Yahoo Finance Elon Musk's Tesla wants to power your car...and your home
Elon Musk might be celebrating Earth Day today by getting a brand new Tesla (TSLA) product ready for launch. Set to be announced next week, the popular car company hopes to go from your garage into the rest of your house with a new battery that will help power it.
Right now the “home battery” industry is a small one - $42 million says Monica Mehta of Seventh Capital. But Elon Musk didn’t get where he is today by concerning himself with the present. Mehta says in just three years that small little industry is expected to balloon to one billion dollars. If Musk is in on the ground floor he stands to not only benefit from that growth but to dictate how it grows by controlling the technology.
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While information is still sketchy, Musk mentioned the desire to get into the space back in February. It is thought that the battery would be able to store energy for alternative sources like solar cells, as well as capture and store power off the traditional grid during low-use and low-cost hours. Some reports suggest it could cut home energy bills by 20 to 30 percent.
Musk is the chairman of his cousins’ company, Solar City (SCTY), so it makes sense that he would leverage that relationship, using battery building infrastructure at Tesla to harness the true power of both technologies.
“Elon musk is maybe the next generation of Steve Jobs,” says Yahoo Finance Editor in Chief Andy Serwer. “A person who can transcend one specific vertical, one market, and sort of branch out and do a number of different things.”
The batteries in question are not just for residential homes, but large commercial businesses as well. A report from Bloomberg says Tesla and Solar City have already teamed up on a pilot program that has installed these batteries in 300 California homes already equipped with solar panels as well as in 11 Walmart stores in the state.
Yahoo Finance Senior Columnist Michael Santoli wonders if this project may prove the belief of some investors and analysts that Tesla is, at heart, a battery company posing as a flashy automaker, and not the other way around.
“People like [Elon Musk], a lot of times they don’t specifically know where it’s going to end up,” Serwer notes. “They just keep pushing forward and sometimes things work out and sometimes things work out really well.”
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