Here’s why Elon Musk’s latest creation is every bit as impressive as that super/electric/car of his.
On 30 April, Elon Musk unveiled the ‘Powerwall’; a battery pack that can potentially render the need for grid-based power redundant. A tall order, given that the planet’s consumption of electricity is only on the rise. But being the rockstar entrepreneur/scientist that he is, the presentation at which he unveiled this hugely significant product was rooted in solid facts that many were probably not aware of. And going by his past record of foraying into challenging scientific realms then making products that not only work but also look downright badass, this Powerwall should, with good reason, be on everyone’s radar.
It was clear from his strategy of building a humongous ‘gigafactory’ in the middle of Nevada that his next product line was going to involve batteries. Many, many batteries. And the Powerwall, while it still is a big, rechargeable battery at the end of the day, does push the boundaries like no other. Here are some of the reasons I think this is perhaps one of the coolest products in recent days, even though it doesn’t even have an operating system.
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It can reduce your dependence on grid power to zero: Sure, this isn’t something that’ll warrant bragging rights straight out the door, but the very thought of being able to run your home purely on renewable energy that’s stored in a battery is undoubtedly compelling. And when that battery looks like a minimalist sculpture, so much the better.
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It can be charged from virtually any energy source: Not just solar energy, the unit can supposedly be hooked up to pretty much any energy generation system including wind energy or even regular utility power. The most significant challenge up until now was being able to store charge for when the renewable energy source wasn’t available (at night when there’s no sunlight, for example), which this battery addresses. Effectively, it facilitates a power delivery system that can operate continuously.
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It doesn’t cost the earth: This Powerwall costs the equivalent of a cheap second-hand car in the US: $3,500. A very alluring proposition for domestic or even commercial use.
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It can be scaled to service bigger power requirements: The Powerwall unit can be stacked, where upto nine 10 kWh units together could deliver a total of 90 kWh. From a 2013 report of the US Energy Information Administration, a typical American home consumes 909 kWh per month (or 30.3 kWh a day).
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Its technologies are being released as open source: From the technologies that constitute from the Powerwall to the one used in creating their gigafactory in Nevada, Tesla is open sourcing all of the underlying know how. Effectively, this could be a huge shot in the arm for advancing the field of renewable energy as other players getting into the action over time.
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Its technology can potentially scale ad infinitum: While the Powerwall product is aimed at entry-level power consumption applications, they also announced a higher-capacity Powerpack, which can crank up to power Gigawatt-class scenarios; a city like Boulder, Colorado, for example.
The numbers don’t stop here: Elon Musk, at one point in the presentation, stressed on the fact that the solar installations required to generate country-powering power isn’t as much as is believed. Tha tlittle blue dot in the image below is basically the total surface area that would be needed to harvest sunlight to power the entire United States.
He then went on to making a very believable case as he described a reality where our planet could sustain itself on renewable energy:
- 160 million Powerpacks can transition the entire US to renewable energy
- 900 million Powerpacks can transition the entire globe to renewable energy
- 2 billion Powerpacks can transition all transportation, electricity generation and heating of the entire globe to renewable energy
All of this is well and good (and of course massive sales for the company), and if it does what it says on the box their new battery will in all likelihood revolutionize power consumption as we know it. Of course there are pending questions: How degradable are these battery’s components? When they reach end of life, can they be recycled?
But in the meanwhile, the fact that the location of his keynote speech was powered solely by those batteries, charged using solar power, is pretty darned impressive.
View the entire keynote here:
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