By Jeanne Sutton
04th May 2015
04th May 2015
Remember a few years when everyone was like ?Elon Musk is coming to the Web Summit!?? And you were like ?Cool!? but you were also wondering what’s an Elon Musk. Then a surreptitious Google told you that the character of Tony Stark in the Iron Man movies is based on him and he’s basically the engineer/billionaire building the future of humanity with loads of crazy yet useful inventions? Although his idea of a transporting people long distance in steel tubes – see Hyperloop – was a bit too out there for our tastes.
Well, this man is hitting headlines yet again. He’s gone and invented a battery. A battery that can sustain an incredible amount of power and run a house or car – his company Tesla is primarily an electric car company. Musk, CEO of Tesla, unveiled his battery last week, and it sound pretty amazing. The ?Powerwall Home Battery? could help make people free from relying on grid electricity. The Powerwall stores solar energy for later use. If a heat wave hits, you’re basically leaving the lights on because hello environment. The battery Musk is developing isn’t the first home battery of its kind, but it certainly sounds like the most impressive.
The BBC put its capabilities in laypeople’s language for us: ?The system is called Powerwall, and Tesla will sell the 7kWh unit for $3,000 (?1,954), while the 10kWh unit will retail for $3,500 (?2,275) to installers. Energy comparison firm USwitch estimates that one kWh can power two days of work on a laptop, a full washing machine cycle or be used to boil a kettle 10 times.?
The only catch is this may all take years to implement, so whenever Elon wants to take a break from changing the world, we’re just going to suggest he sets himself a smaller challenge and works on smartphone batteries, Because if we hear another colleague ask us for a charger we may go a little bit crazy.
Follow Jeanne Sutton on Twitter @jeannedesutun
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