Say Good-Bye To Fossil Fuels

While solar and wind energy have made great progress over the last few years, with renewables which accounting for around 22% of the energy generated today, the transience issue has been holding them back. As we all know, the sun does not shine 24/7, and the wind does not blow year-around. These are the problems of all those opposed to the faster progress of renewable power sources.

Great news, though. The renewable energy billionaire Elon Musk (product architect and CEO of Tesla Motors) has just blown away that final defense. He introduced to our world his smooth new Powerwall – a wall-mounted energy storage block that can hold 10 kilowatt hours of electric energy, and deliver it at an average of 2 kilowatts, all for just US$3,500. The event took a place in California last Thursday. We should have seen this coming, however it is too cool to be true!

This leads to an electricity cost (adding installation costs and inverters) of about US$500/kWh– less than ½ current costs, according to Deutsche Bank.

This leads to supplied energy at around 6 cents/kWh for the householder(crazy, huh?), which means that a domestic system + storage would yet come out ahead of coal-fired power supplied through the conventional grid.

Want to hear even more good news? According to Elon Musk these batteries will be manufactured here, in the United States of America, at the “gigafactory” he is building in Nevada. He isn’t waiting for some totally new technology, but is scaling up tested lithium ion battery which he’s using already for the electric cars.

And Not For Homes Only!

  Fossil fuel companies have a lot to think about now. Naturally, they will try to fight the new and much better normal of cheaper renewable supplies and storage.

The Tesla Powerwall system launched last Thursday is extremely comprehensive, with global ramifications. Branded new Powerwall system which offers 10 kWh is targeted at households. It’s supplemented by a commercial system termed the Powerpack offering 100 kWh storage, and a pile of 100 such units to form a ten megawatt hour storage block which can be used for small electricity grids.

Communities could build micro-grid power supply systems around such a 10 MWh energy storage system, fed by renewable energy generation (wind power or rooftop solar panels from SolarPanelCompany), at costs that just possibly became close to unbeatable.

Musk supported that the entire electric power grid of America could be replicated with only 160 million of these utility-scale energy storage blocks. And 2 billion of the utility-scale units could provide storage of (just try to imagine) 20 trillion kWh electric energy for our world.

The Revolution Never Ends

It is critical to know this in numbers. As of today, there are more than 2 billion commercial and non-commercial vehicles surfing about world’s roads. Add to this number about 100 million brand new vehicles are being released every year. The scale is too big to imagine for us.

On the off chance that it’s possible to construct exhaust-pumping complex machines, it is definitely possible to build the storage blocks/units which will help making them unnecessary. On top of that, Musk has just declared that he plans to do so.

Musk is a kind of a Henry Ford-style figure that takes others’ novelties and takes them to the whole new larger level, taking the spectacular entrepreneurial leap of faith that the rest can simply dream about. All of a sudden the universe of renewable power just became the new normal – as when united with cost-effective storage it becomes invincible.

And Musk won’t be alone in this. China is already showing its support and ready to do lots of business together. They have their own companies, such as BYD.com that produces their won energy storage units that are based on lithium ion technology. However, it is not as smooth and cheap as Tesla is offering today.

Our future is in our hands. We started polluted this planet, well we have enough recourses and knowledge to fix everything. From solar panels to electric cars, from Powewalls to the tons of sun renewable energy, we live in the best of times. Human beings will remember 2015 for Elon Musk presenting his one and only Powerwall.

Be sure, more is only coming!