May 13, 2015 • 51 mins
What is the Tesla Powerwall? Does it make sense for people to buy one? We take a look.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Be there, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
podcast that looks at the future and says you're gonna
be the one that saves me. I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm
Joe McCormick, and our other host, Lauren big Obama is
(00:22):
not with us today, but she will be back next time. Yeah,
she is currently being famous doing something else, which is,
you know, more or less true. She she has she
has a lot of other shows that she's on, and
so we're letting her go and be on her other
show and we are going to carry on here, but
she will be on the next episode. So we're going
(00:43):
to cover something that was recently mentioned in the news
and kind of made a big stir online coming from
the company Tesla, which has been known to announced several
things that have cost stirs in the past. Yeah, one
might look at them as aspiring to create somewhat disruptive technologies,
perhaps being the people who want to shake up the market. Yeah,
(01:08):
maybe create a new market where one never existed before,
which could potentially take some steam away from other markets,
sometimes literally as a case. Maybe. Yeah, And so this
technology that we're going to talk about today is the
the widely hyped Tesla power wall, also known as a battery. Well,
(01:28):
so what I imagined when I first heard somebody in
the office here talking about the power wall, like, hey,
did you hear about the power wall? I was like, Okay,
what is that? It's some kind of like home defense
system where if you touch the walls of the house,
it's like a Tesla coil. It's like, it's like the
house defense version of the car alarm and RoboCop. Yeah, okay,
(01:52):
like the batmobile. That's that's not what it is, as
it turns out. So what it is very simply is
a home energy storage solution. Yeah, and that's that might
sound pretty basic, and in a way it is, but
we shouldn't talk about why home energy storage is a
thing that actually matters and will matter more in the future,
(02:13):
probably hopefully. There are some places in the world where
this announcement truly makes a huge difference. Now the place
where Joe and I live is not necessarily one of them,
but we'll get into why that is. In fact, it
might might benefit us to have a discussion really quickly
about how electricity is measured in terms of pricing, because,
(02:38):
as it turns out, the energy storage part has you know,
a lot of the decision to switch to an energy
storage system in your home has to do with the financial,
uh situation you are in, the type of how much
are you being charged for your electricity? Yeah? Well, okay,
let's start off talking about about electricity pricing. How you
(02:59):
get your electricity, how it's measured, and what it costs.
So I've got a question. Okay, a lot of times
you'll see an appliance, some kind of electrical device rated
for like a number of watts or killer watts. But
then it seems like when I have to pay for electricity,
I'm being charged for kill a watt hours. Okay, yeah,
so what's going on there? Your electronics require a certain
(03:22):
amount of electricity in order to operate at any given instant,
and watts is a way of measuring units of electricity
in an instant. So it's it's kind of like if
you are driving thirty five miles per hour, you wouldn't
say how much time was that because that doesn't make
any sense for that question at that instant you were
(03:43):
going thirty five miles per hour, you would have to
ask how long were you driving for thirty five miles
per hour? That that would make sense. All right, I
drew thirty five for ten minutes, that would make that's
the question that makes sense. Same thing with electricity. You'd
say how much electricity does this, uh this a lot
electronic device require? And you'd say, like a hundred watts
(04:03):
in an instant? How long did you operated it an hour? Well,
that means that you were operating at one watts per hour.
So when you are talking about electricity pricing, the utility
companies look at kill a watt hours, how many killer
watts were used per hour in your home? And you
figure this out by looking at all the different electronic
(04:23):
devices you have, right finding out how much how much
wattage they require, multiply that by how long they were
in operation, and then divide that by one thousand, because
one thousand watts equals one kill a watt. And once
you do all that, you know how many killer watts
per hour were used for any given amount of time,
(04:45):
uh like over the you can average that out over
a month, which is what utility companies do. And then
in order for you to figure out how much you're paying,
you would look at your bill and you this gets
a little complicated depending upon where you live. Um, your
you might have a statement right there that says how
much has charged per kilowatt hour, and essentially you would
multiply that figure by the number of kilowatt hours you
(05:07):
consumed in that that time period, or you might have
to actually do the math yourself. Right, You might have
to take the total and take out any additional fees
that were at on top of it, and then divide
the number of kilowatt hours you used to find out
how much they're charging you per kill a watt hour. Well,
that sounds pretty straightforward. If you just have a price
per kilowatt hour and then you've used this many kilowatt hours,
(05:28):
that sounds like a simple way to calculate your bill.
But not all kilowatt hours are the same. This is
this is true, yeah, because there so One of the
things about the power grid, especially in the United States,
is that there are peak hours of usage and there
are slow hours of usage. And depending on the power grid, uh,
(05:50):
it may be operating at near capacity, as in it
is carrying a load that is the maximum for what
it is capable of handling. Right, and you can think
about this in terms of your own daily habits. I mean,
how do you use electricity in your house or your
apartment wherever you live. Well, you probably, if you're like
most people, wake up in the morning, you turn on
(06:10):
some lights, You maybe run the dishwasher, take a shower,
run the water heater. You use some power. Then you
leave for work, and then for most of the day
you're not using much power. Then you come back home
in the evening, turn a bunch of lights on, run
some appliances, turn on the TV, use your computer, and
then you go to bed, and then suddenly the power
(06:30):
drops again. So there's a pretty standard, common sort of
time of day surge in the demand for power throughout
the grid, and often you will find out that the
times when you most use power are the ones that
have surge pricing on them. A tiered pricing level, so
that price per kilo what hour maybe a range. Right,
(06:51):
You might have an average of how much you paid
per kilo one hour, but that that actual amount might
change throughout the day, So in the big lead part
of the day or at the end of the day,
it might be higher because increased demand is putting increased
demand on the system. And it also means that it
creates an incentive for you to use less electricity, thus
(07:11):
decreasing the demand on the power grid. Um. Keeping my
most power companies in the United States are like co
ops or government owned utilities. They're not it's and they
are also regulated, so they're not able to go for
crazy profits there. It's not in their interest to try
and uh uh you know, create the money making scheme
(07:33):
of some sort because they're regulated to the point where
they can't do that anyway. So they're operating under these
rules and uh and and they want to make sure
that they can supply electricity to all the customers who
demand it. But in part of that they have this
tiered pricing to help mediate that demand. Otherwise you would
(07:55):
end up having demands that power grid couldn't meet, and
you could have some pretty serious consequences like brownouts or worse.
Um and uh you know, one of the things we
could talk about a little bit later is how this
is the perfect set up for us to say, yeah,
it is time for us to look in two ways
to address this, because it's a problem that's not going
(08:16):
to get better over time. We're going to have an
increasing demand for electricity. So we need to start figuring
out one how we can decrease our individual consumption levels
and to make the infrastructure to deliver electricity more efficient
so that we're not constantly at that that edge where
things could spill over into a problem. There's some states
(08:37):
like California that are really close to that a lot
of the time. Okay, Jonathan, Well here I've got a solution. Okay,
say I look at this situation and I say, oh man,
some some of these you know, power providers, they're straining.
We're we're going to max out the grid. I'm gonna
put some solar panels on my house, and then I
will be energy independent and I won't have to worry
(08:59):
about this, you know, peak surge pricing at the time
of day or possible brown outs when other people need electricity.
I'll just be I'll be completely free. I'll be like
the Superman of home energy usage. Right. It's not quite
that way, is it. No, It's a little more complicated
for two reasons, too big reasons. The first reason is
that the installation cost of solar panels is something you
(09:20):
can't ignore. Right, That's an upfront cost that is also
going to require replacement over time. So you have to
factor in how much am I spending for the system? Uh,
and if I'm spending more like if you figure out
for the lifetime of those solar panels, if you're spending
more per kilo lot hour effectively for the lifetime of
those solar panels than you would if you were getting
(09:42):
it off the power grid, it doesn't make financial sense. Environmentally,
that's a different question, but financially that doesn't make sense. Okay,
well let's say we ignore that. Okay, we've still got
another problem. Time problems actually eider that for a different
reason now, right, because solar panels will convert solar power
to electricity, but that's immediate. That's it happens when it
(10:06):
when the solar power, when the sun light hits those
solar panels. Yeah, that's when the electricity gets generated, whether
you are using it or not. That's when the electricity
is there and it doesn't stick around. So we talked
earlier about the peak times when we're going to be
using electricity, first thing in the morning and in the evening,
especially once it starts getting dark and we need to
(10:28):
turn lights on so we can see well when it
gets dark, we're not getting any sunlight on the solar panels.
In the morning, we may not be getting very much
sunlight either, and so you're not generating a lot of electricity.
You're generating the most electricity in the middle of the day,
which we have already established the time when you're not
at home. It's the cruel irony of nature. So you
need some way to store that electricity so that you
(10:51):
can then access electricity during the hours when you need it.
But it's also the hours when you're not generating electricity,
at least not through solar panels. Right. So we've reached
the point where whether you're just drawing grid electricity or
you want to outfit your home with solar panels and
stuff like that. Either way, it would be really advantageous
if you had an efficient way to store a lot
(11:14):
of energy without much loss, uh, that you could use
whenever you really needed it, right, Yeah. And this would
allow you to do things like even like you were saying,
even if you don't have solar panels, you could use
a battery and charge your batteries when the peak, yeah yeah,
when the pricing is at its lowest, and then in
the day when it get parts of the day where
(11:35):
the pricing is higher. Instead of pulling your electricity off
of the grid, you pull it from the batteries, so
you're still getting the electricity you need, but you're only
sipping from the power grid during the hours when it's
at the low off hour times. And this would usually
be at night, so you'd be probably asleep your batteries
charged in the middle of the night. That's the only
(11:56):
thing that's really going. There might be a couple of
other systems like air conditioning, especially here in the South,
some other things that might be running, but in general
most of your electronics are off or in sleep mode
or whatever. Uh so you would be sipping power from
the power grid at a lower cost per kill a
lot hours. Let's say, let's arbitrarily say it's eight cents
(12:17):
for off peak hours, which is you know, low, but
it is not unheard of. I've seen between five and
ten cents, depending upon where you live. Um, there are
other parts of the country where it's very different. But
if it's eight cents per killer whatt hour off peak hours,
that's when you're pulling your charging your battery. Then during
peak hours it might be something closer to eighteen cents
(12:38):
per kill a lot hour. Well, instead of pulling your
electricity for the power grid there, you're pulling it from
the battery. So this is electricity that you only spent
eight cents per kill a watt hour to get in
the first place. And if you do that time and
time again over time, that difference between the the peak
hour usage and the off peak our usage costs will
(13:00):
offset the the the purchase and installation price of the
battery hopefully, right, So whether you whether you go grid
or whether you go solar, either way it could be
a big help to have a large energy storage unit
in your home. It could make financial sense, yes, depending
on what it costs exactly and how much energy it
(13:21):
can hold, and that and a lot of other considerations.
