• by Thom Forbes  @tforbes, May 1, 2015

Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk late yesterday touted his company’s new Tesla Energy rechargeable lithium-ion battery units for homes, businesses and utilities as a breakthrough in solar storage that could help to change the “entire energy infrastructure” and “wean it off fossil fuels,” as the press kit puts it. The news release also reinforces the positioning of the enterprise as “not just an automotive company” but as “an energy innovation company.”

“This is within the power of humanity to do,” Musk told a crowd gathered at Tesla's design center in the Los Angeles suburb of Hawthorne, Chris Woodyard reports for USA Today. “We have done things like this before. It is not impossible."

The battery “that will get the most attention is the Powerwall,” observesForbes contributor Micheline Maynard, which Tesla said “consists of a lithium-ion battery pack, liquid thermal control system and software that receives dispatch commands from a solar inverter.”

“The issue with existing batteries is that they suck. They’re really horrible,” Musk told some apparently grumpy “journalists waiting until after midnight East Coast time Friday,” Maynard reports, for what the BBC characterized as a “highly anticipated event.”

“It's expected that the Powerwall would be bought mostly by homeowners who want to store energy from their solar systems, allowing them to run off their own power after the sun goes down,” writes USA Today’s Woodyard. “The company showed off the sleek design of the home batteries, pointing out they are a slim six inches thick and can be mounted on walls.”

“Ranging from a $3,000 7 kilowatt-hour wall-mounted unit to a $3,500 10 kwh unit, [the batteries] cost far less than the going rate for large-scale batteries and can be easier to install,” write Alexandra Berzon and Cassandra Sweet for the Wall Street Journal. “Tesla aims to begin delivering units by the summer from its car factory in California, and then shift production to a $5 billion 'gigafactory' battery plant under construction near Reno, Nev."

There is “a strong commercial rationale … to leverage Tesla's expertise in building highly efficient car batteries and put them in a single unit in consumers' residences,” writes the BBC’s Richard Taylor in an analysis piece. 

“The business strategy is a bit like the battery itself: high impact, but a slow release which will really only reap significant benefits over time. But it comes with risks. Tesla may face a challenge getting the cost-saving message across to potential customers, especially with a significant $3,500 upfront cost.” 

Plus, there are competitors such as General Electric and LG and the possibility of a different technology, such as hydrogen fuel cells or aluminum-air batteries, superseding lithium ion. None of which daunts Musk, apparently, who frequently finds the adjective “irrepressible” attached to his name. In fact, he seems to embrace it.

“While he was talking about Tesla Energy, he started referring to the Gigafactory — the massive battery plant the company is building in Nevada — as ‘Gigafactory 1.’ Later, Musk said ‘there will need to be many gigafactories in the future,’” reports Bryan Logan for Business Insider. “He then hinted that Tesla may not be the only company building such battery plants, saying other companies may be able to run ‘gigafactory-class operations of their own.’”

As the company points out in its statement: “Tesla is already working with utilities and other renewable power partners around the world to deploy storage on the grid to improve resiliency and cleanliness of the grid as a whole.” The list includes Amazon and Southern California Edison.

“Musk said Tesla is capable of ‘infinitely scaling’ the units into a gigawatt hour-class installation, which could power a mid-sized town of about 100,000 people, or even build larger configurations,” Adam Pasick reports for Quartz.

“Energy and auto analysts have generally responded positively to Tesla’s move,” writes Diane Cardwell in the New York Times. 

“Elon thinks that there’s a long-term gain to be made or a long-term play not only in electric cars but also in electric energy storage — and he’s probably right,” Kelley Blue Book analyst Karl Brauer tells Cardwell. “There’s a universal application for portable energy and storable energy that goes to everybody. It’s really just a matter of getting the business model together.”

Ah, yes, the business model. Tell it to Nikola.