The introduction of renewable energy is one of the fundamental axes of the activity of Tesla, a company that is not only dedicated to the production of electric cars, but also carries out projects such as the huge facility just built in Hawaii.
Having made the island of Ta'u self-sufficient, Tesla continues his expansion plan to provide clean energy to remote Pacific islands They need fossil fuels to meet their electricity needs. Kauai, an island in Hawaii, is the second to embrace Tesla's renewable model. The company has installed a solar factory, made up of a total of 54978 panels and batteries that is capable of storing up to 52MWh. All this thanks to the presence of 272 Powerpack 2 batteries.
Unlike the Ta'u project, Tesla has reached an agreement with the local authorities to sell them the KWh at 13,9 cents for the next twenty years. The cost will be fixed and, with it, Tesla ensures that the island will be able to safeguard itself from fluctuations in the price of diesel fuel, which until now fed the generators. According to the firm, the installation will save up to six million liters of fuel.
As discussed above, Tesla has installed almost 300 Powerpack 2 units, the renewed version of the batteries that began to market a couple of years ago, and that have been manufactured in the Gigafactory that the firm has in Nevada. Island residents already have the means to generate electricity during the day, either via solar panels or through wind energy, so Tesla aims to be in charge of supplying residents when the sun goes down at night.
The solar farm installed in Kauai provides 13MW and it is one of the first steps that the firm takes to become an electric company. “In the long term, energy storage is going to be a business probably bigger than the car«, Said at the time Elon Musk, CEO of the company.
But market analysts are not as optimistic as Musk. «We do not believe that this movement offer any additional value to Tesla shares due to uncertainties and regulations facing the energy sector and solar in particular, ”said Adam Jonas, analyst at Morgan Stanley.
Other Tesla Projects (Powerwall)
Powerwall is a battery of the company TeslaEnergy, a US subsidiary of Tesla Motors. Powerwall batteries are rechargeable for home use and small industries. PFor larger installations Tesla offers the Power Pack that can be scaled indefinitely to reach GWh capacities
HYPERLOOP
hyperloops is the trade name registered by the aerospace transport company SpaceX, for the transport of passengers and goods in vacuum tubes at high speed.
The original Hyperloop sketch was an idea made public through a preliminary design document in August 2013, which included a theoretical route through the area of Los Angeles to the San Francisco Bay Area, for most of its route parallel to Interstate 5. Preliminary analysis indicated that the estimated time for such a route could be 35 minutes, meaning that passengers would traverse the 560-kilometer route at an average speed of around 970 km / h, with a maximum speed of 1.200 km / h.
SpaceX
SpaceX was founded in June 2002 by Elon Musk to revolutionize space technology, with the ultimate goal of allow people to live on other planets.
It has developed the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 rockets, which have been built with the goal of being reusable space launch vehicles. SpaceX has also developed the Dragon spacecraft, which was launched into orbit by the Falcon 9 launch vehicles. SpaceX designs, tests and manufactures most components in-house, including the Merlin, Kestrel and Draco rocket engines.