We knew how visionary Elon Musk has been, all those cool Tesla Electric cars, the even cooler Falcon rockets manufactured by Musk’s SpaceX (world’s only commercial space flight company), and the even more cooler Mars One project. Today, re-assuring once again, his futuristic vision for the human race, Musk unveiled Tesla Energy, a new commercial arm of Tesla aimed at cutting off our electrical dependence on grids.
And the first product to come out of Tesla’s energy arm, is the $3000 priced Powerwall. Designed to allow you to run your home entirely on Solar Energy, The Tesla Powerwall is a rechargeable lithium-ion battery designed to store energy at a residential level for load shifting, backup power and self-consumption of solar power generation.
The Powerwall consists of Tesla’s lithium-ion battery pack, liquid thermal control system and software that receives dispatch commands from a solar inverter. The unit mounts seamlessly on a wall and is integrated with the local grid to harness excess power and give customers the flexibility to draw energy from their own reserve.
The battery can provide a number of different benefits to the customer including:
- Load shifting – The battery can provide financial savings to its owner by charging during low rate periods when demand for electricity is lower and discharging during more expensive rate periods when electricity demand is higher
- Increasing self-consumption of solar power generation – The battery can store surplus solar energy not used at the time it is generated and use that energy later when the sun is not shining
- Back-up power – Assures power in the event of an outage
The Powerwall Home Battery increases the capacity for a household’s solar consumption, while also offering backup functionality during grid outages (Please launch this India at the earliest !!).
The Powerwall is available in 10kWh, optimized for backup applications or 7kWh optimized for daily use applications. Both can be connected with solar or grid and both can provide backup power.
And like any other battery stack, the Powerwalls can be stacked up too. Up to 9 Powerwalls can be stacked up together to create a strong and reliable power source.
However, it isn’t just your home which Musk wants to get off the Power Grid. He believes that 160 million battery packs could “transition” power usage in the U.S. to renewable energy, while 900 million units could shift the entire world’s energy needs.
So is it really that scalable ? Well, as of now, we don’t know, and frankly it is beyond the scope of understanding of common people. However, Musk believes he can scale it to the level he talks about, and looking at the revolution which Tesla motors and SpaceX have already brought, it isn’t too hard to believe that Tesla Energy is probably the energy revolution this generation has been craving for.
