One of the Reasons I deduce that is within the realms of...

One of the Reasons I deduce that is within the realms of possible futures that TESLA comes for SL Vein Graphite and perhaps MRL Corporation.

Like I just posted...

"The lithium battery industry requires premium graphite and therefore brings superior prices. The high-grade Sri Lankan graphite has an advantage in this market because its reduced physical processing requirement and much higher starting TGC purity enables it to achieve a greater recovery rate than most disseminated flake graphite deposits."

Tesla has to be aware of the Properties of SL Vein and how they are going to fed into their Scaling up plans. This is why Tesla is in China...

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Tesla Energy’s goal? Changing the “energy infrastructure of the world”

Batteries could change traditional grids to make micro-grids and smart-grids possible.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2015...nging-the-energy-infrastructure-of-the-world/


A row of business-class Tesla power packs at Jackson Family Wines.
Jackson Family Wines

Tesla CEO Elon Musk formally announced last week that his electric car company will spin off a new battery business. Tesla Energy—now distinct from Tesla Motors—will manufacture lithium ion batteries for households and businesses that can be used to augment solar or wind-powered systems, or just to provide an extra layer of redundancy for customers connected to the traditional grid.

Further Reading


Tesla’s new “Powerwall” home battery will cost $3,500 for 10kWh units [Updated]

Elon Musk extols the virtues of battery power in an evening press conference.

But over the next several years, Tesla's consumer-grade batteries may not make much financial sense for households in many places around the US. Unless traditional power is very expensive in your state (as it is in Hawaii), it's likely cheaper to stay on the grid when the sun goes down every day, especially if utilities buy back excess solar from rooftop systems (as they do in California). And though consumers might want batteries to use as backup electricity, for a multi-day emergency scenario a generator can still deliver more power for less money. So what's Tesla Energy's business model?

Consumer batteries have garnered most of the media's attention, but Musk admitted in an earnings call this week that Tesla Energy's near-term target demographic is actually business and utilities. “We expect most of our stationary storage sales to be at the utility or industrial scale,” is how he phrased it.

That's where the money will be too. Musk has been clear that Tesla will manage the installation and maintenance of batteries for large businesses and utilities, but installation and maintenance on the consumer-focused Powerwall units will be handled by third-party installers. This could mean that Tesla Energy will make less on the smaller batteries.

The focus on utilities is also important if Tesla Energy wants to "fundamentally change the way the world uses energy at the terawatt scale," as Musk claimed last week when he announced the new batteries. To do that, Tesla must tackle a larger issue than consumer energy storage—it must change our traditional, aging power grid at a utility level.

Tesla’s new batteries will come with integrated management software and Internet connectivity "so we can create smart micro-grids," Musk said when explaining how this fundamental change will occur. Currently, no major US cities have utilities that operate such micro-grids outside of pilot programs, so Elon Musk's enthusiasm made us wonder: what does the micro-grid of the future look like and how might Tesla's new utility-grade batteries play a role?

The ideal grid is smaller islands

The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s (PNNL) senior staff scientist Rob Pratt says that an ideal micro-grid has a smaller collection of customers sharing multiple, local power sources—think a college campus or industrial park. This allows the micro-grid to be isolated from the larger electric grid or from neighboring micro-grids in an emergency or by design.

To Pratt, the ideal micro-grid would start using a mixture of diesel or natural gas generators and enough renewable energy sources to make the grid cleaner—or at least as clean as what we have today.

“My ideal next step is recycling waste heat from the diesel generators," Pratt said. "If you utilize the waste heat, then you’re squeezing 70 to 80 percent of the energy out of the fuel, when it’s 40 percent currently.”

With a micro-grid in place, batteries can then be introduced. If the micro-grid is powered in part by renewable energy like solar, utility-scale batteries can store some of that harvested energy to use during unfavorable conditions, just as individual households can. That would give a micro-grid operator some additional leeway, and it might help reduce the need for additional generators.

"The other thing that batteries can do is provide a buffer,” Pratt said. “Diesel generators don’t like to be running at part load; they really like to be at 70 percent output. They’re more efficient and least-polluting when they’re in that sweet spot.” During transition periods in mornings and evenings, “when it’s time to turn on another generator, but you really wish you didn’t have to,” a battery could kick in instead.

“By bringing the battery in for a while I can really keep my generators moving as efficiently as possible,” Pratt said.

In addition, a battery could help with handling very short term "frequency transients" in older rotating generators—where the generator's output will stagger for a few seconds before it can catch up to deliver the appropriate energy load. If an event like this happens, “the battery can respond so quickly, it can kick right in there and help absorb those transient events,” Pratt explained.


