Tesla has finally taken the wraps off Tesla Energy, its
ambitious battery system that can work for homes, businesses, and even
utilities. The system breaks down into two separate products: the
Powerwall is a home battery system, that comes in a 10 kWh version for
$3,500, or a 7 kWh model for $3,000, excluding installation and the
inverter. The unit is about three feet by four feet in size and six
inches thick, and comes with integrated heat management and can fit
either on the inside or outside of the wall of your home. The system is
connected to the internet — Elon Musk said that the system can be used
to create "smart microgrids" — and can be used as a redundancy system,
or potentially allow a home to go off the power grid entirely. "The
whole thing is a system that just works," Musk told reporters during a
briefing this evening.
The big brother of the Powerwall is what Musk and his team are
calling Powerpack — and it's where things get really interesting. They
describe it as an "infinitely scalable system" that can work for
businesses, in industrial applications, and even public utility
companies, that comes in 100 kWh battery blocks that can scale from 500
kWH all the way up to 10 MWh and higher. "Our goal here is to change the
way the world uses energy at an extreme scale."
Musk's ambitions with the battery are tremendous. He opened the press
event by invoking climate change, and saying that it's "within the
power of humanity" to change the way we produce and use power. He went
on to say that he sees the Gigafactory under construction in Nevada as a
product, the first of many. With 160 million Powerpacks, we could power
the United States, he said, and with 2 billion, the world. The entire
presentation and party, Musk said, was powered by stored solar energy.
While the system is being announced today, Powerwall has been testing
for a year, and has already been on sale to select customers. For the
Powerpack system, Tesla will start taking orders later this year and
then really ramp up production as Tesla's battery-building Gigafactory
comes online.
Tesla has been teasing the new system for months now, with Elon Musk casually referencing it on a call with investors last February and then hyping the new product line directly on Twitter
last month. Tesla's invite for today's event was entitled "The Missing
Piece," and it many ways that's what Tesla Energy is for the company's
electric cars. Charging an electric vehicle at home can be expensive,
and while solar power offers a way to reduce those costs when the sun
goes down owners have had no choice to charge their vehicles with power
from the grid. A robust home battery system like Powerwall could allow
owners to store that solar-generated power during the day even if
they're away, and then use it to charge their vehicle at night.
Batteries can absorb surplus power and flow it back into the grid when
needed, evening out supply and demand, something called load shifting.
But the implications for Tesla's own cars is just the beginning. The event was powered by stored solar energy
As more electricity is generated from
renewable but intermittent sources like solar and wind, demand for
storage is going to go up — batteries can absorb surplus power and flow
it back into the grid when needed, evening out supply and demand. That's
why states like California with aggressive renewable energy mandates
are demanding utilities add storage capacity too.
Right now most storage is being added at the utility level or to
businesses, which are subject to higher prices when demand is high. But
energy analyst GTM
believes residential storage is about to boom as well, representing
almost half of the storage market by 2019, and driving the transition to
a more decentralized grid. Tesla and SolarCity, run by Musk's cousin
Lyndon Rive, have been positioning themselves
to take advantage of this space. SolarCity has been running a pilot
program that pairs its panels with Tesla batteries, and Musk, who sits
on SolarCity's board, says that every SolarCity unit will come with a
battery within five to ten years, and that the combined systems will
drive the price of solar below that of natural gas.
While Musk has been known for pushing ideas that can seem very
bleeding edge, in this case he underscored what a practical, immediate
solution Tesla Energy can provide. "This is a feasible thing," he said.
"It’s very important to appreciate that."
UPDATE: SolarCity tells Bloomberg that
a 9-year-lease for the 10kWh Powerwall costs $5,000, including
installation, maintenance, inverter, and control system. Buying the
system upfront costs $7,140.
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