Watch Elon Musk announce Tesla Energy – Great keynote speech
It’s interesting how Elon and Tesla can make technology simple, sexy and maybe even funny. Of course the technology to go off-grid or have a grid-tied solar system at your house isn’t new but it’s pretty complex compared to Teslas new Powerwall system. They’ve simplified things and made it accessible to people who aren’t solar power nerds like myself. You don’t have to know how it works you just have to hang this PowerWall on your wall, to stop using fossil fuels to produce your homes electricity. They’re also marketing this as a device to save you money on power. Even if you don’t have solar panels they claim you can cut your power bill to 25% of your current bill by selecting when to use your electricity. The battery is smart so it can charge during off peak usage times when power is cheaper. Then your home can draw off it during the day when power is expensive.
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.”
Ya this is way to expensive for our cabin too. I think it’s meant for your main dwelling to power your whole house and look pretty doing it. Also power costs more for Californians than up in the PNW so the pay back time would be longer here.
This is a very interesting concept, but the price is higher than our current battery system. But with any new technology, prices do come down over time. By next year we do need to replace our original batteries from 10 years ago. We’ll keep it in mind. – Margy