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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKORsrlN-2k

When their NV factory comes online and they start producing in volume so that prices come down further, would this be a great way to supplement power needs for mining?

I am watching the video now.

I have to say Elon Musk never fails to impress. Always coming up with awesome ideas.

He's is the only entrepreneur I would trust 100%.

Would be interesting to see if miners will pick this technology up.

need more details his power pack holds 10kwatt for 8 hours of work

so if you run 4kwatts of miners  it should last 14-18 hours.  and your sunup is 10 to 14 hours.

very rough estimate would be 1 pack would let you run 4kwatts for 24/7

it cost 3500 usd. not count panels and or install cost.  I could not find the warranty.


10 cent power  4 kwatts  an hour is 10 cents x 100 = 10 dollars a day or 300 dollars per month or 3600 dollars a year.

Panels last long most everything lasts long.  except batteries.  if this has a 5 year rock solid warranty

It could work for miners.  If the warranty is 2 years I do not think it is good.

It's probably not a great improvement if you already have some solar powered miners.
And if you don't, the only use I can find for it is to take profit of the low rates of electricity to charge the powerwall and power miners from it when you should have paid peak rates.
As for many things, I don't think investing in it for mining purpose alone can give some kind of ROI, but if you plan to use it to power you entire house, running 1000w of miners off it can help getting back some money.

The powerpack should be a better choice for mining, but I believe its cost won't allow any kind of ROI as long as it'll be used for mining purpose only.

it's 10 years warranty, but you probably misread the kwh thing (or I did)
it's 10kwh, 2kw continuous, 3.3kw peak, so 2kw for 5 hours

http://www.teslamotors.com/powerwall

They also have other larger units which may be cheaper that connecting a bunch of 10K units in parallel.

yes, it's the powerpack, but I'm not sure the price/kwh will be much better.
the lithium batteries are probably making 80% of the final price.

And you are limited to 9x 10kw powerwall linked together acting as one 90kw power source.
I'll do a small xls spreadsheet to check how long it'll take to ROI if I'd use one at home to charge during the night (low rate during 8 hours) and discharge during peak rate hours.
Don't forget you'll need to buy an inverter to power your house with this powerwall. It's outputing DC current.

The answer is probably never. If we're talking $350/KWh currently, lets make up 'trade sized' unit for $200/KWh. So to run even just an Antminer S5 overnight its a $1200 investment just for the power storage. Now given they have 10 year warranties, and ignoring any degradation, we could say this unit will power 15 S5's or similar over its 10 year lifespan.

Investment per S5 is now $120 for the storage, nevermind the solar system or the inverter. If someone wants to take the analysis forwards then by all means.

This isn't interesting right now, but as the factory comes online and prices come down (we don't know by how much obviously) due to mass production it will be... Many options become interesting... You could charge up at night when it's 2 cents on a smart meter and mine during peak times from the packs then switch to the grid etc... Other options become interesting as well.  I find it useful from the perspective of footprint as well... 

If we assume:

• 2c at night
• 10c during the day
• 10KWh capacity
• 10 year warranty
• no performance degradation
• no additional hardware required
• we max it out every day for 10 years

Then we 'save' $0.80 a day, $292 a year, $2920 over the lifetime. With current small units @ $3500 per 10KWh, its possible. How common are dual tariffs with such cheap night prices and normal day prices? In the UK we get higher day prices when lower high prices, which for mining even with storage doesn't get close to just a 'lowish' single tariff?

What DC output voltage are we talking about? It might be interesting to hack power supplies to bypass active PFC and feed high-voltage DC directly into the main switchnodes. That'd give a decent conversion efficiency boost over using AC, especially 120V into KW-grade PSUs.

I'm not sure I'm understanding what everyone's raving about.

Is this anything more than an expensive battery in a nice case?

I'm in the same boat right now not understanding....watching the video now.

http://www.wired.com/2015/05/get-tesla-home-battery-let-physics-explain/?mbid=nl_050115
Keep in mind, this is the first model... In a few yrs, price should be half with the factory running full steam.

Cheaper per amp hour more likely after the  factory starts being built. Although you wouldn't see savings unless you're a massive farm compared to  grid prices for electricity and you would have to pay more upfront to see savings in 5 to 10 years with solar. Very risky today but soon enough it will be  standard.

Voltage
350 – 450 volts

so it's probably similar to a pack of 110 li-ion cells serial linked, if you assume 18650 cells @2.2kw


it's more or less that, a "nice" battery, but it's "large" and easily available. For those who need batteries for their solar/wind system, they may be something interesting, and easier to setup than the good old heavy lead batteries.
I don't know how is the price compared to the lead batteries with deep discharge needed.

What I'm more worrying about is the fact that li-ion cell are usually good for 5 years before they slowly die.

Lot longer than 5 years lifepo4.

https://plus.google.com/+DacianTodea

interesting, with it was a bit cheaper.  May be some area, someone could qualify for the government rebate or tax rebate or some kind of comp or investment tax write offs and use it for multi-purpose to get best ROI

30 percent rebates in New Jersey, but I think that ends this year.

Cool, so then the people that don't have 'em can help you pay for yours.

Difficulty will rise to compensate for the drop in electricity price

Who is paying for electricity powered by Coal/Nuclear? You are US taxpayers. Dollar for Dollar getting people use solar is best bang for the buck and will eventually reduce the dependency on Coal and Nuclear etc. likely leading to your taxes going to something like roads or education as opposed to cleaning up coal pollution or nuclear decommissioning. Think outside the 'faux' libertarian corporate designed and built box.

