Home generators are becoming more popular by the day but an actual home battery would be even more interesting. Elon Musk of Tesla, Space X, and Solar City, has just announced a “very large utility scale home battery”.
Home batteries power up overnight, when energy companies typically charge less for electricity. Then, they can be turned on during the day to power a home. Though home batteries cost thousands of dollars, many utility companies will offer rebates.
At a battery conference last year, Tesla’s Stationary Energy Storage Director Arch Padmanabhan showed off some of the company’s early plans, including a 10 kilo-Watt hour residential battery and a 400 kWh commercial/utility battery for large buildings.
In a pilot project, Tesla has already begun offering home batteries to SolarCity (SCTY) customers, a solar power company for which Musk serves as chairman. There are 330 U.S. households currently running on Tesla’s batteries, the majority of which are in California, according to company analyst Trip Chowdhry.
Those batteries start at about $13,000, though California’s Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (PCG) offers customers a 50% rebate. Tesla’s batteries are three-feet high by 2.5-feet wide, and they need to be installed at least a foot and a half off the ground. They can be controlled with a Web app and a smartphone app.
It’s unclear if the batteries that Tesla plans on announcing next week are the same as the ones in the pilot program or in the presentation made at the battery conference last year.
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