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New: Tesla Unveils Megapack Order Page & Pricing
These are list prices and include installation. I think a pretty standard utility-scale order will be between 10 and 100 Megapacks - with quite a few orders in the 100 megapack range.
Will be interesting to find out if these are high-end prices in comparison to other vendors. Could be like Mac vs PC.
I hope that Tesla regularly updates this pricing page. Some analysts think that Tesla is close to getting their newest car batteries to below $100 per kWh. If that is the case, then the profit margins on these megapacks will be enormous.
I guess somebody forgot to tell Tesla that the denomination for their batteries should be "trillions".
New: Tesla Unveils Megapack Order Page & Pricing
Tesla has a new order page for their utility-scale energy storage product, unveiling pricing and other interesting details.
Discussions
Do you know, Joe if Tesla's price includes the total cost of energy wasted by storage in batteries (16%)
Nope didn't see that anywhere- but Tesla mentioned a 94% round-trip efficiency in their "view product details" link. Is that what you are looking for?
Looks like renewables + batteries are expensive at any price!
Just last week I saw a quote that said: "At today's prices, batteries that could match the output of a peaker plant for a single day would cost tens of $billions."
Most peaker plants would run for less than five hours at a time but let's be stupidly conservative here and pretend that they run for 24 hours. That would mean 50MW x 24 = 1,200 MWh.
So the cost dropped from tens of $billions to $334M in just a week. That like a 33x drop. What will the price be next year?
"Tesla mentioned a 94% round-trip efficiency in their "view product details" link. Is that what you are looking for?"
Nope, saw that. Tesla has conveniently omitted the energy cost of bi-directional inversion.
Unless you're using batteries to light a flashlight, or children's toy, AC ("alternating current)" must be converted to DC ("direct current") to charge a grid battery. When the battery is discharged, it must be converted back to AC again.
In practice, bi-directional inversion wastes 15-20% of the energy used to charge/discharge a grid battery as heat. New studies suggest 90% efficiency is possible, so I used that figure to give grid-scale batteries every benefit of the doubt.
10 + 6 = 16% roundtrip losses.
OT, is Tesla's Gigafactory in Nevada running on 100% renewable energy yet, or is Elon learning how to lie like a good renewables advocate?
Most peaker plants would run for less than five hours at a time...that would mean 50MW..."
50 megawatts? You're thinking in "flashlight" terms again (Moss Landing's capacity is twenty times that).
"What will the price be next year?"
I don't know, let's wait and see. That way we won't be disappointed by another renewables pipe dream!
Bob - you said:
50 megawatts? You're thinking in "flashlight" terms again (Moss Landing's capacity is twenty times that).
Interesting that you think Moss Landing is a "peaker" plant. Generation there was 5TWh in 2019 which was more than 6% of all NG generation in CA.
However, why don't we take this a step further and look at all simple cycle generation in California - this can be found State Electricity Profile for CA - Table 5 - here is screenshot.
The total for all simple cycle generation in CA for 2019 was 15,743,166 MWh. I have highlighted numbers in red. Interestingly, this is very similar to Diablo output in 2019.
Now if you take that number and divide by 365 you get 15,743,166/365 = 43,131 MWh/day. So that is the average simple cycle generation per day in CA.
How much would it cost store 43,131 MWh on a daily basis in Tesla batteries?
Multiple 43,131MWh by Tesla pricing of $278,000 per MWh = $11,990,685,337.
Obviously using average is not the best way to do this, but it is interesting to see that $12B could potentially replace most of the simple cycle/peaker generation in CA.
At this years prices.
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