All the buzz right now in many sections of both the tech and energy industry, is on Tesla’s Powerwall sustainable energy solution.
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Tesla's battery has no third world applications
When Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, announced the Powerwall on April 30th, it was generally received positively. After all, fossil fuels used in generating power and electricity, was depleting the ozone layer and life was already hard enough as it is.
Tesla's Powerwall
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When Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, announced the Powerwall on April 30, it was generally received positively. After all, fossil fuels used in generating power and electricity, was depleting the ozone layer and life was already hard enough as it is.
Musk and his company had developed just what the world needed – a sleek looking battery (that came in different colors) which would power homes and businesses cheaply, conveniently and most of all, cleanly. It wasn’t unnecessarily large, it was weather proof, practical and so on. Hordes of people trooped to Tesla’s website to pre-order theirs.
As much as all of this sweet and nice, I don’t think Tesla’s Powerwall has come to save us all from intermittent or absent power. Granted, it may save some of us – our brothers and sisters in the developed world perhaps, but we shouldn’t let ourselves get carried away just yet.
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I will come out and say outrightly that Tesla is not going to save Nigeria, not now at least. Let’s consider the reality of Tesla’s power solution. For starters, Tesla is only producing batteries. For those batteries to be of any use, you have to get Solar panels, which are sold by a separate company, and also get an electrical inverter to convert and transfer the solar energy. This is also separate from the Powerwall system.
Now, SolarCity – the company which supplies the solar panels, does not charge anything up front. However, it reserves the right to raise charges on the system by 2.9% every year. Tesla's miracle battery isn’t cheap either with the 7KWh version costing $3,000 and the 10KWh pack going for $3,500 – that’s nothing less than half a million naira in each case, regardless of the exchange rate.
Even if you have the money, it doesn’t ship until after June and requires a Tesla technician to install. Also, Musk has said that deliveries will be slow because Tesla’s Gigafactory is still under construction. Even if it could be shipped down to Nigeria on time, there is still the issue of the solar panels and shipping charges plus the electrical inverter that makes the whole setup function. Don’t forget that all of this is entirely exclusive of installation costs and professional costs.
In conclusion, even if you could afford the system (you need a large roof for the solar panels), it is difficult to install and not practical to use (the average Nigerian home has more than 1 TV with a refrigerator and freezer. Air conditioners too), which means you may have to get more than one Powerwall.
As far as the third world is concerned, Tesla’s battery is useless. If you want an alternative source of power, buy an inverter. Or better still, get a solar panel that can be installed here at a much lesser cost. At some point in future, if Tesla comes up with something more relevant to Africa, I’ll be sure to encourage. For now, Tesla’s Powerwall is not a good use of money in Nigeria.
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