But all of this is what brings us to the
power wall. So ultimately, let's let's you know, to deconstructed.
It is a battery. It is a lithium ion battery,
but it's a very inexpensive lithium ion battery, particularly for
the capacity, the efficiency in the number of cycles it has.
(13:43):
So I don't want to take anything away from the
achievement because battery technology is one of those things we've
talked about in the past about how you know to
to get it to a point where it has advanced
similar to how other technologies have advanced. Is really really hard. Yeah,
I think I've said this on the podcast before. I
think batteries are one of the great overlooked marvels of
(14:05):
modern life. They're one of the things we take for granted.
We don't often think to be thankful for batteries, but
just think how amazing batteries are. Awesome they make your life. Yeah, yeah,
the only time we tend to think about them is
when a battery's juice runs out and then were cursing, right, Like,
if you walk into your house and you hear the
tell tale beeping noise of a smoke detector was as
(14:26):
its battery is dying, You're like, I've got to go
replace that. But assuming it's functioning properly, I mean the
fact that you can like put a little thing in
your cell phone or your laptop and then go use
this device for hours without plugging it in, that's amazing.
It is phenomenal, and it gives us. It gives us
a lot of independence and freedom that we would not
otherwise have. So certainly very important and uh and again,
(14:49):
Tesla has done a lot to bring that price down,
which is one of the big barriers to using energy
storage at home. Now there are people who have had
solar pedals on their homes for years, and they have
had batteries for years, because you have to have a
battery if you want solar panels to make sense, or
you're using the solar panels to help offset how much
(15:10):
you're pulling from the grid, because otherwise you're that again,
that electricity that is being generated is just going to
waste if you're not using it. Well, I think in
some scenarios you can you can sell excess energy back
to the grid. Yeah, depending upon the utility company in
the region you're in there and the laws of the
state you are in. This is very complicated when it
gets down to it, but yes, there are some places
(15:31):
where if your house is actually generating an excess of electricity,
you can sell it back off to the grid, which
makes sense. It it ends up taking some of the
load off the grid itself. They don't have to produce
as much electricity. Okay, but so, how is the power
wall different from the batteries that, say, a solar panel
equipped house has had before. Okay, well, one the design,
(15:53):
it's pretty I mean it looks kind of like a
big like pictures mound or like home plate. Like I
was thinking that it looks like it's kind of bigger.
And it's also uh, like you said, it's a lithium
ion battery. Right. A lot of the batteries that were
used in solar panel technology before now had been lead
acid batteries, which are the same type of batteries that
(16:15):
you would have in a vehicle like a car. Lead
acid batteries. Um are you know, they're they're sturdy, they're
proven technology, they cry horrible acid, they are all. They
also can be bulky. Uh. If you have a bunch
of them in series then one of them goes out,
then you're in trouble because then you have to find
the one that's gone out and replace it. Um. It's
(16:35):
it's not the Uh, it's not the easiest technology to
swap in and out, and it definitely has its disadvantages,
but it's proven it works. Lithium ions worked too, but
they had been very expensive until Tesla had said, Hey,
we're gonna come out with these couple of models. Um,
so let's talk a little bit about the the actual
(16:57):
power wall batteries. There are two models of them that
they have. As far as I know, they are the
same um size, right, yeah. I think one of the
first things a lot of people would want to know
about it is simply how big is this thing? Like
where does it go? So they suggest, well, you put
it on the wall, you mounted on one of the
walls in your house, and it is in inches fifty
one point to by thirty three point nine by seven
(17:21):
point one, so so not a not an insignificantly small box.
It is smaller, probably smaller than you in metric what
is that It is a d millimeters by eight hundred
sixty millimeters by one hundred and eighty millimeters and they
(17:42):
are producing Tesla's producing two different types of power wall batteries.
There's also another um power battery that Tesla's coming up
with for like industrial use, but we're not really focusing
on that. We're looking at the home use ones. So
the two models they're looking at is a seven kilowatta
our daily cycle capacity, meaning that it has the capacity
(18:03):
to hold seven kilowatt hours of electricity. Then there is
a ten kilowatt our weekly cycle battery. So we can
hold ten kilo one hours. But you heard me say
daily cycle and weekly cycle. And that's important, I think
because a lot of people have been using the ten
kilowatt hour cycle weekly cycle battery as their um basis
(18:25):
to explain how this would work. But it would require
you to essentially use and charge that battery every day,
which is not a good idea for a weekly cycle battery.
The cycles refer to how how much charged, how much
capacity that battery can hold over a certain given amount
of time or certain number of uses. Really is what
(18:47):
I should say. So, Uh, the simplest way of explaining
a cycle is, let's say you've got a battery, it's
charged full. You use the battery until the charge has
hit quote unquote zero percent. Trually do that. You shouldn't
necessarily do that, depending on the battery. Some batteries it
doesn't matter, but we won't get into all that. Then
you recharge it all the way back up to full.
(19:08):
That's a cycle. From full to empty to full. That's
a cycle. But you don't necessarily have to do it
that way. If you if you end up using half
the charge, recharged it, then used half the charged and
recharged it that's a full cycle too, so it's really
just the the representation of a of that battery's capacity
being used and recharged, and there's a limited number of
(19:31):
those per battery. The battery officials decreases, like you get
a new laptop or something, and it will tell you
the battery has this many cycles in its lifetime. And
I said efficiency, it shifts at just capacity, because what
I mean to say is that after you hit that number,
there's no guarantee that capacity is going to be the
same as what it was when you first got the battery.
(19:52):
In fact, it probably won't be right. So let's say,
for example, here's here's I'm just using this as a
as a out of the blue kind of example. Let's
say that you have a ten kilowatt hour capacity battery
and after ten thousand cycles, it's capacity has dropped, so
now it's closer to nine kilowatt hours of capacity. Again,
(20:14):
I just grabbed that out of nowhere. That would mean
that that battery would now be nine kilowatt hours, but
when you first got the battery, of that capacity would
be ten kilowatt hours, and over time that that full
capacity would drop more and more and you would need
to replace the battery because you would no longer be
able to store as much electricity in the battery as
(20:36):
you could when you first got it. Uh. And sometimes
this drop off can be pretty dramatic, and depending upon
the type of battery, you can have issues. Like the
reason why Joe was saying you don't necessarily want to
drain a battery completely and recharge it is that sometimes
with some batteries you can't recharge it, like it gets
all the way down to the bottom and it won't
(20:57):
charge back up. Yeah. Well, the horrible thing to do
is like let it go to zero, charge it to
use it, let it go to zero. Don't do that
to your battery. Yeah. Depending again, depending on the battery,
you can build up a memory of that where the
battery starts to think of as being its new and
then you've got a battery can hold half the capacity
(21:18):
of what it used to. That's not as big a
problem these days as it used to be, but it
is still something like you really shouldn't do that all
the time. Um, it's better to avoid it. So uh. Anyway,
if you're using the ten kilowatt hour battery, it's suggesting
weekly cycles, so they Tesla's marketing as a backup battery,
(21:39):
something that would be used in times where perhaps you
needed to you wanted to maybe ease off on your
consumption but only for a little while, or your consumption
from the grid for a little while, or perhaps there
might be power outages and this would be a great
way to be able to still provide electricity to your
home even during a power outage. But you would only
(22:01):
recharge it like once a week, or at least have
the equivalent of one cycle being consumed once per week. Uh,
seven killo whate hours being a daily cycle, that means
that you could recharge it every single day, and the
number of cycles is presumably larger to because both of
these batteries are warrantied for ten years. So if they're
(22:22):
warrantied for ten years, you would imagine that means they
have enough cycles in them to get through those ten
years without an appreciable loss of capacity. So, uh, the
daily one, you're more likely to be able to drain
that and recharge it frequently than you would the ten
kilo one hour one um that being said, seven kilo
(22:43):
one hours, it sounds like a lot, but it's you know,
the depending upon, uh, your household, it may not be
enough for you to get through a night even Here's
another question though, I mean at any even time. Let's
say you're trying to run a bunch of appliances at once.
What's the maximum output, like just the watts they can provide? Oh,
(23:06):
that's an excellent question. Yeah, while they can provide to
kilowatt hours or two kilowatts rather continuously with peaks of
up to three point three kilowatts, So I don't know
how much that is, all right, So let's say that
you've got a refrigerator that's about four hundred watts. Usually
four wats a washer or dryer can be around to
(23:31):
kill a watts of required power. Like some things just
draw more power, they need more electricity to operate. So
depending upon what you need to do to kill a
watts at an instance is not unusual. I think the
average for any part of a day, like it's essentially
the daily average a house uses is one thousand two kilowatts.
(23:54):
But that's the average that's not peak used, right, that's
when you're averaging it all over the entire twenty four
hour period. So they're gonna be sometimes where it's significantly
higher than kill a watts that you're going to need
to power everything that you want to do it simultaneously.
Me I like to run the washer, the dryer, the microwave,
a hair dryer. I don't even have hair, and my
Xbox and my TV. Plus I usually have a computer
(24:16):
downloading something downstairs, and I don't know. Sometimes I have
the upstairs air conditioning going on because I like the
room to be cool when I go upstairs. And some
space heaters, yeah, just outside. I just have them pointed
outside to make the Georgia heat even that much more unbearable.
Because you know, I'm this is your doctor doom plan. Yes,
well it's a really thing of it more as a
(24:37):
Cobra commander plan, because I think that through climate change
I can I can actually control the weather. That was
his go to was weather control. Okay, no, seriously, I
don't do all that. But there are times where you
might be drawing more power than uh to kill a watts.
And you know, three point three kill a watts is
a peak. That's a pretty I'd say it's a fairly
(24:57):
safe number there. I don't know how along that could
be sustained. I mean, obviously you're not going to be
able to do it for more than two hours with
the seven kilowatt hour battery because you'll drain it, like
in two hours, it would be pretty much gone. Um.
Keeping in mind also we haven't talked about the batteries
efficiency yet. We'll get to that. And when we talk
about efficiency, that means that while it's capable of holding
(25:18):
seven kilowatt hours, that's not all the electricity you're going
to get. Right, You're gonna get less than that because
about the battery is not um as efficient as that.
