Power Merger
Earlier this year, Elon Musk bought SolarCity for at least $2.6 billion, merging the solar engineering company with Tesla. Since then, both have been busy working on a few things. Perhaps the most interesting of these is the promise to cut down on your household electric bill.
Yup, that's right. Tesla, powered by SolarCity, is working on way to help you save not just on gas, but on the electricity you use from the grid, too. Tesla is promising to make its cars capable of powering a household with its battery, a capacity called Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G).
Tesla VP for energy in Europe and Africa, Ben Hill, speaking at the Intersolar Conference in Dubai last Tuesday, promised that V2G technology would be out "very, very soon," reports Gulf News. With V2G, Tesla is looking at supplying energy from and to the grid.
Improving the World
How does this work?
The idea is to get non-solar Tesla cars to store energy when electricity is cheap. The stored energy can be used to power a household when prices go up — or the sell it back to the grid. And with Tesla's plans to have their cars ferry people around when its not in use, Elon Musk seems to want to help Tesla car owners to earn a profit.
Not just that. He is also keen, it seems, on improving life on Earth. The wonderful thing about V2G is not just cheaper electric bills, but also its potential for producing cleaner energy. The average daily US household electricity consumption is 30 kWh, and Tesla's latest battery improvements allow for storing 60 kWh of energy — and that's their smallest battery!
With enough Tesla cars supplying energy to the grid, we can have months without needing electricity from power companies (oh how they would love that!), and just using stored energy from these vehicles. V2G, if Tesla gets it to work, can be a powerful tool to usher in an era of cleaner energy.
Here's a video by Italian company Enel explaining how V2G works:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnbcgU4ECPc
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