Elon Musk is designing a Tesla battery to power your home

In all the excitement over the looming battle for supremacy in electric cars between Tesla and Apple, some pretty important comments last week from Elon Musk were largely overlooked.
During Tesla’s quarterly earnings call, Musk said his car company is progressing with plans to sell a lithium-ion battery for energy storage in homes and businesses.
We’re going to unveil the Tesla home battery, or the sort of consumer battery that will be for use in people’s houses or businesses, fairly soon. We have the design done, and it should start going to production, probably in about six months, or so. We’re trying to figure out a date to have the product unveiling, but it’s probably in the next month or two months. And it’s really great; I’m really excited about it.
We’ve known about this for a while, of course. As I wrote last year, Tesla’s batteries could be huge—and possibly a much bigger product than its cars.

In theory, a homeowner could capture energy in a solar panel on their roof (maybe made by Solar City, which Musk chairs) and store it in a Tesla battery. This is key, because at the moment, one of the main problems with solar power is that, as The Verge neatly put it, “the sun isn’t always shining when you need power, and sometimes the sun is shining when you don’t need power.

In theory, a homeowner could capture energy in a solar panel on their roof (maybe made by Solar City, which Musk chairs) and store it in a Tesla battery. This is key, because at the moment, one of the main problems with solar power is that, as The Verge neatly put it, “the sun isn’t always shining when you need power, and sometimes the sun is shining when you don’t need power.”

There’s a lot of hype about what kind of threat Tesla could pose to electricity utilities by helping people go off the grid. Morgan Stanley estimated last year that by 2028, Tesla’s US fleet of cars will have an energy storage capacity of 237 gigawatts, which it said was equal to 22% of US production capacity, and nearly 10 times larger than existing US grid storage capacity. (That analysis doesn’t even take into account batteries sold separately from cars).

In reality, mass defections off the electricity grid aren’t likely. Solar City CTO and Musk’s cousin Peter Rive has said he has “no interest” in such a scenario, because “the grid is a network, and where there are networks, there are network effects.” Also, it seems to be illegal in some states.

Tesla is actually working closely with utilities on the home battery product. “There’s a lot of interest, and a lot of utilities working in this space, and we’re talking to almost all of them,” chief technology officer JB Straubel said on the conference call. More likely, the batteries will help people sell excess energy back into the grid, and save money on their electric bills.

Rive envisages a scenario where batteries with storage capacity were optimized across the grid, allowing utilities to direct clean solar electricity more efficiently, lowering costs for everyone and helping the environment. “We can do so much more working together than we can working alone.”

Wildlife conservation on ice: frozen zoos to save animals

On the edge: Disease and habitat loss is decimating wild amphibian populations globally, with more than 200 species needing urgent intervention through captive breeding, says Dr. Simon Clulow. In a south-eastern suburb in Melbourne, there’s a zoo. It has no visitors, and there are no animals anywhere inside it. Rather, the Australian Frozen Zoo houses living cells and genetic material from Australian native and rare and exotic species. This place, and others like it, could be a big part of the future of conservation. Department of Biological Sciences’ Simon Clulow and his colleagues make the case for ‘biobanking’ in a recent piece in Conservation Letters. Clulow is keen to stress that this doesn’t mean getting rid of conventional zoos or captive breeding programs. “Captive breeding has had some wonderful successes, and there will always be a huge place for it,” he says. PhD student and lead author Lachlan Howell agrees. “It was captive breeding that brought the giant panda back from

Insects are terrified of fish

ScienceDaily — The mere presence of a predator causes enough stress to kill a dragonfly, even when the predator cannot actually get at its prey to eat it, say biologists at the University of Toronto. "How prey respond to the fear of being eaten is an important topic in ecology, and we've learned a great deal about how these responses affect predator and prey interactions," says Professor Locke Rowe, chair of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB) and co-principal investigator of a study conducted at U of T's Koffler Scientific Reserve. "As we learn more about how animals respond to stressful conditions -- whether it's the presence of predators or stresses from other natural or human-caused disruptions -- we increasingly find that stress brings a greater risk of death, presumably from things such as infections that normally wouldn't kill them," says Rowe. Shannon McCauley, a post-doctoral fellow, and EEB professo

Nasa’s Mars perseverance “Kodiak” moment – Jezero Crater’s Lake is more complicated and intriguing than thought

The escarpment the science team refers to as “Scarp a” is seen in this image captured by Perseverance rover’s Mastcam-Z instrument on April 17, 2021. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS Pictures from NASA’s latest six-wheeler on the Red Planet suggest the area’s history experienced significant flooding events. A new paper from the science team of NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover details how the hydrological cycle of the now-dry lake at Jezero Crater is more complicated and intriguing than originally thought. The findings are based on detailed imaging the rover provided of long, steep slopes called escarpments, or scarps in the delta, which formed from sediment accumulating at the mouth of an ancient river that long ago fed the crater’s lake. The images reveal that billions of years ago, when Mars had an atmosphere thick enough to support water flowing across its surface, Jezero’s fan-shaped river delta experienced late-stage flooding events that carried rocks and debris into it from the hi

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