Elon Musk will make his next big announcement later this month and he won’t be joined on stage by an electric car or a space capsule. Tesla will finally share details on its long-awaited batteries designed for home use, plus a larger “utility-scale” battery as well. Both products will likely be manufactured in its new Gigafactory in Nevada.
Tesla’s charismatic founder Musk has dropped severl hints via social media that the batteries were on the way and now his spokesperson has confirmed it.
“We have decided to share a bit about what we will announce on the 30th,” Jeff Evanson, Tesla’s VP of investor relations wrote in a message. “We will introduce the Tesla home battery and a very large utility scale battery. We will explain the advantages of our solutions and why past battery options were not compelling.”
Tesla’s batteries are significant – both for the industry and for the country. It will mark the first time large scale battery production has occurred in the United States in some time. Such manufacturing has traditionally been done in Asia, with manufacturers preferring cheap Chinese labor or high technology Japanese manufacturing.
What Musk is doing, on an industrial level, is amazing and marks a resurgence of American manufacturing. The entrepreneur already pledged to make batteries for 500,000 cars by 2020 at its new Gigafactory located in Nevada.
The batteries themselves have been heralded as a serious game changer for the clean energy industry providing a low-cost alternative that will complement the growing demand for solar power. Given Tesla’s need to make large batteries for its cars the home battery product was an obvious addition.
But the real revolution could be in the “utility-scale” battery which is a new development. Given Tesla’s disruption of the vehicle market its perfectly logical to see it start selling batteries to utility companies and radically altering our energy future.
Batteries of the sort Tesla needs are a high scale business. The more that are made and the larger they are the cheaper they get. If Tesla is able to create markets that drive this sort of scale it could be game changing – both for industry and average Americans.
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