And Tesla is not the only company in the world that makes devices for the purpose of storing solar energy, although some people talk as if they believe that Tesla's Powerpack is the only energy storage option for home solar. You know what, a lot of them probably do believe that. But the fact is, some large companies including LG, Mercedes, Nissan, BMW, Sonnen, SimpliPhi, Sunverge, Powervault and ElectrIQ are competing with Tesla for a slice of the home solar storage market, as well as a lot of smaller companies. Tesla also makes those Giga Batteries, which utility companies use to store the electricity from their solar and wind and other generating sources, but there, too, Tesla is far from the only option.
So shop around, please.
Or, if you're a do-it-yourself sort of person, save some more money and do it yourself. Jehu Garcia, a fascinating individual, has a popular You Tube channel, where many of the videos have to do with showing do-it-yourselfer's how to make and improve their own home solar energy storage units. Some of Garcia's other videos have to do with the 2 vintage Volkswagen Buses he has converted from gasoline to electric; some others show him working with the company EV West -- here is their popular YouTube channel -- which converts all sorts of internal-combustion engines to electric. I'm not sure whether Garcia's day job is at EV West, or if he just collaborates with them from time to time, or what. In any case, Garcia made a solar energy storage unit for EV West's main building, which is a very large building.
In that EV West storage unit, and in the storage unit which Garcia makes for one-family homes, and in the portable, suitcase-sized storage units he makes, and in those VW Buses he converted to electric, and in most of the conversions EV West does -- and, for that matter, in most Teslas and most other electric vehicles -- the batteries used are the same ones used in personal computers and laptops. The very same batteries.
A house just uses more of them than a computer does. You can think of an electric vehicle as a mobile energy storage unit, or of an laptop computer as an energy storage unit that also computes.
A do-it-yourself home solar energy storage unit can use brand-new batteries, or it can use 2nd-hand batteries which have lost a bit of their capacity and are no longer appropriate for use in computers or cars. So there's an answer to the guys asking, so, whaddya gonna do with all them batteries in them electric cars when they run down? Huh? Smart guy?
The answer is, there are all sorts of things you can do with a lot of those run-down batteries, dumb guy. Actually, that's the second answer. The first answer is that the batteries last a lot longer in the cars than people thought they would.
I'm not able to keep up with all of the tech when someone explains how to put solar panels on a roof or make a solar energy storage unit -- I didn't pay attention in shop or science classes in school, and I'm old and tired, so how about you cut me some slack, eh? -- but there are a lot of people on YouTube showing the DIY (Do It Yourself) types how to do all sorts of things with solar and storage and electric vehicles, and a lot of how-to books being sold covering the same ground. There are a lot of people learning how to do these things, the same way that people have learned how to fix their own internal-combustion cars and trucks, and fix and improve their own homes. They are the very same people, in many cases, and of course in other cases, new people are coming into the DIY sector because the environmental benefits of some of these technologies are adding a new fascination to it all.
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