Amazing New Tesla Invention Will Completely Eliminate Your Electricity Bill

Friday, February 13, 2015

Amazing New Tesla Invention Will Completely Eliminate Your Electricity Bill

AUTHOR: LEFT WING NATION FEBRUARY 13, 2015 2:06 PM

Frankly, I have no idea how Elon Musk is still breathing. He’s been so disruptive to so many established industries that he HAS to have a number of powerful people who would very much like to see him go away forever. If he delivers on his promise of a battery that can run a house for a month or two, he will have effectively signed the death warrant of the power companies:

Tesla is working on a battery that can power your home and even help large-scale utilities store energy more efficiently, according to company chief executive Elon Musk.

On an investor call Wednesday, Musk said the designs for a home or business battery are already complete and will likely be unveiled to the public “in the next month or two.” Production could be as little as six months away, he added.

If this is true (and Musk is not known for making wild claims about products he’s about to unveil), it’s the beginning of the end for greedy power companies and a huge deal for the environment.

This battery, if affordable, is the missing piece to the puzzle of individual houses being able to generate and store their own power through solar panels. Right now, homes have to remain on the power grid because there hasn’t been a way to store extra power for lean hours. Not for nothing, solar panels are great but not terribly useful at night or on a very cloudy day. With a (relatively) cheap and reliable battery to hold that power until needed, there won’t be any reason at all to be connected to a decaying and inefficient power grid that regularly fails whenever it snows too much or rains too hard.

Also, being connected to the grid leaves people vulnerable to the greed of the power companies. Right now, unused electricity is being fed back into the grid and sold at market rates. The power companies, being the natural monopolies they are, really, REALLY hate this competition. They’ve been using Republican politicians to pass laws punishing solar panel owners by charging them for selling excess electricity. After all, if people keep generating their own power, how will power companies make their billions in profits? That’s just anti-American!

But with a battery sucking up the extra electricity, the power companies won’t be able to charge the consumer anything at all. Further, people will simply unplug from the grid altogether and, the Post points out, as the power companies lose more and more customers, the price of electricity will go up. That, in turn, will make the alternative combination of solar and battery storage more attractive and on and on the vicious cycle goes.

With the need for so many coal-fired power plants gone (there’s 572 of them in the US alone), many of them will be forced to shut down. That’s great news for the environment since coal generated electricity is the “single biggest air polluter in the U.S.”

The tricky part of getting this technology into the hands of consumers is getting past the roadblocks that Republicans will undoubtedly be putting up to protect their corporate masters. While Republicans pay lip service to the “free market” and “Capitalism”, they’re far more interested in maintaining the status quo and stifling competition wherever possible.

Tesla’s battery can solve a lot of our environmental, economic and logistical problems. Let’s hope Musk can make good on his promise.

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