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

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Good decision. The barriers to electric car use are basically low uptake and a lack of charging points, because nobody needs charging points, because nobody has an electric car, because there's nowhere to charge them.

And we're soon going to have way too much solar power generated at times of days when we don't need it, so I can imagine a future where it's really cheap to charge your car up at mid-day. Take some of that peak load out the system.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Plausible - mass electric storage is still incredibly difficult, using things like artificial lakes pumped up when there is spare generator capacity, run down when there's a lot of load. Spreading a lot of it to cars would help.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

I was reading something the other day about how they've already got this problem with massive over supply from solar panels during the days in... sunnier countries than ours. And that they're now refusing to hook any more up to national grids because there is a danger of blowing out systems because there is just too much.

And of course it all vanishes when people go home from work when the capacity is really needed.

But I thought it was interesting that some countries have already reached saturation point, and they're refusing to hook up any more solar.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

There's still people out there giving away free solar panels - my house probably qualifies, the problem is I'm not the sole owner so organising it would be complicated.

[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.