Joel Makower of GreenBiz.com reports: Elon Musk has established a well-deserved reputation for designing and building things that take off quickly — rockets, electric cars … and stock prices. But his biggest impact won’t necessarily be in speeding up how we get from here to there. It may be in transforming a much slower-moving industry: electric utilities.
Musk’s transportation companies, Tesla Motors and SpaceX, as well as SolarCity, the solar company whose board he chairs — not to mention the still-theoretical Hyperloop high-speed rail system — are tied together by one underlying idea: how we power things is archaic and inefficient. And in his peerless zeal and passion to reinvent automobiles, space travel and more, he is — wittingly or not — creating innovative and less-polluting energy ecosystems.
A key component of that ecosystem was announced last week: a $5 billion, 10-million-square-foot so-called gigafactory, to be located somewhere in the western United States, for producing lithium-ion (Li-On) batteries. These are the devices that power much of our rechargeable world, from phone and laptops to — well, electric vehicles. The 7,000 or so standard-issue Li-On batteries crammed into a Tesla Model S, for example, enable it to go from zero to 60 in less time than it takes to say “We design, develop, manufacture and sell high-performance fully electric vehicles and advanced electric-vehicle power train components,” the opening line of the company's IPO application.
Until Tesla, battery technology hadn't historically advanced to the point where it could provide consumers with an electric vehicle that had compelling range and performance, one reason why incumbent automobile manufacturers focused largely on hybrid-electric vehicles instead of pure electric models. The lithium-ion battery cells Tesla uses have evolved to the point that they can provide higher energy density, or more energy per kilogram, at a lower cost per energy unit than competing battery cell chemistries.
By building its own battery factory, Tesla is doing what it does best: engineering and building a higher-performance, lower-cost version of an existing technology. Those batteries will help usher in Tesla’s third-generation vehicle, a relatively affordable mass-market vehicle.
But the company’s gigafactory stands to energize much more than that. By optimizing the price and performance of rechargeable energy storage, Tesla stands to upend the staid business model of electric utilities.
In December, SolarCity — co-founded and run by Musk’s cousins, Lyndon and Peter Rive — announced a service, called DemandLogic, to install and operate lithium-ion batteries made by Tesla alongside photovoltaic panels. As GreenBiz.com reported,
Business customers sign a 10-year contract with monthly fees, rather than purchase the batteries and solar panels up front. SolarCity is also putting combined solar-storage systems at residential buildings in California but has not yet made that offering generally available.The batteries themselves are the same used in Telsa's electric cars, but packaged with power electronics to store solar energy, provide power to a building and connect to the grid. The entire system is remotely monitored by SolarCity.
The ability to store solar (and wind) energy in batteries has long been considered renewable power’s killer app. Batteries allow renewable power to be utilized when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. Marrying solar with batteries — and doing so with innovative financing that doesn’t require a hefty downpayment — is a game changer for owners of homes and commercial and industrial buildings. That's SolarCity's ploy.
It’s not just about saving money — or being environmentally responsible, for that matter. It’s about resilience. As the electricity grid becomes less and less reliable — whether from outages due to extreme weather, physical and cyber attacks on power stations and grid operators, fuel shortages or other factors — being able to operate a business or simply keep the freezer cold will become of growing importance. Never mind the ability to keep streetlights and traffic lights powered, ATMs humming and the Internet streaming.
For utilities, this may be the beginning of the end of the current monopolistic business model. Today's electric power utilities could lose half of their addressable market to energy efficiency, solar and storage and other distributed generation technologies, according to "Energy Darwinism — the evolution of the energy industry," a recent report from the investment banking arm of Citibank.
Traditional utilities’ central power plants have been a vital service to building economies around the world, but today’s market needs — not to mention the disruptive specter of climate change — demands a new, distributed business model. Much like the Internet itself, energy needs to be a dynamic ecosystem where at any given time an electricity customer can be either an energy producer or consumer. That opens to door to a new generation of products and services, including arbitrageurs that negotiate prices and redirect kilowatts in real time in order to provide the grid with the electricity it needs. (Think eBay for energy.)
The SolarCity-Tesla hook-up already is providing some of what utilities have traditionally offered. As Laurie Guevara-Stone at the Rocky Mountain Institute recently put it:
What's really exciting in the solar-plus-battery arena is what batteries offer beyond backup — to both solar PV and the grid and utilities. Voltage and frequency regulation. Black-start capability after macro- or microgrid outages. Using batteries as a less expensive alternative to peaking plants during high demand periods. Demand charge reductions via peak shaving. Shifting load profiles with batteries to take better advantage of time-of-use electricity pricing. The list goes on.
The threat to utilities is hardly hidden. “Our business model is to become the energy company of the 21st century,” SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive told The Atlantic late last year. “You’re still connected to the grid but the grid would be your secondary provider and the primarily provider would be your solar system and your storage device.” Imagine: coal-fired power plants as back-up, not primary power.
Tesla and SolarCity are hardly alone in this quest, and Li-On batteries are only one of several promising energy storage technologies. There’s compressed air, liquid air, pumped-storage hydro, flywheels, superconducting magnets, molten salt, underground hydrogen and more. Each of these has its own ecosystem of startups, funders, pilot projects and potential customers. And each is vying for what is seen to be a massive market opportunity that will upend how we think about, buy and use energy.
But Musk is alone in leading the disruption, what with his hyper-ambition, systems thinking and almost limitless ability to attract money and attention. Will Tesla’s sleek vehicles someday be an afterthought, much like the Apple II, largely forgotten amid Steve Jobs’ roiling of the media and entertainment industries?
It could well be that Tesla’s Roadster, Model S and whatever comes next will be mere vehicles to a new energy future.
