A company created to build battery-operated cars is now expanding into battery-operated homes and, if Tesla chief Elon Musk wins his battle to electrify the carbon-based world, battery-operated everything. Starting later this year, a new Tesla company called Tesla Energy will market a 10-kWh, $3500 wall-mounted battery called the Powerwall, and will also launch a line of refrigerator-sized industrial batteries that are scalable up to sizes large enough to power whole neighborhoods. If all goes to plan, Tesla’s new Gigafactory in Reno, Nevada, will be cranking these new products out en masse next year when it opens for business.
“The issue with existing batteries is that they suck,” said Musk at a glossy debut at Tesla’s Hawthorne, California, design studio in front of hundreds of people. “They’re expensive, ugly, and stinky.” With its sleek design, compact dimensions, and availability in different colors, the lithium-ion Powerwall takes a page from Apple in its transformation of an industrial product into a home fashion accessory.
Musk’s vision is for homeowners to become their own solar-power stations and thus replace the current coal- and natural-gas-dependent electric grid with a solar one. Hence, Tesla intends the 400-volt Powerwall to be used with solar panels (which Musk conveniently markets under his Solar City brand), or in place of a home generator during outages. With solar panels, an accompanying battery pack can power a house through the night or at other times when the sun is hiding.
Based on its size, a single Powerwall unit can run a typical American house for about eight hours, according to statistics from the Energy Information Agency which state that the average American house needs around 30 kWh per day. However, the Powerwall is also designed to be ganged together with others to produce up to 90 kWh, in case you’re running a marijuana farm in your basement.
Tesla’s new batteries use the same basic lithium-ion chemistry as the substantially larger ones at use in the Model S sedan, which currently range from 70 to 85 kWh. However, Musk said there are changes in the control software and chemical makeup due to a home battery’s different duty cycles. The Powerwall is self-cooling, has an integrated DC-DC voltage converter that can feed to your solar panel’s existing DC-AC inverter, and connects to the internet. Why you’d want your home battery connected wasn’t specified—we imagine its so you can keep tabs on its operating status, level of charge, etc., from afar—but creating a relatively simple, intelligent, plug-and-play unit that would look handsome on a garage wall was the goal. The Powerwall can even charge your Tesla Model S, although not for very long unless you buy multiple units.
Tesla Energy eventually sees its 100-kWh batteries being grouped together to scale to create power systems of capacities from 500kWh to more than 10MWh.
Musk figures the typical Powerwall buyer will likely lease the batteries, which will be available from independent distributors rather than Tesla dealerships. Production starts this year at Tesla’s Fremont, California, plant, but significant volumes won’t be available until the Gigafactory starts up in 2016, Musk says.
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