And plus there are some other issues we have to
think about. Well, how about the issue of the current type.
Exactly right, you one of these alternating current because it
is much better for transmission over long distances. With direct current.
(25:41):
You want to be uh, you want the load, that is,
the the whatever you're powering, to be fairly close to
the point of generation. So if we were using direct
current like Edison wanted, we would need power plants everywhere, right,
we would have to have them all over the place
in order to supply the power we need. Alternating current
is gray for transmitting power electricity over very great distances.
(26:04):
The crazy thing, though, Joe is that your appliances really
want direct current. But well that's why we've got those
direct current transformers. Well they have their inverters, yeah, yeah,
you have inverter converters. We'll just use the word converter
for boxes. Yes, we're just gonna use converter for simplicity's sake. Uh.
(26:24):
You know, all of you electricians out there can roll
your eyes because I understand that we could talk about
the difference between inverters and converters and all that kind
of stuff. But yeah, you want to be able to
convert from a C to d C because that's the
way that our appliances have been designed. So the crazy
thing is that power from a battery is direct current,
(26:44):
right right, Like you go from the negative terminal to
the positive terminal. Technically, with current, it's the opposite way
because when Franklin was describing electricity, didn't realize that the
negative ones were the ones doing the moving. I didn't
know about electrons yet, so uh, but anyway, you've got
direct current with batteries, but the the system you're using,
your home system, works on alternating current, so you have
(27:05):
to have a device to convert the DC power to
a C and then the A C power, we go
to your devices, which would then convert it back to
d C to actually consume it to use it for
whatever you're using it for. Um. But that means that
you need to have this inverter device, and the power
wall does not come with one, so you actually have
(27:26):
to buy it separately. UH. And I've read lots of
different versions about how much they cost, and um. In fact,
I didn't mention this, but I might as well mention
that the power wall itself, the ten kilowatt hour version
costs uh. The seven kilowatt hour version costs three thousand dollars.
You can stack sevens with sevens and tens with tens.
(27:48):
Tens you can get up to ninety one hours capacity
to be more than enough for for a day easily,
but for for a week, probably doing pretty well there. Uh,
sevens you can stack up to sixty three kill one
hours together, so UM, so if your house does require
more capacity than seven kill one hours per day, then
(28:10):
you could stack them, but that means another extra three
thousand dollars per battery unit. You still need the inverter
to convert the DC power to a C, so that's
an additional cost. It does not come with that cost.
Tesla has said that you would have to pay for
like installation and an inverter, so uh, these can cost
somewhere in the realm of a thousand to two thousand dollars,
(28:32):
So that goes on top of the cost of whatever
batteries you're buying. These are all important things to take
note because a lot of people have been pointing at
power wall saying this is a great way to get
either independent from the grid, which means that you also
have to invest in some other means of generating electricity
like wind or solar, or to offset the cost of
(28:53):
those peak pricing periods on the grid. And in that case,
you have to sit there and look at all, right,
the stallation cost and the purchase cost is that over
the lifespan of the the actual products going to be
lower than if I were to just stay on the
grid entirely, And that those questions are tough. Um, you
(29:18):
actually have to ask that based upon where you live.
It's not it's not so simple as just um, you know, yes,
it's better to be independent. All right, Well, it sounds
like we're already sort of talking about the question that
I wanted to ask which was simply like, as it stands, now,
does it make sense for most people to buy one? Uh?
(29:39):
This is entirely dependent upon individual basis. Like Uh, to
the point where I mean, you've got it upfront cost
that is not insignificant. I meant is for a ten
kilowatt hour per weekly cycle battery, that's that's expensive. Three
thousand dollars for seven kilowae hour, that's expense of upfront cost.
(30:00):
Not everyone can afford it. Um. So even if you're thinking, oh,
over the long term, I'll save money, if you can't
afford the upfront costs, and that's gonna be tough. Right,
Even if you can afford it over the long run,
then uh, you you may have to look at your
individual situations just to see if it makes sense from
a financial standpoint, if you're doing it for an environmental
(30:22):
standpoint in order, or or you're doing it because you're
being you're trying to be a super good citizen and
reduce the load on the power grid. Um. First of all,
you're probably Captain America because I don't know that many
people who are willing to spend that kind of money
to help the power grid, right, I don't think a
lot of people view the power grid as being like
(30:42):
this thing that we need to help out, although it
really is um it would and it does make sense
to try and reduce the load, but that I don't
think that's the motivator from most people. Right. If you
have an environmental motivation, like you, you say, well, my
local power concern is coal fired, and I want to
put some solar panels on my roof and be able
to use that. Yeah. Yeah, If you're doing it the
solar panel way, either you're trying to get off grid
(31:03):
or you're trying to just supplement, you know, you're trying
to reduce the need for the power from the grid.
I totally get that. If you're just talking about using
it to get lower rates on your electricity, then you're
still I mean, the power plants still burning coal at night.
It's not like the nighttime electricity suddenly came coal free.
So it all depends upon your motivations. What what's your
(31:25):
reason for purchasing it, and then you have to look
at the actual finances. So let's take the tin killer
what our battery, because that's what a lot of people
have been looking at. That's the one. Uh So that's
three fifty dollars per kill a what hour, So you
take that the full three hundred dollars divided by ten um.
The other battery systems that are out there are closer
(31:47):
to five dollars to six hundred dollars kill a one
hour competitors existing. Yes, So in other words, the Tesla
power Wall on a a cash per kill awa our basis,
is less expensive than competing batteries that already exist on
the market. Okay, so it takes a desirable but expensive
(32:10):
proposition and makes it cheaper. Yeah, exactly. So the question
is isn't cheap enough? Now? According to winfried Hoffman, this
was something that I read in Forbes. The cost per
kill a watt hour of running a battery that has
an installation cost of four dollars per kilo one hour
with eighty percent efficiency and the ability to run five
thousand cycles is fifteen cents per kilowatt hour. So that's
(32:36):
obviously not exactly the same as the power wall, right
because we had already just said that the ten kilowatt
hour would be closer to course, that doesn't include installation,
nor doesn't include the inverter, which would add to that
um and the efficiency of the power wall is higher.
It's it's in the ninety's. I think it's efficient, which
is obviously significantly higher than eight percent efficient. Uh. And
(32:59):
we don't know the number of cycles it can run,
but we do know it's supposed to be a weekly
cycle thing. But fifteen cents per kill one hour, that's
that's not bad. Um. So if we look at fifteen
cents per kill a one hour, and then we look
at what the national averages for electricity cost, the national
average is twelve cents per kill a one hour. So
(33:20):
in other words, if you live in one of the
states where your the the cost for electricity is at
this level or lower, then it doesn't make any sense
to buy one in order to save money because you
won't be saving money. So if that's the reason why
you would want to buy a power wall, it doesn't
make sense for you. That means said, there are states
(33:40):
that have significantly higher kill what hour prices for their electricity,
Hawaii being the big one. Like we're talking an average
of thirty seven cents per kill a one hour, So
a battery there to get the kilowatt hours at the
cheapest level and then sipping from the batteries during the
peak hours makes incredible sense over the long run because
(34:05):
you will very quickly end up seeing the value of
that purchase. California is another example California peaks. California is
the most complicated state when it comes to figuring out
how much your electricity costs. It's like a three tiered system,
and it ends up being like it involves so many
factors that it might even include things like what color
shoes are you wearing today? I mean, it really gets complex.
(34:28):
But California is another one of the states where it
really makes a lot of sense because those peak charges
can reach up to the neighborhood of forty cents per
kill one hour. So again, if you need electricity during
those times, it makes more sense to use a battery
where you can draw the power when it's cheap and
then you access it when it's expensive. Uh So, in
(34:49):
those cases it makes a lot of sense. But if
you're living in a state where the cost is much
lower I think George's pretty low on the whole national
average thing, um, then it's hard it's a harder sell. Yeah,
I'd say from a money point of view, this might
not be as revolutionary as some people have claimed it is.
(35:11):
On the other hand, I see people seeming to be,
at least to me, kind of overly dismissive, and I'm
not sure quite what that is about. Some people seem angry.
I'm not overly I'm trying not to be overly dismissive
because I think it is. One. It's a huge improvement.
The battery cost has come way down to it's bringing
attention to it, and there are people who could very
(35:32):
much benefit from this battery, right, the folks in Hawaiian
California being two examples. Also, if you decide you want
to invest in sellar panels, and maybe it isn't because
of financial reasons, it's not because of the the money
you're spending on electricity, but because you want to be
independent of coal firing, you know, power plants. Uh, then
(35:53):
this makes a lot of sense, uh, you know, because
it's it's a better investment. Right, you're talking about the
investment you have solar panels put in. Uh, you're talking
about the the inverters you might need you might need
to by the way, um, depending because if you're using
just the batteries themselves without the solar panels, then you
you would need a converter from a C to d
C to charge the battery, and then another converter from
(36:16):
d C to a C to send the electricity to
your home, So that would add to the cost of
the system as well. But assuming that you're doing solar panels,
solar panels are going to generate electricity in d C power.
It's not alternating current, so your solar panels would not
need some sort of converter to run the electricity to
your battery. The battery would still need an inverter to
change that to a C for your home appliances, but
(36:37):
you wouldn't need two of them, you just need one.
Um So if you're concern is to is to go green,
then this is great because it cuts down the barrier
of entry to do that. The the expense becomes lower.
And of course solar panel technology has gotten less expensive
over time as well, and I think that does matter.
(36:58):
I mean, for a lot of people for a long time,
that's been a you know, they like to have some
solar panels, but then they look at the price test, right,
and there's just no way I could afford that the
upfront cost is too much, and it may still be
true that if you add up all the numbers, right,
you add up how expensive the solar panel purchase and
installation is, how expensive the power wall installation is, how
(37:19):
expensive the inverter is. If you add all of that up,
and then you average it out over the life the
expected lifetime of those elements, and you look at the
price per killer, what hour you'd be spending an equivalent
if you're on the power grid, it may be that
you're still spending more money using the solar panel solution,
but maybe that's not what's important to you. Maybe that's
(37:41):
not the reason why you want to make that conversion,
but you could argue that this helps bring that dream
closer to reality for a lot of people. The other
thing we have to remember is Tesla has built, or
is it the process of building, their Giga factory, which
is their massive battery production manufacturing plant, right, and with
(38:02):
mass manufacturer, one of the things we see is that
costs come down as manufacturing processes improve, volume increases, cost decrease,
and so this three thousand dollar price tags that we're seeing,
those could drop in a few years. So it may
be that Forbes is right in calling this a rich,
(38:25):
rich person's green toy for the time being. Maybe that's
true for now, but it's probably not true for the
long term. And it's a great first step to really
getting to this sort of energy independence where we we
can decrease the load on our really you know, stressed
(38:48):
power grid structure. Yeah, and that sort of makes me wonder,
like what is the future of home energy access and
home energy stores, because you could sort of think of
if this makes any sense, it might be kind of
strange think about energy as compared to television. It used
(39:08):
to be that everybody got all their television uh linearly
like it's coming in right now. I see where you're going.
