It Is Here: Tesla Releases Its Batteries For Homes, Businesses
Tesla Motors has finally released its much-anticipated suite of batteries for homes, businesses and utilities, on the back of expansion of its business beyond electric vehicles.
The home battery has been named Powerwall, a rechargeable lithium-ion battery that stores energy at the residential level for load-shifting, backup power, and self-consumption of solar power. It is a home battery system that comes in a 10kWh version for $3,500 or a 7kWh model for $3,000. (This excludes the price of installation and an inverter.)
CEO Elon Musk said the system can be used to create “smart microgrids”, as it is connected to the internet and allows a home to go independent of the grid entirely.
The battery for businesses and industrial applications, or even public utility companies, is called Powerpack. This comes in 100kWh battery blocks that can scale from 500 kWh to 10MWh and higher.
Tesla has plans to fundamentally change the way the world produces and uses power, by using stored solar energy. 160 million Powerpacks can power the United States, and with 2 billion, the world.
SolarCity, recently acquired by Tesla, has been running a pilot program that pairs its panels with Tesla batteries. Within the next five to ten years, every SolarCity unit will come with a battery and the combined systems could drive the price of solar below that of natural gas, according to Musk.
If you want to know more about this and other topics directly from end users of energy storage technologies join us at one of these annual events: The Energy Storage World Forum (Grid Scale Applications), or The Residential Energy Storage Forum, or one of our Training Courses.
