THE CARBON WAR

176
The Winning of The Carbon War
More laughter, including from Musk.
They are really horrible. There is a missing piece and that is what we are
going to show you tonight.
The Tesla Powerwall appears on the screen now, as dramatic music swirls.
It is a simple wall-mounted flat box, albeit a beautifully designed one. Attendees
lift smart phones to take pictures.
A normal household can mount this in their garage or on the outside
wall, Musk explains. It gives you peace of mind. You don’t have to be worried
about power outs. If you want to, you can go completely off grid. And the cost
of this is $3500.
Clapping and cheering.
You can stack up to nine of them in a home. That’s 90 kilowatt hours.
And very importantly, this is going to be a great solution for remote parts
of the world, he suggests. We’re going to see what happened with cell phones
and landlines, where cell phones leapfrogged landlines.
You can order the Powerwall right now on the Tesla website.
Whooping. I imagine people reaching in the dark for iPads to place their
orders at the head of the queue.
We’re going to start shipping in approximately 3-4 months. Next year we
will ramp up as we transition to the Gigafactory in Nevada.
This is a reference to the enormous Tesla battery factory currently under
construction.
What about something that scales much larger? For that, he continues,
we have the Powerpack.
An image of this second product appears, a wardrobe-sized box.
It’s designed to scale infinitely, Musk enthuses. You can go gigawatt hour
or higher.
Now would be a good time to transition the power we are using in the
building to batteries, he says. A dial appears, showing that the entire launch
event has been powered by batteries: batteries entirely charged by solar on the
roof of the building the event is being hosted in.
His audience is by now ecstatic.
What’s really needed to scale the world entirely to sustainable energy? Is it
insurmountable, impossible? It’s not. With 160 million Powerpacks you could
transition the entire US. With 900 million you could transition the world’s
electricity – all renewable, primarily solar. It would take two billion Powerpacks
to do all the world’s transport, electricity and heating. That may seem like an
insane number. Its not, in fact. We have approximately two billion cars and