TESLA or TSLA announced battery units for residential property, also known as Powerall. A lot of experts think that it is an excellent opportunity to talk about physics and batteries. We will take a closer look at some questions homeowners might have about this topic.
Why would property owners want to use batteries for their houses?
It is perhaps one of the most important questions and one that has been addressed a lot of times. To make the long story short, batteries will let homeowners are more independent when it comes to powering their houses. If property owners use solar panels or power from the wind, they do not always produce the same electricity. With batteries, people can store energy during the day or when the wind is strong and use it at night.
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These things will also let homeowners get electricity from the service provider at night when the rates are much lower and use it during the day. It is a win-win situation for both the electric company and the property owner. People win with lower power bills, and companies win with a much lower demand during the day.
How is the TESLA battery system different from its competitors?
People could always have an energy storage device for their house. The most common way was to use a lead-acid battery, like what your car uses. But this is a pretty complicated situation. Individuals would need to have a lot of storage devices, and they would need to connect them together.
When one unit goes out, property owners need to replace it. Not to mention these things are pretty expensive and will take up so much space. TESLA solar batt seem to make these things more like simple appliances. It mounts on walls, and people do not have to maintain each batt. The price looks reasonable, starting at $3,000.
Can homeowners get these things and run their houses?
The answer is no. People’s houses run on alternating current, but batteries give direct current. It means that homeowners need to take the direct current and convert it to an alternating current. Individuals might need to use devices like an alternator (like what cars have) so that they can use household items like a coffee pot or television.
Converters take the direct current from the batt and turn it into an alternating current so that the computer can use it and convert it back to DC. Yes, it sounds crazy, but it is true. Devices like Powerwall do not include DC to AC converters (or vice versa if homeowners want to charge from the grid).
Visit https://www.energy.gov/articles/war-currents-ac-vs-dc-power for more info about AC and DC.
How long can users run their house using TESLA solar batts?
TESLA makes a seven or ten-kilowatt-hour energy storage unit. Let us take a closer look at their ten-kilowatt-hour device. The company says that people can stack these things so that they can make a twenty-kWh unit if that makes them happy. In reality, it comes down to the definition of energy as the rate that homeowners do work. People need to know the electricity stored in these things so that they can estimate the average energy the property uses.
This thing has ten kilowatt-hours. The next thing people need to understand is the run time of the device. How much power does the property use? More or less two kilowatts is an excellent estimate. Five hours does not seem like a very long time, but it would get homeowners through the night if they are using solar power. Property owners do not use as much electricity when they are sleeping.
Actually, people would get less than five hours, assuming everything is at 100% efficiency. As a matter of fact, batts are only 92% efficient, and the converter would also have some power loss. If individuals aimed for three hours at two kW, there is a good chance that they will be okay.
Energy density
If we talk about density, there is a good chance that individuals will think of the mass of objects divided by their volume. The truth is, it is mass-density. It is the energy stored in devices divided by the volume of the object. It looks simple, right? But why would individuals need this? It tells them how large solar batteries will need to be to store a specific amount of energy.
What’s the density of Powerwall?
From their website, the device has a dimension of 130 centimeters by 86 centimeters by 18 centimeters. Assuming that it is a perfect rectangular cube, it will have a volume of 0.201 meters squared. With 3.6 by 107 Joules of stored electricity, this device has a density of 179 mega joules per meter squared or 0.179 mega joules per liter. There is no exact explanation why individuals like densities in Joules per liter.
How does this density compare to other items?
According to various online sources, the density for this device seems pretty low since lead-acid batts have a density of 0.56 mega joule per liter. But maybe this is because of additional space in the TESLA device. There is also mass density, also known as energy/unit mass. The TESLA device has a mass of 100 kilograms, which puts the mass density at 0.36 mega joule per kilogram. This value puts it right on par with Lit-Ion batts.
There are also Powerpacks, which is the industrial version of Powerwall and can store at least 100 kilowatt-hours of power. According to the company, with 160 million of these things, we move the United States into a solar-powered society.
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