Enlarge / The inside of a power pack that will be sold to utilities.
Megan Geuss

To make various micro-grids talk with each other, a utility will need software. That's where companies like RTI (Real Time Innovations) come in. David Barnett, Vice President of Products and Markets for the company, said RTI is currently developing and selling analytics software to help utilities predict demand for power in real time, something that would allow a micro-grid operator to decide how much of and what kind of power to produce.

That's not a simple problem to solve. "If somebody plugs in their Tesla, that’s going to create a big drain on the grid," Barnett said, and a micro-grid would only "have tens of milliseconds to respond to that event." RTI's software mixes real-time data and predictive analytics to make sure a utility's substation doesn't get caught trying to respond to massive spikes in demand in too short of a time.

Batteries can help a micro-grid respond more quickly to such needs. "These days, most of the decisions [about power switching distribution] are made in one location," Barnett said. But with a micro-grid, "batteries [are] at the substation, so they’d be distributed around town. All the intelligence exists at the substation, and goes between the consumer and the substation," he added.

All this adds up to a new kind of electric grid that’s more efficient than the aging structure we currently have—and it could be just as environmentally-friendly, if not more so.

"Batteries can respond to counteract virtually all the transitory effects at various time scales from seasonal, to daily, to minutes and seconds, that make the grid difficult (and expensive) to manage," Pratt wrote in a follow-up e-mail to Ars.

However, batteries aren't the only new tool that can help.

Pricing energy appropriately

Flexible customer loads—such as air conditioners which can switch off their compressors for short period during periods of heavy grid use—can produce similar results.

One way utilities can create flexible consumer loads is by implementing versions of what is called demand-response pricing. With demand-response pricing, instead of paying a fixed price per unit of energy consumed, the price of electricity is variable according to the demand for it. This lets consumers choose to reduce energy usage when power is most expensive.

Currently, demand-response pricing is being refined and tested by Pratt and his researchers at PNNL, where they are working on technology to compare historical data on consumer energy use with up-to-the-minute price information on energy generation and transmission. The years-long project is the largest of its kind in the US, with participation from 11 utilities across five states.

Customers in a specific area participate in a “location-specific, 5-minute double auction to return a price to the customer’s home or building energy management system, enabling an economic decision by the consumer on when to operate the appliance or load,” according to a US Department of Energy summary sheet (PDF).

This is where the smaller, consumer-facing Powerwall from Tesla could come back into play. With a demand-response model, consumers with a home battery like Tesla’s could practice power arbitrage—filling up the battery when power is cheap and using that stored energy to power the house when it’s more expensive to buy it straight from the utility.

While consumers won't see the kind of dynamic, up-to-the minute demand-response pricing that Pratt and his team are working on for years, some private companies are implementing simpler versions of demand-response pricing. When Tesla launched its line of batteries, it listed a few utilities and utility suppliers as launch partners.

Among them was Southern California Edison, a subsidiary of Edison International, which is in contracts with Tesla and other battery providers to add 264 megawatts of storage to its power plants in the coming years. But the utility has already laid some groundwork for getting automated demand-response systems online.

In test systems deployed at a Nordstrom department store (PDF) and at a Railex distribution center (PDF), Southern California Edison set up a system where, when the grid was at peak use, the automated system would turn off some non-essential electricity running through the companies' buildings. Doing so earned the companies incentives that reduced their electricity bills at the end of the month.

Theoretically, Southern California Edison could expand such a scheme at the household level using the integrated management software on Tesla's household Powerwall batteries. During peak load periods rather than firing up a huge additional generator or power plant, the utility could simply offer a discount to homes that can run on battery power for a few hours until the grid has a chance to recover.

Tesla, managing relationships between companies and utilities

This is already happening at Jackson Family Wines, a collection of family-owned California vineyards that currently has the largest Tesla energy installation anywhere: 21 utility-grade power packs that add up to 8.4MWh (that's 8,400kWh) of power across six Northern California wineries. Julien Gervreau, Jackson Family Wines Senior Sustainability Manager, told Ars that when Tesla approached the company, the winery had already been working with Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) to implement a rudimentary demand-response strategy.


Ahh the bucolic vineyards of Northern California.
Jackson Family Wines

Starting in 2010, PG&E began a program in which it calls up a Jackson Family Wines vineyard "30 minutes to four hours" before the power plant serving that vineyard predicts its grid will face heavy loads. The vineyard voluntarily shuts down its cooling, lighting, compressed air, and water treatment systems for two to six hours in exchange for financial incentives.

