Elon Musk May Have Scooped Tesla's Big Announcement It's a big deal

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Elon Musk is about to announce a new product that's not a car. He said so in a mysterious Tweet designed to induce the highest level of nail-biting suspense. But the Elon Musk of two months ago may have told us exactly what we should expect.
“We are going to unveil the Tesla home battery, the consumer battery that would be for use in people’s houses or businesses fairly soon,” Musk said during an earnings conference call in February. He said the product unveiling would occur within the next month or two.

Tesla is building the world's biggest battery factory in Nevada -- a $5 billion project that Musk says will reduce the price of battery storage by 30 percent. Combining solar panels with backup capacity could allow homeowners to avoid buying electricity from utilities. If the prices come down enough, it could both enhance and disrupt the U.S. power grid.

Elon Musk May Have Scooped Tesla's Big Announcement - Bloomberg Business

 

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It’s going to be “cool.”

That’s not a word typically used to describe the home machinery hidden in basements beneath floorboards and waste pipes. But it’s a word Elon Musk uses -- to describe the battery his company is cooking up to store solar power.


Tesla is pinning its growth to a new “gigafactory” battery plant that would cut battery pack cost by 30 percent. Batteries make up roughly a quarter of the cost of a Model S, and the company faces limited availability of the cells that are used to produce them.
That’s why at this stage, Musk said, the company isn’t actually trying to build demand for stationary storage like home solar backup, because it would push up the price of his cars. Instead, engineers are biding time and focusing on “what would be a really cool stationary storage pack," Musk said.
The stationary batteries being designed could be used individually or stacked together for commercial projects, Musk said. More details about the design will be discussed at the end of this year or early 2015, he said. The gigafactory is expected to be operational in 2017.

Tesla’s battery plans marked another milestone this week as Panasonic signed a letter of intent to work with Tesla on the project. Panasonic is the world’s third-largest producer of lithium-ion batteries, which power most modern electronics including laptops and smartphones.
Battery storage is one of the biggest remaining impediments to more widespread adoption of renewable power. Regardless of how the thing looks, if Tesla’s battery can speed up the shift to cleaner energy, that would be “cool.”

Musk Reveals What Tesla's Solar Backup Battery May Look Like - Bloomberg Business