Slashdot Mirror
Tesla To Announce Battery-Based Energy Storage For Homes
Okian Warrior writes: Billionaire Elon Musk will announce next week that Tesla will begin offering battery-based energy storage for residential and commercial customers. The batteries power up overnight when energy companies typically charge less for electricity, then are used during the day to power a home. In a pilot project, Tesla has already begun offering home batteries to SolarCity (SCTY) customers, a solar power company for which Musk serves as chairman. Currently 330 U.S. households are running on Tesla's batteries in California. The batteries start at about $13,000, though California's Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (PCG) offers customers a 50% rebate. The batteries are three-feet high by 2.5-feet wide, and need to be installed at least a foot and a half off the ground. They can be controlled with a Web app and a smartphone app.
Would make sense to have pv panels charge them up during the day and release energy at night.
Are you really this stupid?
This isn't stupidity, exactly, it's obstinacy. And actually, it's cognitive dissonance. Typically, when you see someone passionately arguing against their own best interests, that is what at fault. In this case, one of the people ranting against solar and storage is arguing that if this were a good idea, it would have been done already, because they want to believe that they are more intelligent than Elon Musk, every PG&E employee, and the majority of slashdotters who have woken up and recognized that batteries have gotten immensely better within our lifetimes — and will likely improve just as much in the next thirty or forty years.
People want to believe that they are smart and moral, and therefore they justify their poor decisions and the FUD they've spread by continuing to attack ideas long after they have been proven viable.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Would prefer a flywheel over a battery for home storage, longer life, more reliable, non hazardous materials, smaller carbon footprint, faster to charge, can accurately monitor/diagose, can bury them underground.