SolarCity's CTO Peter Rive on Solar Power Plus Energy Storage
SolarCity, the nation's largest residential solar installer and financier, is coupling Tesla's battery-based energy storage hardware with its rooftop solar systems.
Peter Rive, the co-founder and CTO of SolarCity, spoke at last week's Energy Storage North America conference and said that the standard offering from SolarCity could eventually include storage. Rive added that the combination of solar and storage "won't look that much different for the customer," but that "the benefit to the customer will be that you will have a little backup power."
Defecting from the grid?
A recent RMI blog post contends that "continued rapid declines in the cost of solar and the start of the same trend for storage mean that grid parity may come much sooner than previously thought -- and well within the 30-year planned economic life of typical utility investments." When asked about this report on the economics of consumers defecting from the grid, Rive had this to say: "I hope it doesn't happen. I don't think it makes sense for someone to remove themselves from the grid. If you think about the load on a circuit as opposed to an individual home, an average home on a circuit is maybe 3 kilowatts peak. But you may find that any given home will go up to 10 kilowatts at any given time. That means the battery would have to be sized to 10 kilowatts."
Comments (0)
This post does not have any comments. Be the first to leave a comment below.
Featured Product

MORNINGSTAR - ReadyEdge
The ReadyEdgeTM (RE-1) accessory is an intelligent system controlling and reporting device meant to make monitoring your solar energy system more transparent. Enabling access to LiveViewTM 2.0 and Morningstar Solar ConnectTM, ReadyEdge provides data from all compatible Morningstar devices in your system. It is designed to be paired with the three ReadyBlock options, up to six total, with the possibility to use multiple ReadyShunts and ReadyRelays. The ReadyEdge is compatible with select Morningstar products.