Good luck competing against Redox Flow. Its a miracle that Elon Musk has been able to get so much done with Laptop-batteries (18650 Cells). But the new chemistries actually designed for grid-storage are coming, and they crush laptop-batteries in cost and capacity.
The Gigafactory is designed to make Electric car batteries, and the 26650 (successor to the 18650 laptop cells) aren't even being produced yet. How long before TSLA / Panasonic can tweak the gigafactory to make a cell optimized for grid energy-storage?
Your turn. Show me a 1MegaWatt-hr or larger TSLA installation. kw-installations (Power Wall) are small money, I don't care about that. I care about hundreds-of-million $$ installations.
The only things I see for TSLA are planned projects and/or demos.
Redox Flow is a bit newer technology than Lithium Ion, but small-scale installations already exist all over the world.
Yes. And TSLA doesn't have any utility scale projects except the hypothetical 1MW plant in Ireland until sometime later this year.
Small-scale deployments of Lithium Ion are not going to be as efficient as large-scale deployments of Redox Flow. Period. I don't think TSLA has bet on the right technology at the utility scale. Lithium Ion is great for cars, but better technologies simply exist in other niches.
-----------
Look, Redox Flow batteries are ahead of TSLA. They exist right now at the "small scale" of 2.2MWhr.
These are the numbers for a utility-scale level company... currently mass producing Redox Flow batteries. TSLA power wall just doesn't compete. Not by a long shot.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/11/new-type-flow-battery...
Good luck competing against Redox Flow. Its a miracle that Elon Musk has been able to get so much done with Laptop-batteries (18650 Cells). But the new chemistries actually designed for grid-storage are coming, and they crush laptop-batteries in cost and capacity.
The Gigafactory is designed to make Electric car batteries, and the 26650 (successor to the 18650 laptop cells) aren't even being produced yet. How long before TSLA / Panasonic can tweak the gigafactory to make a cell optimized for grid energy-storage?