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A lot of people use the battery argument when it comes to solar, but isn't Musk's home battery pack designed specifically for this purpose?



*Tesla's, Musk is only the CEO of the company that designed that device, and attributing Musk with its invention or production isn't flattering for the (faceless?) engineers behind the brand.


Yes, we should cite the brilliant engineer who came up with the idea of storing electricity in a battery instead of the CEO that enabled low enough production cost of said batteries to make it feasible... There are many things Musk shouldn't be credited with, but this is not one of those things.


As are CAES, Redox Flow Batteries, Pumped hydro, and other utility-scale energy storage.

Energy storage is improving rapidly. Lithium-Ion batteries are but one technology that I don't personally expect will become the norm at grid-scale.


I thought that was a UPS, designed to cover outages for a short time. Not all night.


No. They discontinued the larger battery and it isn't designed to operate at grid scale. http://gizmodo.com/tesla-is-discontinuing-its-10-kilowatt-po...


FWIW, your article says that the remaining Powerwall is designed exactly for this purpose.

> The larger Powerwall was positioned as a longer-term back up power supply, which GTM noted was looking like a hard sell, with other market alternatives that were priced far below the $3500 price tag.

> The remaining 6.4 kwh device has less capacity, and is designed more to shift the load of available power, such as from a solar panel, to times when the production of such energy is lower.


They discontinued the battery with the lower number of charges because the people actually prefer the more expensive one (per KWh) with higher number of charges.

Also the Powerwall is for home use. For utilities they offer Powerpacks, and they are already on sale:

https://www.teslamotors.com/powerpack/design


Yes and no. Tesla has decided that it won’t be making the 10kWh stationary storage batteries it unveiled in April 2015, instead focusing exclusively on the 7kWh version.

There's nothing stopping anyone from getting more than one battery to make up for the capacity that was offered by the larger model.


They announced three products initially. Two Powerwall products (7kWh daily cycler and 10kWh emergency backup) and a grid scale product called Powerpack. The product that was canceled was the 10kWh emergency backup. They are still selling the grid scale Powerpack.




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