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A comment on Tesla's giant battery saved $40M during its first year, report says. Parent comment

Re:Tesla's giant battery saved $40M during its first year, r... by benj111 on Thursday December 06, 2018 @11:37AM (#18619511)
By "that quickly" I was thinking orders of magnitude per year. This would have been competitive at 4 times the price. Depending on the details it might have been competitive at 10 times the (battery) price.

Was the decision taken years ago? This is the 100 days or free battery. But yes I accept the power companies may have been slow. But still it isn't just Australia that was slow, its the US, Germany, Denmark, the world.

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Re:Tesla's giant battery saved $40M during its first year, r... by pixl97 on Thursday December 06, 2018 @01:13PM (#18620530)
>This would have been competitive at 4 times the price.

Not exactly.

Australia's high prices were not due to a technology failure, but a regulatory one. The power generators were manipulating the market causing extremely high peak prices, and essentially being allowed to get away with it. Most other countries don't allow the market to wildly fluctuate so much, so the payback is far longer. Think decades and not years.

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Re:Tesla's giant battery saved $40M during its first year, r... by benj111 on Thursday December 06, 2018 @01:37PM (#18620743)
4 * $66m = $264m / $40m = 6.5 ish years payback.

Not many investments offer that rate of return.

You may be right to suggest it may not be competitive in other locations though. I don't know.

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Re:Tesla's giant battery saved $40M during its first year, r... by singhrac on Thursday December 06, 2018 @12:13PM (#18619893)
He's right. Unless this was a media stunt for Elon's benefit (and it really doesn't look that way), the decision was made in a few days and the turnaround was 100 days: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/840032197637685249?s=20
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