I think each powerwall can draw 5 kW continuous and 7 kW peak.
> A PowerWall has a 10 year lifespan, where they guarantee that batteries will have 70% capacity or better during that time. I take this to mean you'll need to size for a 30% capacity drop, and plan for battery replacement in 10 years.
Well, it has a 10 year warranty, not life span. Yes, for sure there will be some degradation with time (although for my car, a Model S, I'm surprised that after close to 5 years and 25K miles I barely "lost" 1% of range). It depends on how you draw and charge.
> Does your loan factor in installation costs, which can be significant?
I believe it does, and also includes the rebates/credits. But you can answer those questions yourself by going to their website and doing a "pretend order" - that'll give you a bunch of knobs to play with and see the various options between buy cash vs loan.
> Since the goal is to reduce the chance of fire, what would the probability of starting a fire be with thousands of powerwalls installed all over the place be in comparison?
Well, the goal isn't just to reduce the chance of fire: it's also to offer availability at reasonable cost.
Some will also like the "independence" aspect of it, like "stick it to the man" - but that isn't particularly important to me.
But back to your probability question, I frankly have no idea. I imagine we'll learn it from deployments, like we are learning about "spontaneous fires" that have been happening with electrical cars.
It's certainly a tradeoff, but one of the interesting things about this technology is that a hot environment is generally the time when you can produce good energy with the panels, which you can use to cool the infrastructure that needs cooling (batteries for example).
That being said, there is no 100% safe system. We're dealing with Kilowatts of power moving across a bunch of lines, so we have to be humble and realize we can't control everything to a zero risk environment.
What we can do, however, is measure, learn, and get it safer iteration after iteration.
What do you mean by that? The amount you can draw from the power walls?
This page has a chart with specs that cover this: https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/tesla-powerwall-2/
I think each powerwall can draw 5 kW continuous and 7 kW peak.
> A PowerWall has a 10 year lifespan, where they guarantee that batteries will have 70% capacity or better during that time. I take this to mean you'll need to size for a 30% capacity drop, and plan for battery replacement in 10 years.
Well, it has a 10 year warranty, not life span. Yes, for sure there will be some degradation with time (although for my car, a Model S, I'm surprised that after close to 5 years and 25K miles I barely "lost" 1% of range). It depends on how you draw and charge.
> Does your loan factor in installation costs, which can be significant?
I believe it does, and also includes the rebates/credits. But you can answer those questions yourself by going to their website and doing a "pretend order" - that'll give you a bunch of knobs to play with and see the various options between buy cash vs loan.
> Since the goal is to reduce the chance of fire, what would the probability of starting a fire be with thousands of powerwalls installed all over the place be in comparison?
Well, the goal isn't just to reduce the chance of fire: it's also to offer availability at reasonable cost.
Some will also like the "independence" aspect of it, like "stick it to the man" - but that isn't particularly important to me.
But back to your probability question, I frankly have no idea. I imagine we'll learn it from deployments, like we are learning about "spontaneous fires" that have been happening with electrical cars.
It's certainly a tradeoff, but one of the interesting things about this technology is that a hot environment is generally the time when you can produce good energy with the panels, which you can use to cool the infrastructure that needs cooling (batteries for example).
That being said, there is no 100% safe system. We're dealing with Kilowatts of power moving across a bunch of lines, so we have to be humble and realize we can't control everything to a zero risk environment.
What we can do, however, is measure, learn, and get it safer iteration after iteration.