Tesla CEO and genius, Elon Musk, is at it again - this time aiming to revolutionize the energy utility sector of this country and possibly the world. Musk has, for years, been turning industries on their heads.
As creator of PayPal (where he earned his fortune) he changed the way online buying and selling was done. No longer needed were credit cards or ACH transfers, this was a fast, easy, safe way to transfer money online for goods purchased initially on eBay and now essentially everywhere on the internet.
He also turned his sights on the newly privatized space industry. As NASA closed its doors, someone needed to fill the gap. Musk and SpaceX have stepped up nicely. After years of development and testing, SpaceX recently became the first private space company to successfully dock with the International Space Station. They will be delivering supplies and tools to the ISS while the Russians continue to use their rockets to transport the astronauts.
So after Musk has transformed Outer Space and CyberSpace, he is turning his attentions to... Battery Space? Enter the Gigafactory. A joint venture spearheaded by Musk and Tesla Motors, his electric car company, Tesla Gigafactory will look to revolutionize the Lithium-Ion battery space globally. Gigafactory is reportedly looking to produce upwards of 30 gigawatts of batteries per year when fully operational. Those batteries would be used to power all of Tesla's motor vehicles along with a new product line aimed at Residential (and soon to be small commercial) properties for storage of Solar Power. Once up and running, and assuming they actually achieve the 30 gigawatts per year worth of batteries they claim they can produce, according to Musk,“We are talking about something that is comparable to all of the lithium-ion battery production in the world in one factory."
So how does this change everything? Utility companies around the world battle spikes in power usage, most often in evening between 4-7pm when people arrive home from work and put all of their systems to work. That also happens to be when the sun is going down and the solar panels on the roofs of these homes are no longer producing energy. Power produced during the day had been fed back into the grid, but now the house is drawing all the power and then some back. With this surge in usage, the systems of the power companies are always strained. Enter the Tesla Home Battery (my name, not theirs). With a Home Battery connected to your solar panels, it would charge itself with all the power the panels draw in throughout the day and store that energy until it is needed in the evening. Homes would still be connected to the grid for excess power needs but the batteries could be programmed to use all their power during the most expensive time periods effectively bringing down the drain from utilities and also ensuring any power taken from the grid is purchased at the lowest price point.
Long term, if Musk's predictions are correct, the Gigafactory and the 2-3 more he intends to build in the US will effectively dive bomb the price of Lithium-Ion batteries and make the Residential Home Battery so effective, people could use them to collect enough solar energy to completely run their home and also store power in case of emergency black outs, as the power would come from the panels on the roof, not from a main grid system that could fail and go offline.
Currently, the Gigafactory's location is TBD. But people in the know, people following developments closely, have predicted the announcement will come this Thursday, July, 31st, as Tesla announces its earnings to Wall Street. There has been rumor that this ground breaking in Reno is the first site that has been chosen as Gigafactory 1. There are also plans being put together for a location in Stockton, Ca and Phoenix, Az. Musk has said that he would go as far as breaking ground on up to 3 locations in order to take precautions against any local or construction problems at any one site.
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| Gigafactory will also produce all its own power onsite with newly built solar panels & wind turbines. A Net Zero factory. |
I am going to revisit this topic after Thursday's announcements, if any. But I think this is going to be an ongoing fascinating development in our region, in our country and in our world as we see a massive shift from fossil fuels to a cleaner future of energy production.
Cheers
TJ
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