Los Angeles, California - Tesla has unveiled Tesla Energy - storage systems or batteries for homes, companies and utilities that will expand its business beyond electric vehicles and tap into a fast-growing area of the energy industry.
Chief executive Elon Musk said the company's goal was to “fundamentally change the way the world uses energy on an extreme scale.”
He introduced the products to a crowd of business partners and journalists at a Tesla facility near Los Angeles.
In Tesla's view, such storage systems could become part of a fossil-fuel-free lifestyle in which people can have solar panels on their roof generating electricity to power their home and recharge their electric car batteries.
The smallest battery unveiled on Thursday, known as Powerwall, is housed in a 150mm-wide container that is meant to be hung inside a garage or on the outside wall of a house.
At $3500 (R42 000) for a 10kWh model, excluding inverter and installation costs, the Powerwall can be used for backup power or to store solar energy.
Tesla's lead installation partner for the home battery will be SolarCity, the solar installer backed by Musk. The company will also partner with many others, Musk said.
POWER PACK
Tesla has several hundred batteries installed with SolarCity systems in California already. The growth of those projects has been helped by a subsidy from California's public utility regulator.
Utilities have also been seeking out energy storage to help manage increasing amounts of renewable energy on the grid. To address that market, Musk unveiled what he called the “power pack,” a 100 kWh battery block that is meant to help smooth out power from intermittent solar and wind energy production or add energy to the grid quickly when demand levels are high.
Tesla already has several utility-scale batteries deployed on the grid in California, which requires its biggest utilities to source large amounts of energy storage.
The company will initially manufacture the batteries at its car plant in California but will move production to its planned “gigafactory” in Nevada in 2016. Analysts expect Tesla will build stationary storage systems around the same basic batteries it is developing for its vehicles at the large factory the company is building in Nevada.
Tesla is not the only player in energy storage. Coda Energy, which rose from the ashes of a failed battery-car maker and is now owned by Fortress Investment, as well as startups backed by companies such as Total, General Electric and Siemens are among the many companies going after shares of the stationary storage market.
Reuters