Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla has been talking about uses for the batteries in his Tesla Cars and other electric cars after their useful life for quite a while now. But it appears he isn’t going to wait for them to be available from used cars to get this idea going. Just a few days ago he announced the Tesla Power Wall.
While this is not a new idea, using batteries to store electricity you either gather from your own solar panels or even buy from the electric company at night while power is cheap and use during the day when its not. He’s now making it a commercial reality. One where just like his Tesla cars the production is sold out for months to come.
After I bought my Ford Focus Electric I had wondered if, when you are not using the car to it’s full capacity every day, if you could run your house from it? After all, The average U.S. house uses 32KWH per day. In AZ most of that is AC. And in the summer that peak demand goes up to about 18 cents per KWH from the 6 cents per KWH I pay at night. My monthly bills go from about $100 a month to $300 a month. Being able to buy at night rates would save me quite a bit. Even when it’s not summer. I could probably lower the bill another $50 a month by doing that.
I had even thought of buying a used Nissan Leaf with a degraded battery to achieve the same thing. The Leaf has a 24KVH battery or double to triple what Tesla is selling. A first year leaf can be had for around 9k.
Nissan has even developed a car to home power convertor that they started selling a while ago. They developed it after the tsunami.
Once again Elon Musk is challenging the status quo in areas where entrenched ideology makes it almost impossible to bring new ideas to market.
I’m almost beginning to think that one day in the not to distant future their might actually be people not only going to but living on mars.
I think it’s a pretty good thing that he chose the U.S. to immigrate to, illegally at first. We might have to get his permission if we want to immigrate to mars.
Nissan Leaf to Home Power Station.
My favorite line from the video. We don’t need to win the Darwin Award.