We here at CEG/CESA have been touting the growing market for solar combined with electricity storage for a while now.  But apparently when Morgan Stanley says something, people listen. The multinational financial services corporation set off a minor furor in the investment world when it published a neat bit of research titled “Clean Tech, Utilities & Autos; Batteries + Distributed Gen. May Be a Negative for Utilities.”  The main conclusion of the report – “utility customers may be positioned to eliminate their use of the power grid” – sparked a flurry of discussion about the “disruptive technology” that is the marriage of PV and battery storage. What’s new about this is the recent announcement by Tesla that it plans to build a $5 billion “gigawatt scale” battery manufacturing plant somewhere in the southwestern U.S., a plant that the company projects will produce more lithium-ion batteries than the entire global supply for 2013, while halving per-unit costs.... Read the Full Post »