Tesla Energy rechargeable batteries to power your home

Elon Musk launches Tesla Energy to produce and sell rechargeable battery packs for homes and businesses to cut costs for users and smooth power demand.

Elon Musk talks a good game – as evidenced by Tesla’s remarkable share price – and he’s talking a good game with the announcement of Tesla Energy too, which promises to empower homes and businesses to take control of their energy use with rechargeable battery packs – the Tesla Powerwall.

The key to this is the ability to store self-generated power – think solar – or to store energy in the batteries from off-peak to use at peak times; you could charge your batteries overnight from a cheap off-peak rate and then use it as you want, or you could use the power you generated from solar days later when you need it instead of feeding it back to the grid when it generates as you currently have to.

It’s a very sensible move by Tesla (although it’s one also being mirrored by others, like GE and LG) which has become possible because the cost of lithium ion batteries has dropped so much. Tesla want around £2,275 for a 10kWh unit you’d hang on your garage wall, a unit that would probably have cost ten times as much just a few year ago.

Of course, there’s another reason Tesla are going this route – necessity.

Tesla are busy building a huge battery gigafactory – at a cost of some $5 billion – which is due to come on-stream in 2017. And yet, despite the hype, all Tesla has is one car on sale to use those batteries, the Model S, one more, the Model X, on the way (although it’s been on the way for a very long time) and the promise of a BMW 3 Series/Jaguar XE,/Mercedes C Class Tesla Model III EV at some point. Possibly.

That’s never going to be enough to swallow up the mountain of batteries the gigafactory will churn out, and Tesla Energy is another route for moving its products in to the market. But it’s a route paved with potential pitfalls.

It seems likely that lithium ion battery technology will be usurped at some point in the next few years by some form of liquid battery, and home hydrogen power systems are not that far off being viable. Whether Musk and Tesla Energy can react to those events when they happen – and stay viable – we’ll have to wait and see.

But for now, the Tesla home battery pack is a good move.

Source: Tesla