Tesla’s Powerwall is way too expensive and underpowered to do much of anything except provide a wee bit of power to your house, assuming the sun has been shining, that is. Plus, Tesla is getting huge subsidies, so forget about it being an example of scrappy capitalism bootstrapping new products to market.
But does all the messianic talk of battery-powered “disruption” and solar triumphalism stack up? Hardly. For all their ballyhooed price reductions, Tesla batteries are still way too feeble and expensive to come even within hyping distance of neither a reliable power supply, nor an off-grid revolution.
Contrary to Musk, you would be ill advised to go off the grid with solar panels and batteries. The 10-kWh Powerwall stores enough electricity to supply an average American home, which uses 30 kWh of electricity per day, for all of 8 hours; a day of overcast weather would leave an off-grid solar-plus-Powerwall system without any power at all. And the 10 kWh system can only cycle — charge up with electricity and then discharge — about once per week; it’s designed as a back-up for grid outages, not to store daily household solar generation.
However, Elon Musk is indeed a magician at extracting concessions from government to pay for his projects.
Basically, Tesla is operating tax free for ten years and gets a discount on the electric bill. That’s the invisible hand of capitalism in action.
And please stop telling me that Elon Musk is some kind of visionary. Is he is bad as the Wall Street parasites who are eating our colons from the inside out? No. He’s actually making something. But just because he builds electric cars doesn’t mean he’s Leonardo da Vinci. Stop telling me all of his quirks and personality flaws are symptoms of genius. He seems to me like a full-fledged creature of the modern age: a media savvy techno geek with a Gordon Gekko attitude. Forgive me if I don’t get wet.
Musk is great at selling expensive toys to the wealthy and making himself money from corporate welfare.