Tesla patents news

[ffutures]

Interesting news gacked from sjgames - Tesla Motors have just announced what appears to be the equivalent of going open source with their patents. Suspect that you still have to pay royalties for their commercial use, of course, but it's an interesting development. No doubt others who know more about the legal situation will have more to say about this.

http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you

Comments

[nojay.livejournal.com]

The problem is that the consumer-end infrastructure, from the grid to the home is not designed to transmit power up the ladder into the main backbone grid, it's a one-way street. A few folks with solar and/or wind in a neighbourhood can contribute to the local power "net" to some extent to reduce total consumption but if the neighbourhood's consuming, say, 1 MW and home solar in that net is overprovisioned to the point where on a good day it's pumping 2MW in then that's going to be a problem. It can blow breakers, damage wiring, maybe even cause fires. It would cost a lot of money to rebuild the local distribution systems to cope with this. The alternative would be to limit solar and home generation which contributes to the "net" or allow the suppliers to disable individual generators on some sort of round-robin schedule when supply exceeds demand. This will not be popular since everyone wants free money.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

It strikes me as yet another one of the ways in which the government did not think through this home-generation levy scheme.