well, for a company that pretty much started from scratch, their cars already kick ass. Something the oil companies would have us believe was impossible.

The the advantage I can see for the average home consumer, it's lighter and more compact than say for instance, lead acid batteries. That does let them get it out of the way.

But personally, I want to see the step where the battery pack is at least two (or more) swappable cartridges, one stays at home getting charged by the rooftop solar and the other powers your car during the day. When you get home, you just tell the car to swap batteries and it performs pre-choreographed moves to accomplish that. Instantly ready to go and has lower losses than trying to accomplish high-current fast charging.

[Dave]

yes, no arguing Tesla is doing good stuff, just not sure how much is hype, and how much is real, and for sure, he will have a lot of "dangerous" giants doing their best under the table to make sure he fails.....

[rebelwireless]

Dave, the difference in Tesla's batteries have been discussed at length on the web. in a nutshell, they are like modern laptop batteries manufactured in enough volume to bring the price down.

Elon did a talk a while back that he didn't think batteries solved energy, but they allowed for intermittent energy collection. Solar and wind homes don't make sense until you can store that power.

[lligetfa]

For stationary applications, I think FES may have some advantage over batteries, at least as far as how long they last (charge cycles).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_energy_storage

[rebelwireless]

I've been interested in the flywheel battery for decades. Seems like a forgotten tech. I'm confident that we have the precision in manufacturing to produce flywheel battery that could store much more energy than a chemical battery.

[JustJoe]

Flywheels in a home might be OK, but it would be hard to make it that flat.

However, seems like about 40 years ago when they started testing extremely high speed flywheels in passenger cars. They felt they need to handle the high speed to store more energy, while remaining small and light. But then they started testing what happens to flywheels in vehicle collision accidents.

1) Gasoline, very hot fire, possible explosion.
2) Batteries, very hot fire, but contained to a small area.
3) Flywheel, they found no way to safely contain it. Let's just say it makes one helluva nasty saw-blade flying down the highway.

[rebelwireless]

a) we only care about stationary batteries, APs don't move around much...
b) the whole 'no way to contain' argument is just conjecture, the amount of energy is all that matters and a flywheel expends a lot of energy into a bearing or it's container on a collision. A flywheel also wouldn't contain substantially more energy than a chemical battery or gasoline. The issue with a mobile flywheel is conservation of angular momentum means that the flywheel would resist angular changes. A flywheel battery will torq steer a vehicle when drawing power. not good for mobile applications.

[lligetfa]

I thought I was pretty clear about the stationary aspect.

For stationary applications...

The linked article does mention mobile application along with some of the undesirables.

Size would certainly be a factor as it would be larger than a PowerWall. I was more thinking in situations where size doesn't matter. There is a lot of hollow space in the base of windmills and under solar panels. Same with the oceans and wave energy. Electric trains and regenerative braking could use the technology trackside to ease the spikey load on the grid.