Review of Tesla Solar Lithium Batteries
Tesla was founded in 2003 by a group of engineers who wanted to prove that people didn’t need to compromise to drive electric – that electric vehicles can be better, quicker and more fun to drive than gasoline cars. Today, Tesla builds not only all-electric vehicles but also infinitely scalable clean energy generation and storage products. Tesla believes the faster the world stops relying on fossil fuels and moves towards a zero-emission future, the better.
Launched in 2008, the Roadster unveiled Tesla’s cutting-edge battery technology and electric powertrain. From there, Tesla designed the world’s first ever premium all-electric sedan from the ground up – Model S – which has become the best car in its class in every category. Combining safety, performance, and efficiency, Model S has reset the world’s expectations for the car of the 21st century with the longest range of any electric vehicle, over-the-air software updates that make it better over time, and a record 0-60 mph acceleration time of 2.28 seconds as measured by Motor Trend. In 2015, Tesla expanded its product line with Model X, the safest, quickest and most capable sport utility vehicle in history that holds 5-star safety ratings across every category from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Completing CEO Elon Musk’s “Secret Master Plan,” in 2016, Tesla introduced Model 3, a low-priced, high-volume electric vehicle that began production in 2017. Soon after, Tesla unveiled the safest, most comfortable truck ever – Tesla Semi – which is designed to save owners at least $200,000 over a million miles based on fuel costs alone. In 2019, Tesla unveiled Model Y, a mid-size SUV, with seating for up to seven, and Cybertruck, which will have better utility than a traditional truck and more performance than a sports car.
Tesla vehicles are produced at its factory in Fremont, California, and Gigafactory Shanghai. To achieve our goal of having the safest factories in the world, Tesla is taking a proactive approach to safety, requiring production employees to participate in a multi-day training program before ever setting foot on the factory floor. From there, Tesla continues to provide on-the-job training and track performance daily so that improvements can be made quickly. The result is that Tesla’s safety rate continues to improve while production ramps.
To create an entire sustainable energy ecosystem, Tesla also manufactures a unique set of energy solutions, Powerwall, Powerpack and Solar Roof, enabling homeowners, businesses, and utilities to manage renewable energy generation, storage, and consumption. Supporting Tesla’s automotive and energy products is Gigafactory 1 – a facility designed to significantly reduce battery cell costs. By bringing cell production in-house, Tesla manufactures batteries at the volumes required to meet production goals, while creating thousands of jobs.
Here are the Li ion battery solutions by Tesla Inc:
Powerwall is a home battery designed to store energy from solar or the grid, so you can use it anytime you want—at night or during an outage.
Powerwall 1
Powerwall 2
Powerwpack Series
Powerpack is a fully integrated, AC-connected energy storage system with everything needed to connect to a building or utility network. It dramatically simplifies installation, integration and future support, offering system-wide benefits that far outweigh those of standalone batteries.
Megapack
FULLY INTEGRATED SYSTEM: Megapack ships with battery modules, bi-directional inverter, thermal management system, and AC main breaker all pre-installed and pre-tested within a single enclosure. This turnkey system is designed to have the industry’s fastest, lowest cost installation without sacrificing performance or reliability.
OPTIMIZATION SOFTWARE: Proprietary optimization software, developed in parallel with the Megapack hardware, learns and predicts local energy patterns, offering autonomous charge and discharge and seamless SCADA integration. Fast-response controls can integrate co-located renewables and enable market participation.
ENHANCED SYSTEM SAFETY: Parallel DC/DC converters, integrated heating and cooling at the cell level, and dedicated hazard venting are just a few of the safety and hazard mitigation features built into Megapack. Designed to meet international safety standards, Megapack helps ensure ease-of-permitting wherever it’s installed.
INDUSTRY-LEADING RELIABILITY: A vertically integrated product from hardware design and sourcing to software development, Megapack offers significant reliability advantages over the competition. These design advantages are exemplified by a cooling system optimized specifically for Megapack that provides superior heating and cooling while factoring its HVAC energy consumption into its performance, and module-level DC/DC converters that can keep the system running uninterrupted in case of a partial failure.
LOWEST ENGINEERING, PROCUREMENT, AND CONSTRUCTION (EPC) COSTS: Megapack is shipped onsite fully assembled and pre-tested, offering customers the world’s fastest utility-scale energy storage installation. Once on site, Megapack only requires seismic anchoring and connection of AC conductors and a communication cable. The EPC benefit is clear: no other current utility-scale solution offers such a simplified process.
GLOBAL SERVICE FOOTPRINT: As a vertically integrated manufacturer and supplier, Tesla provides a streamlined service offering on all components of Megapack. With Tesla, customers enjoy a single point of contact through all stages of product life. Our operational fleet of 2+ GWh provides valuable data that informs our maintenance models and our performance guarantees, and the entire Megapack system is covered by a standard warranty of up to 15 years, with the option of a 20-year Capacity Maintenance Agreement (CMA) in certain cases.
Conclusion
The Battery Day announcements are largely in keeping with our forecast developments on EV batteries. Should Tesla fulfil all its ambitions on this front, it may catalyse faster uptake of EVs – both passenger and commercial vehicles. Success could spill over into adjacent transport sectors. For example, on the assumption of success on all fronts, Tesla will also more than achieve the critical battery density for short range electric airplanes – namely 400 Wh/kg with high cycle life. Indeed, Elon Musk recently stated this could happen within three to four years.
As we detail in our full Energy Transition Outlook report, even the rapid energy transition we forecast is not fast enough for the world to meet the ambitions of the Paris Agreement. To do so requires not only much more renewable energy, but also a great deal more energy efficiency and carbon capture and storage applied especially to those sectors where emissions are hard to abate – for example in long distance heavy transport and in industrial processes requiring high heat.
Tesla’s main impact will be through accelerating EV uptake and in advancing renewables – in other words it is pushing against an open door in tackling so-called ‘easy to abate’ sectors. Furthermore, its expansion plans are consistent with our forecast, which, as we conclude, is not fast enough.
That is not to say that Tesla will not shift the needle on the transition. But by how much is also dependent on its ability to make a material difference to the utility-level storage market, and through a second-order effect of spurring even greater expansion of renewable sources of power, such that surplus energy may become available for an earlier scaling of electrolysis based production of hydrogen than we forecast. In our view, it is too early to make a call on the long-term impact of Tesla on sectors beyond those that are easy to abate.
From a sustainability perspective, we applaud Tesla’s plans to eliminate cobalt use in batteries, and in targeting the possibility of reducing large amounts of wastewater use. We caution, however, that the world cannot simply build its way out of the climate crisis. Technology can certainly deliver the required energy transition, but only against the backdrop of bold policies and regulations accompanied by behavioural shifts towards sharing and circular economic models.