United States - Flag United States

Please confirm your currency selection:

Bench Talk for Design Engineers

Bench Talk

rss

Bench Talk for Design Engineers | The Official Blog of Mouser Electronics


Tesla PowerWall: A Backdoor for the Mass Adoption of Home Automation?
On July 13, 2015 in Automation, Open Source, Wireless by Mike Parks
Mike Parks

On April 30, 2015, Elon Musk announced to the world the Tesla PowerWall. In its first week alone, Tesla brought in $800 million dollars for their new PowerWall. Powerwall is a rechargeable Lithium-ion battery pack that will store energy for when you need it, or to use as a backup power supply during an outage. Unlike a generator, it doesn’t require fuel and creates no noise. What’s interesting is that the backlog of customer orders is already winding itself well into the second half of 2016. This is a sign that demonstrates there is a market demand for rethinking how we power our homes both from the perspective of lead-shifting and backup power. With a little speculation, it is also a product that just might serve as a backdoor to the mass adoption of smarter, more automated homes.


 

While many articles have been focusing on the cost per kilowatt-hour and the number of charge/discharge cycles with regard to the PowerWall, I’ve been enamored by the little known detail that the PowerWall can connect to your home's Wi-Fi network. The reason it has connectivity is that PowerWall will check when utility rates are cheapest before attempting to recharge the battery. Not only is this utterly cool, but it’s convenient if you opt not to install solar panels on your home and still want to (eventually) see a return on upfront installation costs.

 

But….What If?

 

If we have a data connection for the battery to get this type of information, why can’t it then be extended to our home appliances so they only run when energy is cheap? In other words, is it reasonable to assume that we could “hack” the PowerWall to become the brain of our smart home? I think it's certainly possible. But I am not interested in hacked-together, homebrewed solutions (well, for DIY fun I am, but that’s beside the point). What I would like to see is a genuinely consumer-friendly solution that will bring home automation to the masses. A Tesla PowerWall-centric, smart appliance ecosystem just might provide the financial incentive to get consumers interested in automation. After all, money talks.

 

As with everything related to home automation, it will come down to getting all appliance manufacturers to agree on a standard communications protocol. Perhaps Tesla, if successful with the PowerWall, can garner enough muscle that they can get manufacturers on board. From there, to realize a truly automated home, it would then be a matter of getting companies onboard that manufacture things such as light bulbs, ceiling fans, and door locks, to name a few.

 

The PowerWall might just be the sort of backdoor technology that plants the seeds for true home automation to finally blossom. Seeds based on consumer demand and preference to save money versus trying to sell yet another new-fangled, stand-alone “tech product.” In the industrial space, Tesla also announced PowerPack, which is a scalable battery solution aimed at retailers and other commercial properties. Lastly, Mr. Musk also announced that all patents on the technology would be open sourced to help invigorate market competition, just as Tesla did with their electric vehicle battery patents. So, are you one of the lucky few that managed to snag a PowerWall for installation this year, or are you still on the fence? Let us know in the comments.

 

 



« Back


Michael Parks, P.E. is the co-founder of Green Shoe Garage, a custom electronics design studio and embedded security research firm located in Western Maryland. He produces the Gears of Resistance Podcast to help raise public awareness of technical and scientific matters. Michael is also a licensed Professional Engineer in the state of Maryland and holds a Master’s degree in systems engineering from Johns Hopkins University.


Related Posts

  • Home Automation Adventures Part II: The Home Automation Attack Surface: Miles Wide and Wafer Thin

    Bob and Alice Smarts are very excited about their new home automation system. It is the very latest in the latest Information Technology consumer space, incorporating all of the Smarts' smart devices, tying everything together. They can adjust their thermostat from far away. They can view the security system's cams to check on the pets. The baby monitor comes in handy to check on Baby Smart, the newest of the Smart kids. The refrigerator keeps track of inventory and sends reminders. Their smoke detectors and home security system now work together, ready to notify at a moment's notice. All via smart phone. And on and on.

  • Home Automation Adventures Part III: Common Sense Things To Reduce The Home Automation Attack Surface

    In this blog, we'll cover simple common sense best practice things that Bob and Alice can do to improve defenses and reduce risk. By the way, these are common sense best practices for all aspects of personal computing, cell phones, web, and internet.

  • A Tale of Two Automation Strategies

    Much has been written about the trials and tribulations associated with the adoption of home automation technologies. The lack of mass consumer appeal is often attributed to high costs and lack of a simple, universal protocol. For the technically savvy, the idea of giving in to “vendor lock” by adopting a single company's product line has been too much to bear. However, for more affluent consumers this idea is not a problem as most of the time they rely on 3rd party installers to install and maintain their systems. This has left the DIY crowd to resort to more “hackable,” although way more complicated solutions, such as X10 products. In the end we have grown an ecosystem unsuitable for mass adoption. The niche market of affluent consumers is just lucrative enough for companies to continue to peddle proprietary solutions. The equally niche Maker- and DIY-market has been strong enough to attract those with the skills to homebrew a custom solution. Neither are good enough for the mass market.

  • It's The Little Things: Searching for the Home Automation “Killer App”

    Our pursuit of modern home automation can be readily observed if one looks at the archives from the various World Fairs dating as far back as the 1930s. While tantalizing possibilities have captured our imaginations, in practice the mass adoption of home automation technologies has yet to really take-off. Costs and lack of a common, interconnected protocol are often attributed as the root cause for the failure of home automation to launch. Perhaps though, home automation just hasn’t found it’s “killer app” yet. What might be needed is one must-have product that, while it stands alone in its first iteration, will drive people to adopt then demand more devices that interact with each other.

  • Home Automation – In the Beginning and Beyond!

    Home automation has come a long way since The Clapper was first introduced back in 1986. Today you can find a plethora of home automation products to augment all of the creature comforts already found in most American homes.

  • Home Automation Adventures Part I: When (Internet) Things Go Bump in the Night

    For Bob and Alice Smarts (not their real names) and their kids, such a world was not only hard to imagine, it was long-forgotten by Bob and Alice, and never known a'tall by their kids. The pre-internet, pre-web world -- if such a world ever existed -- would be a vast empty space. Boring. A wasteland. Such a world was no more real than the black-and-white, scratchy WWII news reels that Uncle Fred, flying in from St. Louis, tuned-in within thirty minutes of arriving if no football games were on at the moment. There is a room with a smart TV for that.
17680 Views
Tagged With: Elon Musk, PowerWall, Tesla

Search

Categories

Featured Authors

All Authors

Show More Show More
View Blogs by Date

Archives