Another Tesla caught on fire while sitting in a Toronto garage
By Linette Lopez From Business Insider
Earlier this month, a Tesla Model S sitting in a Toronto garage ignited and caught on fire. The car was about four months old and was not plugged in to an electric socket, says a source.
Fires are a touchy issue for the company, which reports Q4 2013 earnings on February 19th.
Last year, three vehicles caught fire over the course of six weeks. The company has previously pointed out in a government filing that the lithium ion battery cells “have been observed to catch fire or vent smoke and flame.” So the fires have raised concerns with consumers and caused a flurry in the media — so much so that CEO Elon Musk has addressed the coverage of these fires himself.
This latest fire occurred after the owner came home from a drive and left the car parked in the garage. After a few moments, the owner’s fire detector went off and the fire department was called. Though the fire was intense, the firemen were able to put it out quickly. They also had to remove the other car in the garage, a Lexus, which was parked next to the Tesla.
Tesla confirmed that the fire occurred and sent Business Insider the following statement:
“Dealing with occasional fires is something that every car company has to do, as no vehicle is completely fireproof under all circumstances. What matters is the number of such incidents per car, and it is worth noting that gasoline car companies experience an average of five to ten times more fires per car than Tesla. Also extremely important is the fact that there has never been a serious injury or death in a Model S as a result of a fire or any other cause. The Model S continues to have the best safety track record of any vehicle in the world. In this particular case, we don’t yet know the precise cause, but have definitively determined that it did not originate in the battery, the charging system, the adapter or the electrical receptacle, as these components were untouched by the fire.”
Shortly after the fire, seven Tesla employees visited the owner of the vehicle. The company also offered to take care of the damages and inconvenience caused by the fire, but the owner declined
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How Tesla batteries are powering an energy revolution
By Todd Woody for The Atlantic From Mashable
Those Tesla Motors lithium-ion battery packs aren’t just powering electric luxury sports sedans for the 1% any more.
They’ve started appearing in a small number of California homes to store electricity generated by rooftop solar panels, and beginning today SolarCity, the Silicon Valley solar installer, will start providing Tesla batteries for businesses that want to cut their utility bills. A big box retailer like Walmart could charge up a Tesla battery pack with cheap energy produced by its SolarCity rooftop photovoltaic array and then tap that power when demand — and electricity rates — spike.
That would let them minimize paying their local utility high “demand charges” for electricity when they need it most. And the cost of the SolarCity’s system, called DemandLogic, effectively zero, according to SolarCity, since the monthly payments for energy storage would be less than the money saved by not forking over cash to the utility.
And if that sounds like a threat to century-old monopoly utilities, it is. “Our business model is to become the energy company of the 21st century,” “Our business model is to become the energy company of the 21st century,” SolarCity chief executive Lyndon Rive told The Atlantic. “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.”
For now, though, it’s only a minor threat to utilities that levy high demand charges, such as those in California and parts of Massachusetts and Connecticut where SolarCity is offering DemandLogic. And to get the Tesla battery pack you have to sign up for a solar array, which means only businesses with low-rise buildings and flat roof — retailers, corporate campuses — can take advantage of going solar.
But the trend is clear. Another Silicon Valley company, Stem, has begun installing 54-kilowatt-per-hour lithium-ion battery packs for corporate customers, allowing them to store electricity from the grid when rates are low and use that power when demand charges spike.
While Stem is a startup, the utilities should be particularly wary of SolarCity and its partnership with Tesla Motors. (Tesla chief executive Elon Musk serves as SolarCity’s chairman and is Rive’s cousin.) Tesla and SolarCity’s combined market cap — $21.3 billion — exceeds that of the parent companies of Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison, the two big California utilities whose customers Rive covets.
And SolarCity is pioneering the securitization of solar — giving it the ability to dip into a potentially vast pool of capital by packaging leases for photovoltaic systems into asset-backed notes that are sold to pension funds, hedge funds and other deep-pocketed investors.
Rive says DemandLogic should save commercial customers 20% in demand charges. The system’s algorithms constantly monitor electricity supply and demand, charging and discharging the battery to minimize drawing expensive electricity from the power grid. The size of the battery pack will be customized for each business but would be able to store roughly 30% of the electricity generated by the solar array. And the Tesla batteries provide backup power if the grid goes down in an earthquake or storm — a key selling point as climate change spawns increasingly powerful hurricanes and tornadoes.
While energy-storage systems would cut utilities’ revenues, they would also help them balance supply and demand on the grid as increasing amounts of renewable but intermittent electricity are generated by wind and solar farms.
Lithium-ion batteries remain expensive, and Rive and SolarCity spokesman Jonathan Bass was sketchy on the details on how the economics pencil out when providing energy storage to customers for no money down.
But growing economies of scale are in SolarCity and Tesla’s favor. “In places with high costs of electricity, I think you’ll see up to 50% of solar systems will have energy storage,” says Rive.
“The economics and scale that Tesla has achieved in the automotive market now make stationary energy storage more cost effective and reliable than it has ever been in the past,” JB Straubel, Tesla’s chief technical officer and co-founder, said in a statement. “We expect this market to grow very rapidly now that we have crossed this economic threshold.”
Image: Flickr, ScaarAT
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