You're getting exactly what is being broadcast at this moment.
But we've made a very strong transition in recent years
to more on demand viewings. People like they have TiVo
or they just they watch Netflix or YouTube, or they
(39:31):
watch what they want when they want it. And you know,
it doesn't matter what's streaming in at any given time.
It's just there when you need it and not when
you don't write. You don't have to you don't have
to sit there and make time in your day at
at seven pm to make sure you catch something because
now you can you can watch it whenever you like.
Right So, right now, grid powers the same way. It's
sort of like the old linear programming TV. It's coming
(39:53):
your way. And if if you want to get some
of that power, you're getting the power that's being gen
rated right now, unless your grid is you know, unless
your grid has some kind of like storage just I
mean it might be different in different places. Yeah, most
most power grids don't have I mean, Tesla also has
Solar City, which is you know, so they have a
vested interest in solar power. But you could have like
(40:15):
solar farms where they would also have their own energy
storage perhaps so that way they are generating electricity, storing
the electricity, and then the electricity you're getting is actually
coming from the battery storage systems, not from not necessarily
directly from the solar panels themselves. That's a possibility. Um.
Another thing that I think is interesting is the possibility
of seeing smart grid technology worked into our paragrid infrastructure,
(40:38):
which would would really help with load balancing and help
help prevent things like brownouts are blackouts from happening. But
even so, you still want to see this growth and
home energy storage because it allows people to get independent
from the power grid, which it does a couple of things.
(41:00):
It helps us create greener means of generating our electricity,
so we don't have to worry about polluting the earth
quite as much. And it also means that we're decreasing
the the demands the load on those power grids and
making it less of a volatile situation. Yeah. Yeah, I
mean I wonder if coupling some kind of like home
(41:22):
energy storage system with just more responsive feedback on our
energy usage. I mean, I don't think there's any reason
we couldn't do the same kind of feedback with the
grid energy we consume. But what if it's like overnight,
you know, you charge up a battery and that battery
has a big display on your wall that's showing you
sort of like a bar of all the energy that
(41:42):
you want to set out to ration for that day,
And as you use appliances and devices, that bar goes down,
so it's sort of like your battery indicator on your
smartphone or Yeah, and it could help you be more
conscious of exactly how much energy you're used. That could
be great because I mean, but that's not dependent on
the battery like I said, mean you could just have it.
Add up, you can have you could just have a
smart meter, right, there's smart meters that give you a
(42:05):
lot more information about how much electricity you're using, and
the stuff I've read have suggested that people who have
smart meters, once they become aware of it, really get
much better about conserving electricity. And you know they a
lot of it is just because you know when it's
when it's not easily accessible or easy to understand, you know,
you don't pay it very much, mind, I mean, why
(42:28):
would you, Because it's it's kind of behind the scenes,
and it's not until you get your electric bill that
you're like, oh, yeah, I guess, um, I guess I
did use a lot, so smart meters definitely help. I
would also say that there's the possibility this is kind
of a pipe dream, but there's the possibility we could
develop a really awesome way of generating electricity, like fusion power,
where energy storage no longer becomes a big problem because
(42:51):
we can generate tons of electricity more than enough to
meet demand. Which is kind of a naive thing to say.
Whenever there is there's I don't think you could ever
claim there's a power excess, like, we will always find
ways to consume that energy. But but if we were
able to crack something like that where we're not dependent
(43:12):
upon fossil fuels, we're using a a you know, much
safer means of generating electricity than something aunt right something
it's not nuclear power in the sense of fission, so
we're not generating nuclear waste like we would with nuclear
fission plants. Nuclear fusion is a very different process. It's
just happens to be one that right now isn't efficient
(43:34):
enough to be a means of generating electricity for like
a city or something. It's still in the laboratory phase
where we're trying to find a way of initiating fusion
um in a way that is both efficient and consumes
enough of the fuel to make sense to actually convert
to So if that happens energy storage at home, you know,
(43:54):
it's still is a good idea since you know, there
could be an infrastructure problem, like let's say that there
are storm that knocked down power lines or an earthquake
or something like that, you would still be able to
supply electricity to your home because you would have batteries
that would allow you to do that, but it wouldn't
be as important from a stance of uh, you know,
(44:14):
trying to reduce the amount of money that your electricity
bill is uh is mounting up to, because we could,
in theory, once if fusion works out, invest in that
infrastructure to the point where we don't have to worry
so much about load balancing, we don't have to worry
about running out of supply because fusion is would produce
(44:36):
abundant amounts of energy uh, and it might end up
making a lot of these other issues moot. But but
that's a big if, and you don't want to put
yeah yeah, So my view and it's very much I
think what you were saying, Joe, is that I want
to see this kind of technology continue to evolve, to
continue to come down in price. I see it as complementary.
(45:00):
Perhaps in the long run, it could be a replacement
for the current ha ha means of distributing electricity. But
it's certainly a complimentary approach. And um, while I don't
think it's the announcement to completely lose your head over
unless you live in a place like Hawaii or California
(45:21):
where you know your electric bill is is significant, especially
in those peak hours. Um, I think it is a
very encouraging announcement, so I would I don't totally dismiss it,
but I don't like I don't have stars in my
eyes either. I had posted a Twitter message and this
might have been a little excessive, I guess, but I
(45:42):
posted a Twitter message I said. I think Tesla Motors
is well named because it seems to have the same
distortion field that Nicola had, at least after his life. Anyway,
because people look at Nicola Tesla as like this kind
of iconic mythical figure. Now, um, I call it the
Tesla fog. It's this fog of kind of like rumor
(46:05):
and legend that you encounter on the Internet and it's
hard to tell, like, wait, what's real about this guy?
And what's just strange misconception and and lionization and yeah,
and I think the company has the same the same feature, right,
It's maybe not to the same extent as as the person,
but there seems to be some of that going on.
Like if you if you ever, if you ever say
(46:27):
anything that is critical of electric cars, the Tesla fans
will jump on that in a heartbeat. Or if you
say something that like if you if you point out
that as a particular space X project hasn't worked out
the way that it was hoped, even if you're being
very you know, very uh objective about it, who the
(46:49):
fans can come after you? So you know there are
some passionate Tesla fans and Elon Musk fans for good reason.
The man is is inarguably a genius. He is certainly
a business genius. He has done in an incredible amount
to push electric battery technology. Uh so, um, you know,
(47:10):
not taking anything away from him, I hope that in
maybe five years time, we are seeing this battery price
come down to a point where it makes sense for
a lot of people, because I would love to see
more and more people be able to take advantage of
those lower off peak rates to decrease the demand on
our power grids and to kind of, you know, find
(47:31):
a way of of uh maintaining a lifestyle that they're
accustomed to without having to take too many huge sacrifices
because obviously the more sacrifices you have to make, the
harder it is to commit to that kind of change. Yeah,
if I can, if I can analyze a little bit, Yeah,
I think what you're reacting to is not You're not
(47:52):
having a negative reaction to the power wall itself as
a technology, more just to sort of overblown misconceptions about
it in the media. Yeah. I mean, I've seen a
lot of media coverage where it seemed like they were
focusing on like, oh, this could provide electricity at fifteen kilo?
What fifteen since Perkella what hour? And my thought was,
(48:13):
before I read what it was, I thought it was
people thinking that this was a way of making elect
That's exactly what I was coming across too. I was
reading these reports and it sounded like, wait, you realize
this is a battery, right, and that once it's drained,
you have to refill it, so that electricity has to
come from somewhere. It's like it was putting a putting
a power reactor inside your house, and that's not what
(48:34):
it is. You know, It's a battery, just like any
other battery. So uh it maybe those the people who
wrote those were already working with the presumption that this
is paired with something like solar panels, which would make
sense because again Tesla is invested in solar panel technology,
but it didn't say that in the article. It was
just like how they could deliver electricity at fifteen since
(48:55):
Prokella one hour, And I thought, well, where's the electricity
coming from to charge the battery? If you have solar panels,
and that's your answer, that's fine. I have no problem
with that. Obviously, you have to affector in the price
of the solar panels. But if you already have solar panels,
then you you've already committed that expense. I think it's
coming from the arc reactor in your check. Yeah, well,
you know, I am iron Man. According to brain stuff,
(49:19):
I am iron Man. Yeah, so that's me. Um, you know,
they're worse burdens to bear. Uh, but yeah, it's it
was one of it. I have felt the same way,
like it just seemed to me that there was a
misconception that this was a means of generating electricity, not
storing electricity. So I'm sure that we have completely done
away with that misconception in this episode. Anyone who had
(49:42):
that before by now is certainly like, Okay, I get
it's a battery, John, then you say it too many times.
