Elon Musk debuts the Tesla Powerwall!

Tech 1 Minute

Elon Musk debuts the Tesla Powerwall!
I admire this man’s ability to approach the impossible, and prove it possible – and – open sourcing it!

 

https://www.youtube.com/attribution_link?a=a7TcP0_KWJg&u=/watch?v%3DyKORsrlN-2k%26feature%3Dshare

Published by Lars Fosdal

Software Developer

Published

47 thoughts on “Elon Musk debuts the Tesla Powerwall!”

  5. Elisabeth Schabus I’m confused at the point you are trying to make. Obviously this is not old technology or we would be using it instead of all the other ancient energy producing methods that we use right now.

  7. This is not about invention. It is about renewing something old and making it applicable on a large scale.  Approaching a problem on the scale that Musk does, is a rare quality.

  8. The “iBattery” … lol … great marketing. Yes, I am sincere, TheBonerizer​ … my point is, KidKacti311​ , the whole of Austria works like this, we have photovoltaic roofs (even transparent ones for town squares and such, to let the light through) , batteries to safe that power for the night (just not with such a nice name and such grand marketing .. and I’m pretty sure they don’t come in fancy colours smh ), fully electric cars … hell, most of us don’t even think about it any more, it’s so normal. But here comes a Yank and tells us how it works … wow! Just wow! ;)) … btw it was an Austrian team who won the California solar challenge (or whatever that contest was called, where teams should build an energy self-sufficient house. We’re doing this!!! For ages!!!! Hell, but here’s a guy who ‘splains it to the stupid, and lo and behold, he must have invented it o.O

  14. Elisabeth Schabus Aside from the obvious scaling differences between the two. I’m sure there is considerable cost involved in installing a photovoltaic roof.

     This is a serious game changer, and a lot more realistic an option for people that aren’t already living in housing with PV roofs. Congratulations on having that. Consider the cost, time, and work involved it would take to convert every residence in a country to PV roofs. Or, ship x amount of powerwalls in one shipment that can power an entire neighbourhood.

  15. Elisabeth Schabus so you Austrians had the solution to save the world from self destruction since forever, and you kept it for yourselves.
    The yank here instead jumped out of his rocket with a plan to have the world running on solar+batteries in a reasonable timescale, and with the intention to give away their knowledge and intellectual property for the greater good

  17. Elisabeth Schabus but there are many countries out there are not using solar energy and still using non renewable energy and produce high amount of CO2 especially third world, thats the point. and Musk mention for people who even dont have electricity. you are lucky enough to live in Austria to use this technology but not everyone. Musk wants everyone in this world to use this technology to minimize damage to the earth. He is doing in a very large scale and is open source, maybe Austria can help too for everyone. think about others. and is not normal for other countries to have this technology. if Austria has been doing this for very long why not help the world, thats what Elon Musk is doing. cheers

  18. It’s very expensive to use photovoltaic energy, Snowie TK​ as Kris Mayer​ pointed out . This iBattery of Mr. Musk’s won’t come cheap either. marmis85​ that’s stupid and you know it. I shall not converse with people using aliases such as yours and all you other blueheads any further.
    And you can look that up yourself, Lars Fosdal​ or go on believing that the US of A are going to save the world … again.
    One thing I give you guys, it was in my initial statement: nice thing if you get rid of your Diesel generators, USA … only most won’t … because: see beginning of this comment. Costs!

  19. Elisabeth Schabus the concept may not be new but as you see it hasn’t bee feasible until now. What Tesla has invented is highly advanced battery and power delivery technology. They made the existing concept affordable and packaged it in a form factor that the general public can embrace.

  20. +Elisabeth Schabus I’m sure that through government subsidy in the form of tax breaks to consumers and grants to the companies, and inevitable economies of scale and improvement in their production process (the gigfactory) will eliminate the cost issues. If people who have money jump on this wagon with Tesla right now, instead of fighting against it or ignoring it, I see the potential for his vision to be achieved within a decade. Of course that is the ideal, but the reality is that humanity hurts itself without knowing it. Cynicism and nationalism (which I believe is your only motivation for even commenting), this is a glimpse of human evolution at its finest and the beginning of something good. You may think that this has been done before, it’s too expensive, blah blah. Your missing the point, Elon musk has the ability to insert the concept of something like this existing into the minds of Americans (one of the most powerful populations on the planet). Elon musk can tap into ridiculous amount of sources for cash. Elon musk can use the freedom and flexibility of being within the private sector to do this right. Elon Musk can make this technology a world standard, something that no other person, government and even the great people over in Austria will be able to do.

  21. Elisabeth Schabus – You do realize that the blueheads are YouTube commenters?

    I tried finding something similar at Conrad’s, but German is not my second language – and there was a lot of batteries.  What would you pay for a 10KWh battery at Conrad’s? What type of battery would it be?

    Musk sells the 10KWh Powerpack at $3500 USD – and as the production goes up – the price most likely goes down.  The same goes for PV (ref. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source)

  22. What is the point of having a 10KWh battery? No matter how much storage you have, renewables are way too unreliable and produce way too little to be able to replace coal, gas, nuclear and hydro. A while ago I wrote a program that used UK Gridwatch data to model a grid based on renewables and massive storage. Even with completely unrealistic amounts of renewables and storage there were a lot of times when the solution did not match actual demand, resulting in power cuts. Some lasting for days.

  23. Jarto Tarpio Because in order for technology to get better you need to implement it and create it. The battery makes solar more feasible, not amazing, which will snowball into developing it into something amazing.

