Saturday, May 2, 2015

Tesla Powerwall

Last night we had a power outage.

I'm pretty sure it was due to Elon Musk sneaking around and tripping our circuit breaker to market his new Powerwall.


The Powerwall is a big, wall-mounted battery pack, available in a couple varieties. A 10 kWh version is optimized for long-term power backup - most of the time is sits around fully charged, then when your power goes out, the battery takes over powering the house for an extended period of time. A 7 kWh version is designed to pair with solar system - it charges during daylight each day, and powers the house after sunset each night.

I'm curious to find out if these 10 and 7 kWh numbers are the actual useful energy you can get out of the powerpack, or if that's the nominal capacity.

I'm also a little disappointed  - I thought this product might allow someone with an electric car but no plug-in at work, to charge that electric car via solar power stored in batteries at home over night - time-shifted solar power, if you will. But the smallest Tesla car battery is 60 kWh, so I don't think that's very practical. At least, not with just one battery.

Anyway, I'm going to write up a solar post one of these days. I'll probably talk about this battery product again then.

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