"It works pretty well for us, generally speaking, because the demand-response events are all called in by 3pm, and our workday is over by then," Gervreau said, noting that farmers work early in the morning anyway.

In 2013, Tesla approached Jackson Family Wines through the vintner's electricity management software provider, EnerNOC (also a Tesla Energy partner), and pitched the idea of battery storage. Over the following two years, Tesla performed energy load analysis at the various vineyards and created a tailored system for the company, finally delivering the 21 power pack units in January and February of this year.

Currently, Jackson Family Wines uses the battery storage to perform "peak-shaving," opting to use battery-stored energy for power-intensive tasks. But Gervreau says the batteries have the software to be "smarter," and they will eventually automate the conversation that PG&E has with Jackson Family Wines on the handful of days during summer months when the power grids get overloaded.


That vintage is powered (in part) by Tesla's new business-class batteries.
Jackson Family Wines

"Tesla's really kind of managed the interrelationship," between the utility and Jackson Family Wines' new batteries, Gervreau told Ars. He noted that Tesla is even underwriting the cost of the vintner's batteries. Jackson Family Wines is splitting the amount of money it saves on its electricity bill with Tesla, which it estimates will be in the range of "hundreds of thousands of dollars annually" once all of its planned systems, plus an extensive array of solar panels, are up and running.

The final push might be the most difficult

Although micro-grids and demand-response pricing sound terrific, there is a catch. Incumbent utilities may not want to invest in more advanced schemes that make it harder for them to make money.

“That is the rub,” Pratt told Ars. “If the micro-grid is only used occasionally and only used as an emergency resource, that actually makes it easier to prevent a blackout… But if that micro-grid is operating a lot, then the grid is losing sales—significant sales.”

Similarly, as very basic demand-response systems help ease an over-burdened grid, they may be welcomed. But if demand becomes too elastic, utilities may be less willing to cooperate.

”The bottom line is regulatory restructuring of the utility business model is needed to make micro-grids not be an anathema, and some of that restructuring is underway," Pratt said.

To get to a place where utilities might voluntarily choose to set up micro-grids, regulatory agencies would have to allow utilities to set higher rates during peak demand times or find some other means to entice them to build the necessary infrastructure.

At the federal level, the Supreme Court agreed last Monday to review the legality of an Obama Administration regulation which would have required utilities to pay users to reduce energy consumption during peak hours—a type of demand-response pricing. (An appellate court threw out the rule in earlier litigation.)

Some communities are already moving in the direction of micro-grids, however. “This is really important to New York" because of Superstorm Sandy, Pratt said. “There are a number of municipalities [there] that want to take the grid into their own hands.” Earlier this month, the state of New York, through its Reforming the Energy Vision (REV) initiative, gave $500,000 to utilities serving the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus and four municipalities—Bath, Westfie, Sherburne, and the East Hampton area of Long Island—to launch feasibility studies for the construction of micro-grids.

RTI, for its part, recently launched a testbed developed in collaboration with Duke Energy, Cisco, and other companies to further its analytics software. The company "proposes re-architecting electric power grids to include a series of distributed micro-grids which will control smaller areas of demand with distributed generation and storage capacity." The test will culminate in a field deployment of smart micro-grid technology in San Antonio, Texas.

Barnett agrees that regulation has played a major role in making micro-grids the possibility that they are today.

"Definitely I see [micro-grids deploying] within five years at some utilities because there’s a lot of pressure to move to adopt distributed generation," he said. "And you can only do that if you deploy micro-grids. In some places the utilities have no option but to accommodate. Typically one thinks of utilities as a slow moving industry because they’re a regulated industry. But in this case regulatory agencies are actually pushing utilities to adopt new technology much faster than they normally would."

If that prediction is right, Tesla's bet on whole-home and utility-grade batteries may prove a lucrative; it'd be aided by regulatory agencies eager to move beyond the aging and vulnerable traditional power grid.

At last week's event, though, Musk made clear that his sights aren't set just on the US. "The goal is complete transformation of the entire energy infrastructure of the world,” the CEO said to fervent applause.

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The Nature of SL Vein itself makes me speculate that Tesla could show up in Sri Lanka even as soon as next year.

I don't think MRL Corporation will be able to sell it fast enough in my opinion.




Kind Regards

To Make Mistakes is Easy !!!
Could be 100% Wrong !!!
To Err is Human !!!
DYOR !!!