Tesla which is known for the sales of electric vehicles also deals with the sale of clean energy products. Recently Elon Musk who is the CEO of Tesla has said that he wants to make a distributed power plant in every home. Let’s look at how Tesla is planning to make it possible.
New Company Policy of Tesla
The CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk wants to make a distributed power plant in each and every home. The distributed power plant will generate, store and even deliver the energy back into the electricity grid. All these will be possible by just using the products of Tesla.
The company has been involved in the sale of solar and energy related products for quite a few years. Elon Musk on 26 April 2021 commented a new company policy which states that Tesla will only sell solar products coupled with energy storage products.
Tesla's Strategy
The new company policy is a strategy that is aimed to scale the energy product business of Tesla by showing it in the form of essential utilities. During an investor call, Elon Musk said that the new strategy has a successful future for utilities as well as Tesla.
He added on saying that, if this is not done then the utilities will fail to serve the customers and said that the utilities will not be able to do it. He came up with this strategy noticing the blackouts last summer in California and the most recent failures in the grid in Texas. These incidents have become a big concern on the reliability of the grid.
Changes to the Tesla Website
Last week, Tesla had bough some changes to its website. The company had changed the options on the website to prevent customers from only buying solar or its Powerwall energy storage products. The customer had the option to only purchase the entire system.
Elon Musk later posted a tweet that stated that the solar power will feed the energy completely to the Powerwall and the Powerwall will use it only between the utility meter and the main breaker panel of the house. He said that these features will enable a super simple install and will provide a house backup seamlessly during utility dropouts.
Elon Musk’s view
Elon Musk’s statement says that, the grid will need more power lines, larger substations and more power plants in order to use renewable resources and storage to decarbonize fully. In Elon Musk’s view distributed residential systems using the products of Tesla will provide a better path.
A recent study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has backed up the claim of Elon Musk by finding that the United States can decarbonize fully by more than doubling the transmission capacity of the grid.
Another study from Princeton University has shown that the country will have to triple its transmission capacity of the grid to reach net zero emissions by 2050.
According to the imagination of Elon Musk, the electric grid system is completely different from the one we have today. He wants a grid system that is centrally controlled and run by the grid operators or the independent organizations such as the Electricity Reliability Council of Texas or the California Independent System operator. The vision is to solve the logistic and the bureaucratic challenges.
He said that there should be a policy on the Utility and the Regulatory to solve the problem on the ways to handle the large entry of people on the distributed energy resources such as installation of solar panel on residencies which may run opposite to the utilities that are long established on the business models.
FAQ
Who owned Tesla before Elon Musk?
Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning started the original Tesla Motors in 2003.
Who was the first CEO of Tesla?
Martin Forest Eberhard was the first CEO of Tesla.
Who is the CEO of SpaceX?
Elon Musk is the CEO of SpaceX.
Conclusion
However, the important point to be noted is whether just renewable energy storage is sufficient to achieve net-zero carbon emissions through the grid system. Elon Musk had always been positive towards the model of renewables plus storage. In July 2020 he had tweeted that physics favors electric transport, solar or wind for energy generation and batteries for stationary storage.
Author: Alan Joseph
Source : https://startuptalky.com/tesla-distributed-power-plant/
Date : 2021-04-29T15:17:35.000Z