Elon Musk of Tesla Motors stirs media excitement for house- and industrial-scale batteries
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8116
On a stage in a darkened room last week—under roving spotlights, with pulsating music, and before a cheering crowd—Elon Musk presented an 18-minute product announcement designed to incite enthusiasm. To introduce Tesla Motors’ forthcoming batteries for houses, businesses, and utilities, the physics-educated techno-entrepreneur opened with this: “What I’m going to talk about tonight is … a fundamental transformation of how the world works, about how energy is delivered … across the earth.” An associated Tesla press release asked, “What if we could move the electricity grid off of fossil fuels and towards renewable energy sources?”
The high-wattage initial product illumination worked for Musk, who is already known for high-visibility enterprises in internet commerce, space exploration, and electric cars. Excitement about his batteries is soaring in publications across the country and around the world, as vividly shown in the extensively proliferating articles’ and commentaries’ very headlines.
At the business site Forbes.com, contributor Carmine Gallo’s posting carries the headline “Tesla’s Elon Musk lights up social media with a TED style keynote,” meaning the 18-minute presentation. Gallo begins:
When Elon Musk introduced a new home battery that delivers stored solar energy, I expected to read about it briefly and move on to other news. But his keynote kept appearing on my radar. Readers encouraged me to watch it. A writer for the Verge titled his blog post , “The best tech keynote I’ve ever seen.” “Dude’s selling a battery and he still managed to be inspiring,” writes T. C. Sottek.
Nature‘s headline on Davide Castelvecchi’s news report (reprinted at Scientific American) repeats a widely asked question: “Will Tesla’s battery change the energy market?” Castelvecchi opens by summarizing the news, with a bit of skeptical framing:
Tesla Motors, the electric-car maker based in Palo Alto, California, has announced that it will sell versions of its battery packs directly to consumers to help to power their homes, as well as to businesses that run larger facilities, and utility companies.
At a press conference in Los Angeles on 30 April, the company’s charismatic founder Elon Musk said that the firm’s lithium-ion batteries would enable economies to move to low-carbon energy sources. Solar energy sources are erratic—but by storing their energy and then releasing it when required, batteries could solve that problem, he said.
Many other companies also sell stationary battery storage for buildings and for power grids—but analysts say that the technology is still too expensive for widespread use. Here, Nature explores whether Tesla’s announcement might change the game.
Castelvecchi cites a March 2014 Nature article to emphasize that Tesla has not invented a new technology; the manufacturer is selling standard lithium-ion batteries. He writes, “Although companies and academic labs are pouring billions of dollars into research and development to significantly increase the amount of energy that batteries can store and to lower their cost, it could take years before significant breakthroughs reach the market.” He adds that whether Tesla has lowered the cost of the standard technology isn’t clear. Concerning utility firms he stipulates:
The US Department of Energy estimates that for energy storage to be competitive, it must not cost much more than $150 per kWh. Assuming a cost of $700 per kWh, Tesla’s systems are still much more expensive than that. Right now, the cheapest way to store energy is to pump it uphill into a hydropower reservoir—where one is available. The next-best storage solution is to compress air in large underground reservoirs.
But at the Huffington Post, under a headline extolling “the latest step toward our clean-energy future,” Vivek Wadhwa predicts, “Tesla is about to do to the power grid what cellphones did to the land line: free us from it.” Last year the former software entrepreneur and present technological evangelist published a Washington Post blog piece predicting planetwide energy transformation. Now Wadhwa predicts a Moore’s-law-like extension of a technological trend for solar power, and declares success for Powerwall, the home version of Tesla’s battery:
Most people are skeptical that we’re heading into a clean-energy future. They find it hard to believe that solar energy is fewer than 14 years away from meeting 100 percent of today’s energy needs. They argue that today solar energy hardly provides 1 percent of Earth’s energy needs, and that we can’t effectively store sunlight and therefore have a long way to go.
But when technologies advance exponentially, as solar is doing, 1-percent solar means we are halfway from 0.01 percent to the goal of 100 percent. The prices of solar panels have fallen 75 percent in the past five years and are advancing on a scale comparable to Moore’s law, as tech guru Ramez Naam has documented. At this rate, solar energy is only six doublings away from 100 percent. Even then we will use hardly one 10,000th of the sunlight that falls on Earth, so we can increase our usage dramatically without fear of running out.
What has been holding solar back so far has ostensibly been the cost of storage. Technologies such as batteries were prohibitively expensive, large and cumbersome. Residential solar installations needed to feed into the electric grid during the day and buy back energy during the night. This is a problem that Tesla has just fixed, through, with its Powerwall, a rechargeable lithium-ion battery.
Consider a sampling of similarly optimistic headlines:
- • For a piece by Chris Mooney, known in part for his book The Republican War on Science, the Washington Post used “Why Tesla’s announcement is such a big deal: The coming revolution in energy storage .”
- • Slate published “Freedom, Tesla-style: The company’s new home-based battery isn’t just nifty. It’s liberating. ”
- • Dow Jones’s Market Watch headlined a news report “Australian economist: Tesla battery can solve climate change .”
- • CBC Radio-Canada went with “Tesla battery could power big change in electricity use .”
- • Forbes.com printed a piece by contributor Roger Kay called “Tesla gets ready to drop the final piece of the energy puzzle into place. ”
Some of the headlined optimism focuses directly on sectors of the energy industry:
- • Clean Technica, which calls itself “the #1 cleantech-focused news & analysis site” in the world, citing major publications that have referred to it, published a piece called “Tesla battery system could speed exit of coal generation .”
- • Forbes.com identified pieces by columnist Jeff McMahon with “Did Tesla just kill nuclear power? ” and “Why Tesla batteries are cheap enough to prevent new power plants .”
- • The Conversation published “The Tesla battery heralds the beginning of the end for fossil fuels .”
Some of the headlined optimism addresses Tesla’s marketing prospects:
- • Business Finance News published “Here’s why Tesla Motors Inc energy will be ‘multi-billion dollar’ business in ‘near term .’”
- • Alexander C. Kaufman, business editor of the Huffington Post, predicts via a headline that “Tesla’s new home battery could be the iPad of energy storage .”
- • At Wired, a headline declares “Tesla’s new battery will make lithium ion the next AA ,” referring to what the text calls “the day when large-scale energy storage batteries become commodities, as interchangeable as the AA batteries you throw into your cart in the checkout line.”
Sometimes the headlines focus on specific energy users, as at Defense One (“Here’s what the new Tesla battery means for the military ”) or at a specialty blog (“New Tesla battery could be a game changer for marijuana growers ”).
Less easy to find, but not rare, are headlines conveying skepticism. At Canada’s Financial Post, the business section of National Post, Peter Foster’s column’s headline includes disdain-conveying quotation marks: “Tesla chief Elon Musk’s battery ‘breakthrough’ is off the wall .” At Forbes.com, physicist Varun Sivaram , concerned that possible Tesla market dominance could discourage energy-storage advances, contributed “Ensuring Tesla doesn’t crowd out the batteries of the future .” A subhead at the Guardian expresses worry that Powerwall’s “price raises questions about its economic viability .” At the website Fox Business, the headline was “Tesla home battery met with questions on Wall Street ,” followed by an opening paragraph that includes this: “While the announcement was met with much fanfare, Wall Street wasn’t as impressed.”
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.