  24. I wish that people dreaming about renewables would go through the trouble of doing the math. If you aim to replace the current solutions, you need to be able to power the world 24/7/365 year after year after year. If your solution depends on the weather, it fails at that.

  25. Having grid of high capacity batteries would enable us to reduce the grid load spikes – better utilizing our existing grids – not just store wind/solar energy. I am pretty sure that Tesla has done the math, and then some.

  26. Jarto Tarpio The key is your aiming to do it. Not that your going to do it anytime soon and perfectly. A household switching to solar energy is a battle won. The world switching is the war.

  27. I give up. There seems to be one sensible guy here, Jarto Tarpio​​ … sorry, Lars Fosdal​​ … I understand you like the idea, it’s just too good to be true entirely and in this simplicity. Go ahead, you others, and finance Mr. Musk … it’s YOUR ridiculous amounts of cash he has at hand. Over and out.

  28. Elisabeth Schabus I can understand your frustration. But I can’t really blame people for believing in renewables. The media is full of uncritical hype of it. No reporter digs deeper to unearth the real problems. Also, very few people take the time and effort to look at the details and do the math. Lars Fosdal you can do it by downloading my Gridwarch simulator from Github and compiling it with Lazarus: https://github.com/jarto/GridWatch

    Very few people also realize that all these renewables are only constructed because of lucrative subsidies. The biggest renewables fund in Finland admitted in writing that they are doing it only to milk money from the government. I really, really dislike people who lie through their teeth in press releases about saving the world and drive countries deeper into debt.

  29. Every 5th car sold in Norway is an electric car (and no, Tesla is not the only one) due to state subsidies. You also get subsidies for swapping out you old oil heater with a more environmentally friendly alternative, such as electricity.

    We are fortunate to have most of our power from hydroelectric sources, but when the peaks arrive, we also import power – it being Swedish nuclear generated, or Danish coal powered, or German LPG or coal powered. Wide spread use of Power walls or similar, would most likely eliminate our peak consumption import needs, allow us to store power, and have clean power to export to our neighbors.

    I fine combed conrad.de, and I was unable to find anything even remotely similar to the Tesla product. They had a few lead accumulator/mini solar panel combos close to €1K.

    The Tesla products are on a completely different capacity scale, and Tesla is open sourcing the product, and even the plans behind the factories that make these batteries on a large scale.
    Musk does not pretend that it is cheap, but says this is the cost of cutting our carbon emissions.

    If the state will subsidize these devices – that is a good thing, IMO.

    Which Finnish fund are we talking about?

  31. Jarto Tarpio – We do need batteries.  There are discussions about using surplus green power to pump water back up to use our reservoirs as a hydro battery for German wind and solar power. (article in Norwegian:  https://www.sintef.no/aktuelt/mulig-a-gjore-norsk-vannkraft-til-batteri-for-europa/ )

    The question is: What kind of batteries?

    I think the Tesla approach is better – and can start locally, on a small scale and grow. Pumping back water – which may have other unforeseen negative effects on local nature and fauna – requires a large scale to be economical, and the power grids will need to be strengthened, which also comes at significant cost.

  32. TheBonerizer This is not a solar panel, but a battery. are you ppl retarded? can’t tell apart a solar panel from a storage device? Also affordable solar power has been available for years now, they are all over Germany for example. You ppl are severely uneducated….

  33. Lars Fosdal I guess no one thinks about the huge hole in the ground from mining or the HUGE HAZ MAT site that battery manufacture will make…..this presentation is fallacious in sooo many ways I hardly can contain myself. But the open sourcing of the patents at the end…THAT WAS GOOD….so all you greens have your moment…

  35. There is a huge amount of magic going on here…..LOOK look over here ….no not at the mining tailings pile!  I think this whole presentation is fraught with stats that are off by 40-100%.   Look look! at this factory that is sorta green…no NO! don’t look at the people using up water in the middle of the desert….

  37. Corinna Jäger I have six times gone long on this stock and 4 times GONE SHORT…there are 10’s of millions at stake here….on just this one product….the cheekiness of it all amazes me.

  40. Elisabeth Schabus
    As someone that knows nothing about engineering, I must say I was expecting some fancy explanation of this “innovation”. . . which never happened.

    Also Tesla has been lowering the costs of their previous existent batteries, so this came to me as you said:
    a marketing for their new inexpensive iBattery.

    People needs to aknowledge that 35 “hundreds” it’s still alot for third world countries, where the vast mayority of the people (in the world), which also happens to have no voice on the internet, lives the day by the day paychek, unable to save any money.

    Here (where I live) a single person, living with a TV., a fan and a refigerator might spend up to $10 dollars a month on energy.
    Energy is relatively cheap, no person in it’s right mind, with such economical difficulties (living the day by the day paychek) would spend 3500 minus the solar panel and installation expenses.
    never forget stacking 9 of them!!!! hahaha.

    People would rather save for a car, for transportation, or a flat TV for them to enjoy, or an iPhone to brag (which I find profoundly stupid and ridiculous expenses) but that’s an entirely other problem of the third world countries.
    You might think “third world population” are ignorant by their priorities in spending money, but we are not in their shoes to judge.

    It would be different if the approach, instead of being of a “consumable product” would be done as contingence plan executed by goverments, where a minimal taxation may help with the costs of it’s implementation.
    Also imposible too, given the many private interests to be held accountable (in both sides – apparent in this video).

    When Mr. Musk talked about the “open source patents of batteries” I thought he was reffering to the gamma of colours the Powerwalls should be.

  42. rRobert Smith
    10 bucks a month, yes there is people living in those conditions (fan tv refrigerator), you know. . . 3rd world problems.