Last week, a company introduced a battery. It was a good battery, you could run your house off of it for a while. It was not cheap, but was significantly less money than other, similar batteries, so that’s a step in the right direction. It was sold as something that could be useful as backup power or a way to store energy generated by solar setups, which are also not cheap but getting more reasonable every year. In all, the battery was the announcement of a good product that eventually would become a better product, though not quite a revolution. People decided that they should treat this as a revolution.
The thing is that if this battery was released by most companies it would be regarded as what it is, a useful thing that could be part of a larger attempt to implement personal electricity generation. Instead, this battery was released by Tesla, which has been cultivating an image of being an edgy iconoclast that’s pushing the boundaries of environmentally friendly transportation. Sure, their bread and butter is luxury cars, but they’re powered by electricity and that is giving them the ability to position themselves as outsiders. Tesla might make very good vehicles, but their real strength is marketing, and as a result people buy into what they’re selling, because they represent a reality they want to exist.
Which isn’t to say that their newly announced big battery, known as the Powerwall, is a bad thing. It just isn’t what people apparently want it to be. For instance, following the announcement, plenty of people were declaring that it had “killed nuclear energy and fossil fuels.” That’s not accurate, because it’s not a method of power generation. It’s a method of power storage, that’s a key difference. The battery can store energy from whatever source you draw from, but it’s nothing new. Batteries have existed for years, and a basement full of golf cart batteries would also store energy from solar power, just not as well. The new battery might be better, but it’s not actually doing anything new.
For a technology to effectively kill all other forms of power generation, it would have to generate power. A better solar cell, more efficient windmills, some sort of third option we haven’t even dreamed up yet. That’s what will “kill nuclear energy and fossil fuels.” A battery might be an essential component of the system, but it’s still just the storage medium. To say it’s destroying the current power generation systems is to say a new cupboard will destroy the electric stove. It stores ingredients, it doesn’t make dinner.
People want to get “off the grid,” whether it’s because they want to live in a more environmentally sustainable way or because they want to drop their power and gas providers out of spite. As a result, things that will make it possible are embraced, because it becomes somewhat closer to making those dreams a reality. If the Powerwall means that battery technology is getting better and cheaper, that’s one way that people get closer to their dreams of living off the grid. But it’s not everything that people want it to be, and it wasn’t even designed to be that. The reality of the situation is that it’s only one of the components needed, and it’s far from the game changer that it’s professed to be. The actual game changer will need a battery once it arrives, of course, but it won’t be the battery itself.
