After weeks of rumors and teasers about what Tesla was going to unveil at its big unveiling event last night, the company finally delivered, and it’s quite something. It had been all but confirmed by numerous sources that the new product was going to be a home battery system, but the details about the product and what Tesla planned to due with it were still a mystery. To put it simply, Tesla sees this as far more than just a new product, it sees it as the foundation of a truly solar-powered future.
The world currently consumes 20 trillion kWh of energy annually. Enough energy to power a single family home for 1.8 billion years or supply energy to a nuclear power plant for 2,300 years (or launch the Falcon 9 rocket seventeen million times). Of all the fossil fuel consumed in the United States, one third is used in transportation and another third goes to electricity production. The US electric power sector alone produces over 2,000 million metric tons of CO2 which is like burning 225 billion gallons of gas. The EPA says it would require 1.6 billion acres of US forest to negate the environmental damage. What if we could move the electricity grid off of fossil fuels and towards renewable energy sources? Once we’re able to rely on renewable energy sources for our power consumption, the top 50% of the dirtiest power generation resources could retire early. We would have a cleaner, smaller, and more resilient energy grid. Today, Tesla introduces Tesla Energy, a suite of batteries for homes, businesses, and utilities fostering a clean energy ecosystem and helping wean the world off fossil fuels.