I got it. But h but still pretty cool, and
I'm still very eager to see where this goes in
the future, me too. All right, Well, that wraps up
this discussion. I guess it was really fun to look
into this because again, when we see these things pop
up in the news often it takes a little bit
(50:04):
of critical thinking to kind of get to the bottom
of it and see, you know what, how excited should
we be about it? I think we do need to
be excited about it. We just need to, you know,
not lose our heads over it. So if you guys
have any suggestions for future episodes of forward thinking, maybe
there's a technology that you want to know, what's that
going to be like in the future, or maybe it's
a rumored technology you want to know how likely is
(50:25):
that going to happen. We've got a a doozy of
an episode coming up where we're gonna be looking at
a theoretical uh type of technology that is bending our
minds as we try to understand it. But we love
that kind of challenge, So feel free to write in
let us know what you think. Our email addresses FW
thinking at how stuff Works dot com, or drop us
(50:47):
a line on Facebook or Twitter or Google Plus. At
Twitter and Google Plus, we are f W Thinking. Just
search FW thinking in the Facebook search bar will pop
right up. Leave us a message, and we'll talk to
you again, really soon. For more on this topic and
the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot Com, brought
(51:19):
to you by Toyota. Let's Go Places,
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Be there, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
podcast that looks at the future and says you're gonna
be the one that saves me. I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm
Joe McCormick, and our other host, Lauren big Obama is
(00:22):
not with us today, but she will be back next time. Yeah,
she is currently being famous doing something else, which is,
you know, more or less true. She she has she
has a lot of other shows that she's on, and
so we're letting her go and be on her other
show and we are going to carry on here, but
she will be on the next episode. So we're going
(00:43):
to cover something that was recently mentioned in the news
and kind of made a big stir online coming from
the company Tesla, which has been known to announced several
things that have cost stirs in the past. Yeah, one
might look at them as aspiring to create somewhat disruptive technologies,
perhaps being the people who want to shake up the market. Yeah,
(01:08):
maybe create a new market where one never existed before,
which could potentially take some steam away from other markets,
sometimes literally as a case. Maybe. Yeah, And so this
technology that we're going to talk about today is the
the widely hyped Tesla power wall, also known as a battery. Well,
(01:28):
so what I imagined when I first heard somebody in
the office here talking about the power wall, like, hey,
did you hear about the power wall? I was like, Okay,
what is that? It's some kind of like home defense
system where if you touch the walls of the house,
it's like a Tesla coil. It's like, it's like the
house defense version of the car alarm and RoboCop. Yeah, okay,
(01:52):
like the batmobile. That's that's not what it is, as
it turns out. So what it is very simply is
a home energy storage solution. Yeah, and that's that might
sound pretty basic, and in a way it is, but
we shouldn't talk about why home energy storage is a
thing that actually matters and will matter more in the future,
(02:13):
probably hopefully. There are some places in the world where
this announcement truly makes a huge difference. Now the place
where Joe and I live is not necessarily one of them,
but we'll get into why that is. In fact, it
might might benefit us to have a discussion really quickly
about how electricity is measured in terms of pricing, because,
(02:38):
as it turns out, the energy storage part has you know,
a lot of the decision to switch to an energy
storage system in your home has to do with the financial,
uh situation you are in, the type of how much
are you being charged for your electricity? Yeah? Well, okay,
let's start off talking about about electricity pricing. How you
(02:59):
get your electricity, how it's measured, and what it costs.
So I've got a question. Okay, a lot of times
you'll see an appliance, some kind of electrical device rated
for like a number of watts or killer watts. But
then it seems like when I have to pay for electricity,
I'm being charged for kill a watt hours. Okay, yeah,
so what's going on there? Your electronics require a certain
(03:22):
amount of electricity in order to operate at any given instant,
and watts is a way of measuring units of electricity
in an instant. So it's it's kind of like if
you are driving thirty five miles per hour, you wouldn't
say how much time was that because that doesn't make
any sense for that question at that instant you were
(03:43):
going thirty five miles per hour, you would have to
ask how long were you driving for thirty five miles
per hour? That that would make sense. All right, I
drew thirty five for ten minutes, that would make that's
the question that makes sense. Same thing with electricity. You'd
say how much electricity does this, uh this a lot
electronic device require? And you'd say, like a hundred watts
(04:03):
in an instant? How long did you operated it an hour? Well,
that means that you were operating at one watts per hour.
So when you are talking about electricity pricing, the utility
companies look at kill a watt hours, how many killer
watts were used per hour in your home? And you
figure this out by looking at all the different electronic
(04:23):
devices you have, right finding out how much how much
wattage they require, multiply that by how long they were
in operation, and then divide that by one thousand, because
one thousand watts equals one kill a watt. And once
you do all that, you know how many killer watts
per hour were used for any given amount of time,
(04:45):
uh like over the you can average that out over
a month, which is what utility companies do. And then
in order for you to figure out how much you're paying,
you would look at your bill and you this gets
a little complicated depending upon where you live. Um, your
you might have a statement right there that says how
much has charged per kilowatt hour, and essentially you would
multiply that figure by the number of kilowatt hours you
(05:07):
consumed in that that time period, or you might have
to actually do the math yourself. Right, You might have
to take the total and take out any additional fees
that were at on top of it, and then divide
the number of kilowatt hours you used to find out
how much they're charging you per kill a watt hour. Well,
that sounds pretty straightforward. If you just have a price
per kilowatt hour and then you've used this many kilowatt hours,
(05:28):
that sounds like a simple way to calculate your bill.
But not all kilowatt hours are the same. This is
this is true, yeah, because there so One of the
things about the power grid, especially in the United States,
is that there are peak hours of usage and there
are slow hours of usage. And depending on the power grid, uh,
(05:50):
it may be operating at near capacity, as in it
is carrying a load that is the maximum for what
it is capable of handling. Right, and you can think
about this in terms of your own daily habits. I mean,
how do you use electricity in your house or your
apartment wherever you live. Well, you probably, if you're like
most people, wake up in the morning, you turn on
(06:10):
some lights, You maybe run the dishwasher, take a shower,
run the water heater. You use some power. Then you
leave for work, and then for most of the day
you're not using much power. Then you come back home
in the evening, turn a bunch of lights on, run
some appliances, turn on the TV, use your computer, and
then you go to bed, and then suddenly the power
(06:30):
drops again. So there's a pretty standard, common sort of
time of day surge in the demand for power throughout
the grid, and often you will find out that the
times when you most use power are the ones that
have surge pricing on them. A tiered pricing level, so
that price per kilo what hour maybe a range. Right,
(06:51):
You might have an average of how much you paid
per kilo one hour, but that that actual amount might
change throughout the day, So in the big lead part
of the day or at the end of the day,
it might be higher because increased demand is putting increased
demand on the system. And it also means that it
creates an incentive for you to use less electricity, thus
(07:11):
decreasing the demand on the power grid. Um. Keeping my
most power companies in the United States are like co
ops or government owned utilities. They're not it's and they
are also regulated, so they're not able to go for
crazy profits there. It's not in their interest to try
and uh uh you know, create the money making scheme
(07:33):
of some sort because they're regulated to the point where
they can't do that anyway. So they're operating under these
rules and uh and and they want to make sure
that they can supply electricity to all the customers who
demand it. But in part of that they have this
tiered pricing to help mediate that demand. Otherwise you would
(07:55):
end up having demands that power grid couldn't meet, and
you could have some pretty serious consequences like brownouts or worse.
Um and uh you know, one of the things we
could talk about a little bit later is how this
is the perfect set up for us to say, yeah,
it is time for us to look in two ways
to address this, because it's a problem that's not going
(08:16):
to get better over time. We're going to have an
increasing demand for electricity. So we need to start figuring
out one how we can decrease our individual consumption levels
and to make the infrastructure to deliver electricity more efficient
so that we're not constantly at that that edge where
things could spill over into a problem. There's some states
(08:37):
like California that are really close to that a lot
of the time. Okay, Jonathan, Well here I've got a solution. Okay,
say I look at this situation and I say, oh man,
some some of these you know, power providers, they're straining.
We're we're going to max out the grid. I'm gonna
put some solar panels on my house, and then I
will be energy independent and I won't have to worry
(08:59):
about this, you know, peak surge pricing at the time
of day or possible brown outs when other people need electricity.
I'll just be I'll be completely free. I'll be like
the Superman of home energy usage. Right. It's not quite
that way, is it. No, It's a little more complicated
for two reasons, too big reasons. The first reason is
that the installation cost of solar panels is something you
(09:20):
can't ignore. Right, That's an upfront cost that is also
going to require replacement over time. So you have to
factor in how much am I spending for the system? Uh,
and if I'm spending more like if you figure out
for the lifetime of those solar panels, if you're spending
more per kilo lot hour effectively for the lifetime of
those solar panels than you would if you were getting
(09:42):
it off the power grid, it doesn't make financial sense. Environmentally,
that's a different question, but financially that doesn't make sense. Okay,
well let's say we ignore that. Okay, we've still got
another problem. Time problems actually eider that for a different
reason now, right, because solar panels will convert solar power
to electricity, but that's immediate. That's it happens when it
(10:06):
when the solar power, when the sun light hits those
solar panels. Yeah, that's when the electricity gets generated, whether
you are using it or not. That's when the electricity
is there and it doesn't stick around. So we talked
earlier about the peak times when we're going to be
using electricity, first thing in the morning and in the evening,
especially once it starts getting dark and we need to
(10:28):
turn lights on so we can see well when it
gets dark, we're not getting any sunlight on the solar panels.
In the morning, we may not be getting very much
sunlight either, and so you're not generating a lot of electricity.
You're generating the most electricity in the middle of the day,
which we have already established the time when you're not
at home. It's the cruel irony of nature. So you
need some way to store that electricity so that you
(10:51):
can then access electricity during the hours when you need it.
But it's also the hours when you're not generating electricity,
at least not through solar panels. Right. So we've reached
the point where whether you're just drawing grid electricity or
you want to outfit your home with solar panels and
stuff like that. Either way, it would be really advantageous
if you had an efficient way to store a lot
(11:14):
of energy without much loss, uh, that you could use
whenever you really needed it, right, Yeah. And this would
allow you to do things like even like you were saying,
even if you don't have solar panels, you could use
a battery and charge your batteries when the peak, yeah yeah,
when the pricing is at its lowest, and then in
the day when it get parts of the day where
(11:35):
the pricing is higher. Instead of pulling your electricity off
of the grid, you pull it from the batteries, so
you're still getting the electricity you need, but you're only
sipping from the power grid during the hours when it's
at the low off hour times. And this would usually
be at night, so you'd be probably asleep your batteries
charged in the middle of the night. That's the only
(11:56):
thing that's really going. There might be a couple of
other systems like air conditioning, especially here in the South,
some other things that might be running, but in general
most of your electronics are off or in sleep mode
or whatever. Uh so you would be sipping power from
the power grid at a lower cost per kill a
lot hours. Let's say, let's arbitrarily say it's eight cents
(12:17):
for off peak hours, which is you know, low, but
it is not unheard of. I've seen between five and
ten cents, depending upon where you live. Um, there are
other parts of the country where it's very different. But
if it's eight cents per killer whatt hour off peak hours,
that's when you're pulling your charging your battery. Then during
peak hours it might be something closer to eighteen cents
(12:38):
per kill a lot hour. Well, instead of pulling your
electricity for the power grid there, you're pulling it from
the battery. So this is electricity that you only spent
eight cents per kill a watt hour to get in
the first place. And if you do that time and
time again over time, that difference between the the peak
hour usage and the off peak our usage costs will
(13:00):
offset the the the purchase and installation price of the
battery hopefully, right, So whether you whether you go grid
or whether you go solar, either way it could be
a big help to have a large energy storage unit
in your home. It could make financial sense, yes, depending
on what it costs exactly and how much energy it
(13:21):
can hold, and that and a lot of other considerations.
