Telsa's New Powerwall Home Battery Means You Can Effectively Live Off-Grid On Solar Energy Alone

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, recently debuted his Powerwall home battery and just a week after it was announced pre-orders have sold out through to mid-2016. But what exactly is it?

The idea is that if you've got solar panels on your home harvesting energy, during peak sun hours they can often generate more power than people need. So the excess is sold to utility companies and then you buy it back when you need it.

But doing things that way can be inefficient and means your lining the pockets of the utility companies.

Tesla's Powerwall battery changes all of that though, it will store the excess energy for you so you can use it at a later date or time (which is similar to a lot of other renewable energy storage systems), so say bye-bye utility company and say hello to self-sufficiency, if that's what you want.

But Tesla's battery will also work with the energy you get from the grid, meaning that it'll charge during non-peak hours of energy use when energy rates are lower, then gives you your stored energy during peak times when rates are higher, which is typically in the mornings and evenings.

And if you choose to live off-grid entirely, it can help facilitate this too and be your primary source of energy.

It's also ergonomic to look at with a sleek, compact, and unobtrusive design. You can learn more about it, and Musk's thoughts on the future of the renewable energy industry, in the keynote above.

Bloomberg reports, "The new Tesla Powerwall home batteries come in two sizes—seven and 10 kilowatt hours (kWh)—but the differences extend beyond capacity to the chemistry of the batteries. The 7kWh version is made for daily use, while its larger counterpart is only intended to be used as occasional backup when the electricity goes out.

The bigger Tesla battery isn't designed to go through more than about 50 charging cycles a year, according to SolarCity spokesman Jonathan Bass."

It's a vision of the future and a big step for a greener, cleaner way of living.