Telsa PowerWall and Power Pack Launched
Normally, we don’t cover tech news that much – since there is so much going on, and its often not that exciting. But wow. Elon musk smashed it today at the launch of the Tesla PowerWall and PowerPack.
A quick summary for those who don’t like reading,
Tesla PowerWall – Home use battery pack to be used with solar panels. The starting price, for a single battery cell is $3,500 (plus solar panels). Each cell is 10kWh (kilo-watt hours).
Tesla PowerPack – Industrial use power racks (like server racks) which use 10 or more cells from the home use version, to have around 100kWh of power per rack.
Now, onto the longer stuff. If you just want to watch the keynote, the video is at the bottom of this article – but we do have some more information available as well, so please do read on!
Musk starts off by defining the problem. We have an exponential increase in CO2 in our atmosphere, and it is slowly killing us. The first step is getting solar panels everywhere – something he illustrated in the image below. I roughly approximated (with some google maps work and a bit of holding fingers to screens) that the blue square below, representing all the solar panels the USA needs to be fully sufficient in its energy creation, to be around 100Km square (100km x 100km) – and therefore can guess the red dot in the middle which represents the space taken by all the batteries you’d need, is roughly 10km square (10km x 10km). In my eyes, that really isn’t much space! I’d bet more space is taken up by coal and nuclear power (not that I’m fully against nuclear power – a thorium reactor for example is much more efficient, much less dangerous and a lot less wasteful).
Musk’s solution to the problem, if you haven’t guessed already, is for everyone to buy a PowerWall. He states that the patents for the Gigafactory project will be made free, which is awesome, and will allow people to be able to make similar products to the PowerWall. He says the PowerWall is very safe, efficient and is designed to work ‘out of the box’. He described the current state of batteries as ‘Expensive, unreliable, ugly, stinky, and pretty much bad in every way’, which is a pretty damn good point – especially if you were to look at something like Toyota’s Prius Battery.. God that is ugly, unsafe and terrible!
After a rather cool animation, Musk officially announced the PowerWall, a 10kWh, wall mounted battery designed for home use – to work in conjunction with solar panels on roofs. If 10kWh seems a little low for you, you can buy multiple PowerWalls, up to 9, and link them together to get up to 90kWh total – which is pretty insane! Oh and by the way, it costs $3,500. Wow. How much do you spend in energy a year? A couple hundred pounds? What about never paying for it again? Not bad eh? Also, this protects you from outages in the grid, and if you’re building a new house, you won’t need to pay for the electricity lines to be run in, this would allow you to power your house, car (Telsa of course.. 😉 ) and possibly even heating!
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Now, onto the PowerPack. This is an ‘infinitely scalable solution’, where each unit is 100kWh, but can be infinitely combined to increase that output drastically. To prove his point, he shows everyone, that the entire building they are in, was powered by batteries. AND THE PACKS WERE CHARGED WITH THE SOLAR PANELS ON THE ROOF. That’s free electricity folks. Sure there is an upfront cost, but damn thats cool, and the CO2 levels would level out!
According to Musk, 900 Million power packs could power the world, and if you wanted to switch transport, heating and electricity in general, it would take 2 billion power packs – and that sounds like a lot – but if you count the number of cars and trucks on the road you will get around 2 billion as well. Hmm, so this is feasible? Apparently.
Musk then talks about the Gigafactory (calling it Gigafactory 1), and referred to it as a product of Tesla. Pretty cool. As I mentioned, he says all the patents will be open source for other companies to use – which alone is freaking awesome. He suggests in a graph that by 2050, all CO2 emissions could level off completely – a feat and a half, but a damn good legacy don’t you think?
Check out TeslaEnergy.com for more info and to buy a PowerWall for yourself!
Here is the video of the keynote, if you want a watch.