But all of this is what brings us to the
power wall. So ultimately, let's let's you know, to deconstructed.
It is a battery. It is a lithium ion battery,
but it's a very inexpensive lithium ion battery, particularly for
the capacity, the efficiency in the number of cycles it has.
(13:43):
So I don't want to take anything away from the
achievement because battery technology is one of those things we've
talked about in the past about how you know to
to get it to a point where it has advanced
similar to how other technologies have advanced. Is really really hard. Yeah,
I think I've said this on the podcast before. I
think batteries are one of the great overlooked marvels of
(14:05):
modern life. They're one of the things we take for granted.
We don't often think to be thankful for batteries, but
just think how amazing batteries are. Awesome they make your life. Yeah, yeah,
the only time we tend to think about them is
when a battery's juice runs out and then were cursing, right, Like,
if you walk into your house and you hear the
tell tale beeping noise of a smoke detector was as
(14:26):
its battery is dying, You're like, I've got to go
replace that. But assuming it's functioning properly, I mean the
fact that you can like put a little thing in
your cell phone or your laptop and then go use
this device for hours without plugging it in, that's amazing.
It is phenomenal, and it gives us. It gives us
a lot of independence and freedom that we would not
otherwise have. So certainly very important and uh and again,
(14:49):
Tesla has done a lot to bring that price down,
which is one of the big barriers to using energy
storage at home. Now there are people who have had
solar pedals on their homes for years, and they have
had batteries for years, because you have to have a
battery if you want solar panels to make sense, or
you're using the solar panels to help offset how much
(15:10):
you're pulling from the grid, because otherwise you're that again,
that electricity that is being generated is just going to
waste if you're not using it. Well, I think in
some scenarios you can you can sell excess energy back
to the grid. Yeah, depending upon the utility company in
the region you're in there and the laws of the
state you are in. This is very complicated when it
gets down to it, but yes, there are some places
(15:31):
where if your house is actually generating an excess of electricity,
you can sell it back off to the grid, which
makes sense. It it ends up taking some of the
load off the grid itself. They don't have to produce
as much electricity. Okay, but so, how is the power
wall different from the batteries that, say, a solar panel
equipped house has had before. Okay, well, one the design,
(15:53):
it's pretty I mean it looks kind of like a
big like pictures mound or like home plate. Like I
was thinking that it looks like it's kind of bigger.
And it's also uh, like you said, it's a lithium
ion battery. Right. A lot of the batteries that were
used in solar panel technology before now had been lead
acid batteries, which are the same type of batteries that
(16:15):
you would have in a vehicle like a car. Lead
acid batteries. Um are you know, they're they're sturdy, they're
proven technology, they cry horrible acid, they are all. They
also can be bulky. Uh. If you have a bunch
of them in series then one of them goes out,
then you're in trouble because then you have to find
the one that's gone out and replace it. Um. It's
(16:35):
it's not the Uh, it's not the easiest technology to
swap in and out, and it definitely has its disadvantages,
but it's proven it works. Lithium ions worked too, but
they had been very expensive until Tesla had said, Hey,
we're gonna come out with these couple of models. Um,
so let's talk a little bit about the the actual
(16:57):
power wall batteries. There are two models of them that
they have. As far as I know, they are the
same um size, right, yeah. I think one of the
first things a lot of people would want to know
about it is simply how big is this thing? Like
where does it go? So they suggest, well, you put
it on the wall, you mounted on one of the
walls in your house, and it is in inches fifty
one point to by thirty three point nine by seven
(17:21):
point one, so so not a not an insignificantly small box.
It is smaller, probably smaller than you in metric what
is that It is a d millimeters by eight hundred
sixty millimeters by one hundred and eighty millimeters and they
(17:42):
are producing Tesla's producing two different types of power wall batteries.
There's also another um power battery that Tesla's coming up
with for like industrial use, but we're not really focusing
on that. We're looking at the home use ones. So
the two models they're looking at is a seven kilowatta
our daily cycle capacity, meaning that it has the capacity
(18:03):
to hold seven kilowatt hours of electricity. Then there is
a ten kilowatt our weekly cycle battery. So we can
hold ten kilo one hours. But you heard me say
daily cycle and weekly cycle. And that's important, I think
because a lot of people have been using the ten
kilowatt hour cycle weekly cycle battery as their um basis
(18:25):
to explain how this would work. But it would require
you to essentially use and charge that battery every day,
which is not a good idea for a weekly cycle battery.
The cycles refer to how how much charged, how much
capacity that battery can hold over a certain given amount
of time or certain number of uses. Really is what
(18:47):
I should say. So, Uh, the simplest way of explaining
a cycle is, let's say you've got a battery, it's
charged full. You use the battery until the charge has
hit quote unquote zero percent. Trually do that. You shouldn't
necessarily do that, depending on the battery. Some batteries it
doesn't matter, but we won't get into all that. Then
you recharge it all the way back up to full.
(19:08):
That's a cycle. From full to empty to full. That's
a cycle. But you don't necessarily have to do it
that way. If you if you end up using half
the charge, recharged it, then used half the charged and
recharged it that's a full cycle too, so it's really
just the the representation of a of that battery's capacity
being used and recharged, and there's a limited number of
(19:31):
those per battery. The battery officials decreases, like you get
a new laptop or something, and it will tell you
the battery has this many cycles in its lifetime. And
I said efficiency, it shifts at just capacity, because what
I mean to say is that after you hit that number,
there's no guarantee that capacity is going to be the
same as what it was when you first got the battery.
(19:52):
In fact, it probably won't be right. So let's say,
for example, here's here's I'm just using this as a
as a out of the blue kind of example. Let's
say that you have a ten kilowatt hour capacity battery
and after ten thousand cycles, it's capacity has dropped, so
now it's closer to nine kilowatt hours of capacity. Again,
(20:14):
I just grabbed that out of nowhere. That would mean
that that battery would now be nine kilowatt hours, but
when you first got the battery, of that capacity would
be ten kilowatt hours, and over time that that full
capacity would drop more and more and you would need
to replace the battery because you would no longer be
able to store as much electricity in the battery as
(20:36):
you could when you first got it. Uh. And sometimes
this drop off can be pretty dramatic, and depending upon
the type of battery, you can have issues. Like the
reason why Joe was saying you don't necessarily want to
drain a battery completely and recharge it is that sometimes
with some batteries you can't recharge it, like it gets
all the way down to the bottom and it won't
(20:57):
charge back up. Yeah. Well, the horrible thing to do
is like let it go to zero, charge it to
use it, let it go to zero. Don't do that
to your battery. Yeah. Depending again, depending on the battery,
you can build up a memory of that where the
battery starts to think of as being its new and
then you've got a battery can hold half the capacity
(21:18):
of what it used to. That's not as big a
problem these days as it used to be, but it
is still something like you really shouldn't do that all
the time. Um, it's better to avoid it. So uh. Anyway,
if you're using the ten kilowatt hour battery, it's suggesting
weekly cycles, so they Tesla's marketing as a backup battery,
(21:39):
something that would be used in times where perhaps you
needed to you wanted to maybe ease off on your
consumption but only for a little while, or your consumption
from the grid for a little while, or perhaps there
might be power outages and this would be a great
way to be able to still provide electricity to your
home even during a power outage. But you would only
(22:01):
recharge it like once a week, or at least have
the equivalent of one cycle being consumed once per week. Uh,
seven killo whate hours being a daily cycle, that means
that you could recharge it every single day, and the
number of cycles is presumably larger to because both of
these batteries are warrantied for ten years. So if they're
(22:22):
warrantied for ten years, you would imagine that means they
have enough cycles in them to get through those ten
years without an appreciable loss of capacity. So, uh, the
daily one, you're more likely to be able to drain
that and recharge it frequently than you would the ten
kilo one hour one um that being said, seven kilo
(22:43):
one hours, it sounds like a lot, but it's you know,
the depending upon, uh, your household, it may not be
enough for you to get through a night even Here's
another question though, I mean at any even time. Let's
say you're trying to run a bunch of appliances at once.
What's the maximum output, like just the watts they can provide? Oh,
(23:06):
that's an excellent question. Yeah, while they can provide to
kilowatt hours or two kilowatts rather continuously with peaks of
up to three point three kilowatts, So I don't know
how much that is, all right, So let's say that
you've got a refrigerator that's about four hundred watts. Usually
four wats a washer or dryer can be around to
(23:31):
kill a watts of required power. Like some things just
draw more power, they need more electricity to operate. So
depending upon what you need to do to kill a
watts at an instance is not unusual. I think the
average for any part of a day, like it's essentially
the daily average a house uses is one thousand two kilowatts.
(23:54):
But that's the average that's not peak used, right, that's
when you're averaging it all over the entire twenty four
hour period. So they're gonna be sometimes where it's significantly
higher than kill a watts that you're going to need
to power everything that you want to do it simultaneously.
Me I like to run the washer, the dryer, the microwave,
a hair dryer. I don't even have hair, and my
Xbox and my TV. Plus I usually have a computer
(24:16):
downloading something downstairs, and I don't know. Sometimes I have
the upstairs air conditioning going on because I like the
room to be cool when I go upstairs. And some
space heaters, yeah, just outside. I just have them pointed
outside to make the Georgia heat even that much more unbearable.
Because you know, I'm this is your doctor doom plan. Yes,
well it's a really thing of it more as a
(24:37):
Cobra commander plan, because I think that through climate change
I can I can actually control the weather. That was
his go to was weather control. Okay, no, seriously, I
don't do all that. But there are times where you
might be drawing more power than uh to kill a watts.
And you know, three point three kill a watts is
a peak. That's a pretty I'd say it's a fairly
(24:57):
safe number there. I don't know how along that could
be sustained. I mean, obviously you're not going to be
able to do it for more than two hours with
the seven kilowatt hour battery because you'll drain it, like
in two hours, it would be pretty much gone. Um.
Keeping in mind also we haven't talked about the batteries
efficiency yet. We'll get to that. And when we talk
about efficiency, that means that while it's capable of holding
(25:18):
seven kilowatt hours, that's not all the electricity you're going
to get. Right, You're gonna get less than that because
about the battery is not um as efficient as that.
And plus there are some other issues we have to
think about. Well, how about the issue of the current type.
