With the forthcoming Tesla home battery, is the proposed Dominion Power Atlantic Coast pipeline through Nelson County (and obviously other localities) obsolete before it’s a reality?
Tesla (Tesla Motors, Space X, Hyperloop, and God knows what else) is apparently going to launch a battery for homes. Game. Changer.
The biggest news here—and why utility companies are likely worried—is that with a cheaper, more accessible battery, homeowners will now very easily be able to achieve complete energy independence. You could store your power for off-peak usage, and you might be able to sell your excess energy to a neighbor. In the near future, cord-cutting may mean severing one’s self from the electrical grid.
This won’t happen overnight, but I can see an enormous market for homes being off-grid … with a Tesla battery and solar panels providing the power. Tesla are a battery company, after all.
Also, kudos to the Charlottesville Area Association of Realtors (CAAR) for stepping up and speaking out in defense of property rights with respect to the actions taken by Dominion so far.
I wouldn’t bet against Elon Musk.
Jim, while the Tesla battery product is very cool, it will take a whole lot more than some PV and a tiny 10kWh battery for homeowners to achieve energy independence. In our area, nearly all households use a lot more energy in the winter than they do in the other three seasons. As a result, a household that wants to be off grid would need some combination of additional PV, seasonal thermal storage and/or a huge battery system to swing them through the winter. As an example, I’ll use my house and household – our net-metered PV system provides about 1,000kWh more energy than we need for our super-efficient, all-electric home on an annual basis…however, if we wanted to be off-grid with the same PV system we would need over 800kWh of stored electricity in batteries by mid-November in order to get us back ’round to mid-March….80 times the amount of storage provided by one of the Tesla battery packs….of yeah, and that would be for an average winter…an especially cold, cloudy and/or snowy winter would require even more storage.
Thanks John.
This Tesla announcement is a step in the right direction though right?