Elon Musk, who quite frankly is some kind of mad technologist who wants to send people to Mars to die, has announced the next batch of energy and battery technology which people will no doubt froth over – if you’ve got the coin to invest in it, that is.
He’s dropped two new innovations from Tesla and the recently-acquired SolarCity: the Powerwall 2 and a new product called a “solar roof”. The Powerwall 2 is aa high-capacity, more efficient update to the first Powerwall, which was basically a huge battery connected to your house’s power which slurps up energy from the grid or your solar power and retains it. It’ll be $US5,500, which is starting to move into less ridiculous territory for a home investment.
The solar roof is interesting, though: rather than a chunky panel on your roof, each individual roof tile is actually a solar panel. Musk announced it among a number of houses, all of which had solar roofs installed.
Musk says that this constitutes the three parts of his plan for renewable energy – generation, storage and transport. The transport part quite obviously being Tesla vehicles. You can get all three from Tesla too, so they’re obviously doing their bit to lock down the market.
Watch the announcement of the solar roof here;
Source: Tesla.
Photo: YouTube.
