Musk swaps cars for homes
Pretoria-born billionaire Elon Musk, chief executive officer of Tesla Motors, has unveiled a suite of batteries to store electricity for homes, businesses and utilities, saying it has a mission to provide pollution-free energy.
“Our goal here is to fundamentally change the way the world uses energy,” Musk said this week at the company’s design studio in Hawthorne, California. “We’re talking at the terawatt [1 trillion watt] scale.”
If sufficient batteries are sold, Musk believes they’ll almost make power stations obsolete. “The goal is complete transformation of the entire energy infrastructure of the world.”
The announcement, after weeks of anticipation, marks Tesla’s expansion beyond electric cars. As homes, businesses and utilities use more renewable energy generated by sunshine and wind, the need to provide reliable power grows. Batteries store electricity during peak production and dispense it later, when sun and wind power aren’t available.
Tesla’s home battery, named “Powerwall,” is a rechargea- ble lithium-ion battery retailing at prices starting at $3 000 (R35 600) that mounts on the wall and comes in 7 kilowatt-hour or 10 kilowatt-hour versions, the company said. Deliveries will begin in late August, Tesla said.
The battery is designed to enable so-called “load-shifting” by charging during times when electricity prices are lower due to less demand, and discharging when demand and prices are high. It can also store solar power generated during daytime and release it at night, and serve as backup during outages, according to Tesla.
The average American home consumes about 30 kilowatt-hours of energy a day.
Musk said home batteries came in different colours and looked like “a beautiful sculpture on the wall”. – Bloomberg