Exactly right, you one of these alternating current because it
is much better for transmission over long distances. With direct current.
(25:41):
You want to be uh, you want the load, that is,
the the whatever you're powering, to be fairly close to
the point of generation. So if we were using direct
current like Edison wanted, we would need power plants everywhere, right,
we would have to have them all over the place
in order to supply the power we need. Alternating current
is gray for transmitting power electricity over very great distances.
(26:04):
The crazy thing, though, Joe is that your appliances really
want direct current. But well that's why we've got those
direct current transformers. Well they have their inverters, yeah, yeah,
you have inverter converters. We'll just use the word converter
for boxes. Yes, we're just gonna use converter for simplicity's sake. Uh.
(26:24):
You know, all of you electricians out there can roll
your eyes because I understand that we could talk about
the difference between inverters and converters and all that kind
of stuff. But yeah, you want to be able to
convert from a C to d C because that's the
way that our appliances have been designed. So the crazy
thing is that power from a battery is direct current,
(26:44):
right right, Like you go from the negative terminal to
the positive terminal. Technically, with current, it's the opposite way
because when Franklin was describing electricity, didn't realize that the
negative ones were the ones doing the moving. I didn't
know about electrons yet, so uh, but anyway, you've got
direct current with batteries, but the the system you're using,
your home system, works on alternating current, so you have
(27:05):
to have a device to convert the DC power to
a C and then the A C power, we go
to your devices, which would then convert it back to
d C to actually consume it to use it for
whatever you're using it for. Um. But that means that
you need to have this inverter device, and the power
wall does not come with one, so you actually have
(27:26):
to buy it separately. UH. And I've read lots of
different versions about how much they cost, and um. In fact,
I didn't mention this, but I might as well mention
that the power wall itself, the ten kilowatt hour version
costs uh. The seven kilowatt hour version costs three thousand dollars.
You can stack sevens with sevens and tens with tens.
(27:48):
Tens you can get up to ninety one hours capacity
to be more than enough for for a day easily,
but for for a week, probably doing pretty well there. Uh,
sevens you can stack up to sixty three kill one
hours together, so UM, so if your house does require
more capacity than seven kill one hours per day, then
(28:10):
you could stack them, but that means another extra three
thousand dollars per battery unit. You still need the inverter
to convert the DC power to a C, so that's
an additional cost. It does not come with that cost.
Tesla has said that you would have to pay for
like installation and an inverter, so uh, these can cost
somewhere in the realm of a thousand to two thousand dollars,
(28:32):
So that goes on top of the cost of whatever
batteries you're buying. These are all important things to take
note because a lot of people have been pointing at
power wall saying this is a great way to get
either independent from the grid, which means that you also
have to invest in some other means of generating electricity
like wind or solar, or to offset the cost of
(28:53):
those peak pricing periods on the grid. And in that case,
you have to sit there and look at all, right,
the stallation cost and the purchase cost is that over
the lifespan of the the actual products going to be
lower than if I were to just stay on the
grid entirely, And that those questions are tough. Um, you
(29:18):
actually have to ask that based upon where you live.
It's not it's not so simple as just um, you know, yes,
it's better to be independent. All right, Well, it sounds
like we're already sort of talking about the question that
I wanted to ask which was simply like, as it stands, now,
does it make sense for most people to buy one? Uh?
(29:39):
This is entirely dependent upon individual basis. Like Uh, to
the point where I mean, you've got it upfront cost
that is not insignificant. I meant is for a ten
kilowatt hour per weekly cycle battery, that's that's expensive. Three
thousand dollars for seven kilowae hour, that's expense of upfront cost.
(30:00):
Not everyone can afford it. Um. So even if you're thinking, oh,
over the long term, I'll save money, if you can't
afford the upfront costs, and that's gonna be tough. Right,
Even if you can afford it over the long run,
then uh, you you may have to look at your
individual situations just to see if it makes sense from
a financial standpoint, if you're doing it for an environmental
(30:22):
standpoint in order, or or you're doing it because you're
being you're trying to be a super good citizen and
reduce the load on the power grid. Um. First of all,
you're probably Captain America because I don't know that many
people who are willing to spend that kind of money
to help the power grid, right, I don't think a
lot of people view the power grid as being like
(30:42):
this thing that we need to help out, although it
really is um it would and it does make sense
to try and reduce the load, but that I don't
think that's the motivator from most people. Right. If you
have an environmental motivation, like you, you say, well, my
local power concern is coal fired, and I want to
put some solar panels on my roof and be able
to use that. Yeah. Yeah, If you're doing it the
solar panel way, either you're trying to get off grid
(31:03):
or you're trying to just supplement, you know, you're trying
to reduce the need for the power from the grid.
I totally get that. If you're just talking about using
it to get lower rates on your electricity, then you're
still I mean, the power plants still burning coal at night.
It's not like the nighttime electricity suddenly came coal free.
So it all depends upon your motivations. What what's your
(31:25):
reason for purchasing it, and then you have to look
at the actual finances. So let's take the tin killer
what our battery, because that's what a lot of people
have been looking at. That's the one. Uh So that's
three fifty dollars per kill a what hour, So you
take that the full three hundred dollars divided by ten um.
The other battery systems that are out there are closer
(31:47):
to five dollars to six hundred dollars kill a one
hour competitors existing. Yes, So in other words, the Tesla
power Wall on a a cash per kill awa our basis,
is less expensive than competing batteries that already exist on
the market. Okay, so it takes a desirable but expensive
(32:10):
proposition and makes it cheaper. Yeah, exactly. So the question
is isn't cheap enough? Now? According to winfried Hoffman, this
was something that I read in Forbes. The cost per
kill a watt hour of running a battery that has
an installation cost of four dollars per kilo one hour
with eighty percent efficiency and the ability to run five
thousand cycles is fifteen cents per kilowatt hour. So that's
(32:36):
obviously not exactly the same as the power wall, right
because we had already just said that the ten kilowatt
hour would be closer to course, that doesn't include installation,
nor doesn't include the inverter, which would add to that
um and the efficiency of the power wall is higher.
It's it's in the ninety's. I think it's efficient, which
is obviously significantly higher than eight percent efficient. Uh. And
(32:59):
we don't know the number of cycles it can run,
but we do know it's supposed to be a weekly
cycle thing. But fifteen cents per kill one hour, that's
that's not bad. Um. So if we look at fifteen
cents per kill a one hour, and then we look
at what the national averages for electricity cost, the national
average is twelve cents per kill a one hour. So
(33:20):
in other words, if you live in one of the
states where your the the cost for electricity is at
this level or lower, then it doesn't make any sense
to buy one in order to save money because you
won't be saving money. So if that's the reason why
you would want to buy a power wall, it doesn't
make sense for you. That means said, there are states
(33:40):
that have significantly higher kill what hour prices for their electricity,
Hawaii being the big one. Like we're talking an average
of thirty seven cents per kill a one hour, So
a battery there to get the kilowatt hours at the
cheapest level and then sipping from the batteries during the
peak hours makes incredible sense over the long run because
(34:05):
you will very quickly end up seeing the value of
that purchase. California is another example California peaks. California is
the most complicated state when it comes to figuring out
how much your electricity costs. It's like a three tiered system,
and it ends up being like it involves so many
factors that it might even include things like what color
shoes are you wearing today? I mean, it really gets complex.
(34:28):
But California is another one of the states where it
really makes a lot of sense because those peak charges
can reach up to the neighborhood of forty cents per
kill one hour. So again, if you need electricity during
those times, it makes more sense to use a battery
where you can draw the power when it's cheap and
then you access it when it's expensive. Uh So, in
(34:49):
those cases it makes a lot of sense. But if
you're living in a state where the cost is much
lower I think George's pretty low on the whole national
average thing, um, then it's hard it's a harder sell. Yeah,
I'd say from a money point of view, this might
not be as revolutionary as some people have claimed it is.
(35:11):
On the other hand, I see people seeming to be,
at least to me, kind of overly dismissive, and I'm
not sure quite what that is about. Some people seem angry.
I'm not overly I'm trying not to be overly dismissive
because I think it is. One. It's a huge improvement.
The battery cost has come way down to it's bringing
attention to it, and there are people who could very
(35:32):
much benefit from this battery, right, the folks in Hawaiian
California being two examples. Also, if you decide you want
to invest in sellar panels, and maybe it isn't because
of financial reasons, it's not because of the the money
you're spending on electricity, but because you want to be
independent of coal firing, you know, power plants. Uh, then
(35:53):
this makes a lot of sense, uh, you know, because
it's it's a better investment. Right, you're talking about the
investment you have solar panels put in. Uh, you're talking
about the the inverters you might need you might need
to by the way, um, depending because if you're using
just the batteries themselves without the solar panels, then you
you would need a converter from a C to d
C to charge the battery, and then another converter from
(36:16):
d C to a C to send the electricity to
your home, So that would add to the cost of
the system as well. But assuming that you're doing solar panels,
solar panels are going to generate electricity in d C power.
It's not alternating current, so your solar panels would not
need some sort of converter to run the electricity to
your battery. The battery would still need an inverter to
change that to a C for your home appliances, but
(36:37):
you wouldn't need two of them, you just need one.
Um So if you're concern is to is to go green,
then this is great because it cuts down the barrier
of entry to do that. The the expense becomes lower.
And of course solar panel technology has gotten less expensive
over time as well, and I think that does matter.
(36:58):
I mean, for a lot of people for a long time,
that's been a you know, they like to have some
solar panels, but then they look at the price test, right,
and there's just no way I could afford that the
upfront cost is too much, and it may still be
true that if you add up all the numbers, right,
you add up how expensive the solar panel purchase and
installation is, how expensive the power wall installation is, how
(37:19):
expensive the inverter is. If you add all of that up,
and then you average it out over the life the
expected lifetime of those elements, and you look at the
price per killer, what hour you'd be spending an equivalent
if you're on the power grid, it may be that
you're still spending more money using the solar panel solution,
but maybe that's not what's important to you. Maybe that's
(37:41):
not the reason why you want to make that conversion,
but you could argue that this helps bring that dream
closer to reality for a lot of people. The other
thing we have to remember is Tesla has built, or
is it the process of building, their Giga factory, which
is their massive battery production manufacturing plant, right, and with
(38:02):
mass manufacturer, one of the things we see is that
costs come down as manufacturing processes improve, volume increases, cost decrease,
and so this three thousand dollar price tags that we're seeing,
those could drop in a few years. So it may
be that Forbes is right in calling this a rich,
(38:25):
rich person's green toy for the time being. Maybe that's
true for now, but it's probably not true for the
long term. And it's a great first step to really
getting to this sort of energy independence where we we
can decrease the load on our really you know, stressed
(38:48):
power grid structure. Yeah, and that sort of makes me wonder,
like what is the future of home energy access and
home energy stores, because you could sort of think of
if this makes any sense, it might be kind of
strange think about energy as compared to television. It used
(39:08):
to be that everybody got all their television uh linearly
like it's coming in right now. I see where you're going.
