Simple but clever : A big battery attached to the wall of your house with a charge capacity that could power your entire home continuously.
What is it ?
When you buy a Tesla car (it happens all the time am I right ?), what Tesla really sellls you is their battery. That is and has always been doing : Conceiving and selling a technology that stores electricity. Tesla PowerWall is also an electric battery. The main difference with your phone battery is that this one is much, much bigger and heavier. And also, much more efficient. With its power capacity of 13.5 kilowatt-hours , the latest version can provide enough electricity to a small house all year long.
How it works ?
The PowerWall is sold with an installation kit. Simply put it on a wall or on the floor, and connect it to your source of electricity (solar panels, wind turbines, regular grid, …). The battery charges, and you can program it to provide electricity at certain times of the day when your source of electricity is lower or is getting more expensive (during peak hours).
How it could change the game
The big issue with electricity, is not only how to produce it, but also how to store it. We can produce a lot of electricity using renewable energy. We could try to harness the power of thunder for example. But even if we did, we wouldn’t know what to do of all this electricity at the same time. We could consume it directly, which is what we do with, for example, nuclear powerplants. But we don’t have the technology yet to store that much electricity. The genius of PowerWall is that instead of trying to put everything in a single battery that we didn’t invent yet, we can store it in multiple smaller ones, connected to each house.
The most genius part though, is that if you combine the PowerWall with solar panels or a Solarglass Roof (which Tesla is also selling), you could get closer to become energy autosufficient, and thus, independant of the public electricity grid. More than that, houses could produce more energy than they consume, and redistribute it through the grid ! Unfortunately, at the moment, there are too many conditions to officially say that it works. But for now, PowerWall can help you to control your electricity bill.
PowerWall is not only a solution to use renewable energy. It also could be a real game changer in some areas of the world, where access to electricity is still limited.
Now the downsides are the price : for the battery and the installation, the bill will go somewhere between 8 000$ and 16 000$. If you add the solar panels, you can double that amount ! It can be a bit too much for a battery that you will need to change every ten years, when the guarantee expires.
Fun fact: The idea is so simple that someone actually assembled many laptop batteries together to create his own DIY PowerWall (besides other inventions). And that person has more fans on its Facebook page than Tesla PowerWall ! Not sure if it is as efficient, but it’s worth having a look !
PowerWall’s website : https://www.tesla.com/solarroof
