On Thursday, June 28, 2012 12:30:42 AM UTC-4, thumper wrote:
On 6/27/2012 11:59 AM, wrote:

Being an electronics guy, I thought about inveters... just wondered if you could scale one up enought to power 200 homes, as he says his ultimate big battery will do. Assuming 200 amps per house, that's 40,000 amps. That's one hell of an inverter. And another big heat source, even with the high efficiency.

Why do it all in one place? The inverters could be distributed and
tailored to smaller loads.

The presentation was talking about hooking this "to the grid", which implies a single connection point. You could distribute the DC then supply smaller loads, but now you'd have a single point of failure for those small loads, and you'd have the addition issue of the DC distribution. If you retain the present connection to the AC grid at each smaller load point (for redundancy), now you have two completely different distribution systems. We're quickly pricing this technology out of the realm of possibility.