A Must Read Article On The Tesla Powerwall
I have a Google Alert set for Tesla Powerwall and usually it just picks up pretty boring stuff, but this article from ecomento.com is better than most. It does state this.
The Tesla Powerwall won’t really make economic sense for most US customers until the price drops – considerably. The people who buy one now will help fund the research and development that needs to take place to drive battery prices down in the future.
So as with a lot of new technology, with my engineer’s hard hat on, I think it will be best to wait until the cost of solar panels, Powerwall-like devices and all the other electronics and control systems needed, have been proven to be reliable and have dropped in price.
My house here has a flat roof, which would be ideal for solar panels, so I’m watching the technology and will buy them, when the payback is less than five years.
Why five years? It’s the length of our fixed term parliament, so hopefully the financial conditions won’t be mucked up too much by a change of governmen.
The Anonymous Widower 
I have 4kW of PVs on my roof, and the payback is quite good. Most people only consider the feed in tariff payments as the payback revenue, but I find that my electricity bills are also reduced by the free electricity available. I currently have a number of hardware/software projects in the pipeline (to keep my hand in), and have completed several. One that I have investigated, both through research and by test developments, is the better use of the power from the PVs. I use quite a lot of electricity but a lot of it is at night when I have yet to see the sun shine. If I could use the low power from the roof (typically 1 to 3 kW) to charge up my AGA, heat my hot water, or add heat to the water recirculating in my heating system, then I could save more.
Comment by John Wright | May 23, 2015 |
My house collects a lot of sun and I generally need to use air-conditioning for quite a lot of the year. Solar panels on my flat roof would probably do a lot to offset the air-con, as when that is needed most, there is generally a lot of sun.
But solar panels on my flat roof would probably act in part as a subshade for the house. I wonder how many kW I could get on my about 25m2 roof?
Comment by AnonW | May 23, 2015 |