Tesla PowerWall

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What are folks views on this, looks interesting.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tesla-s...

So basically whilst you're out at work and not using any power the solar panel on your roof charges the Li-Ion batteries for free, when you come home you can utilise this power thus reducing the amount of power you pull from the mains. The batteries seem to be of a size where they're storable without taking up a whole room. Obviously the amount of charge you'll get day to day will depend upon the amount of daylight you get, but they're suggesting a 10kWh unit for $3500, that's quite a lot of autonomy for not a huge amount of coin.

Obviously you need the other bits to go with it and to generate 10kWh worth is going to need a big panel. But in principle the biggest problem with 'renewables' was the ability to store the energy generated so it could be used when required, I wonder if Elon and his crew are onto something.

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ewenm said:

Note it can only output power at 2kW, so it won't run your whole house with lots of appliances going at the same time anyway.

Yeah it's not going to run a kettle or oven but you can run a lot of other stuff on 2kW.

For example a 55" Samsung UE55H8000 4K TV set uses 101W to run.

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yes, both would run in parallel, so the grid would see what you use less 2kW.

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eldar said:

Just a UPS with expensive batteries?

Yes but the difference is the size of the batteries don't take up the usual amount of space as they do in a ups and last longer