Lung disease?
Cancer?
Subsidies for non-renewables?
Devastation to ecosystems?

All of the above and more.

This whole 'concept' is a sideshow. Unless you live in the tropics, solar is not viable unless it's heavily subsidised. To buy a 4kW panel at trade prices is still nearly 1,700 dollars, that does'nt include the inverter and other electronics and that price won't  fall much in the near future. Read this article:

www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2015/05/01/why-teslas-powerwall-is-just-another-toy-for-rich-green-people/

Storing energy in a battery isn't energy efficient, end to end you will be lucky to get 70%.

What would be much more efficient, if a little tricky, would be driving an asic at 0.6V directly from a solar cell. It's a diode, remember? ...... No power supplies, no DC - DC, no power factor. Trouble is, no sunshine at night, and lots of supercapacitors needed for low voltage storage.

Viable in Saskatchewan. Plenty of sun and wind to make a DIY system off grid. It has been done for home power.

http://electrodacus.com/

http://www.youtube.com/user/electrodacus

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxZF8J7wrww

http://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/3-2V-50Ah-LiFePO4-battery-GBS_60022436969.html

Guys doing it right now and not in the tropics as Saskatchewan has a lot of sun cloud free days.

For mining though? Now doubtful I would agree.

Solar mining doesn't make sense unless you have access to millions of dollars and do a grid tied system and get the system so cheap that the economy of scale would give you less cost per kilowatt hour even with the battery system very doubtful.

It's TESLA, its solar powered, miners can start dreaming for free electricity ^^

Interesting idea, although it'll probably take years until consumers can enjoy the benefits.

Maybe but someone need to do the first step!  ;)

I just don't like tax subsidies for pretty much anything. I know the government likes to step in on things it deems necessary but not economically viable (research grants and whatnot), but too much economic meddling in individual lives ends up screwing everyone in some way - either by overtaxing or overdependence. I have no problems at all with the idea of renewable energy sources. That said, I also have no problems with nuclear power. Well, that's not true - I have a problem with the US political grumblings keeping us running on 40-year-old reactor technology when every other country has developed cleaner, safer and more continuously operable reactors. I wouldn't mind seeing actual good and currently available nuclear as a holdover between relatively immediate decomissioning of coal plants and the development of not just a better renewables infrastructure but a better grid infrastructure as a whole. There's a lot of good options and it sucks that the primary ones available to most US residents are the worst and the almost-worst.

Solar is so last year.... Dilithium is the future.  This way we will "live long and prosper". ;D

I agree to some of that.

Personally the future is not nuclear or coal obviously given the problems with both is waste.

Solar if it were given the same subsidies or oil, coal and nuclear had their subsidies removed would mean a huge shift to Solar / Wind / CO2 capture.

It can either be government subsidies or through government closing the loopholes. Either way things won't change appreciably because of the feed trough is set up for coal, oil and nuclear companies not for solar or wind etc.

Tesla got huge tax breaks to break ground on its battery plant. The right move? Keeps jobs in US and cutting edge jobs certainly. There is a lot of fat and waste in the US budget particularly for military spending far in excess of any solar rebates which are minimal. Minimal compare to coal, oil and nuclear subsidization that is now entrenched in US Budgets.

http://priceofoil.org/fossil-fuel-subsidies/

The future is pretty much coal or natural gas until most of you get to pension age.

Read this if you can get access to a copy: "The Carbon Crunch: How we're getting Climate Change Wrong - and how to fix it" by Dieter Helm.

A lot of it will make your blood boil (especially about renewables and the subsidies they get), but if you're interested in the future of energy generation it gives very good insights.

Bit off topic here, sorry.

Solar makes all the sense, it's simply there, everyday for the taking. What we are missing still is high conversion efficiency panels.  I do believe this will be solved in the near future and energy production will be decentralized at that point.

 The Sustainocene: era of personalized energy: Daniel Nocera at TEDxCaFoscariU (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u92O8LSkezY)

Decentralized is the key. If you can power your car and home all OFF GRID, which you can do now almost at par with Grid costs over the lifespan of the solar installation, then the debate over the need for coal or nuclear ends and the water issue would 'evaporate' as well especially with regards to fossil fuel exploration and production.

Imagine solar that produces hydrogen directly and you have cracked part of the dependencies on heavy and costly batteries. Where this will happen is in the 'developing' world not in the US at first.

This would be ideal for mining as well in small decentralized ways then you can make cheaper abundant miners that in totality out mine all the megafarms. Just need to make small cheap miners available to millions. The only people that are working on that challenge right now are Gekkoscience... support that project. There is a potential for a complete reversal of the centralization of mining if you have cheap personalized energy and cheap personalized miners that are in the hands of everyone.

Efficiencies for Solar will improve given newer materials and these could implemented rather quickly into solar cell production. The future for solar is now not later.

 Nature Photonics 8, 506–514 (2014) doi:10.1038/nphoton.2014.134
Received 10 February 2014
Accepted 12 May 2014
Published online 27 June 2014 (http://www.nature.com/nphoton/journal/v8/n7/full/nphoton.2014.134.html)


http://isic.epfl.ch/files/content/sites/isic/files/images/news/2013/Graetzel_Cell-efficiencies.jpg

But if you still don't like Tesla's Power Wall for all your power needs... why not throw in some Hydrogen.

 Cheap hydrogen fuel from the sun – without rare metals (http://actu.epfl.ch/news/cheap-hydrogen-fuel-from-the-sun-without-rare-meta/)