Elon Musk: A thermostat-sized box may one day power your house

[bananas]

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/elon-musk-a-thermostat-sized-box-may-one-day-power-your-house-2014-09-17

Elon Musk: A thermostat-sized box may one day power your house
Published: Sept 18, 2014 7:57 a.m. ET

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — It’s easy to get lost in the numbers that swirl around a project as massive as Tesla’s $5 billion gigafactory. But by sitting back and looking outside of the box, the potential ground-level benefits of such an immense factory begin to set in.

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What this really means is the massive factory -- which Tesla Motors Inc. CEO Elon Musk and his first cousin, SolarCity Corp. CEO Lyndon Rive, hinted Wednesday at a private conference may be the first of several perhaps larger plants -- is that an increased level of manufacturing scale will improve the efficiency and affordability of lithium-ion batteries.

That, in turn, will power not just the car, but also the home. In fact, of the 50 gigawatts of battery power Tesla aims to produce through the gigafactory by 2020, 15 gigawatts is expected to be funneled directly towards stationary energy storage systems.

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SolarCity and Tesla have for years operated as separate entities, seemingly with a separate focus. But that is starting to change. Musk, in a closed-door interview with the press on Wednesday, said Tesla is using SolarCity’s customers as a base to discover how to make battery packs that are small enough, light enough and powerful enough that they might one day sit comfortably in your garage, a mere four inches from the wall.

Musk didn’t provide specifics on this futuristic vision, but alluded to the fact that home storage might one day fit into a device similar to the size of a Nest thermostat or, perhaps, a flat-screen TV.

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[GeorgeGist]

1. Rubbish.

[Stryst]

2. Why?

The energy density of batteries continues to get better all the time. I can invision a place in the future where a small battery pack is the core of our home power system.

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. A thermostat is many times smaller than a flat screen TV

(though both can vary in size quite a lot). It seems a strange coupling of comparisons. Why not talk about something of fairly unvarying size - a shoe box, a washing machine or something? Or give a measurement or two?

[bananas]

5. It's a range of sizes, but smaller and lighter than most people would think.

What I get from his description is that it could be easily and unobtrusively installed on a wall near a breaker panel.

For electrical reasons, you'd probably want to install the battery on a dedicated circuit within a few feet of a breaker panel - close to ground, shorter wiring runs, etc.

In an apartment, you could install it on a wall near the apartment subpanel.

In a house, it could be installed on an interior wall near the master panel.

In a house which has a subpanel in the garage, it could be installed on the wall near the garage subpanel.

[Uncle Joe]

4. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, bananas.