Tesla’s grand entrance to the stationary storage market has been (largely) welcomed but question marks remain over the company’s business model. Andy Colthorpe gauges the latest reaction and explores the options facing Elon Musk.
Tesla reported losses of around US$0.36 per share in its quarterly earnings announcement yesterday, despite a flurry of activity around its stationary storage launch last week – yet the company still outperformed the expectations of the investment community.
Ecotricity, a UK-based supplier of renewable and clean energy, will trial a home energy storage box later this year.
Battery manufacturer Leclanché and a maker of ceramic separators and electrodes owned by Electrovaya have signed a deal to scale up their respective efforts in the lithium-ion battery space.
More details have emerged on inverters for Tesla’s new home battery system, to be made by Fronius and SolarEdge, while the EV-maker’s energy storage will be installed at demonstration and commercial projects for US utility Edison International.
Prices for Tesla’s stationary storage systems for homes, businesses and off-grid communities, to be packaged and sold in partnership with SolarCity, will begin at US$3,000, thought to be as little as a third of the price of comparable products previously available on the market.
Raj Prabhu of cleantech research and communications firm Mercom Capital talks through some of the interesting findings and trends highlighted by his company’s recent “Smart Grid, Battery/Storage, Efficiency Funding and M&A” report for Q1 2015.
Germany’s residential storage system maker Sonnenbatterie will continue its push into the US, partnering with Sungevity, the residential PV installer founded by environmental activist and cleantech entrepreneur Danny Kennedy.
The hotly anticipated announcement tomorrow of two products in the Tesla’s stationary storage range, teased and trailed by a series of cryptic and not-so-cryptic tweets and interview snippets, has led to mainstream media taking an interest in the stationary storage sector and what it could offer like no other news we’ve heard to date. And there hasn’t even been any actual news yet. Andy Colthorpe spoke to energy storage expert Cosmin Laslau at Lux Research, about what to expect.
One firm exploring the possibilities of contributing to grid stability by installing energy storage at solar farms is German PV plant technology provider Belectric. The company will install two large-scale energy storage projects in the UK and connected an energy storage system at a large-scale solar power plant in Germany late last year. The system at Alt Daber is the first such installation in Europe to operate on the primary operating reserve market. Andy Colthorpe interviewed Belectric’s UK managing director Duncan Bott and Tim Mueller, chief executive of Belectric’s solar research and innovation subsidiary, Adensis, about the Alt Daber project earlier this year.