You're getting exactly what is being broadcast at this moment.
But we've made a very strong transition in recent years
to more on demand viewings. People like they have TiVo
or they just they watch Netflix or YouTube, or they
(39:31):
watch what they want when they want it. And you know,
it doesn't matter what's streaming in at any given time.
It's just there when you need it and not when
you don't write. You don't have to you don't have
to sit there and make time in your day at
at seven pm to make sure you catch something because
now you can you can watch it whenever you like.
Right So, right now, grid powers the same way. It's
sort of like the old linear programming TV. It's coming
(39:53):
your way. And if if you want to get some
of that power, you're getting the power that's being gen
rated right now, unless your grid is you know, unless
your grid has some kind of like storage just I
mean it might be different in different places. Yeah, most
most power grids don't have I mean, Tesla also has
Solar City, which is you know, so they have a
vested interest in solar power. But you could have like
(40:15):
solar farms where they would also have their own energy
storage perhaps so that way they are generating electricity, storing
the electricity, and then the electricity you're getting is actually
coming from the battery storage systems, not from not necessarily
directly from the solar panels themselves. That's a possibility. Um.
Another thing that I think is interesting is the possibility
of seeing smart grid technology worked into our paragrid infrastructure,
(40:38):
which would would really help with load balancing and help
help prevent things like brownouts are blackouts from happening. But
even so, you still want to see this growth and
home energy storage because it allows people to get independent
from the power grid, which it does a couple of things.
(41:00):
It helps us create greener means of generating our electricity,
so we don't have to worry about polluting the earth
quite as much. And it also means that we're decreasing
the the demands the load on those power grids and
making it less of a volatile situation. Yeah. Yeah, I
mean I wonder if coupling some kind of like home
(41:22):
energy storage system with just more responsive feedback on our
energy usage. I mean, I don't think there's any reason
we couldn't do the same kind of feedback with the
grid energy we consume. But what if it's like overnight,
you know, you charge up a battery and that battery
has a big display on your wall that's showing you
sort of like a bar of all the energy that
(41:42):
you want to set out to ration for that day,
And as you use appliances and devices, that bar goes down,
so it's sort of like your battery indicator on your
smartphone or Yeah, and it could help you be more
conscious of exactly how much energy you're used. That could
be great because I mean, but that's not dependent on
the battery like I said, mean you could just have it.
Add up, you can have you could just have a
smart meter, right, there's smart meters that give you a
(42:05):
lot more information about how much electricity you're using, and
the stuff I've read have suggested that people who have
smart meters, once they become aware of it, really get
much better about conserving electricity. And you know they a
lot of it is just because you know when it's
when it's not easily accessible or easy to understand, you know,
you don't pay it very much, mind, I mean, why
(42:28):
would you, Because it's it's kind of behind the scenes,
and it's not until you get your electric bill that
you're like, oh, yeah, I guess, um, I guess I
did use a lot, so smart meters definitely help. I
would also say that there's the possibility this is kind
of a pipe dream, but there's the possibility we could
develop a really awesome way of generating electricity, like fusion power,
where energy storage no longer becomes a big problem because
(42:51):
we can generate tons of electricity more than enough to
meet demand. Which is kind of a naive thing to say.
Whenever there is there's I don't think you could ever
claim there's a power excess, like, we will always find
ways to consume that energy. But but if we were
able to crack something like that where we're not dependent
(43:12):
upon fossil fuels, we're using a a you know, much
safer means of generating electricity than something aunt right something
it's not nuclear power in the sense of fission, so
we're not generating nuclear waste like we would with nuclear
fission plants. Nuclear fusion is a very different process. It's
just happens to be one that right now isn't efficient
(43:34):
enough to be a means of generating electricity for like
a city or something. It's still in the laboratory phase
where we're trying to find a way of initiating fusion
um in a way that is both efficient and consumes
enough of the fuel to make sense to actually convert
to So if that happens energy storage at home, you know,
(43:54):
it's still is a good idea since you know, there
could be an infrastructure problem, like let's say that there
are storm that knocked down power lines or an earthquake
or something like that, you would still be able to
supply electricity to your home because you would have batteries
that would allow you to do that, but it wouldn't
be as important from a stance of uh, you know,
(44:14):
trying to reduce the amount of money that your electricity
bill is uh is mounting up to, because we could,
in theory, once if fusion works out, invest in that
infrastructure to the point where we don't have to worry
so much about load balancing, we don't have to worry
about running out of supply because fusion is would produce
(44:36):
abundant amounts of energy uh, and it might end up
making a lot of these other issues moot. But but
that's a big if, and you don't want to put
yeah yeah, So my view and it's very much I
think what you were saying, Joe, is that I want
to see this kind of technology continue to evolve, to
continue to come down in price. I see it as complementary.
(45:00):
Perhaps in the long run, it could be a replacement
for the current ha ha means of distributing electricity. But
it's certainly a complimentary approach. And um, while I don't
think it's the announcement to completely lose your head over
unless you live in a place like Hawaii or California
(45:21):
where you know your electric bill is is significant, especially
in those peak hours. Um, I think it is a
very encouraging announcement, so I would I don't totally dismiss it,
but I don't like I don't have stars in my
eyes either. I had posted a Twitter message and this
might have been a little excessive, I guess, but I
(45:42):
posted a Twitter message I said. I think Tesla Motors
is well named because it seems to have the same
distortion field that Nicola had, at least after his life. Anyway,
because people look at Nicola Tesla as like this kind
of iconic mythical figure. Now, um, I call it the
Tesla fog. It's this fog of kind of like rumor
(46:05):
and legend that you encounter on the Internet and it's
hard to tell, like, wait, what's real about this guy?
And what's just strange misconception and and lionization and yeah,
and I think the company has the same the same feature, right,
It's maybe not to the same extent as as the person,
but there seems to be some of that going on.
Like if you if you ever, if you ever say
(46:27):
anything that is critical of electric cars, the Tesla fans
will jump on that in a heartbeat. Or if you
say something that like if you if you point out
that as a particular space X project hasn't worked out
the way that it was hoped, even if you're being
very you know, very uh objective about it, who the
(46:49):
fans can come after you? So you know there are
some passionate Tesla fans and Elon Musk fans for good reason.
The man is is inarguably a genius. He is certainly
a business genius. He has done in an incredible amount
to push electric battery technology. Uh so, um, you know,
(47:10):
not taking anything away from him, I hope that in
maybe five years time, we are seeing this battery price
come down to a point where it makes sense for
a lot of people, because I would love to see
more and more people be able to take advantage of
those lower off peak rates to decrease the demand on
our power grids and to kind of, you know, find
(47:31):
a way of of uh maintaining a lifestyle that they're
accustomed to without having to take too many huge sacrifices
because obviously the more sacrifices you have to make, the
harder it is to commit to that kind of change. Yeah,
if I can, if I can analyze a little bit, Yeah,
I think what you're reacting to is not You're not
(47:52):
having a negative reaction to the power wall itself as
a technology, more just to sort of overblown misconceptions about
it in the media. Yeah. I mean, I've seen a
lot of media coverage where it seemed like they were
focusing on like, oh, this could provide electricity at fifteen kilo?
What fifteen since Perkella what hour? And my thought was,
(48:13):
before I read what it was, I thought it was
people thinking that this was a way of making elect
That's exactly what I was coming across too. I was
reading these reports and it sounded like, wait, you realize
this is a battery, right, and that once it's drained,
you have to refill it, so that electricity has to
come from somewhere. It's like it was putting a putting
a power reactor inside your house, and that's not what
(48:34):
it is. You know, It's a battery, just like any
other battery. So uh it maybe those the people who
wrote those were already working with the presumption that this
is paired with something like solar panels, which would make
sense because again Tesla is invested in solar panel technology,
but it didn't say that in the article. It was
just like how they could deliver electricity at fifteen since
(48:55):
Prokella one hour, And I thought, well, where's the electricity
coming from to charge the battery? If you have solar panels,
and that's your answer, that's fine. I have no problem
with that. Obviously, you have to affector in the price
of the solar panels. But if you already have solar panels,
then you you've already committed that expense. I think it's
coming from the arc reactor in your check. Yeah, well,
you know, I am iron Man. According to brain stuff,
(49:19):
I am iron Man. Yeah, so that's me. Um, you know,
they're worse burdens to bear. Uh, but yeah, it's it
was one of it. I have felt the same way,
like it just seemed to me that there was a
misconception that this was a means of generating electricity, not
storing electricity. So I'm sure that we have completely done
away with that misconception in this episode. Anyone who had
(49:42):
that before by now is certainly like, Okay, I get
it's a battery, John, then you say it too many times.
I got it. But h but still pretty cool, and
I'm still very eager to see where this goes in
the future, me too. All right, Well, that wraps up
this discussion. I guess it was really fun to look
into this because again, when we see these things pop
up in the news often it takes a little bit
(50:04):
of critical thinking to kind of get to the bottom
of it and see, you know what, how excited should
we be about it? I think we do need to
be excited about it. We just need to, you know,
not lose our heads over it. So if you guys
have any suggestions for future episodes of forward thinking, maybe
there's a technology that you want to know, what's that
going to be like in the future, or maybe it's
a rumored technology you want to know how likely is
(50:25):
that going to happen. We've got a a doozy of
an episode coming up where we're gonna be looking at
a theoretical uh type of technology that is bending our
minds as we try to understand it. But we love
that kind of challenge, So feel free to write in
let us know what you think. Our email addresses FW
thinking at how stuff Works dot com, or drop us
(50:47):
a line on Facebook or Twitter or Google Plus. At
Twitter and Google Plus, we are f W Thinking. Just
search FW thinking in the Facebook search bar will pop
right up. Leave us a message, and we'll talk to
you again, really soon. For more on this topic and
the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot Com, brought
(51:19):
to you by Toyota. Let's Go Places,
Fw:Thinking News
Hosts And Creators
Jonathan Strickland
Joe McCormick
Lauren Vogelbaum
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