This morning, I mentioned a little bit about Tesla’s Gigafactory being built in Nevada, right on top of the state’s lithium basin. And the news loves to harp on Tesla’s products: the current and future electric vehicle models and their incoming Powerwall and Powerpack batteries.
Even as the Gigafactory is still being built, Tesla’s battery pre-orders reached $800 million, mostly for the business-sized Powerpacks. What business wouldn’t want to cut energy costs by running on renewable solar energy?
However, homeowners have a few concerns.
The main questions here are when these fabulous devices will become available to the general public and how much they will cost when they do.
Currently, the home-sized Powerwall runs $3,500 for a 10 kilowatt-hour model and $3,000 for the 7 kilowatt hour model. And even these are only being described as a “battery backup service” by Tesla’s sister company SolarCity.
So, it all comes down to whether or not Musk and friends can make this technology more efficent and affordable in the future.
The founder of DBL Investors, who have invested in both Tesla and SolarCity, asserts that the solar plus battery revolution “isn’t that far away.”
“Remember your cellphone,” she says, “how unfunctional and expensive and huge it was in those early days.” These large, expensive lithium batteries will be the same: as time goes on, they are sure to evolve quickly past these early stages.
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